Rose: My Life in Service to Lady Astor (2 page)

It was a relief to get to school. I enjoyed learning. The building was typical of the time. There were two classrooms and we were taught by the headmaster and his wife, a Mr and Mrs Lister, just the three R’s with a little geography, history, art and, for the girls, sewing and embroidery. Opposite the school there was a field where we used to play football. I used to keep goal at one end and Mr Lister at the other. I loved it. Apart from the fact that I was good at it and very few balls got past me, it gave me the opportunity to use my voice. I’d scream encouragement and advice from beginning to end of the game and I could be heard all over the village. When I went home my mum would be angry with me and tell me off about my unladylike behaviour. It didn’t make any difference – I’d be at it again the next time. The game used to take the toes out of my shoes so eventually Mum made me wear clogs. I didn’t mind, it was after all true Yorkshire footwear. I remember once being dressed in a lovely little bolero with a wide skirt and with orders to take great care of them. I couldn’t resist playing football and I caught my foot in the hem of the skirt and nearly tore it away. I didn’t dare go back home for Mum to see so I went into the schoolhouse and together Mrs Lister and I sewed it back again.

I learnt a lot in school which was to be useful to me in later life, particularly through reading and writing. I always enjoyed writing and receiving letters. I kept many that I think are going to refresh my memory as I write this book. Whereas most children left school when they were fourteen I stayed on until I was sixteen. There were reasons for this as Mum and I had plans for my future. I believe that those two extra years when Mr and Mrs Lister gave me occasional individual tuition were of the greatest value to me.

During the lunch break, or as we called it, the dinner hour, I’d go home for my meal. When I’d eaten it I’d go into the wash-house and turn the mangle while Mum fed it with the morning’s washing. When school finished in the afternoon I’d go back to help Mum get Dad’s tea, which was his meal of the day. After that was cleared up I’d have to knit so many rows of Dad’s socks. This I found unrewarding work and they never seemed to get any longer. They did, of course, since I kept him provided with them for many years.

After knitting there was the needlework, the darning and mending, getting the children to bed and then getting there myself. On Saturdays as well as the ordinary jobs I had to clean and blacklead the kitchen range. The blacklead came in blocks like soap. It was kept in a jam-jar and every time I used it I’d have to pour cold water on it and work at it until it produced a sort of paste. This was brushed on to the stove and finally polished until it shone. When I’d finished I must have looked a terrible sight for I had porous skin which absorbed any of the blacklead that got on it, and plenty seemed to. The family all got a good laugh out of me on Saturdays which I thought was very unkind of them at the time and more so now that I think of it again. Then the steel fender had to be emery-papered and polished.

I must say that by the time I had finished with it the stove looked a lovely sight. It deserved to be, because it was the most important piece of furniture, if I can call it that, in the house. It was the means whereby we lived. I shall never forget it; there was the oven on one side, the boiler on the other, and in between the grate and a wreckin, a sort of iron bar across the top. From this we would hang the kettle, a big black iron one which was almost permanently over the fire, or, when required, the frying-pan, one with a long vertical handle that hung over the flames. It could be adjusted by a chain which was fastened to the wreckin. In the evening our two cats would creep into the kitchen, jump up and sit each side of the grate, one on the oven and the other on the boiler. It’s the kind of family scene one never forgets.

Another of my Saturday jobs was to clean Dad’s boots for Sunday. In the afternoon whenever it was fine, we children would go out gathering wood for kindling. Studley Park was a good hunting-ground and there was a big copse near us, but we didn’t dare go often since pheasants were reared there and the keepers didn’t care to have anyone disturbing them. We almost used to welcome a storm or a high wind during the week because it made our task so much easier.

As I grew older Dad developed what was called in those days a weak heart, so it was the duty of the family to relieve him of whatever work we could. Then it was that I acquired another Saturday chore: lighting and stoking the church boilers as well as helping Mum with the cleaning and polishing there. Saturday was also bath-night which was just as well with me having done so much dirty work. In the winter I had to make do with a sort of wash-down. I’d stand naked in a large tin bowl of water in front of the kitchen fire, but in summer I used to luxuriate in the wash-house outside by heating the water in the copper and then filling the big dolly tub. Eventually the day arrived when Dad came back from Studley Royal with a lovely hip bath which they had discarded. We felt like millionaires from then on. I didn’t know what it was like to lie in a bath until I went into service.

