Few women wanted to work as a live-in servant by the mid-1930s. It had become an embarrassing profession to admit to, particularly if you were in search of a husband. ‘If you said you were in domestic service it was still the same old story’, wrote former housemaid Margaret Powell of her attempts to snare a man in the thirties; ‘you could see their faces change. The less polite ones used so say “Oh, skivvies!” and clear off, and leave you cold.’3 Working women had a new sense of self-worth, fired by increased literacy and the rise of Labour politics. The hard-pressed middle classes began instead to rely on ageing ‘dailies’ and charladies. There were concerned debates in the national press and on BBC radio about ‘missing maids’, the decline of deference and the ‘class war in the home’. An advertisement for Fry’s Cocoa at this time shows a mob-capped maid cheerfully savouring her mid-morning cup, while her mistress’s bell jangles unheeded behind her. ‘Let ’em ring!’ is the disconcerting slogan.
The upper classes fared better, since there was still a certain prestige attached to working in a large country house. Many estates remained generously staffed, still functioning on Edwardian lines both in opulence and attitude. Lady Astor’s personal maid Rosina Harrison routinely worked an eighteen-hour day, seven days a week, seeing to the needs of a woman who got through five sets of clothes in a day.4 At Shugborough in Staffordshire, the Countess of Lichfield told laundry maid Nesta MacDonald that her fashionably bobbed hair was out of the question, since the young ladies of the house had just had their hair bobbed.5 In June 1936 the MP Harold Nicolson, house guest at the Astors’ immense country seat in Buckinghamshire, wrote the unthinkable in his diary: what was all this show for?
Cliveden, I admit is looking lovely. The party also is lavish and enormous. How glad I am that we are not so rich. I simply do not want a house like this where nothing is really yours, but belongs to servants and gardeners. There is a ghastly unreality about it all. Its beauty is purely scenic. I enjoy seeing it. But to own it, to live here, would be like living on the stage of the Scala theatre in Milan.6
Vanessa Bell was made uncomfortable by her annual visits to Clive Bell’s large parental pile, Cleeve House in Seend, Wiltshire. Playing the role of conventional wife (though long amicably separated from Clive), she would retreat to her bedroom to write tartly comic letters to sister Virginia describing the ranks of humble servants and the household’s footling, pointless existence. ‘I don’t think this establishment can last very much longer’, she wrote at Christmas in 1929. ‘I suspect one’s trial at Seend will soon be over. Already it seems quite unreal and only hanging by a thread to the year 1929. It all belongs properly to 1870 and the wonder is that still servants can be found to keep up the illusion.’
Yet for all her poking fun at Seend, Vanessa Bell and her sister could not seriously imagine life without servants. When Virginia Woolf took to doing the housework as a way to manage her nerves during the Second World War, ‘I’d no notion’, she wrote to a friend in 1941, ‘having always a servant, of the horror of dirt.’ On a rare occasion when she found herself doing the dishes, she was amazed at the effort: ‘I’ve been washing up lunch–how servants preserve either sanity or sobriety if that is nine 10ths of their lives–greasy ham–God knows.’
With Grace about to marry Walter, Vanessa thought hard about how they could keep her and whether this would work, weighing convenience (a live-in housekeeper for Charleston) against imposition (the Dolt in their attic). Grace must have worried too. Would she be allowed to stay? Should she leave service after fourteen years with the Bells? Walter would have preferred this, but he did not have a reliable income. After the army he worked in farming, for the council, then at the local brickworks, earning a slender living.
When he and Grace got engaged he looked hard for a cottage to rent, but nothing comfortable could be found. Grace’s wages were low for a domestic servant (it is not remembered precisely what she earned at this stage; her son claimed she never once asked for a pay rise)–but at least board was included. From 1933 there was electricity at the farmhouse, too. With Vanessa Bell’s blessing, the newly-wed couple moved into the attics at Charleston.
On 23 May 1934 Vanessa wrote to her servant from London.
My dear Grace,
I am sending you two cheques, one for your wages the other a wedding present from Mr Bell, Mr Grant & myself. I am so glad that I need not write to say goodbye, but only to send you every affectionate good wish from us all & hopes that you will be very very happy & make yourselves a lovely home.
Yours affectionately
Vanessa Bell
Duncan Grant gave the married couple a painting of the Coliseum in Rome: his touch was always more personal.
Grace wrote to Clive (who, earlier that year, had sent her a provocative postcard of a naked African woman with pendulous breasts posted ‘between Daka and Port-of-Spain’):
Dear Mr Bell,
I am writing rather late I’m afraid to thank you for the lovely and generous present which you sent me. It was very kind of you, I feel I have done nothing to deserve so much; I have never been so wealthy before, & although I had a great temptation to spend some of it, I put it all in the Bank. I am so glad that although I am married, I am still living at Charleston, it is very kind of Mrs Bell & yourself to allow me to stay on, I hope some day to be able to repay the many kindnesses to which I am indebted to you both.
Yours sincerely,
Grace Higgens7
Both mistress and servant professed to be ‘so glad’ that nothing would change: it was a source of relief all round.
Three months later, Grace was pregnant. Wearily Vanessa took this new yet inevitable development on board. As a rule, Bloomsbury did not like babies. ‘Sticky fingers, sticky fingers,’ Clive Bell would say with jocular distaste when young children clattered through the house. But he meant it. Children were anathema to clever conversation, to civilised mealtimes and silent hours in the studio or library. Although Charleston had been a haven for the wild antics of young Quentin, Julian and Angelica, those years were over. Now, when Julian and his Cambridge friends came to stay, they debated politics late into the night.
