The final diary Mrs Wells kept at Uppark, covering 1892–3, is written in The Englishwoman’s Pocket Diary. This book allows more room for her entries–a week over two pages–but still no space for Sunday. Down the right-hand side of each page is a ledger column for personal housekeeping, which Mrs Wells–not keeping her own house–ignores. She has her big black housekeeper’s ledger, and this is enough.
It is written in ink this time, in a flowing but shaky hand, and the same well-worn phrases fill its pages. But this year something is different. There is a growing sense of claustrophobia; a certain desperation in her situation.
Oh! So tired. Longing to get out, how can people shut themselves up indoors.
Mr Thompson & wife with Mrs J Legge [the gamekeeper’s wife] & Miss Tigg [the plumber, painter and glazier’s wife] came to tea. Shut up all day waiting on them.
Physically, she is falling apart. Mrs Wells is now nearly seventy years old, with no prospect of retirement.
Began the [annual] house cleaning. My feet so tender what can it be?
After tea my last poor old double tooth came out.
Did not go out today. Suffering with pain and stiffness I fear it is rheumatism.
Her relationship with Miss Fetherstonhaugh is also degenerating. A new uneasiness is recorded–she even asks permission to go to church: ‘Spoke to Miss F about the Evening service–gave her notice to leave.’ It is hard, for this elderly woman, still to be owned by another and prey to capricious mood changes and querulous demands. ‘Miss F more kind. I long to get away.’ She feels increasingly ambivalent towards her employer–and the feeling is mutual.
‘I think Miss Fetherstonhaugh was very forbearing that my mother held on so long’, H. G. Wells wrote in his autobiography.
Because among other things she grew deaf. She grew deafer and deafer and she would not admit her deafness, but guessed at what was said to her and made wild shots in reply. She was deteriorating mentally. Her religious consolations were becoming more and more trite and mechanical. Miss Fetherstonhaugh was a still older woman and evidently found dealing with her more and more tiresome. They were two deaf old women at cross purposes. The rather sentimental affection between them evaporated in mutual irritation and left not a rack behind.
There are hints in this diary that Mrs Wells’s mind is indeed beginning to falter. These entries might be veiled references to staff spats, but she appears confused and paranoid.
26 March 1892: ‘Busy all day as usual. I do not feel comfortable. Such strange things one hears and sees!!’
28 May: ‘Unpleasant answer from the Cook who seems to act very queer.’
On 2 June she has a chat with ‘dear Freddy’, her eldest son, ‘in my bedroom’–an odd place to receive guests, and perhaps significant enough to be noted. Is this the only safe place to talk? A fortnight later she is ‘Greatly worried about servants’. By full summer comes a sense that the housekeeper of Uppark is finally reaching the end of her tether.
2 August: ‘Numerous disagreeables, what I have to contend with.’
4 August: ‘12 years today I came here and left Bromley. What anxious years they have been to me. What rude insulting people I have had to live with and it is worse now.’
12 August: ‘Worried with Head Dairy Maid’s tales.’
13 August: ‘Carried to Miss F the tales in circulation.’
On 22 August she sweeps her own bedroom (something was seriously amiss with the housemaids’ regime if the housekeeper was reduced to cleaning her own room–but perhaps her growing paranoia insisted she do it herself), and the following day feels ‘very poorly’. She doses herself with cod liver oil, but it’s not enough to fortify her against Miss Fetherstonhaugh’s bruising brush-off.
25 August: ‘Miss F returned. Unpacked her boxes, but not required to dress her. Felt my deafness very much but I must be thankful for good health.’
As Mrs Wells’s hearing gets worse, so her catalogue of staff upsets increases. By the summer’s end she is permanently aggrieved. The girls are, no doubt, exasperated by their ailing, deaf housekeeper.
29 August: ‘Cook as usual not a word that is kind.’ (Mrs Keeble, barely there a fortnight, was a disaster. She was to leave in two weeks.)
2 September: ‘That horrid woman upset me again. Oh how hard to be obliged to stay in such a place.’
27 September: ‘Miss F–queer how altered! It must be my deafness.’
In November, Mrs Wells is told there is to be an important house party, the first in a very long time, and Miss Fetherstonhaugh (now 73) is in a terrible fret about it. She tries to impress upon her hapless, deaf housekeeper what is expected.
On 2 November Mrs Wells is found ‘Busy airing sheets. I dread this party.’ The dust! The bed making! The cleaning of all that silver! Three days later she is ‘Busy writing for all the wants of the house’–as if the house were some voracious, potentially troublesome person. Two days later she is still ‘Busy thinking of all I wanted’. The kitchen is in uproar, Mrs Harrison producing great wobbling jellies and syllabubs, pie crusts and consommés, her kitchen maids barred from false errands to the stables. Upstairs the dust sheets are being pulled off the furniture one by one, revealing the shrouded splendours of the grand Saloon and Red Drawing Room.
