Sarah Wells desperately needed this job: her family needed it, and she took from it what she could. She used Miss Fetherstonhaugh just as Miss Fetherstonhaugh was using her. Within days of arriving at Uppark, she parcelled up and sent off a great quantity of broken chinaware to be mended by one Joseph Wells of Bromley, ‘Dealer in China, Glass, Earthenware, & Cricketing Goods’. A receipt duly came back from her husband, rather smudged and stained, dated 3 September 1880, for £1 14s 9d8 (around £85 in today’s money). In a musty box of accounts for Uppark in the West Sussex Record Office–twenty-six bundles for the year 1880–I found several more such receipts from Mrs Wells’s husband. This opportunism continued until Joe’s business was finally wound down in 1888, despite the one-shilling carriage fee from London–and the glaring fact that Petersfield had china dealers of its own.
Then there were her children to consider. ‘We infested the house’, remembered H. G. Wells. During school holidays and periods of unemployment, unless mistress and housekeeper had fallen out, Frank, Freddy and Bertie used Uppark like a free boarding house. At the start of her tenure they were 23, 18 and 13 years old. Like cockroaches or black beetles, the trio of male Wellses entered at basement level to undermine subtly the great house and its social pretensions.
This is the closest any of the boys had got to the gentry, and it came to them at one remove. ‘There came and went on these floors over our respectful heads, the Company’, wrote H. G. Wells. ‘People I rarely saw, but whose tricks and manners were imitated and discussed by their maids and valets in the housekeeper’s room and the steward’s room.’9 Like a sponge, the teenage Bertie soaked it all up–and some twenty years later put his observations to comic effect in the novel Tono-Bungay (1909). Here, Uppark was reimagined as ‘Bladesover’, his mother as housekeeper Mrs Ponderevo and himself as George, her unruly only son. ‘George’ is as tickled by the servants’ politics as he is by the goings-on upstairs: ‘After Company, I remember, came anxious days, for the poor old women upstairs were left tired and cross and vindictive, and in a state of physical and emotional indigestion after their social efforts.’
Each side of Uppark’s red baize door seemed equally ludicrous to young Bertie. In the face of her young son’s ridicule, Mrs Wells was required to take sides, and she sided with her mistress–if she didn’t, after all, her life would be lived in vain. She absorbed the snobberies, became expert in ‘the ranks and places of the Olympians’ and deft in placing people’s servants about her tea table, where the etiquette was strict. ‘I can see and hear her saying now’, wrote H. G. Wells of her fictional counterpart in Tono-Bungay: ‘“No, Miss Fison, peers of England go in before peers of the United Kingdom, and he is merely a peer of the United Kingdom”.’
Mrs Wells was goaded by her son, who found the upper servants at Uppark ‘intolerably dull’ with their ‘fifteen remarks’ that got them through each mealtime (‘The days draw out nicely’; ‘The frost continues’; ‘The poor souls without coals must suffer’)–and he told her so with teasing mimicry. She would invariably burst into ‘agitated tears’ at having this hollow charade–her life!–driven home. ‘O God how dull I am!’ cried Mrs Wells. ‘O God how dull!’10
Young Bertie Wells was particularly needled by the absurd self-importance of the upper servants–and Tono-Bungay is deliciously, mordantly witty on this point. There come annually to ‘Bladesover’ three pensioned-off servants, invited as a reward (with pointed reference to the housekeeper and her cronies) for their years of loyal service. They sit about in the housekeeper’s room in their ‘black and shiny and flouncy clothing adorned with gimp and beads, eating great quantities of cake, drinking much tea in a stately manner and reverberating remarks’. Also at the housekeeper’s table is Miss Fison (Miss Dyson was Miss Fetherstonhaugh’s lady’s maid at the time), and the butler ‘Rabbits’ (Mr Lambert?)–‘large, with side whiskers, even if his clean-shaven mouth was weak and little’. He has ‘acquired from some clerical model a precise emphatic articulation without acquiring at the same time the aspirates that would have graced it’. For all his morning coat and black tie with blue spots, Rabbits drops his aitches.
H. G. Wells serves them up as a comic vignette, but there is also something pathetic about these people, aping their superiors but having nothing really to say; people ill at ease, as if wearing ill-fitting suits, grasping after the cadences of refined conversation.
Upstairs, Frances Fetherstonhaugh was equally obsessed with class and hierarchy. She must find an heir for Uppark before her death, and the estate dangled like a ripe peach before dozens of speculative friends and distant relatives. At lunch one day Lady Leconfield, of nearby Petworth, was asked what she would do with the silver, should she be given Uppark. Her reply did not please: ‘Take it to Petworth, of course.’11 She had become a genealogy bore, and spent time poring over the Fetherstonhaugh family tree in an attempt to discover an appropriate heir. In the basement, meanwhile, the housekeeper debated the fine degrees of precedence between visiting servants so that they should go into dinner in the right order. Both upstairs and downstairs were caught up in an elaborate charade with no true personal relevance. The only thing to give it sustenance, to make it real, was the house.
From the moment she put on her lace cap, lace apron and black silk dress, Mrs Wells reabsorbed the hierarchies of below stairs and became institutionalised. For her, the house was a kind of prison she must make the best of. Her life of apparent busyness was a vicious circle, a dead end. She was trapped. But for her son, Uppark was a springboard. H. G. Wells depicts George at Bladesover ‘routing’ among the books and treasures of the house while the rain beats down outside. ‘Sitting under a dormer window on a shelf above great stores of tea and spices, I became familiar with much of Hogarth in a big portfolio…with Raphael…and with most of the capitals of Europe as they had looked about 1780, by means of several big iron-moulded books of views.’
Gravely ill, aged 21, Bertie spent four months convalescing at Uppark (an ill-tempered ban on the Wells offspring was temporarily lifted by Miss Fetherstonhaugh on hearing the dread word ‘consumption’), and he worked his way through Shelley, Keats, Lamb and Hawthorne; books bound in leather and embossed in gold. At times he felt desperate, shut up ‘in this accursed land of winds, wet ways and old women’.12 But his sunny, chintz-decorated bedroom in the eaves and Uppark’s ‘beech-woods and bracken-dells’ worked their cure. Bertie Wells absorbed the lesson that Uppark represented ‘all that is distinctively British’, and he took this nuanced, privileged knowledge out into the world, first as pupil, then teacher, then writer.