The Higgenses settled into their new ‘chalet’ in nearby Ringmer with surprising alacrity. It had cost them £6,950 (around £70,000 in today’s money), and Grace had paid for it in cash–in part from the sale of her Norfolk house, in part from savings. Grace had played the stock market for many years, using Clive Bell’s regular financial advice, and been rather successful at it. She clearly had a housekeeper’s head for figures. There had been an ‘insane’ leaving party for her, remembered Virginia Nicholson, ‘at a peculiar restaurant in Lewes run by one of Duncan’s disreputable male friends’. A socially awkward group of around forty had got rather drunk, Grace included. She was free at last! Why, then, did she feel so anguished? ‘Somehow I dread going to live in my new house’, she confided to her diary. ‘I hate the idea of leaving Charleston.’ It had been her home for thirty-seven years. Duncan Grant, now an incontinent 86-year-old, had pleaded with her not to leave–‘poor old dear’, wrote Grace; ‘he is so helpless’. Quentin Bell had even suggested that she rent out her new house until a replacement couple could be found to look after Duncan–advice that had incensed John Higgens. Did they think they owned his mother? On 1 March 1971–a fortnight after ‘Decimal Day’–two lorries had loaded up a lifetime’s possessions from the attic.
When Quentin’s wife Olivier Bell visited Grace in her new home she was taken aback by how modern it all was. ‘Spick and span all over,’ her daughter Virginia recalled her saying. ‘But full of these wonderful pictures she’d been given over the years. It seemed incongruous to my mother–but not to Grace. Olivier had assumed, because of Charleston being lovely and old, and everyone loving old and characterful houses, that Grace would have chosen a rustic cottage.’ How little they really knew Grace, whom Olivier had always liked very much but viewed (so she told me) as ‘part of the furniture’.
Of course Grace was going to choose the ease of a centrally heated home with yellow fitted carpets throughout, a Formica kitchen, gas hob and tea at the touch of a Morphy Richards button. These were her dues, her reward after Charleston. With her snappy little mongrel Dandy at her heels, Grace quickly slotted into community life in Ringmer, revelling in being able to walk to the shops, spend time with her granddaughters Jackie and Suzanne without racing back to prepare Mr Grant’s dinner, and control her own destiny. (She never could get used to shopping for herself, writing ‘every mortal thing’ she bought down in her diary.) Walter pottered happily in his patch of garden, free from ‘that lot’ at last.18
For most career servants, this was the moment at which you might lose your identity. Stepping outside the protection of the big house, you were no longer defined by what you did or where you once lived. Unless you were kept on in an estate cottage and were nominally involved in the running of the house (as so many ‘treasures’ were), you were ejected into an indifferent universe. In 1971, being a former servant was not necessarily something you wanted to boast about. Yet wholly unexpectedly, Grace was to find herself courted in retirement as something of a curiosity. Her memories had acquired a market value. First came a documentary-maker a year before she left Charleston, a man who thanked her for ‘all the scones and cups of tea’ while he made his film about Virginia Woolf, which included a clip of the housekeeper reminiscing in the kitchen. ‘I know you will look and sound superbly’, he wrote.19 The scene was dropped at the final edit and Grace was ‘secretly a little pleased’,20 as the sudden attention was rather discomfiting.
Then came another film crew to make Duncan Grant at Charleston: it needed three takes for Grace to get her memories right as she stirred a pudding at the kitchen table, faltering over names and dates as the cameras rolled. Her voice is soft and careful, her accent mimicking that of her employers. ‘Ay don’t usually hev much time for modelling,’ she told the film-maker.21 Her everyday Norfolk vowels wouldn’t do in front of company.
A few years later the writer and publisher Nigel Nicolson contacted her while editing the letters of Virginia Woolf. ‘What a remarkable record!’ he wrote in reply to what must have been a long letter from Grace. ‘And what an important slice of English history you witnessed during all those years.’22 Important? This is not how it might have seemed to Grace at the time, as she carried cans of hot water up creaking stairs to guests’ bedrooms and scrubbed out the lavatory on their departure. But it gave a woman a sense of self-worth, actually to be sought out as a witness to ‘history’. In 1979 she was interviewed again for a book on Vanessa and Duncan, then in 1980 for Vanessa Bell’s biography. Grace was of increasing interest–if only as a conduit to the Bloomsbury Group.
There is no doubt that she’d enjoyed the frisson of glamour that came from being part of Bloomsbury, and this was probably one of the reasons she chose to stay for so long. The work was hard, but it could be interesting. Not many housekeepers were on such familiar terms with E. M. Forster that they wanted to call their dog ‘Morgan’ (gently discouraged by Mrs Bell); or had watched Sir Frederick Ashton ‘leaping about Charleston Lawn with red Roses threaded in his hair’; or served George Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell her Queen of Puddings (sponge cake soaked in egg and milk, topped with jam and meringue). Yet there were other reasons for her steadfastness that outsiders couldn’t begin to guess at.
By the time of Grace’s retirement, Walter, John and Diana Higgens were united against the Charleston regime and had made their views known to her. John struggled to understand her loyalty when ‘they expected so much of her, for so little. I thought she should give it up.’ His father Walter ‘didn’t like to show unwilling against the family, but he did think that they used to take my mother for granted, and she shouldn’t have done all what she did do, and not for so long. She at times was treated like a skivvy.’
