Grace wrote an exclamatory sentence in biro in her new Women’s Institute diary on 11 January 1953: ‘John out to tea with Diana Piper!’ Her 17-year-old son was out on another date with the girl he would eventually marry. Diana Piper–rosy-cheeked, outgoing, vivacious–blew into the closed world of Charleston in that Coronation year and shook things up. She brought with her an outsider’s perspective on the whole ménage, questioning Grace’s unthinking loyalty to the family and prompting John to ask if his mother was being taken for granted. Diana Piper was the granddaughter of a servant: her grandfather had been a groom for Lord Gage at nearby Firle Place. She had left school at 15 to work with horses, felt beholden to nobody and was surprised to discover that somewhere like Charleston still functioned the way it did. ‘I didn’t like the way they spoke to Grace,’ Diana remembered. ‘It was very formal. All Victorian standards.’
That spring John walked her up the long cart track, ‘puddles and all sorts’, to the farmhouse. First she was greeted by Blotto, Grace’s hairy sheepdog, who slept in a half-barrel kennel outside the back door. John led Diana past the clutter of coats and boots into the kitchen. ‘Grace was there, as she always was–it wasn’t very often you went to Charleston and didn’t find her there, either at the sink or at the table, cooking,’ she said. The first thing that hit her was ‘this awful concrete floor’. Grace had long waged a campaign to replace it with linoleum, but Vanessa Bell had a prejudice against lino. Diana remembered too the comforting smells of the kitchen–percolating coffee, home-made soup simmering on the Aga. She took note of the one-gallon geyser over the kitchen sink for washing up (with no washing-up liquid, though ‘Fairy’ had been around since 1950); and the fact that all the Higgens family laundry was done there by hand. The four squeezed into their tiny sitting room and played card games with much talk and laughter (‘they both liked to talk a lot’), while Grace kept an ear cocked for the call from the dining room. Diana watched with wonder the ritual of serving another family.
‘It was different to my own home,’ she said. ‘We were just a family, two brothers and a sister.’ At Charleston there was this other parallel but subtly different world through an interconnecting door. ‘You would feel you were shut in this little sitting room, in case the family came out while Grace was doing her cooking. After a while I would come into the kitchen and talk to her, and I could see how hard she worked.’ Diana would watch Mr Bell enter to get his gin and tonic from the old Frigidaire, acknowledging her with a gentlemanly nod. Mrs Bell would also nod and say ‘good evening’, very formal. But if Duncan Grant came in, ‘his face would light up if he saw people–he’d ask you questions, he was just interested’. Diana soon learnt, like her boyfriend John before her, to ‘pop back into the sitting room quick’ if it was anyone other than Mr Grant.
On 2 April 1953, Grace and Walter took delivery of a black-and-white television set at a cost of £60–around £1,200 in today’s money–paid for in instalments on the new ‘hire purchase’ scheme (£6 down payment). That year, over a million televisions would be bought in Britain, bringing the total to 2.7 million. It was a hefty object boxed in teak veneer, duly admired by visiting guests; an object that would come to dominate the little sitting room, enhancing their cut-off life at Charleston. From this point, Grace began to record world news in her diaries. On 2 June, a cold day of sheeting rain, the Coronation of Elizabeth II was watched by the Higgenses and their friends the Ramsays. ‘Beautiful reception on Television from abbey’, wrote Grace that night. Vanessa Bell and Mr Grant, neither of them royalists, marked the day in London with plover’s eggs and champagne.
It was a rare occasion that got Vanessa to London these days. After the war Clive returned there, Duncan shuttled between the two and Vanessa stayed on at Charleston. She had become weary of socialising, dreaded London parties and succumbed apparently happily to her contracting horizons. Her style of painting had fallen out of fashion; now her young granddaughters gave her her greatest pleasure: Amaryllis, Henrietta, and twins Frances and Nerissa. Angelica’s marriage–at 24, to a man twenty-six years her senior–was not a happy one. Her husband Bunny Garnett (an ex-lover of Duncan Grant’s, by a classic Bloomsbury twist), played the field while she was stuck in Huntingdonshire in a big house with very little help. ‘It’s really terrible that all your possible servants have fallen through’, Vanessa wrote to her in 1952. ‘It seemed more hopeful when I was with you.’
