ROBERT: Don’t clear up tonight. Leave it for the morning.
CARSON: Thank you, m’lord. The maids have already taken away the food.
ROBERT: I thought Mrs Patmore did wonderfully well under fire. You all did. Please thank them for me.
He turns away and walks into the library to pour a drink.
MARTHA: This evening has made me homesick for America. It’s time to go.
She is in a deep armchair. Robert does not contradict her.
ROBERT: I don’t suppose you want some whisky to take to bed?
MARTHA: Oh, but I’d love one. No water.
She studies him as he brings it over.
MARTHA (CONT’D): Thank you. I’m sorry I can’t help you keep Downton, Robert.
He looks at her, puzzled.
MARTHA (CONT’D): That’s what Mary wanted.
ROBERT: Ah. I thought there was something.
When she speaks again, she is kind, if a little patronising.
MARTHA: You know, the way to deal with the world today is not to ignore it. If you do, you’ll just get hurt. Things are changing.
ROBERT: Sometimes I feel like a creature in the wilds, whose natural habitat is gradually being destroyed.
MARTHA: But some animals adapt to new surroundings. Seems a better choice than extinction.
ROBERT: I don’t think it is a choice. I think it’s what’s in you.
MARTHA: Well, let’s hope what’s in you will carry you through these times to a safer shore.66
63 INT. KITCHEN PASSAGE/MRS HUGHES’S SITTING ROOM. DOWNTON. NIGHT.
Carson is making a last check of the rooms. Mrs Hughes’s door is open. He looks in. Mrs Hughes is staring into the fire.
CARSON (V.O.): Is everything all right?
MRS HUGHES: Certainly. Was there something you wanted?
CARSON: The kitchen managed well tonight. In difficult circumstances. His lordship sent his thanks.
MRS HUGHES: Was the evening a success?
CARSON: The odd thing is, I think it was. Though, for me, everyone sprawled on the floor, eating like beaters at a break in the shooting… That’s not a party. It’s a works outing. Where’s the style, Mrs Hughes? Where’s the show?
MRS HUGHES: Perhaps people are tired of style and show.
CARSON: Well, in my opinion, to misquote Doctor Johnson, if you’re tired of style, you are tired of life.
This does make her smile a little.
MRS HUGHES: Goodnight, Mr Carson.
CARSON: You’d say if anything was wrong, wouldn’t you? I know I’ve been a bit crabby, but I am on your side.
MRS HUGHES: Thank you for that.
He goes and Mrs Hughes follows shortly after, turning off the light behind her.
64 INT. KITCHEN PASSAGE. DOWNTON. NIGHT.
Mrs Patmore is with Mrs Hughes.
MRS HUGHES: You’ve just missed an admirer. Mr Carson says you did well tonight.
MRS PATMORE: Did you tell him?
MRS HUGHES: No. And what is there to tell? One day I will die. And so will he, and you, and every one of us under this roof. You must put these things in proportion, Mrs Patmore, and I think I can do that now.67
Mrs Patmore clasps Mrs Hughes’s hands and leaves. Mrs Hughes turns off the light and goes out into the passage.
END OF EPISODE TWO
1 This car was originally a Humber, a supremely English name and vehicle, and one of the first of my father’s cars that I can remember, but in the event we were limited by what we could get hold of, so it became an AC, which was a genuinely lovely car. You will also notice that, in the script, Anna was going to be with them, but in the end, the designer fell in love with a two-seater, so she had to be left behind to deal with the luggage and organise its safe return to Downton. Actually, this is what would have happened in real life, so nothing was lost.
