In a buff-coloured folder in the British Library is a collection of old recipes snipped from papers by Grace throughout her fifty years in service–from The Times, the Express and Woman’s Weekly magazine. There are dog-eared favourites, part of her reliable repertoire, for roast pork roll, beef in mustard sauce, cold veal and tomato soup and walnut and coffee slices. By the time of Lottie’s arrival, Grace knew what worked, what was popular and what was economical. But still she snipped out wartime suggestions, responding to the national mood of mounting anxiety. In January 1940 bacon, butter and sugar were rationed, followed shortly by meat, tea, jam, biscuits, breakfast cereals, cheese, eggs, lard, milk and canned and dried fruit. By August 1942 almost all foods, apart from vegetables and bread, were rationed.
The Ministry of Food issued daily recipes via the press for housewives trying to rustle up a treat with poor substitutes, such as chocolate cake made with dried eggs and two ounces of margarine, or ‘mock cream’ made with milk, margarine and cornflour. Newspapers quickly brought out their own wartime cookery books full of ideas to stretch non-rationed food further, such as ‘savoury sheep’s tongue’, or ‘cod’s roe pie’ (livened up with an ounce of margarine and a teaspoon of dry mustard). Dried egg, pronounced the Telegraph, could be viewed as ‘a fascinating and progressive branch of present-day catering’.
But Grace never had to reconstitute the dreaded dried egg, whisking hard to get rid of the lumps. She had no need of dried milk, and probably did without sheep’s tongue too. She was lucky to have at her disposal fresh and bountiful ingredients, thanks to the neighbouring dairy farm and the forward planning of the household. ‘I suppose the sensible thing to do would be to grow as much food as possible at a place like Charleston’, Vanessa had written to Grace in October 1939 (the ‘phony war’ having lured her and Duncan back to London); ‘vegetables, pigs, ducks & all we can–anyhow it could do no harm–we might be very glad of such things as we would have been in the last war.’
Vanessa hired Walter reluctantly as part-time gardener and odd-job man, thinking she was doing him a favour, when she would far rather get someone else–such as Mr White, ‘the old man who brings the washing. He buys a new pony every week, Grace says, and he keeps hens and he’s a jobbing gardener. If only I could employ him instead of the D[olt]! Isn’t it tempting’, she wrote to Angelica, who was staying with her 48-year-old lover Bunny Garnett. Walter did not relish being at the beck and call of Mrs Bell. By the following summer, as she wrote to her friend Jane Bussy, she had ‘driven the Dolt with such an iron rod all these months that we really have plenty of cabbages…Poor man, I have no mercy on him.’ Walter knuckled down and built goose pens, chicken runs and a pigsty for an old sow called Hannah who produced an annual litter of piglets. He dug and sowed new vegetable plots, pruned and fertilised the gnarled fruit trees, and Charleston became largely self-sufficient.
Clive Bell played his part too, dressing up like a country squire and coming back at the end of the day, rifle cocked over one arm, with rabbit, hare, pheasant or partridge dangling from his hand. These would be hung in the larder for a week before they could be cooked, and as Peter John remembered ‘they were high. They’d be hanging with newspapers underneath to catch all the nasty drips. They really smelt terrible. The flies would be buzzing around the newspaper on the floor–and Grace dealt with it all.’ Or else they’d be used for still lives, young cock pheasants hung up against a looking glass by artists Angelica and Quentin with a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign propped up to warn off Grace.
The red and white cows continued to produce their thick, creamy milk, delivered to the kitchen straight from the dairy. While the nation sank its teeth into ‘corned beef toad in the hole’, or ‘tripe au gratin’ (Daily Express Wartime Cookery Book), at Charleston there was–as Angelica remembered–‘a defiant abundance of food and drink’. The climax was her cordon bleu twenty-first-birthday dinner party in December 1939. ‘Everyone was determined to make it a remarkable occasion, from Lottie, who slaved for a fortnight beforehand, to Vanessa, who thought of and organised it.’ Oddly, she doesn’t mention Grace.
Lottie Hope, Clive’s cook, was 49 years to Grace’s 36 at the start of the war and they knew each other of old. As young maids they had often shared a bed at Charleston, whispering about boyfriends in the dark. Lottie was all hot, dark intensity to Grace’s cool, freckled calm. She was a foundling, left in a cradle on the doorstep of the hospital; that was why she was called Hope. Lottie drank, so the rumour went, and sometimes lost her temper with violence.
After five years of having the kitchen the way she liked it, Grace opened her door to Lottie and her strident laughter. Previously she had worked beneath Lottie as kitchen maid. Now she was cook-housekeeper: the king pin. This wasn’t going to be easy.