While Vanessa’s world shrank, her housekeeper’s began to expand. The modern milestones of the post-war era are ticked off one by one in Grace’s diaries. In 1948 she gets a Vactric, which runs about polishing floors ‘as if by itself’; in 1953 she buys the television, has her hair permed (‘not too bad’), acquires her own passport and flies off on her first package holiday to Paris with a crocodile-skin travelling case and her friend Ruby Weller (‘Horrible room in Hotel’). In 1954 she pays her first instalment on the Encyclopedia Britannica; in 1958 she’s travelling again, this time on a week’s package holiday by coach to Venice with Ruby and Mrs Harland (‘lovely place’); and in 1961, aged 58, is the proud owner of a ‘wonderful Hoover-Matic’ washing machine (costing £90, a present from Mr Bell).
Grace also took to visiting country houses now open to the public, thanks to the fledgling National Trust and the Historic Buildings and Monuments Act of 1953, which ruled that in return for repair grants, the public should get a measure of access. Grace would join her WI friends on motorbus expeditions to Wakehurst Place, Haremere Hall, Alfriston Clergy House and Polesden Lacey, running her practised servant’s eye over the interiors (‘very grubby’ was her verdict on one). If Grace saw any irony in herself, a housekeeper, visiting such houses as a tourist, she didn’t comment on it. She was a working lady on her weekly day off, enjoying the scenery, nail scissors at the ready for furtive plant cuttings.
There was a price to pay for breaking her bounds. Time and again Grace records getting back from a holiday to find the sink full of dirty dishes, or the fridge full of stinking meat. There was the occasion when she found her big cauldron of soup, left expressly on the Aga for the family, still bubbling foully on her return. ‘Spent day scrubbing & cleaning’, Grace recorded on her return from Paris. ‘Took six buckets of water to scrub kitchen, it was filthy.’ Going to the Paris ballet, riding down the Grand Canal on a Venetian gondola–well, it cast something of a grey pall over daily life. John began to take note of the small disrespects paid to his mother, such as Quentin walking through from his pottery with his ‘clodhopper boots covered in clay’ just after Grace had scrubbed the tiled passageway from front to back door; or the last-minute announcements that there would be eight to dinner, requiring a bus journey into Lewes to buy more food. Few suppliers would deliver to Charleston now; the long, potholed track was too much for the delivery vans.
Grace wasn’t a moaner. She might exclaim, ‘What a waste of time!’ but she seemed outwardly content. There were signs, though, that she wanted something more from life. When the war ended, the women of Britain desired only to put their energies into home–their own home. Home was what the men had been fighting for, symbol of so much hope and pride. For many women it was more than a simple wish for privacy. Home was who they were, their ‘creative power base’, a projection of their very identity. ‘Four walls and a roof is the height of my ambition’, wrote one Mass Observation diarist after the war.16 Charleston was home to the Higgenses, but it was not their home. When Diana Piper met the family in the early 1950s, Grace was already on a housing list to get a council bungalow. She had started thinking about a life beyond Charleston.
But there were few houses to be had. After the war, prices had quadrupled. While Grace had been salting away her tips, her earnings and the Bell Christmas presents of crisp five-pound notes, she and Walter did not yet have enough to buy a home in East Sussex. When Angelica’s old nurse Nellie Brittain visited, boasting a husband in the police force, a son in the civil service and general prosperity, Grace was made uncomfortably aware of how comparatively poorly off she was. Walter was fed up too. ‘He thought they put on her too much,’ said John, ‘especially in the evenings, when she’d like to watch a television programme or listen to the radio, and she’d be called on–“Grace?”–and she’d have to come out of the sitting room and go and see to their needs.’
Or they’d be discussing something at dinner and decide to get their housekeeper’s point of view,
and she’d readily give it; talk it over in the kitchen. Duncan, or Quentin, would come back into the dining room and say, ‘Grace thinks so-and-so’–and they’d laugh, and think maybe she did have a point…very often this would occur.
It was flattering, this dependency on her. They wanted her not just for her cooking but for her opinions. Yet this summoning of Grace might go on up to ten or eleven o’clock at night, and the couple began to crave more privacy.
Her solution was to buy the old family house in Banham, Norfolk; two farm cottages knocked together, bought cheaply from her parents in 1958 and in need of modernisation. Grace had kept in constant touch with her family, writing home weekly, visiting every summer and sending her son off for the school holidays. She harboured a dream of retiring there now that John, who had a steady job with a television repair company, looked set to marry Diana. She and Walter could live among her extended family and contribute to the smallholding. But the dream was just that: a dream. For, as the years went by, Grace found it harder and harder to contemplate leaving her ageing charges at Charleston. Gradually, they had come to depend upon her for everything.