Peter John recalled nothing of the kitchen conflict when asked for his memories of the war. Grace’s son was four years old when war broke out, ten years old when it ended. As an adult he could still picture himself lying in bed at night, looking up through the rusting attic skylight and seeing German doodlebugs zooming over Charleston en route to London.
As Grace walked her son across the fields to Selmerston school, they’d warily watch the dogfights overhead. ‘All those planes, fighting in the air above our countryside. I wouldn’t think of the danger,’ he said. ‘I was fascinated by what was going on in the air.’ At the end of the school day Grace would leave the kitchen and walk to meet him. He had a little bicycle, and she’d push it all the way to meet him so he could ride the bike down Barleymow Hill home. ‘We wouldn’t see a car, in those days.’ Once home, Peter John ran outside with a stick, ‘shooting’ at German planes flying low across the cornfields, chased by British Spitfires, ‘which petrified my mother because she thought they would shoot at me’. Grace had every reason to be anxious: a young Lewes mother had been fired at by a German plane as she pushed her six-week-old baby along in a pram.12
A searchlight was stationed near the farmhouse, run by a dynamo that thundered away at night. It was manned by the Home Guard, trigger-happy local men who would fire at low-flying enemy aircraft with a mounted gun. Grace would shout at them, furious: ‘Of all the stupid things! You could hit one and blow us all up!’
That was Grace: outspoken, opinionated, instinctively pacifist. She had ambitions for her son, the spider-limbed Peter John. Working for the upper middle classes had changed her outlook on life. She decided to take him out of Selmerston Primary and send him to a private school in Lewes for a ‘better education’; a ‘mainly girls school’ that took in boys. Broughton House School drilled him parrot-fashion in countries, capitals and rivers and coached him in sport, at which he excelled. He had no sense of being different to his classmates for being the son of a domestic servant. ‘I was just another boy from the country.’ This was a measure of Grace’s standing with Vanessa, Clive and Duncan. She did not feel inferior, so neither did her son. Nor was he aware that the ménage at Charleston might be of interest to anyone. ‘The Bloomsbury lot? They were just another family. “Bloomsbury” didn’t mean anything to me at the time. There was no mention at school of them…I never talked about them, and no one appreciated or realised who they were.’
When Virginia Woolf committed suicide in March 1941 he was unaware of her great fame as a writer–he was, after all, just five years old. But he remembered vividly the change in atmosphere at Charleston at the time. Vanessa, ‘fragile but not overwhelmed’, broke the news to Duncan on his arrival from London. ‘We all three clung together in the kitchen’, wrote Angelica, ‘in a shared moment of despair, feeling that the world we knew, and the civilisation Virginia had loved, was rapidly disintegrating.’ Was Grace–who rarely left the kitchen–a witness? Was she physically included in this family moment? Angelica, whose memory was selective regarding servants, doesn’t say. Grace was so shocked by the news that she hid it from her small son. Some time later he found out that Virginia had drowned herself in the River Ouse.
Grace’s voice is restored to us again in 1944, but her diaries have by this time shrunk in size–and scope. The little burgundy appointment books make no mention of the war. While the country tensely awaits ‘D-Day’ and the much-talked-of Second Front, Grace lists her outings–from Alice in Wonderland at Lewes Little Theatre, to a trip to the hairdresser’s; from a dental appointment, to a jumble sale at Selmerston. She visits her friend Betty Hudson in Hurstpierpoint, takes part in a local ladies’ darts match and sees her precious goslings hatch.
In April and May of that year, trippers were banned from the coastal zone from East Anglia down to Cornwall, and the roads were clogged with an endless stream of military traffic. Sherman tanks rolled down the steep streets of Lewes. ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’ went the slogan, and Grace stuck to her own concerns. In any case, it was hard to keep a sustained interest in the larger picture of war and its various battles. The domestic front was too all-absorbing, with its ration books, registration cards, queues and petty domestic irritations. ‘Try to run a home without saucepans, frying pans, dishcloths, floor cloths, toilet paper, brushes, Vim, fuel of any sort, and, of course, soap!’ wrote Barbara Cartland in her memoir of the war years. ‘We never had enough.’13 Grace simply recorded day-to-day life, perhaps with a sharpened sense of gratitude for small pleasures.