The truth was that after fifty years of service, Grace was unable to separate her narrative from the Bells’. Her connection with this family predated her marriage to Walter by fifteen years; her photograph albums were filled with pictures of Bloomsbury children and grandchildren, who continued to visit and write to her in retirement like a favourite aunt. This had been not so much a job as a vocation. There was a sense–unpalatable to John, Walter and Diana–that her employers were more ‘family’ to Grace than her own people. Every letter sent to her by the Bells and Mr Grant she kept as having an emotional value. Most contain instructions; others reveal a touching mutual affection. ‘I thought of you as I eat a wonderful steak(!)’, Vanessa wrote from Iseo in Italy, 1952; ‘just right. Thick & juicy.’ Later, from Venice, she sent impressionistic word sketches to her housekeeper from her bedroom window: ‘three boys, practically naked, rowing a boat about the Canal at 7pm’.
After Vanessa’s death Grace had received a letter from Angelica, together with a cheque
for more than what I originally told you because I feel sure that is what Nessa would have wished, if she had realised how little money can buy these days…The actual amount has nothing to do with her fondness for you & her reliance on you, which as you know was unmeasurable–but she would have been happy to think it might be spent on something that would make life easier for you.
Grace’s blue biro has heavily scored out the three-figure amount: she didn’t want anyone to find out how much she’d been left. When Duncan Grant died in 1978, aged 93, he left her £500–the equivalent of £5,000 today. ‘I did not expect it’, wrote Grace, ‘as I did not think the poor darling had much money.’
Grace would occasionally grumble, but she did not consider herself exploited. To think this would be to deny a lifetime’s work its validity. She continued to fill her scrapbooks with press cuttings on the circle and, when tracked down by journalists seeking to denigrate ‘Bloomsbury’ (as had become fashionable), she was staunchly loyal. ‘I was just happy to spend my time with them,’ she told a Sunday Times reporter in 1981, three years after Duncan Grant’s death. ‘They were my kind of people.’ In retrospect, viewed from the dignified comfort of her three-piece suite, hers had been a ‘marvelous’ career. If she had a blind spot in her memories, then it suited her.
It also suited the Bell–Grant household to idealise their housekeeper. She would be addressed with fond irony as ‘Amazing Grace’; ‘The presiding genius of Charleston’, or ‘The Angel of Charleston’–as if her work was a divine calling and it were simply a matter of sprinkling fairy dust around to change the sheets, peel the onions, scrub the passageways and wash the dishes. With nicknames like these, how could Grace complain? For all that her son saw her ‘treated as a slave’, doing ‘ongoing, unrewarding work’, she was the Angel of Charleston, and so it was work worth doing. Advantage had undoubtedly been taken of Grace’s cheerful nature–but she was complicit in the deal.
Grace developed breast cancer in 1983, aged 79–and, unlike Vanessa Bell, she did not survive it. Walter had died a year earlier at 88. Their deaths coincided with the restoration of Charleston, steered by Quentin Bell and his wife Olivier. John and Diana Higgens were among the first tourists in 1986, and it was a bizarre experience. All looked so familiar. John wanted to reach out a hand and touch things to bring back memories, but ‘You mustn’t touch!’ said the guide. ‘You mustn’t sit on any chairs!’ He was surprised by the ‘over-the-top’ descriptions of objects he hadn’t given a second glance–the round Omega Workshop dining table, the pictures on the walls, the painted mantelpieces. But when the group moved into the kitchen, he knew he was on solid ground. Ticked off for pulling out the old kitchen drawer where he used to keep his toys, John felt he had to speak up. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘I don’t think certain things are correct.’ The floor, he told them, had once been concrete, not these smart terracotta tiles. The walls had been covered in ugly lead pipes, the original sink was much lower and smaller and there was no modern, gas-fired Aga but an old brute, ‘a so-and-so to get alight’, that required stoking with coke. The Charleston curators’ obsession with authenticity hadn’t made it into the kitchen. This dark little room, once the hub of the house, had been given a tasteful makeover.
The other tourists looked at John Higgens with new interest–this lanky, diffident man who might be able to get them one step closer to Bloomsbury. ‘It did strike me as rather strange, their interest in me,’ he reflected. ‘I didn’t assume that I was important at all. Obviously my mother was an important person here, but people seemed to think that I might know certain things.’ The room he’d grown up in was essentially gone, but his mother was commemorated with a plaque behind the Aga. Quentin the potter had glazed some tiles in tribute to the cook-housekeeper who had given his family half a century of her life: ‘Grace Higgens, née Germany, 1904–1983, worked here for fifty years & more. She was a good friend to all Charlestonians.’ It was the Bloomsbury equivalent of a gravestone in the family churchyard.
Actually Grace was born in 1903, but it was the spirit of the thing that mattered: she hovered over the farmhouse still, a benevolent angel in flowered nylon housecoat, duster in one hand, soup ladle in the other. For John, this was one step towards redressing the balance. ‘I think in their own way they really did like her and love her,’ he later concluded–‘in some sort of fashion, to the best of their ways.’