December 1951
I were in service at Patchley (Doris explained for the benefit of those who hadn’t already heard that part).
Before that I’d been evacuated here and all and when I was I’d met this girl.
Emily her name was, daughter of the family what owned the place back then.
Back before it was sold off to be a hotel.
(The Branninghams, the manager clarified.)
Me and Emily, we’d been close when we was young.
Then when I’d started working at the house we’d been close again.
Least we’d been as close as you could be when one of you was in service and the other was the young mistress.
I’d started as a housemaid but when Miss Emily’s lady’s maid had gone off to get married, she’d put a request in for me special, like.
And it were a bit irregular because I weren’t that experienced, but Sir Arthur—that’s the one it was back then, though Master James took over after he died in sixty-two—didn’t kick up a fuss.
Mrs. Loris did, though (the housekeeper, Audrey explained to the other listeners).
I was angry about it at the time because I heard some of what she said to the master.
“Highly irregular,” she said, “cause problems below stairs,” she said.
But to be fair, she were right. Other servants as had been there longer didn’t much like having to call me miss like I were better than them.
Because I weren’t, really. I was just me.
They tried not to whisper too much when I was around, because even then they was nice folks in general and there’s solidarity in the servants’ quarters, but I heard things.
Couldn’t not. “You know how she got it,” I remember one of them saying when she didn’t realise I was there, “what she had to do.” And I remember another saying back, “Well better her than me then.” And some of the other girls looked at me with pity, or with fear, and that felt dark and sick in a way that never quite left me, for all I loved my new position.
And I did love it. The duties were lighter, for a start; taking care of the mistress was a sight easier than taking care of whatever needed taking care of that day in a big, messy house.
But what I really loved was that it kept me close to Emily.
And I think she liked that it kept her close to me and all.
Each morning I’d bring her breakfast in bed, which she wouldn’t eat, though she’d drink the coffee, sitting up in her silk nightdress with her hair all mussed from the night before and spilling around her head like a halo.
Only her hair weren’t gold, it was brown like oak and beautiful as the autumn.
And some days—not every day, but often enough—she’d pat the bed and I’d sit beside her and then she’d pick something from the plate she’d otherwise not have touched—bread dipped in egg, perhaps, or a single slice of thick bacon—and she’d feed it me.
And her fingers would stay on my lips and then her lips would follow them, and she’d lay me down and call me her beautiful, wayward nymph, and in them moments when it was just her and me and the morning I was happier than I’d ever been.
Than I’ve ever been since, in a way—though that’s an unkind thing to say because I’ve had a wonderful life.
But nobody’s ever made me feel how she made me feel, when she took the time to make me feel it.
When we was done I’d turn down the bed so as not to make too much extra work for the other girls, and fix my uniform so as not to make too much of a scandal.
And then I’d dress my lady and do her hair and that, and then she’d nod and say very good, Cooper, on account of that was my name back then, and she’d be off to face the world.
And I’d take a bundle of sheets that still smelled of her and of us down to be washed, and then I’d wait until the next time she needed me.
I lived like that all the way through fifty into fifty-one, and though there were parts that were hard, and though Mrs. Loris would take me aside regular to tell me to be careful, I was swept up in it all. In this place, and in Emily.
Back in them days the gentry was still the classy sort what cared about community, so Patchley was forever hosting fairs and fetes and big events for folk from Crinkley Furze and the like.
And Christmas was always a big time of year, with people coming in from as far as Tapworth to celebrate the season with the family.
Some of the lower rooms was opened up—the ballroom what we does the baking in now, for example—and the grounds was all decorated and set with tents and stalls and games for the kiddies.
It was round that time in fifty-one, and I’d just finished setting the mistress’s hair.
We was standing by the window (Doris had gone to the window herself at this point and was gazing out over the grounds where the TV crew were still running their cables and rigging their gear) looking down at the fete setting up beneath us.