In the spring of 1935–just before Grace reached full term–Vanessa and the household went to Rome for five months, promoting her servant to cook-housekeeper of Charleston. This was the top job; Grace could do no better with the Bells. And yet the role was nothing like the impressive equivalent of the previous century. Cook-housekeeper in the 1930s meant doing it all: the pastry making, the hallway scrubbing, the sheet changing, the household accounts, the chamber-pot emptying. Charleston always employed a series of ageing charladies who came weekly to ‘do the rough’, but Grace’s daily round was a relentless one.
‘Have you heard whether Grace has had her baby yet?’ Vanessa wrote to Virginia on 27 April. ‘I hope I shall hear somehow when it does arrive, but I doubt her husband’s capacity to write.’ On the same day she wrote to Grace, a letter quite delicate in tone:
I am beginning to wonder whether you are through your troubles yet…You seemed to think it might be very soon when we left you…It is a pity that I who really adore tiny babies should miss seeing yours. Never mind, it will be fairly small still I daresay by the time I do see it.
She then gave instructions about a wardrobe being removed, chair covers and china delivered and a request for Grace to write to Foley China at Stoke-on-Trent to chase an order. As if that might be too much of an imposition for a woman about to give birth, she added:
Walter will be able to see to all these things if you can’t I suppose. Or else I wouldn’t bother you. You will have enough to do for the first fortnight at least I’m sure with Peter John. Or Elizabeth. Or both! Take care of yourself.
Heaven forfend there should be twins in the attic. Peter John was delivered on 10 May 1935 in his parents’ bed in the eaves of Charleston. The farmhouse had been rented out to friends by Vanessa (ever canny with money), leaving Grace and Walter in their new home on ambiguous terms. Clearly Grace could not be expected to work, but the tenants needed their maid to use the kitchen, which was also the Higgenses’ kitchen. The one bathroom could be used only by the tenants, so Grace and Walter would have to forgo their weekly bath (as negotiated with the Bells, between 8 and 10 p.m. on Friday while the family ate their dinner), and rely instead on cans of hot water which Walter would have to carry up the vertiginous twenty-six stairs to the very top. The attics at Charleston are surprisingly roomy–at one end is Vanessa Bell’s studio, at the other a small sitting room and bedroom, plus space for visiting children on camp beds and maids needing a berth. But for a family of three, the steeply pitched walls seem to contract. You can never forget where you are (so says Mark Divall, the gardener who lives there today): car tyres on the gravel outside, voices in the rooms below, the creak of those wide oak floorboards as anyone moves across them. Every window overlooked the Bells’ realm below–hence Grace’s nickname for the attic, ‘High Holborn’, since it ‘looked down on Bloomsbury’. By the same token, those in the bedrooms below would hear every squeak of the Higgenses’ bedsprings, every footfall across their sitting-room floor, every murmur of conversation. The cry of a newborn baby would have carried throughout the house.
‘How I wish I could see him’, wrote Vanessa Bell with touching warmth from Rome that May.
You must write when you can & tell me exactly what he’s like. The colour of his eyes & hair & whether he’s good or naughty. Boys are generally said to be naughtier than girls. I hope he’s gaining weight properly, perhaps my old baby scales will come in useful…I’m afraid you’ve had horrid cold weather for the first few weeks of your baby’s arrival but I daresay he takes after you & enjoys the cold…When you’re quite well enough & have a minute to spare do send me a short letter & tell me about yourself & the baby, as you know men aren’t much good at describing babies.
We assume that Grace wrote back to her mistress, though no letter survives; a proud little paragraph about her baby, nothing flowery. Now she was a mother just like Mrs Bell. Who knew how the relationship between housekeeper and mistress might change? Vanessa was asking herself the same question, but in an altogether different way. On 18 July she wrote again to her housekeeper from Rome: could Grace get the electricity company to come and read the meter in London–‘see about it as soon as possible’. She was, as usual, vague about her plans–‘We will be back I think at the end of August or beginning of September’–and would come straight to Charleston, but was thinking of asking Lottie and Louie to come to help. In the course of the long letter (mostly filled with instructions) Vanessa circled, warily, ever closer to the nub of the issue: what use was Grace going to be with a small baby, and when could she properly get back to work? ‘Perhaps it will be best’, she suggested,
if you don’t try to do anything for us, but lead a separate life. What do you think? I expect John Peter gives you plenty to do…We could get Mrs Stevens I suppose if we wanted her. Mr Bell won’t be there & I don’t know about Julian. But it shouldn’t be a very large household most of the time.
This pragmatic letter might well have panicked Grace. What did Mrs Bell mean, ‘lead a separate life’? Would she still get her wages? Would she and Walter have to pay for board? She was on maternity leave, of a kind–yet she was being asked to scurry around getting the London house ready, having windows cleaned and meters read. How was she to manage this with a new baby? Perhaps, in her sleep-deprived state, she could focus on just one thing in Vanessa’s letter. ‘I expect John Peter gives you plenty to do.’ Hadn’t Grace written to Mrs Bell about her baby Peter John? Hadn’t she even sent a precious portrait of him, taken in Eastbourne at great expense by a studio photographer? It was just a careless mistake, of course; but somehow a telling one.