18

BEFORE I STARTED studying history for my ‘A’ level at the ripe age of sixty-one you could have written all that I knew about history on a single page. And that all boils down to the way I was taught at my elementary school. We weren’t taught that history was a record of the living past but that it was a record of a dead one. Nothing was presented as the vivid pageant of the times or the fascinating study of the people who’d lived in those times. It was nothing but a collection of facts, figures, and dates.

When I left school all I really knew of history was that King Alfred burned the cakes, King Harold got shot in the eye, and King Richard had a humpback. What a heritage to leave school with. Another bad thing about school in those days was that you never left with a desire to learn more, which surely is the whole reason for education – that you leave with a desire to learn more and that you know how and where to find knowledge. Mind you, you left school knowing the three Rs which is more than many do today. But looking back I can’t really blame the teachers because the same teacher had to teach every subject; not like now when you have specialist teachers for each subject.

Since I’ve been studying history I’ve listened far more attentively to my mother’s tales about Victorian life – she was born in 1880. Before I never used to take much notice of her. I used to let her drone on.

She says – and it’s true – that people think that life for the poor is as hard now as it was many years ago. I must confess I used to think the same. She tells me about her grandparents. Both of them had to go to the workhouse when they were old because the Government gave no money, they only provided workhouses. And none of their children could afford to keep them so they just had to go there.

My mother’s grandmother died in one and because of one. She was over sixty and you might say she died of old age, but the conditions there accelerated it. My mother’s grandfather lived on, though he couldn’t walk, and when his sons used to go and see him he’d cry and say to them, ‘Oh, get a cart, get a wheelbarrow, get anything – only get me out of this terrible place.’

Eventually my mother’s father did get him out and took him home. And the old man used to tell my mother the most harrowing tales. What an appalling place it was.

It was a workhouse and an asylum all in one. The laundry used to be done down in the cellars and the reek of that yellow soap and decaying bodies was always with them. The sick and the infirm just lay in the wards with no one to look after them – only the other inmates, if they felt like it. When it got dark there was just one oil lamp for everyone and they had nothing to do but just sit and gaze at each other. Most of them were illiterate so they couldn’t help themselves.

Things like this don’t happen now. It’s history. But it’s history within living memory and it’s history which accounts for the way some people think and behave today.

When my mother was a girl, the workhouse was at the end of their garden and the children from there used to go to the same school. They used to be known as the workhouse brats, with their grey woollen dresses in the winter and grey cotton dresses in the summer. In the area where Mum lived whole families used to go into the workhouse in the winter and in the summer when there was more work about they’d come out again. But while they were in they would be separated, the women from the husbands and the children from both. The shadow of the workhouse hung over every working-class family.

My mother went into domestic service in 1895. The people she worked for had acquired their wealth in trade as so many middle-class people had at that time. They had sold their town house and bought a big one in the country, filling it with the latest in Victoriana.

She got ten pounds a year there, paid quarterly as it was too small an amount to be paid oftener. Out of this she had to buy herself one new dress a year. She wore the same dresses summer and winter. But then of course you couldn’t buy anything ready-made. She’s told me it took seven yards of serge material and seven yards of lining and of course not only did she have to buy the material, she had to pay to have it made as well. So she had very little money left out of her ten pounds.

In this particular job, the under-servants were expected when they went out to wear a black bonnet provided by the employers. Mother simply hated wearing this bonnet. She was always a bit on the militant side. To her that bonnet was a sign of servitude and she thought it should be resisted. So one day she went out in her own hat and she was seen from the drawing-room. When she came in she was called for and she got a severe telling off. She didn’t dare do it again but she looked for and got another job.

At the next place she got twelve pounds a year, paid monthly, with a Lord Jisson, VC. He lived outside Chichester at a place called Bosham. It was a much larger grander place, and he kept a pack of hounds. But it was run on military lines and everybody’s task was allotted to them. There was a housekeeper there who kept tabs on the women and a butler who kept tabs on the menservants, and for everyone a list of duties was laid down. Whereas in the other places she was at the beck and call of all and sundry, here she had to stick rigorously to the duties. And the housekeeper saw to the standing orders.

All the servants had beer supplied twice a day, even the under-servants. Mother didn’t drink hers, she used to save it for the organ-grinder. Apparently an organ-grinder used to come twice a week with his monkey and this monkey had developed a taste for beer. So the organ-grinder used to drink what he could and give the rest to the monkey. After which, Mother said, that monkey used to cut the most unusual capers and this would be a talking point and an enjoyment for the servants for days.

Of course today it sounds trite and shows a lack of education. But those were the kind of events that you had to look forward to. Some form of variety to relieve from the humdrum. You had no education and little hope of advancement in position or in money, and no security at all of course.

As for the advanced education, that was still a pipe-dream. And it wasn’t until the poor did get an advanced education that they were able to speak up for themselves, that they became, as you might say, powerful advocates for their own class. Left to the upper class nothing was going to be done. Why should they kill the goose that laid their golden eggs.

But things were improving even then, compared to my grandmother’s days, because when my grandmother was in service there was a sort of feudal system.

She worked in a large manor house and the man who owned it owned the entire village; all the land for miles around and every cottage were owned by him too and he was very particular indeed about how they were kept. Nobody from outside could come and live in his village. He made sure that nothing and nobody changed. As Grandmother said, this system had its advantages because when the villagers were ill, medicines and food were sent down from the big house. But, she said, even so the villagers weren’t grateful. They used to detest having to doff their caps to the squire who they felt was rude and arrogant to them. Still Grandmother reckoned that the villagers then had a better life than when things became freer for the working class. Because then nobody really cared at all.

This was always a point of disagreement between my mother and grandmother. Mother was a stickler for her rights, not women’s rights but her rights, and as far as she could she fought for them. Of course she couldn’t break the system, but occasionally she bent it.

One thing she couldn’t bend however was the business of waking up in the morning. It always had been a servant’s nightmare. At one place, though, she came to a good arrangement with one of the gardeners. Every night she would tie a piece of string to her big toe and throw the string out of the window. When the gardener used to come round at five o’clock in the morning he’d give it a mighty yank and so wake Mother up. Apparently she was never late, though on more than one occasion she hobbled round her work for the rest of the day.

The saying ‘early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise’ I’ve always thought a stupid one. Yet there must be something in it since at any rate for much of our lives my mother, Albert and I have had to get up very early. It hasn’t made us wealthy or necessarily wise but we’ve certainly been healthy. Albert and I are both now drawing the old-age pension. So I suppose that proves something.