Mrs Wells might reasonably have expected a pension, perhaps an estate cottage, after her time served at Uppark. Many housekeepers worked up to their death, but if they became frail were usually looked after by the family. Uppark, however, had a different regime, with no sense of noblesse oblige. To the socially insecure Frances Fetherstonhaugh, what mattered beyond all else was loyalty. In the end, she left the great house to a middle-aged colonel, the son of her friends the 4th Earl and Countess Winterton. To Mrs Wells she gave nothing. The housekeeper departed as she arrived, in a carriage bound for Petersfield station with her old travelling trunk.
‘A poor little stunned woman she must have been then, on Petersfield platform’, H. G. Wells imagined, long after the event:
a little black figure in a large black bonnet curiously suggestive now of Her Majesty Queen Victoria. I can imagine her as she wound mournfully down the Petersfield road looking back towards Harting Hill with tears in her blue eyes, not quite clear about why it had all occurred in this fashion, though no doubt God had arranged it ‘for some good purpose.’ Why had Miss F been so unkind?
Her fault, according to H. G. Wells, was that she gossiped about ‘some imaginary incidents’ in her mistress’s former life, which had come back to Miss Fetherstonhaugh’s ears. If this was true, it is revealing. It shows that Mrs Wells, the underdog, was increasingly beset with thoughts of injustice: slaving away for ‘that woman’ who was no more than the sister of a dairymaid. It also implies that Fanny Bullock/ Fetherstonhaugh took to her grave a prickly sense of social alienation from the country-house world she inhabited. She carried a chip on her shoulder to the end.
In future decades, the injustice felt by Mrs Wells was gradually to consume the minds of household staff. ‘Servants are looked upon as a part of the furniture of the house: live furniture, nothing more’, wrote former butler Eric Horne in 1932, railing against the ‘vast abyss’ that separated master and servant. ‘If the live furniture is in the town house and is wanted in the country house, or vice versa, it is simply moved there. If a piece of the live furniture gets broken in body and health, the gentry simply say: “chuck it out and get another”.’20
Most women in Mrs Wells’s position would now have been in dire straits. How would she work again, given her age? Who would support her impecunious family? If the housekeeper was a spinster, who would look after her? Mrs Wells’s savings were small: for the past decade she had been paying her husband’s rent and bailing out three struggling boys. There passed some extremely anxious months (not helped by Bertie abandoning his wife and moving in with a student, Amy Catherine Robbins, in January 1893). Her deafness grew steadily worse; she could no longer hear the sermon in church. She wrote to an employment bureau and every contact she could muster after her years in service, but no one was interested in the elderly ex-housekeeper of Uppark.
Felt depressed. I hope soon to get employed.
Please God I could get some little house where I could be earning my living.
Miss Curtis called and said no replies. I fear I never shall get another situation.
She lived with her husband in the nearby hamlet of Nyewood, paying the rent out of her savings. It was not, in all likelihood, a harmonious time for husband and wife, reunited after a dozen years of separation. ‘Wrote for £5 more of my hard-earned savings!!!’ she records with agitation.
Meat went off quickly in the pantry, and her daily errand was no more exciting than ‘Went to Rogate for Butter & biscuits’, a hard hour’s walk away. Shopping in Harting was demeaning–she was reduced to hunting for scraps and paying with coins, where once she ordered the best for the big house and handed out banknotes.
But Mrs Wells, devoted mother, was lucky with her sons. Freddy was now working in commerce in South Africa, and Bertie was beginning to make a decent living from his writing. The sons rallied round, stumping up a monthly sum to keep their parents. Middle brother Frank, a fledgling watchmaker, lived with his parents.
Initially Mrs Wells fretted. Two years into her retirement, she could not see it as such. She was still, at 72, fooling herself that she would find some work–‘I pray I may still earn a trifle.’ The dismissal from her post rankled, its anniversary recorded in her diary.
16 February 1895: ‘2 years ago I left Uppark.’
The big house continued to exert a pull; it was still her compass point, and she was curious as to what was going on: ‘Heard Mrs Legge was at Uppark’–the gamekeeper’s wife. But did she dare show her face again, after her shaming departure?
On 8 March, two years after her fall from grace, Mrs Wells finally achieved a kind of closure. We learn this from an entry, sweet in its brevity, where she reduces her ex-mistress to her origins: ‘Called on Miss Bullock.’ Three months later Miss Fetherstonhaugh–or Fanny Bullock, dairymaid’s sister, to some–died.
Sarah Wells went on to enjoy an Indian summer after her lifetime of toil. She was moved by Bertie to a ‘pretty little house’ at Liss, not ten miles from Uppark, with ‘seven decent rooms and a garden’. Here she lived to the age of 83 with Joe and Frank. Money still preoccupied her, but things did not turn out so badly. In the back of her diary for 1899 she writes a tally of pounds received: Freddy sends £5 and Bertie £15 to £20 every two to three months. Her annual income for the year is £105, around £11,000 in today’s money. ‘The little old lady is rosy and active’, wrote Bertie to Frank on New Year’s Eve 1896, ‘ –fit for twenty years I shouldn’t wonder.’
One century after Mrs Wells returned to Uppark to act as its housekeeper, a terrible fire broke out in the roof, consuming much of what Miss Fetherstonhaugh had striven to pass on. In 1989 the great house was gutted, the upper floors collapsing onto the ground floor with many archives and treasures damaged or destroyed. After long and painstaking repair, Uppark reopened to the public in 1995–one of the most rigorous restoration projects ever undertaken by the National Trust. As for the servants’ basement rooms, their dank, underground nature proved to be the perfect protection from the flames. They needed little renovation.
Mrs Wells’s diaries–which travelled in her black trunk from Uppark to Nyewood, then from Nyewood to Liss–have ended up in the Rare Book and Special Collections Library of the University of Illinois, on loan from the National Trust. How this would have puzzled, not to say worried their author, had she been able to imagine such an end.