In 1939 the Bells purchased a wireless: heavy, chunky, in a Bakelite frame. It benefited the servants more than their masters, for while Vanessa and Duncan lived their lives in London, Grace and Walter took to sitting around this new and extraordinary device that brought them a sense of connection with the wider world. Short plays, organ music, seaside songs and Children’s Hour at 5.15 p.m. were wonderfully entertaining, but the six o’clock news brought with it an increasing unease. Grace, working on a succession of rag rugs, listened anxiously to the escalating fears of another war with Germany. ‘We are naturally all rather agitated about the news here & you must be too’, wrote Vanessa to her housekeeper on 13 March that year. ‘I do hope things will calm down soon but one simply doesn’t know what to think or expect. The world is certainly mad.’ She signed it with her customary formality, ‘Yours sincerely, Vanessa Bell.’
The Second World War was the most turbulent episode of Grace’s life–as it was for every working woman in Britain. It blew all the old certainties about class distinctions out of the water. As the Blitz bombs rained down, ladies sheltered with their maids for hours on end in Anderson shelters and mansion basements, making small talk to ward off hysteria. Servants in their thousands, men and women, gladly left to join the war effort. Who could say who Vanessa Bell’s ‘really valuable people’ were, now that half a million ordinary women were employed by the services and countless more in essential war work on farms and factories throughout the country?
As a married mother of a small child, Grace was exempt from war work. But as housekeeper of a farmhouse lying directly on the predicted route of invasion, just three miles from Newhaven, the war insinuated itself into her every living moment. Britain had long held dear the idea of the home as a fortress, a place of sanctity and safety. The housekeeper’s role was to safeguard this fantasy; to keep the wheels running smoothly and the rituals unchanged. But if a single bomb could destroy a house in seconds, what fundamental value did her job hold? Was this a time to give up on slavish attention to floor waxing, mattress turning and silver polishing and put other, more vital priorities at the centre of one’s life?
And yet perhaps this was precisely the time that the sanctity of home mattered more than ever; a time in which satisfying domestic routines were the only balm to the madness outside. Picking and bottling blackberries; transforming an army blanket into a winter coat; turning a worn collar on an old shirt: many women wrote of the fulfilment, even joy, that finite domestic tasks gave them during wartime. Both Vanessa Bell and Grace Higgens turned to their knitting needles, to bread making, to vegetable growing and pig rearing in an unforeseen merging–not always harmonious–of two previously opposite lives. At Charleston, mistress and housekeeper both rolled up their sleeves and made the best of it.
There are no diaries from Grace for the outbreak of war; they resume in 1944. But there are letters from Vanessa Bell that fill in the blanks, describing how Charleston was transformed into the family’s retreat. For several months, as the country prepared for war, the Higgenses found their home turned upside down with building dust and chaos through every doorway. ‘Piles of brick and rubble arise and then disappear and there are holes in the floor everywhere’, wrote Vanessa to Virginia in June 1939. ‘Baths and WCs sit about in odd places…I dash into cupboards thinking they are passages…Clive is arriving presently and I rather dread his horror when he finds what a state it’s all in, though he has been warned.’
Clive Bell was moving in–an unusual decision for a former husband, yet one that probably seemed perfectly logical to Grace, since she had always regarded him as her master. Vanessa’s close companion Duncan Grant was just a dear addition to the family, relaxed and informal in his relationship with the servants. Clive, used to far more luxurious surroundings, was to have the best: the whole north end of the first floor, including a bathroom, which pushed Vanessa downstairs into the old kitchen pantry, now with new French windows opening on to the garden.
The Higgenses, too, were to benefit. For the first time in twenty years of service, Grace was to get her own sitting room on the ground floor. She would have somewhere to put her feet up while she waited all evening to clear the dining table. The family wouldn’t have to climb up and down twenty-six stairs every time they needed a magazine or a pair of knitting needles or a toy. This space–11ft by 8ft–was ‘so as to give you a place to put things in’, wrote Vanessa. But really it was somewhere they could stake out as their own, and it became the new hub of Higgens family life.
They needed it, because their personal space was under threat. On Sunday, 3 September 1939, Vanessa, Duncan, Clive, Quentin and Angelica gathered round the wireless at 11.15 a.m. to listen to Chamberlain’s speech. ‘…I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.’ How unreal it seemed, with the garden outside ‘glowing with the reds and oranges of the dying summer’, Angelica remembered. She did not mention the Higgenses, but they would have been there too. Servants all over the country were at that moment taking their places next to employers to listen, tensely, to this historic broadcast.9 Standing next to Grace and Walter was Lottie Hope, turbulent cook-housekeeper of 50 Gordon Square. Lottie had arrived along with Clive’s vast collection of books, his exquisitely tailored tweed suits and his eau de cologne bottles cluttering up the bathroom. She was to work alongside Grace in the kitchen.