Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [78]
Sarah Neal (as Mrs Wells was before marriage) had first joined the household in 1850, pleased because it was close to her parents. She later wrote: ‘this being a convenient distance from home I frequently go in to see d[ea]r Mother and Father.’ She left in 1853 to nurse her mother, and her parents both died later that year. She married Joseph Wells, a gardener from Uppark and the son of the head gardener at Penshurst Place in Kent. Tired of gardening, Joseph became a rather unsuccessful cricket coach and shopkeeper. His inability to support the family drove Sarah back into service aged fifty-eight, as a housekeeper to her old friend.
Wells admitted in Experiments in Autobiography (1934) that the change in his family’s circumstances probably altered his own destiny in some important ways. His mother’s deficiencies were obvious to the family’s agent, Sir William King, and to the competent head housemaid, Old Ann, ‘who gave herself her own orders more and more. The kitchen, the laundry, the pantry, with varying kindliness, apprehended this inefficiency in the housekeeper’s room.’8
Wells observed:
She was frightened, perhaps, but resolute and she believed that with prayer and effort anything can be achieved. She knew at least how a housekeeper should look, and assumed a lace cap, lace apron, black silk dress and all the rest of it, and she knew how a housekeeper should drive down to the tradespeople in Petersfield and take a glass of sherry when the account was settled. She marched down to the church every Sunday morning; the whole downstairs streamed down the Warren and Harting Hill to church.9
Sarah Wells may have had a good grasp of the outward details, as evidenced by a footman describing a very different housekeeper in his memoirs of service in the late nineteenth century: ‘The housekeepers in those days wore a black silk dress, a little silk apron trimmed with beads, a lace collar, a small apology for a cap, made of white lace, and a black velvet bow on top. The under-maids were more afraid of her than they were of her Ladyship.’10 Sarah Wells, however, commanded no such respect.
As a boy staying with his mother, Wells was allowed to rummage in the attic next door to his bedroom, to look at engravings, an old telescope, and to borrow books from Uppark’s library. His days at Uppark provided the narrative for the early chapters of his novel Tono-Bungay, first published in 1909, describing a childhood spent at Bladesover House, a barely concealed version of Uppark. This is how a child in such a household might see the world:
The great house, the church, the village, and the labourers and the servants in their stations and degrees, seemed to me, I say, to be a closed and complete social system. About us were other villages and great estates, and from house to house, interlacing, correlated, the Gentry, the fine Olympians, came and went. The country towns seemed mere collections of shops, marketing places for the tenantry . . . I thought London was only a greater country town where the gentle folk kept town-houses and did their greater shopping under the magnificent shadow of the greatest of all fine gentlewomen, the Queen. It seemed to be in the divine order . . . There are times when I doubt whether any but a very considerable minority of English people realise how extensively this ostensible order has even now passed away.11
In his biography he recounted a vivid detail of the stratified attitudes ‘below stairs’ life at Uppark: when the house had received a visit from a real prince who had, however, given a modest tip, the butler Rabbits nearly cried with fury and indignation. He showed the coin to his colleague the housekeeper: