The Housekeeper's Tale - Sarah Wells's Story by Tessa Boase

Author:Tessa Boase
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MBI
Published: 2014-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

VIII

For Fear Of Spending It

How far should we trust H. G. Wells’s portrait of his mother? He wrote An Experiment in Autobiography in 1934, nearly thirty years after her death. He tries, so he says, to see into her mind–‘I began to wonder what went on in her brain when I was in my early teens and I have wondered ever since.’ But he can only guess, speculating that ‘innocent reverie’ takes up her rare moments of leisure, saving her from more acute unhappiness.

How far can a teenage boy, or young man, understand an older woman’s inner life? ‘Poor little woman!’ is a typical exclamation. He pities her, ‘dear little mother’, but she seems, looking back, rather like a peg doll; a worn caricature in a black silk dress–‘the bothered little housekeeper in the white-panelled room below’. H. G. Wells’s summing up of her time at Uppark–‘perhaps the worst housekeeper that was ever thought of’–has since become her public epitaph.

It is true that Sarah Wells was unprepared for the work involved, and the position did not seem to bring her satisfaction. According to her son she started off ‘frightened, perhaps, but resolute’, believing that ‘with prayer and effort anything can be achieved’. But with an inexperienced and disinterested mistress there was no one to show the housekeeper how to do her work. She was expected to have absorbed it on her way up the ladder.

‘She did not know how to plan work, control servants, buy stores or economise in any way’, wrote her son. ‘She did not know clearly what was wanted upstairs. She could not even add up her accounts with assurance and kept them for me to do for her.’ (Though who would not encourage their clever, numerate son to have a stab at the housekeeping accounts on his rare visits? Mrs Wells was both intensely proud of, and anxious about, Bertie’s on-off scholarship.)

Was she, perhaps, an adequate housekeeper, coping with unusually trying circumstances?

The surviving diaries of Mrs Wells document two phases of her life. First, her early years in service as lady’s maid, then motherhood: twenty years of life (1848–68) squeezed into an old, ‘extra enlarged edition’ desk diary for 1835 (price 7s, half-bound).

Between 1868 and 1890 there is a gap, the diaries lost or destroyed. For her last decade of toil at Atlas House in Bromley, and first decade as housekeeper of Uppark, we have just her son’s description to go by, served up both as autobiography and fiction. But a box of accounts survives for Mrs Wells’s first few years at the big house, neatly folded lengthways into fortnightly bundles, tied tightly with string and sent off to Sir William King in Portsmouth, agent to Miss Fetherstonhaugh and architect of Uppark’s great economy drive. There are also her mistress’s banking books in which all payments are recorded (including £10 sent to one ‘Bullock’–a poor relation?–every two months).13

In the year before Mrs Wells’s arrival, somebody called ‘Smith’ received regular, hefty lumps of cash from Miss Fetherstonhaugh–up to £180 at a time.

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