The guests arrive on Wednesday, 9 November: ‘Got on better than I expected’, writes Mrs Wells in her diary; ‘so thankful. Miss F very quiet’, which makes her uneasy. Has she pleased her mistress? All the ‘folks’ leave before lunch on Friday. ‘Oh! So tired.’
But it is not over yet. A spate of pre-Christmas sociability leaves Mrs Wells peevish and exhausted. Her inbuilt reverence towards the aristocracy has, it seems, evaporated–even her feelings towards royalty. Their comings and goings are reduced to a fuss and a bother. Likewise, her deference towards Miss Fetherstonhaugh has soured. After a lifetime of putting herself second, suddenly she can take no more. On 21 November, the 83-year-old Lady Clanwilliam and her stout-waisted daughters come to lunch. Three days later the Duchess of Connaught (German-born wife of Prince Arthur, Queen Victoria’s seventh child), icily correct, descends on Uppark for tea. With her is Lady Fitzwilliam of Wentworth Woodhouse in Yorkshire (Britain’s largest country house). ‘No time to go out’, writes Mrs Wells.
After this marathon, there are no thanks from her mistress. Instead, ‘Miss F always finding fault.’ On Friday, 2 December, she unpacks a large delivery for the basement stores, sorting goods into the right cupboards, listing everything in her dog-eared housekeeping books. Her work, as ever, goes unnoticed: ‘No thought of me if tired or not.’ Instead, there is a distinct frostiness from upstairs.
3 December: ‘Miss F very strange, resolved to have an understanding soon.’
On 6 December it’s the turn of the Duke of Connaught (Prince Arthur) to arrive with his demanding retinue of valets and coachmen from Bagshot Park in Surrey. Mrs Wells is not impressed. ‘Oh! Such fuss & work, how I wish I was out of it–what ignorant people as a rule servants are. Busy all day early & late. Poor Legge in disgrace.’ (Legge was the head gamekeeper.) A couple of days later she is ‘worn out with worry’. Worry has become a reflex, a modus vivendi. The worry makes her tired, and her tiredness makes her worry.
9 December: ‘Miss F never asks if I am tired.’
Mid-December sees the annual ritual of handing over charitable Christmas gifts (cast-offs, in reality) to the poor of Harting village. It was a habit started by Frances’s sister Mary Ann, and had been continued assiduously after her death in a custom shared by both mistress and housekeeper. One woman gets all the gratitude; the other sees to the detail. But this year things are altered.
14 December: ‘Miss F refused my helping her with her charity clothes. What a comfort the blessed Sabbath day.’
Still, out they head in the chill of Friday, 19 December, distributing goods in the wagonette, and Mrs Wells succumbs to her usual knee-jerk subservience: ‘How good Miss F is!!!’ Two days later the reality sinks in when crowds of villagers are received at the house. Following in Miss Fetherstonhaugh’s gracious wake is her housekeeper, dishing out tea and giving her ear to health and housing grumbles. ‘Miss F gave her presents away to the poor people…I had to wait on them all.’
As the year draws to a close, Mrs Wells’s diaries show her to be dog-tired. On Christmas Eve she sends up eight large mince pies; on Boxing Day she prepares for and waits on company while nursing a ‘severe cold & cough’. On the twenty-eighth the water pipes at Uppark freeze solid. Two days later she travels seven miles by open trap with Mrs Harrison the cook to buy cough mixture in Petersfield. The journey, she writes, is ‘very very cold’.
The year 1893 starts with no new diary. She crams her entries into the back of last year’s: ‘Slippery weather afraid to go out.’ The elements conspire against her…and so does her mistress. Mrs Wells asks for a few days’ leave in early January, catches the train to Clapham Junction and stays with her youngest son Bertie and his new wife Isabel, ‘thankful to be at rest’. She sees the sights, spends time with her family and recovers her flagging spirits.
On her return she is summoned upstairs to the Little Parlour. Here the fire is lit and the dogs are slumbering, but today the mistress of Uppark is unusually stiff-backed and alert. Miss Fetherstonhaugh is glad of her companion Miss Sutherland’s pale, sandy-lashed presence, as she has an invidious task on her hands. There is a hesitant knock at the door, and at once the dogs are brushed from black velvet laps. Her old friend Mrs Wells–cherished lady’s maid, housekeeper at Uppark for twelve years–is given a month’s notice to pack up her belongings and leave.
The coup de grâce from Miss Fetherstonhaugh is not written up in the housekeeper’s diary. Just one line, bewildered and frightened: ‘What shall we do for a living? Please God find me work to do. How cruel of that woman.’ She cannot name her mistress, the friend who turned against her. But she need no longer celebrate her munificence, or bob her head and take orders. The social wrongs of the past twelve years are righted. Frances Fetherstonhaugh is merely, and rightly, reduced to ‘that woman’.