2 Several people involved in the production were shocked by this, saying that it wasn’t very Downton to make a vulgar reference. I suppose they thought it smutty or something. But an absolute hallmark of the upper classes is that they don’t have any worries about that stuff at all. And so I quite deliberately put in a bit of slightly naughty joshing, because it would be standard. I suppose I was dealing with bon bourgeois morality, which was affronted by the exchange, or at least assumed that the Crawleys would be affronted by it. But this is untrue. They have their own rules. Here, the men have separated themselves from the others, because that was always the thing, not to make a risqué joke in mixed company. My father once said to me, you can tell an improper joke to a lady, but she must be on her own with you. What you must never do is embarrass a woman by telling a dirty joke in mixed company. If you’re alone with her, you can say what you like. That remains right to this day.
3 Telling the audience that Shirley MacLaine is still in the show.
4 I was sorry this was cut because here we were trying to re-establish the prickly relationship between Edith and Mary. In my experience, siblings have much more difficult relationships in real life than in the movies. You do get families where brothers and sisters are best friends, but they’re pretty rare in my book, and usually they tip over into an exclusive closeness that makes it very difficult for the wives and husbands to stay around later. I also thought it would be fun to keep the spikiness going between Mary and Edith; one danger for a writer, when siblings get on too well, is that they start to merge as characters, because they have similar responses. But we have set up Mary and Edith, quite deliberately, as two women who will always have different responses to everything, if only to rub the other’s nose in it.
5 We didn’t want Downton’s future to be panic and terror and sorrow, and so somehow in competition with the excitement of the wedding in the first episode, which justified our keeping the dangers of losing it quiet until the wedding was done. But now we will expand the threat and the drama of their possibly losing their home. All the time in these shows you’re trying to put people into trouble or jeopardy. The trouble is, Mary and Matthew are now married. They’re well suited, we have no reason to believe they won’t be very happy, and it would be an artificial re-casting of their characters suddenly to make them unhappy. Thus we have to make them, and everyone else, unhappy – or at least challenged – for a completely different reason.
6 Thomas resents Alfred because he has been wished on the household by O’Brien. Thomas would be perfectly happy to wish a footman onto the household himself. He has completely double standards, and indeed later on brings in a lady’s maid for Cora, but he is affronted at the undermining of his power. I do believe in a fully staffed house the gradations of rank were tremendously important, because they were the steps of a career. We make a point always of the different employees defending their positions against all comers, sometimes without hostility and malice, but always with real purpose. Even Mrs Hughes, who is one of the most sympathetic characters in the show, is still quick to jump on it when one of the maids starts behaving out of turn, and Carson is the same. It’s not a question of likeability. Service was a real career and so you didn’t surrender the progress and the rank you’d achieved.
7 The South of France until the Twenties was considered too hot in the summer. The autumn and the spring were the time to go there, when hotels stayed open for people looking for a milder climate. Supposedly it was the Fitzgeralds, Zelda and Scott, who persuaded the owner of their favourite hotel to stay open during July and August, because normally they closed at the end of June. That was the beginning of the South of France summer, the twentieth-century idyll. It was the same with Switzerland. For the Victorians, it was where you went in the summer for the walking and the flowers. Skiing was essentially a peasant way of getting from one place to another. All that would start to change in the Twenties and Thirties.
I like the way things that seem obvious to us are not obvious when you examine them and they have, in living memory, been entirely altered. Part of it must have been the clothes they were required to wear; even the loose and info
rmal versions of them were still inappropriate for a South of France summer, and it wasn’t really until the Twenties and the end of the corset that you would get much enjoyment playing in the sun. There’s a wonderful letter from Lady Curzon in India describing how her fingers keep slipping when she’s trying to do up the buttons of her evening dress because they’re so wet with sweat. Look at photographs of the Raj and there are the women in their lacings and triple layers and the men in their uniforms. It must have been boiling. It is difficult to imagine how hot they must have been. But the one thing they did understand was their duty.