In 1943 Vanessa painted her housekeeper working at the square kitchen table surrounded by soothing domestic items: mixing bowl, onions, scales, turnips. The atmosphere is serene; Grace rubs fat into flour unhurriedly. Nothing suggests we are at war. It is a nostalgic, idealised version of domestic life, painted with a yearning for peace and normality. It’s also evidence of an unusually intimate relationship between mistress and cook-housekeeper: both silently at work, sharing this small space separately but harmoniously. Many women had their lives changed immeasurably by the war. Those who experienced war work, including thousands of former domestic servants, were tested to their physical and mental limits in both nerve-racking and exhilarating situations. They travelled widely, mixed widely and had their horizons permanently expanded. If Grace had been ten years younger, her story might have been very different. Instead, her war was intensely parochial. At Charleston she looked after what were, in effect, four male drones. Duncan, 54 at the outbreak of war, carried on painting. Clive, 58, enrolled in the Home Guard–as did Quentin, 29, whose past history of tuberculosis disqualified him from active service. Walter was willing to join the Home Guard if he could belong not to the Firle, but the Selmerston corps, which met conveniently in his regular haunt, the Barley Mow pub. ‘There is a great deal of feeling among the wives about the part the Barley Mow plays in the whole affair’, Vanessa wrote to Duncan in 1940. As it had seemed unpatriotic to keep Walter on as a full-time gardener, he found a job in the brickworks at Berwick, a ‘reserved occupation’ that kept him from conscription. By 1942, when Walter was 48 years old, men up to the age of 51 were being called up to fight.
Grace would willingly have played her part by looking after an evacuee or two, since Lewes was bursting at the seams trying to accommodate them all. But the upper middle classes were notoriously chary about accepting East End children–it is hard to imagine Vanessa Bell sharing her studio attic space with a couple of bed-wetters from Bermondsey. No doubt Grace, soft-hearted and maternal, had her views, but these went unrecorded. Country houses all over Britain were doing their patriotic bit, after all, and soon the local big houses–Firle Place, Sheffield Park, Admiralty House, Southover Grange–were commandeered to billet British and Canadian troops.
But Grace’s story of simply tending to a middling-sized house and its occupants was not untypical of many a woman’s experience during the Second World War. Good Housekeeping reminded the housewife of her essential, even heroic contribution:
Yours is a full-time job, but not a spectacular one. You wear no uniform, much of your work is taken for granted and goes unheralded and unsung, yet on you depends so much…Thoughtlessness, waste, a minor extravagance on your part may mean lives lost at sea, or a cargo of vitally needed bombers sacrificed for one of food that should have been unnecessary…We leave it to you, the Good Housekeepers of Britain, with complete confidence.14
That jittery summer of 1944, Walter had a hernia operation, Vanessa Bell had a mastectomy for breast cancer and Quentin had his appendix out. Charleston became a place of recuperation–and Grace was back at the stove, caring for them all. ‘Everyone here has come to the rescue’, Vanessa wrote to Leonard Woolf in August, ‘Grace doing all the cooking and others coming in to help, so that I need do nothing but live like a lady if I only knew how.’ Whatever Grace’s ‘live-out’ arrangement with Vanessa after the Lottie spat, she could not let her mistress continue cooking dinner for the family. From this point on, the balance of power between Grace and Vanessa slowly began to shift in the other direction. Vanessa needed her. Grace looked after her. From being a ‘hopeless amateur’, a girl who once travelled on the overnight train to Provence with her head in Mrs Bell’s lap, Grace was now a mother figure looking after a fragile woman of 66.