However, Sundays, while they were different, were not days of rest. I was awake more or less at the usual time, and went up to the church to stoke the boilers. If there was an eight o’clock communion service I’d ring the church bell and then act as server to the vicar. I went back home for breakfast and we all got ready for the morning service. Dad and 1 used to sing in the choir. I enjoyed that; occasionally I’d have to sing a solo which I liked even better. Sunday lunch, or Sunday dinner as we called it, was a sort of ritual. It was the meal of the week with the best of whatever was in the larder at the time and of course always a Yorkshire pudding followed by pies and tarts.

Nobody could accuse my mum and dad of being sectarian because as soon as lunch was over and cleared up, we children were sent to the Wesleyan chapel for Sunday School. I questioned Mum about the rights and wrongs of this one day. ‘One place is as good as another,’ she said, ‘and I know where you are and that you’re out of mischief.’ I suppose it made a change. It also started our library, for as regular attenders we each of us got a book a year, an improving one like
John Halifax, Gentleman
which I found very hard going and didn’t read until many years later.

The evening found us in church once again. You might think that we would have sickened of religion but I never did. Among the memories that I hold dearest are the services in Studley church. They were happy occasions with the farmers and villagers all cleaned and polished and dressed in their best clothes, singing at the tops of their voices. It was these weekly get-togethers that gave us a feeling of community and a sort of pride in belonging to our village. Studley church was very beautiful and it was ours. During my life in service I was helped by my religion and my childhood memories of it. Although we were expected to behave in a Christian manner it was seldom possible for us to go to church and be practising Christians as it would have interfered with our duties. I don’t say this with rancour but as a fact.

Sunday was the only day our parlour came alive. No one was allowed in it during the week. It was the same in all the village homes. We had a piano, it was the symbol of respectability, which Mum had bought from her laundry money. We children had lessons at fourpence a week as we got older and although none of us learnt a lot we were able to strum a few notes to help as a background for our sing-songs. When the 1914 war came and the military camps were built nearby, Sunday nights at the Harrisons’ were great occasions for the troops and for us. Mum used to sparkle as she sang ‘Goodbye Dolly Gray’, ‘Two Little Girls in Blue’, ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ and the other popular songs of the time, and even Dad would relax and be merry, partly as a result of the drink the soldiers had brought with them. It’s odd, but to me the war was a happy time, the village and the countryside seemed to come alive with the marching feet, the guns and the uniforms. There were dances, Garrison concerts, more fun generally and of course a few more babies around than there should have been!

But work had to go on and Mondays would see the laundry baskets arriving and the flags hoisted again in the kitchen. I think I should make it clear that Mum didn’t just ‘take in washing’; it was much more a full-time job, and a skilled one too. As I’ve said, she worked for the Marquess and Marchioness of Ripon, but she also did the laundry for Lady Baron of Sawley Hall, all their personal and some of their finer household linen. Even when the families went to London for the season it would still be sent to them by rail. Her employers were particular, and they could afford to be. In these days when it seems everyone is vying with each other to wash the whitest it may be of interest to know how my mother managed without any of the mechanical and other aids that are now available to everyone. Rainwater was collected in two huge wooden barrels from off the roof. It was carried by bucket to the copper, a brick-built boiler in a corner of the wash-house and heated by a coke fire from a grate underneath. When it was boiling hot the water was transferred to a long wooden tub where the clothes were carefully washed by hand in the best soap, which at that time was Knight’s Castile. Things seldom needed scrubbing as they weren’t particularly dirty, but if ever any hard rubbing was necessary it was done on a wooden scrubbing-board, the kind of thing that was used at the beginning of the pop music era as skiffle-boards.

