Some thirty years earlier, this same Sarah Wells had arrived at Uppark to take up the post of lady’s maid to Fanny Bullock. They were close in age (27 and 30), and natural companions in a household that Sarah recorded in her diary as ‘very quaint and feeble’, though she ‘got gradually used to them’. Fellow servants included lady’s maid Anne Austin, 64; laundress Sarah Blackman, 72; housemaid Sarah Horwood, 45; and nurse Sarah Chitty, 53.4
Sarah Neal, as she was then called, came via Miss Riley’s finishing school for middle-class girls, followed by a four-year apprenticeship as a dressmaker and a spell with one Lady Forde in Ireland. She nursed ambitions to learn French and to travel. What she got was Uppark’s under-gardener Joseph Wells. And with their engagement announced, she had no choice but to leave. It was not done to continue in service as a married woman. Having become ‘greatly attached’ to her mistress (as she recorded in her diary), the two parted with ‘deep regret…most reluctantly’. Miss Bullock, now aged 34 and unlikely to marry, watched her friend go off to the satisfactions of homemaking and babies, a life peculiarly out of her reach. Fanny Bullock might have thought her own good fortune a kind of curse, but she would have been wrong. The life Mrs Sarah Wells went on to lead was wretched by comparison.
The year she left Uppark, both Sarah’s parents died within three months of each other. Joe was unable to find long-term work, employed for a time at the gardens of Trentham Hall in Staffordshire while his new wife lodged with relatives, ‘spirits sadly depressed’.
Her husband’s fecklessness began to dawn on her. ‘Not quite pleased with what I heard’, Sarah wrote in her diary; ‘JW [Joseph Wells] had an appointment with Miss Burdett-Coutts’–the Victorian banking heiress and philanthropist. ‘Too late the situation had gone. Oh, how disappointed we were, flat very low and dull.’
Things did not get much better. A habitual diary keeper, she packed fifteen years of married life into one battered volume, a line or two for each day. Days before giving birth to her first child in January 1855, Sarah Wells was on her knees scrubbing the floor. ‘Felt it so hard to have so much to do, but I know Dear Joe cannot afford a servant.’
On giving birth, the first thing she heard was a voice saying, ‘It is dead.’ But then the midwife hit the baby, plunged it in a warm bath and brought it back to life. She called the child Fanny, after her old mistress, and she turned into a delicate little girl, prone to whooping cough and chest complaints. Two more children followed; Frank in 1857 and Freddy in 1862, and life settled into a grimly circumscribed routine.
Did not take children out today.
Did not get out. Cold snowing.
Boisterous winds did not go out.
Took children out after dinner. JW Cricket.
Ironed. Did not go out today.
Joseph Wells worked as a haphazard market gardener then as a shopkeeper and china salesman, but above all he was a cricketer. He was an extraordinarily fast round-arm bowler, and he played for the West Kent Club and the County of Kent, travelling the country each summer and earning what he could, bowling on village greens under scudding clouds and blue skies. The indoor life of his wife stood in stark contrast to his own. ‘Busy preparing the children’s winter clothes’, she would write in her diary. ‘I feel I cannot work fast enough.’ Or, ‘Char woman ill, had all my work to do myself–very tired–oh how hard I work, others have servants.’
On 26 June 1862 Joseph Wells made history when he bowled out four Sussex batsmen in successive balls. It turned him into something of a local celebrity. People visited his china shop in Bromley just to see this bowling legend in the flesh. Working in the background was Sarah Wells, long resigned never to learn French, own a silk dress or be waited on by a maid while genteelly entertaining relations in the front room. There was no front room: it was given over to the shop.
In 1864 nine-year-old Fanny Wells came home from a birthday party with a stomach ache. Three days later she died of ‘inflammation of the bowels’ (as appendicitis was called). Sarah Wells recorded her daughter’s death as it happened, on a blank sheet of paper, as she sat in the sick room. This sheet, marked with tear stains, she then copied conscientiously into her diary word for word, as if this was a way of making things count.
My firstborn child expired in my arms. God’s will be done.
My darling dearest pet pet, in her coffin, my darling only child.
Fanny was not her only child, but her favourite: her close companion. Sarah Wells needed to hold herself together for the sake of her boys and her husband, but she unburdened her grief in a series of agonised diary entries.
Oh never did I feel such sorrow–my own beloved mother dearest was severe. But this. Oh this. Is worse. Oh God…
It’s like a dream, her toys & little clothes lying about…her precious drawings…
In a diary that confines itself largely to the mundane, her raw emotion is shocking. High child mortality is one of those Victorian statistics trotted out by historians–but here we get a glimpse of how it felt to be the mother of that child. It was common, but it was still appalling to go through.
Two years later another child was born to Sarah and Joseph–Herbert George or ‘Bertie’. This son grew up to be H. G. Wells, phenomenally successful Edwardian author of novels such as The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, Kipps and The War of the Worlds. He was an observant child from the start.
The family home was Atlas House on Bromley High Street in Kent, a ‘gaunt and dismal’ place, according to Bertie, with a china shop at the front, a business bought from a cousin that proved impossible to invigorate. ‘My mother in my earliest memories of her was as a distressed overworked little woman, already in her late forties’, wrote H. G. Wells in his Experiment in Autobiography in 1934. ‘All the hope and confidence of her youth she had left behind her.’
In 1866, the year of Bertie’s birth, she recorded buying two pairs of sheets and three pillows–‘the first since I married, poor dear mother’s nearly all worn out, how poor we are, not able to buy common necessaries’. She also went to London ‘about my teeth’, which were falling out. ‘Had nothing done, expenditure great.’ A note of desperation and injustice had by now crept into his mother’s diaries. ‘Very boisterous dark day…what a miserable house this is to live in and how hard I work. What shall I have to do soon!! God help me.’
By the summer of 1880 Mrs Wells was a thwarted, worn-out woman of 57. Her two eldest sons, adults now, were in and out of employment. Bertie was 13 and unhappily apprenticed to the Southsea Drapery Emporium, where he worked a thirteen-hour day and slept in a dormitory with other boys. Her husband was unable to play cricket, having broken his thigh bone falling off a ladder in 1877. The family’s supplementary income gone, they were barely scraping by.
‘And then suddenly the heavens opened’, wrote H. G. Wells, ‘and a great light shone on Mrs Sarah Wells.’ A letter arrived in the post, stamped with a coat of arms, written in ink on heavy cream paper. It was a letter from ‘Miss Frances Fetherstonhaugh’, and it contained the suggestion of a plum job at Uppark. Mrs Wells had no experience of housekeeping for a country house, but she was in no position to turn it down. She snatched at the offer like a drowning woman.