8 My mother always complained about people who stayed forever and you couldn’t get rid of them. In London, after the Second World War, thanks to the bombing, it was very hard to get digs. Some friends of theirs had lost their flat and asked if they could stay while they looked for a new one. ‘We’ll only be with you for a few days,’ they said. ‘A week at the most.’ Naturally, they were there for months, but everyone managed to keep their temper and finally the guests found what they were looking for and no cross words had been spoken. As they were shown out of our house in Wetherby Place, my parents tore up to the drawing room on the first floor and started to sing and dance. ‘They’ve gone! They’ve gone!’ they shouted, and my mother jumped onto a table and started doing a flamenco dance, while my father stamped around below her clapping his hands in the air. ‘They’ve gone!’ Suddenly they stopped. There were their guests standing in the doorway: ‘We forgot to give you the keys,’ they said. Obviously it was the end of the friendship, which is rather sad.
9 My mother was telling this story to an aunt and that was the advice she received in return.
10 When my stepmother thought of conversations before the war at dinner and lunch, she couldn’t believe the way they had not been in any sense restrained by the presence of the footmen or the butler. It was not so much a question of family secrets, but gossip of a fairly electric kind and certainly tremendous political arguments, all of which were quite freely indulged in. Someone hostile to the way of life would interpret this by saying that the servants were scarcely human to their employers, who paid no attention to them because they didn’t think of them as people. The reverse of this argument is that, in those days, it didn’t occur to them that they might be betrayed and the idea that their servants would sell some story to the newspapers, or indeed leak things to an outsider, just didn’t seem possible. And on the whole their trust was merited.
But the phrase ‘pas devant les domestiques’ was considered, certainly by my great-aunts, as very common. By being in French the assumption, patronisingly, was that the servants would not understand what was being said, but I think most of them could have worked out that ‘pas devant les domestiques’ was pretty obvious. At any rate, it was a naff phrase, which Martha is making fun of. In real life, if you felt a conversation was perhaps inappropriate, you’d simply say, ‘We’ll talk about this another time.’ Besides which, Martha is deliberately prodding them.
11 Edith stands for a lot of those women who took on an activity in the war, having never had much to do before it, and then found it very difficult when the war was over. I had not only a great-aunt but two cousins, all spinsters with boyfriends dead at the front, who ended up breeding dogs – King Charles spaniels – simply to give them something to do. Because, in peacetime, there were so few careers for women like them. For me, there is always a hovering sense of the idleness and boredom of that life, of just paying calls and dining out and dining in, particularly in the country. There’s a wonderful house we know in Northern Ireland called Glenarm Castle, where I found a very beautiful, very detailed silhouette, cut out with great skill, and on the back was written that this silhouette was executed by Lady Arabella Someone during ‘another long and boring afternoon at Glenarm’. Doesn’t that say it all? The war had woken them up to what it felt like to be busy, but the coming of peace meant they were expected to go back to sleep. That is Edith’s predicament.
12 I remember thirty or so years ago having some Americans staying with me when I lived in Sussex. I had arranged for them to have lunch at a local house of some historic interest, but they came back clutching their throats. The first course had been a chicken liver pâté and the main course had been kidneys, so it had been a whole feast of offal. For the British like me, this was fine because we eat offal all the time, but for them it was a Poison Banquet. I suppose it’s as if one were presented with brains or sweetbread at a lunch party. People eat them, but we would, I think, be wary of serving them up to guests.
13 The laundry is the soft underbelly of this show, because the fact is there would have been an operating laundry, and it would have been manned by local women. If it was connected to the house it would be in a remote wing, but more usually the laundry was a separate building, like the stables, and just as the grooms lived above the stables, so the laundry maids were housed in cottages on the estate. They were generally a rougher group – a rowdy and rambunctious class within a class – big and physically tough, because the work was very demanding. The maids were usually discouraged from mixing with the laundry staff, but the fact remains that we ought to have had someone from the laundry staff in the cast. We never have because the amount of servant characters we have in the house fills it up dramatically. In fact, at a house like Downton, even in the Twenties there probably would have been four footmen, and even if they had cut down by the 1920s there would have been six in 1912, when we started. But we just couldn’t get the dramatic use out of six footmen. At all events, every now and then I allude to the laundry in a lily-livered way, but we never witness it.