It weren’t snowing. But in my mind, it feels like it was snowing. That’s the thing about getting old—memory plays tricks on you. How it was gets all tangled up with how you wish it was, how it should have been.
We stood there watching as the villagers and the house staff was getting ready and I got this, like this ball of sort of wanting inside me.
Because down in the grounds, that was a community coming together.
And though the house was a community of a sort, being where I was and how I was and what with the way things were between me and Emily, I was apart from it.
Hard to gossip with the other maids when they think you only got your place because you let the mistress put her hands up your skirt.
Back home, though—and I mean home as it was when I were young, before I went to Patchley the first time or the second—I’d had family and I’d had neighbours, and this was when neighbours knew each other and did things with each other.
In forty-seven a bunch of us from all over Stepney had a Christmas fair on an old bomb site and a right old time of it we got to having.
For all I loved my life at Patchley, I missed things like that.
As we stood there watching, I remember my hand come to rest, natural-like, on the small of Emily’s back, like we was the regular sort of lovers, and when she noticed she shook me away almost violent.
“What are you doing, nymph?” she asked, and her voice was cold and cautious.
“Sorry ma’am.” I looked down. Whatever else we was to each other, I was in service.
Emily was still staring out the window. “God, look at them.”
I was looking. But I don’t think we was seeing the same things.
“Can you imagine anything more dreary?” she asked. I don’t think she was asking me exactly—Emily was like that, she’d ask questions but she wouldn’t expect answers.
But this time I answered anyway. “I think it’s nice,” I told her.
“You would.”
I didn’t ask her to explain what that meant because I knew.
But she told me anyway. She turned to face me, tilting my chin up with two fingers and looking into my eyes.
“You’re such a romantic, aren’t you? It’s one of the things I—” She cut herself off there.
And I’ve never quite had it in me to believe she was going to say what I wanted her to say.
“It’s one of the reasons I keep you around. ”
She was a fickle thing, was my mistress. So often I’d seen the worst thing she could imagine turn on a sixpence into the only thing she wanted. And now a smile was on her lips, wicked and scheming and enticing.
“Very well,” she said. “If that’s what you want, I shall take you to the fair. We can rub shoulders with the hoi polloi and I can—oh, I don’t know—win you a fruitcake or something.”
“Not sure that would be proper, miss,” I told her.
And then she put her hands on my shoulders, all stern like. “My dear sweet nymph, you’ve just had your—” Actually there she said some things I’d probably best not repeat in company. Point was she made a strong case as how I were in no position to worry about things being proper.
So I didn’t. Not for then, at least.
The fete was a three-day thing, and Sir Arthur was kind enough to give each of the staff a half day while it was running so we could go visit if we liked. Standoffish he might have been, but a proper gent of the old school was Sir Arthur and sore missed.
The first day and the start of the second I was working, and since about a third of the staff was off on account of the reasons we’ve established, I was working double hard to cover for them as was enjoying themselves.
After tending to my mistress in the morning I was called down to help in the kitchen, because while most of the food at the fete come from the village, Sir Arthur were always keen to send something down from the house to show that the family was still part of it.
And over the years, that had settled into a tradition of making gingerbread.
And so we made a lot. Hundreds and hundreds of rounds over days.
It were beneath me, technically, not work for a lady’s maid, but the house was short and I didn’t want to give myself airs. Besides, as far as Mrs. Loris and Cook was concerned, I weren’t a proper lady’s maid anyway.
So I made gingerbread. It was an old recipe.
Victorian, Cook said, and the house had been serving it at Christmastime for nigh on a hundred years.
It was more a cake than a biscuit in some ways, soft and sticky and still a little wonderful.
When I come off-shift at last my hands smelled of ginger and my hair smelled of rum and my fingers were sore from stirring.
But I was happy, because I’d been part of something, and because I’d arranged with Miss Emily to meet her in the grounds and play, just for a little while, at being regular folk.