When clean, the clothes were transferred into three different tubs for rinsing, aided by a dolly, a pole with three legs at the bottom which was turned by hand to move the clothes around in the water. If it was then necessary to boil them they were put into the copper and later rinsed yet again. Then they were put through the mangle and hung on two large angled clothes-lines in the garden where they were dried in the cleanest of country air. The more delicate things were, of course, washed entirely by hand.

The ironing was done on a table kept specially for the purpose under the kitchen window. There was an attachment that was fitted to the kitchen stove with two ledges which held the irons. This was kept red hot and Mum must have had eight to ten irons on it at any one time. There was one little round one with which she polished the gentlemen’s collars and the starched dress shirt fronts till they shone, and to this day I have kept the gophering iron with which she would twist all the fillies on the petticoats and nightdresses to make them curl out. Once ironed everything was hung around our fire to air and finally carefully wrapped in tissue paper before being packed into the laundry baskets. One of the beautiful memories of my childhood comes from sniffing at these baskets before they were closed. They were never scented with lavender bags, they didn’t need to be because they had their own particular lovely clean smell, better even than that of new-mown hay.

When I tell people today of my father’s earnings and the shillings my mother made from the washing and of how they managed to bring up a family of four children, who were fed, clothed and contented, they tend to dismiss it by saying, ‘Of course things were different then and money worth so very much more.’ Things
were
different. There was no National Insurance, so there was the constant fear of getting ill, of being out of work, of growing old without a family to look after you and of being buried in a pauper’s grave. There was no electricity, no sewerage, no running water, no refrigeration; fruit and vegetables came and went with the seasons. I don’t count radio, television, record players, cars and such-like because what you’ve never had you never miss, and there are some things you might well be better off without.

At that time thirty shillings a week, which was about our family income, I’ll never know for sure, was only just enough for us provided everyone played their part in making do. We needed a good manager, good neighbourliness and co-operation all round. We fed well because we lived to a large extent off the land. Rabbits were our staple meat diet. Dad brought these home. He was always ready to do a bit of extra repair work in the gamekeepers’ houses, and in return was allowed to set snares on the estate. A day I shall always remember was when Dad brought a couple of rabbits home and Mum turned to me and said, ‘Right Ena, you’re old enough to start skinning rabbits, you’ve watched me time enough, take them into the kitchen and see how you get on.’

Well, I got on all right until it came to the head, I couldn’t seem to get the skin over it and I couldn’t stand those eyes staring at me. I asked Mum if I could chop the head off but she wouldn’t let me. ‘Dad likes the brains and we don’t believe in waste in this house,’ but she did come and help me. I soon learnt, and I wish I had as many pounds now as rabbits I’d skinned by the time I was sixteen. I’ve eaten rabbit cooked in every kind of way, but even despite the variety Mum gave us we grew tired of it just as the apprentices in Scotland got sick of the sight and taste of salmon, but as I sit and think of my mother’s rabbit pies now it starts my mouth watering. Although we didn’t keep any chickens because Dad wanted the space for vegetables and fruit, which he was often able to barter for eggs, we were able to get old hens from the gamekeepers. Broody hens were much in demand in the spring to sit on the pheasants’ eggs, and when they’d done their job and the chicks were hatched out Dad was able to buy them for a few pence each. Tough birds they were but Mum knew how to cook them and to get every bit of flavour out of them.

A great delicacy which again the gamekeepers helped to provide was fawn. The Marquess kept a deer herd and every so often it would be thinned out by shooting the old stags and some of the fallow deer. It was a great and welcome sight to see Dad arriving back home with a fawn slung over his shoulders. It meant that we should eat like fighting-cocks for days. Every bit was edible; the pluck or liver was particularly tasty, but I only know that from hearsay as it was always reserved for Dad.

We cured the fawns’ pelts and the rabbit skins and sold them to a pedlar-man on his occasional visits to the village. Fish we bought from the weekly fish-cart, kippers being a great treat. Every so often Dad would have to open the sluices in Studley Park. He took a basket with him and came back with it full of eels. When I saw them my feelings were mixed. I liked the taste but hated the preparation. Having to skin them in salt played havoc with my hands and left them red and raw.