Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [102]
When the family went to Rhyl for a holiday she had less work, although she still had to get the servants’ dinner ready. Her master the cook ‘said I’d enough dirty hard work to do when the family was at home, & I was [to] go out for walks, if I’d any spare time, so I did.’ During this period the solitude grated on her and she missed her sweetheart and the liveliness and companionship she had known: ‘I felt lonely . . . But the time soon went by & the family came back, company came to stop, & then the winter with all business as there is in a big family, & I forgot I was lonely.’21
In 1851, the family took her to London, together with the cook, who said she was a ‘good ’un to work & he’d rather have me nor [rather than] Emma the kitchen-maid’. Hannah enjoyed London, but was back after two months with the family, ‘to Pitchford again & from there to Woodcote for the two grand balls at Shrewsbury. The company stay’d at Pitchford for them, so we was both very gay & hard-work’d too, for I seem’d as pleas’d to peep through the bushes to see the ladies & gentlemen start as if I was one of them.’22 She made the acquaintance of a Mr Munby, whom she later nicknamed ‘Massa’ and who would play a prominent role in her life.
Hannah moved to Henham Hall in Suffolk, the home of the Earl of Stradbroke (whom she calls Shadbroke in her diary). It was a long journey from London to the lodge gates ‘where the laundrymaid met me with a man & a cart for my box. The housekeeper star’d at me but didn’t speak for ever so long & then said to the char-woman, “She looks young,” & then to me, “You can go in the laundry for some tea & then come in to get His Lordship’s dinner up.” ’23
Because of the housekeeper’s unfriendliness, Hannah’s ‘heart began to fail me, but the servants was nice in the laundry & I made haste, & put my cotton frock & cap & apron on to be in the kitchen by 6. Mrs Smith the housekeeper was most unkind to me . . . & I was ready to say I’d go back in the morning.’ The friendly groom told her: ‘Never mind her, she’s drunk & doesn’t know what she’s about – you stop & you’ll get on all right.’24
When the elderly Countess of Stradbroke, the earl’s mother, ‘wish’d [the servants] a kind goodbye’, she gave the under servants a new cotton frock and half a sovereign each. ‘The lady gave me good advice. I wasn’t to mind the housekeeper’s temper but learn all I could of her, for she says, “She’s an excellent cook & baker & whatever you see her do you may be sure it’s right.” ’ After showing Hannah some watercolours, the countess ‘took my rough hand in her very delicate one, & said goodbye. It was the first & last time too that ever a lady like her touch’d my hand.’25
By this time Hannah’s sister Ellen was living with her at Henham Hall as a scullion. However, Hannah left her position there to be closer to her lover, Munby, in London. Over the next forty years, Hannah took a long series of jobs in private town houses and lodging houses in London and elsewhere, in which she was determined
to go where only one was kept in the kitchen. And so this was the beginning & the end of me trying to be an upper servant. I had cleaner hands & face, & wore cleaner frocks & aprons & had a kitchenmaid to do the dirty work for me & all that, but I dislike the thought of being over anybody & ordering things, not only ’cause I’d rather do the work myself but for fear anyone shd think me set up or proud. No, I’ve long resolved in my own mind & felt that, for freedom & true lowliness, there’s nothing like being a maid of all work.26
The entry for Monday, 16 July 1860 was fairly typical of her days after she left country-house service:
Lighted the fire. Swept the birdroom & dusted the other rooms. Clean’d 3 pairs of boots. Got breakfast up & made the beds & emptied the slops. Clean’d & wash’d up. Put the linen for the wash. Cleaned the brass rods & the bedroom windows & the sills. Put up clean curtains. Clean’d the knives & got the dinner