Although the niece of a fellow servant remembered Lottie to be an awful cook (based on visits to Gordon Square in the 1930s), according to Quentin she was a gifted one, producing rich and elegant meals for Clive, who was something of a gourmet and had been known to order a butler from Fortnum’s when entertaining at home. Grace’s style was different. She is remembered for her good, unpretentious English cooking: succulent roast joints, wonderful soups, seed cakes, spotted dog. The two locked horns in a culinary battle that was to last a year and a half, each vying to out-trump the other with their wartime specialities.
As the Government sought to control every aspect of domestic life, so tensions mounted in communal households where ration books were pooled and commodities shared. How dare Lottie use up the precious sugar allowance on another wholly unnecessary iced cake? Who had been at young Peter John’s ration of concentrated orange juice? Was it right that the best cuts went to the family, when rationing had introduced a scrupulous equality to the table? Not only food, but other goods too became hard to obtain: safety pins, knitting needles, saucepans, Vim. Sanitary towels, face powder, contraceptives, soap. Toothpaste, toilet paper, floor cloths, hairpins. Every intimate corner of domestic life was brought under official scrutiny. Charleston was not a particularly spacious country house: there were nine people sharing its rabbit warren of low-ceilinged rooms. The potential for petty grievances was high.
People were irritable, and they were fearful. Hundreds of East End children from Bermondsey had been evacuated to Lewes with satchels and gas masks (shoplifting, so they said, proliferated).10 The wailing night sirens followed by the continuous flute-like all-clear began to be a fact of life in town. The Bells and their servants hunkered down behind the blackout smoking, knitting, keeping nerves at bay–the Bells by the dining-room fire, the servants next door in the kitchen. By the summer of 1940 a German invasion at Newhaven was expected imminently, the tension mounting inexorably after France’s surrender in June. Virginia Woolf was close to hysterical: Leonard was a Jew–what was the point of going on living? Women everywhere felt near to breakdown. How would you save your child from German soldiers? A mother in Essex writing a diary for the Mass Observation Project decided she would put aside a bottle containing a hundred aspirins, which she would dissolve in milk and give to her four-year-old daughter if the Germans came.11 Grace and Walter, sitting around the wireless for the six o’clock news, tried to keep such fears from their five-year-old son.
That summer, the blue skies of southern England were criss-crossed with smoke and fire from swarms of German Messerschmitts and British Spitfires: the Battle of Britain had begun. On the evening of 7 September, close to a thousand aircraft attacked London, lighting up the sky like a sunrise as the East End burned. The bombing continued for the next seventy-six nights. Vanessa Bell’s studio at 8 Fitzroy Street was destroyed that September: most of her early work went up in flames.
Vanessa retreated physically and mentally within the four walls of Charleston, calming her nerves by painting. Interior with Housemaid is an early wartime work; more accurately, interior with housekeeper. Grace is slim, her hair bobbed, her posture young for a 36-year-old. She stands by Vanessa’s mahogany writing cabinet, its pot of fountain pens contrasting with her own tool of work: a broom. It must have been hard to carve out the time to pose, what with the demands of the kitchen and her young son at her heels. Vanessa, who would nab anyone in the house for a life model, also painted the little boy; his was one of the first portraits done in her new attic studio. ‘Peter John’s not a very good sitter,’ he remembered her tutting to Grace. ‘He’s so restless.’ He was always desperate to get back downstairs to the kitchen and his mother.
News worsened daily. Bombs came close enough for the blacked-out windows to rattle. Outside, rolls of barbed wire cut off Grace’s blackberry-picking walks along the cliffs. Life, necessarily, contracted. By the end of 1940–a winter of power cuts, worsening queues and a dozen bombs dropped on Lewes–tensions at Charleston finally exploded. As Vanessa and the family sat at the round dining table one evening eating pot-roast pheasant, drinking French wine and making erudite conversation, there came the sound of raised voices from the kitchen across the hallway. Two women arguing–no, shouting at each other. There was a scuffle and a scream. Duncan put down his knife and fork and went to investigate.
‘Terrific domestic upheavals’ at Charleston, wrote Vanessa Bell to her old friend Jane Bussy after the event. Lottie had, she said, ‘got at odds with the Higgens family (Grace and the Dolt) and our sympathies were divided. But when it came to the point of loud shrieks during dinner and terror lest a carving knife should be brought into play something had to be done.’
When forced to make a choice, Vanessa couldn’t envisage life without her right-hand woman–and so it was Lottie Hope who was dismissed without a pension after twenty-five years in Bloomsbury. Grace won the battle over Lottie, but there were other discontents. She wanted more privacy: a separation between work and her own domestic life. Taking strength from her victory, she became more assertive. ‘The Higgens family remain’, Vanessa continued,
but have a separate ménage of their own. Grace in fact has become a daily, and in consequence I cook the evening meal. The result is most of my stray thoughts are given to food, and in spite of all I must say we live very well…With unlimited quantities of milk, potatoes, bread, vegetables, apples, coffee etc, I don’t want to make your mouth water, but one can do without Lottie’s spate of iced cakes and not starve.