Acorn the butler opened the great front door of the Shrapnel Academy in response to General Leo Makeshift’s ring. The General and Bella stepped inside, and a flurry of snow blew in with them. Acorn sent the houseman Raindrop to see to the garaging of the car. Joan Lumb stepped forward to welcome the General and rather half-heartedly greet his young secretary Bella.
Acorn took the opportunity of asking Muffin where exactly the General’s chauffeur and the General’s secretary were to be put, since Joan Lumb had issued no orders, and now Ivor stood at the back of the hall, waiting, embarrassed, and as it were undesignated.
‘She’s a little indecisive today,’ said Muffin, kindly.
‘It’s all the excitement, and of course Murray’s coming.’
Joan Lumb believed her feelings for Murray were well disguised, but of course they were not. Everyone knew but Murray. ‘Besides,’ added Muffin, ‘she does like to see people first. But I’ll ask her for a decision.’
At the Shrapnel Academy the grand ground-floor rooms were used for dining, lecturing and relaxing. On the first floor were the suites where visiting dignitaries and lecturers were accommodated – the Queen’s sister herself had once stayed in the Charlemagne Suite. On the second floor were the smaller but still pleasant student, cadet and Academy staff bedrooms, and on the attic floor were the small dormered rooms where visiting white servants slept. The Shrapnel servants slept in dormitories in the semi-basement and basement which made up the kitchen and service areas of the great house. And if they slept five to a bed, and six under it, Joan Lumb was not to know. Their children were trained not to cough or cry when she was on her monthly round of dormitory inspection. Old ladies stayed their wheezing and old men their coughing, while Joan Lumb strode by. They pressed themselves into the cupboards and alcoves of this dank, subterranean world, and lived to see another day.
In Joan Lumb’s mind the status scale ran thus:
Employers, male, white
Employers, female, white
Servants, male, white
Employees, male, black
Servants, female, white
Employees, female, black
Servants, male, black
Servants, female, black
This seemed to Joan the natural order of things; and exceptions, of course, proved the rule. Both Ivor and Bella, on first sight, presented Joan Lumb with difficulties. It was rare for a servant to be as blond as Ivor the chauffeur. His very blondness seemed to qualify him for more than a servant’s room; on the other hand he was a chauffeur – fairly low down the servant scale. And what about Bella? A secretary? Surely she, by virtue of her pallor and the carved, still quality of her perfect face, all but qualified for a room on the second floor? Moreover, she was coming to dinner. But no, look again. She was no secretary, she was the General’s tart. Her blouse was thin and cheap and she wore a ridiculous gold cross at her neck.
‘The third floor for Miss Morthampton, Acorn,’ said Joan Lumb. ‘And for the chauffeur too, of course.’
All this detail as to where guests are put and why must seem tedious to some, and I hope they will bear with me, but anyone with more than one spare mattress at their disposal will understand the calculations which go on in the hostly mind: will the doubleness of the bed make up for the twanging of its springs? is it the oldest guest or the most entertaining who deserves the quilt which does not lose feathers? who’s to get the spare bed in the child’s room – the heaviest sleeper or the one least likely to take offence? And he or she will sympathise with the likes of Joan Lumb and see themselves in her, in this small manner, or that. We must lose our good opinion of ourselves if the world is to be changed, and see ourselves in those we most dislike.
I must tell you rather more about Acorn the butler; he was the uncrowned king of the downstairs domain. Acorn Jeffreys was young, shiny black, languid of speech, brilliant of smile, quick of thought. Plucked as an adolescent from his native Soweto, he had been shipped North and educated by a white welfare agency far, far beyond his parents’ expectation. Both bad and good fairies danced attendance at Acorn’s birth. The bad doomed him to Soweto and an absentee mother – absent against her will, of course; money has to be earned if children are to be fed, but the child takes little notice of maternal motives and sees only maternal conduct – and the good granted him magnificent good looks and a fine intelligence, the wherewithal of his salvation.
Acorn had passed well enough through the white man’s schools and university, but had been sent down from his law college, not for revolutionary activity, but more simply, for non-payment of his fees. Acorn had given the money to SWORD (Student World Organisation for Revolution and Democracy), instead, and argued his right to do so. But educational institutions are much the same the world over. They are, on the whole, kindly, but how can they keep going if students will not pay their fees? They will make do somehow if a pupil who can provide no money provides gratitude and comfortable notions, but if a pupil offers nothing pleasant, why put up with him? Can you blame them for expelling him? Now, partly from choice and partly from necessity – for his government would not allow him home – Acorn worked with the needy and oppressed, in the servant quarters of the Shrapnel Academy. Acorn had to eat, so he had to serve. The white races, in his experience, were too cunning to give, except in their own interests, and too dangerous to rob. So now Acorn worked for them, as did so many of his countrymen, as had his mother before him, placing their food in front of them, wiping up after them. Acorn ate well, mind you, better than his mother ever had. For now he was at the heart of Empire, where the good things are, and the crumbs which fall from the tables of power are fat and large.
In fact Acorn ate not just crumbs but whole chickens, appropriated from the upstairs table, at the rate of eight or ten a week. The cooks provided them; a simple enough matter – the young gentlemen upstairs ate well, and chickens passed through the kitchen by the hundred. The downstairs staff did not grudge Acorn his luxuries, or if they did, did not show it. Acorn’s warm brown eyes could quite quickly turn cold and cruel. The cooks themselves, along with the rest of the staff, these days made do for meat with flakes of chicken flesh left over from the upstairs table. Mixed up with rice, vegetables, lentils and chillis – which will make the poorest dish exciting – it served them well enough. It had to. It was Acorn’s habit to commandeer the money allocated – generously enough – by Joan Lumb for the staff table, and send it off weekly to SWORD. Joan Lumb inspected the kitchens once a week. Acorn saw her round, and Joan Lumb saw nothing wrong, and continued to believe that her staff numbered thirty souls. In fact, several hundreds lived in the warrens below, and the numbers grew all the time: babies were born, spouses shipped in, partners acquired, runaways sheltered, and Joan Lumb knew nothing about it.
It did sometimes occur to Hilda, the lovely, gentle Balinese girl who was Acorn’s bedfellow, she with the degree in English Literature, to wonder how much of Joan Lumb’s Staff Food Allowance was sent to SWORD and how much went into her lover’s pocket, but she said nothing. How could she? Why should she? She was trained to love, admire and appreciate, not to criticise. Acorn had spent a summer training with SWORD in the Lebanon, and knew all too well how to deal with opponents, secretly, quickly and effectively. If you are the lover of a man like that you need to go carefully, tread more softly, not less.
Hilda, of course, had not started life as Hilda, any more than Acorn had started life as Acorn. But Joan Lumb, being a member of the literate races, had no time for names which, however full of phonetic and racial resonance, would give difficulty to typists.
‘Acorn,’ she said, when first he stood before her – he seemed to glisten with pride and strength – ‘We will call you Acorn.’
‘That from which mighty oaks grow,’ he remarked. ‘Very well, Acorn it shall be.’
Joan Lumb, having not required this assent, was a little taken aback to receive it. She hoped the young man would not prove uppity. But his English was excellent, and he was intelligent, and cheerful, and there is nothing worse than being served by people who do not understand a simple order, are debased in their humanity, and unhappy. She wanted, quite actively, to have him on the staff. She employed him in the same spirit as a businessman employs a pretty girl rather than a plain one; and then she made him butler, in that same spirit as the headmaster makes a naughty boy a prefect, hoping it will quieten him down.