Below Stairs by Margaret Powell

Author:Margaret Powell [Powell, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781447200406
Publisher: Pan Macmillan

19

CHRISTMAS IN domestic service was nothing like the Christmases we had at home. I remember the excitement there was at home even with little money, the excitement of waking up early, the rush into our parents’ room for the presents and stockings. We didn’t have turkeys or Christmas trees, but we had plenty of laughter and there was always enough food to eat.

Christmas in Mrs Cutler’s house was a very formal and elaborate affairs. There used to be a large tree in the dining-room which was decorated by the nanny.

On Christmas Day after breakfast all the servants had to line up in the hall. Being the lowest in status I was at the end of the line. Then we had to file into the dining-room where all the family, Mr and Mrs Cutler, and the daughter, and the grandchildren, were assembled complete with Christmas smiles, and social-welfare expressions. The children looked at us as though we were beings from another world. And I suppose to them we were really sub-beings from a sub-world. It used to remind me of those adverts with blacks all walking along. I used to keep kidding Gladys, trying to make her laugh. But you couldn’t really laugh, it was such a solemn occasion. Talk about Christmas! When we got to the Christmas tree we deferentially accepted the parcels that were handed to us by the children, and muttered, ‘Thank you, Master Charles, thank you, Miss Susan.’ Oh I hated it all.

Then we had to go to the Master and Madam and were given an envelope containing money; I used to have a pound and Mrs Bowchard had five pounds. The presents were always something useful; print dress lengths, aprons, black stockings, not silk, of course, they never gave you anything frivolous; black woollen stockings. How I longed for some of the things they had, silk underwear, perfume, jewellery, why couldn’t they have given us something like that? Why did we always have to have sensible things? I think that the reason they used to give us uniforms was because they knew we couldn’t buy them out of our measly wages. Besides if we were to have perfume or silk we would go astray. So I hated this parade of Christmas goodwill, and the pretence that we also had a good time at Christmas.

We had to work like trojans, coping with their dinner parties and the other entertaining that went on upstairs. All right, we had a Christmas tree in our servants’ hall that they’d bought, but they never put anything on it; we had to decorate it up with tinsel and bells and things, and they didn’t put their presents on it. We had to line up before them in Indian file accepting their alms. That was Christmas there.

It was a replica of all the Christmases I had in domestic service. Formal and elaborate, a lot of entertaining by them, but nothing much for us. I dare say in the very large establishments they would arrange a servants’ ball like they do at Buckingham Palace.

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