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. Smith, whatever his or her role, got through £350 to £400 a month (£17,000 to £22,000 in today’s money). For the first five months of Mrs Wells’s new job, Smith and the housekeeper overlapped, and Smith held the purse strings. Then from January 1881, ‘Wells’ was the only recipient of the cash handouts–and they were rather small in comparison.
She was not initially trusted with large sums of money, receiving £30 in January, £20 then £50 in February, and £50 then £80 in March. Soon, though, she was being handed £100 to £200 at a time (£5,000 to £10,000). These are phenomenal amounts of money for a woman who for thirteen years couldn’t afford to replace her own bed linen, and it made Mrs Wells very anxious. She handled around £10,000 a year (£500,000 in today’s money), her weekly accounts running along the lines of ‘Coffee, lemons, sugar, pipkin & seeds, malt & hops’ plus casual labour, as well as settling the various bills with tradesmen in Harting and Petersfield.14
The next chapter of Mrs Wells’s diary keeping picks up her life ten years into her job at the big house. It was 1890: she was 67 years old, and money still made her nervous.
Went to Petersfield Miss F–Bank £150.
Sent Miss Pink the remainder of bills 9/ leaving only £1-00 in hand which is due to Joe!!!
Showery day sent to Petersfield £60-00. Put away £5-00 for fear of spending it.
Her mistress was by this stage 71 and her son Frank was 33, Freddy, 28 and Bertie, 24 (within a year to be married to his cousin, Isabel). Her husband Joseph Wells had given up the shop, and for the past three years had been living a couple of miles away in the tiny agricultural hamlet of Nyewood. She sent him regular if slightly reluctant payments that she recorded in her diary:
Sent JW £1-00.
Sent JW rent £2-00.
Paid JW £1-00. Very tired.
Joe’s years on his own had not been spent entirely unhappily. At Atlas House ‘My father camped, so to speak, amidst its disorder very comfortably’, wrote H. G. Wells. ‘He cooked very well, far better than my mother had ever done.’ On moving close to Uppark he gave up all pretence at work and was kept by his wife, who he would see for the occasional afternoon tea, overnight stay in her rooms or walk in the woods. Mrs Wells felt both guilty and exasperated.
JW left after breakfast he sounded sadly depressed.
Sent JW £1-00 being the last. What will they do when I am gone.
This diary is a seven-inch Ferre’s Twopenny Pocket Diary, one week to a page. Inside is an advertisement for ‘The latest and most improved system of gas lighting, the Etoile Gas Lamp Regenerator’. Most country houses have by now succumbed to gaslighting; Chatsworth House in Derbyshire is at work on the water turbines that will shortly bring it electricity. But Uppark is not on the gas mains, so Mrs Wells does her work by oil lamp.
In the back of the diary are advertisements for health supplements:
Beecham’s Pills–for Bilious and NERVOUS DISORDERS, such as Wind and Pain in the Stomach, Sick Headache, Giddiness, Illness and Swelling after Meals, Dizziness, and Drowsiness, Cold Chills, Flushings of Heat, Loss of Appetite, Shortness of Breath, Costiveness, Scurvy, Blotches on the Skin, Disturbed Sleep, Frightful Dreams, and all the Nervous and Trembling Sensations, &c.
(Now in use for half a century, the secret ingredients in Beecham’s Pills were aloes, a purgative and ginger soap.)
Her entries are no longer in ink but written with a soft stub of pencil, firmly pressed. The handwriting is now almost illegible; the hand of an old lady tremblingly filling in a mundane line a day. It is her bedtime ritual–what we might call today her therapy.