14 We needed to mention the dead Lavinia Swire, because her father is going to become a very important absent character.
15 This is a classic Downton situation, in that most of the audience will think, ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake! If you can save the house and everyone in it, what’s the problem?’ But Matthew believes that when Lavinia saw him kiss Mary she realised he didn’t want to marry her, and that this contributed to her illness and death. Because of this, he feels he cannot, in conscience, benefit financially from a man who thought Matthew was his daughter’s only love, when he may have been her killer. He betrayed Swire’s daughter, and he cannot take his money for a betrayal. It is an important distinction and I think Matthew has a point, but of course personally I am nearer Mary: ‘It’s happened, so move on.’ That would be her viewpoint and it would probably be mine, but we shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking Matthew doesn’t have a leg to stand on, because I think he does have a strong and moral leg to stand on.
16 Lloyd George was an avowed enemy of the landed classes. He did not believe that the rural economy benefited from their large estates. In fact, history has proved him wrong on that, as many European countries have had to learn the hard way, and now large estates are the hope of the rural economy, even when they’re owned by corporations or investment trusts. In his defence, Lloyd George’s beliefs – that to destroy the aristocracy was worth anything, even the destruction of the local economy and the loss of many jobs – were shared by many people, the Labour politician Manny Shinwell among them. This seems terrible to me, but then I’m not a socialist. I don’t think the pursuit of a pseudo equality is worth sacrificing people’s lives for. But others do, and quite a lot of them work in my profession.
17 Women were expected to understand the realities of the situation and also to run an estate if they were required to. It wasn’t like being married to a banker. If your husband was the chairman of a bank and he died, nobody rang you up and said, ‘Come and take over,’ but with an estate, and in the absence of an adult male heir, they expected the surviving women to know how things worked. I think that is, if anything, even truer today, and it was certainly true then. Violet is being no more than typical of her kind, in that she doesn’t take out her handkerchief and start sobbing. She immediately tries to think: ‘Do we have coal? Might we have gravel?’ These women were tough.
18
Although the famous Duke of Marlborough is the one who married Consuelo Vanderbilt, it was his father who attempted to save the Churchill fortunes by marrying his own American heiress, a widow called Lillian Hammersley. Her money was less use to the Churchills, because it was only a life interest (when she died it would go back to the Hammersleys), but nevertheless it was a pretty fat income while she lived, and indeed the whole of the long library at Blenheim was put in by Mrs Hammersley, or the Duchess of Marlborough as she became. She also rebuilt the roof, and who knows what besides. At the time, the New York Times said the reason for the marriage ‘appears to be that the lady has plenty of tin’. I liked the phrase, so that’s why I used it here.
19 By the end of the war a great many women had got themselves into trouble one way or another, either because their husbands had been killed, leaving them with no income, or because they were nursing handsome soldiers and officers who took advantage of the situation. A couple of my great-aunts got involved in helping these women get back on their feet, which is what gave me the idea.
20 Cancer is a curious disease, as old as time. This generation seems to be heavily cursed, perhaps because we have far more carcinogenic activities and substances going around, but nevertheless the ancients died of cancer, and whether they called it tumours or malign growths they still knew what it was. For some reason, difficult now to understand, it was a dirty word until the 1960s when, for the first time, you could have cancer without it being seen as shameful. My grandfather died of lung cancer in 1948, and certainly my grandmother was uncomfortable with the term for as long as I knew her. She only died in the 1980s and she couldn’t bear the fact that he’d died of cancer, whereas, for the rest of the world, by then it was just a disease that could kill you and had no meaning other than it was very sad. At any rate, this is why, here, Mrs Hughes chooses to say nothing.
Downton Abbey, Series 3 Scripts (Official) Page 13
