by Tessa Boase
The year she left Uppark, both Sarah’s parents died within three months of each other. Joe was unable to find long-term work, employed for a time at the gardens of Trentham Hall in Staffordshire while his new wife lodged with relatives, ‘spirits sadly depressed’.
Her husband’s fecklessness began to dawn on her. ‘Not quite pleased with what I heard’, Sarah wrote in her diary; ‘JW [Joseph Wells] had an appointment with Miss Burdett-Coutts’–the Victorian banking heiress and philanthropist. ‘Too late the situation had gone. Oh, how disappointed we were, flat very low and dull.’
Things did not get much better. A habitual diary keeper, she packed fifteen years of married life into one battered volume, a line or two for each day. Days before giving birth to her first child in January 1855, Sarah Wells was on her knees scrubbing the floor. ‘Felt it so hard to have so much to do, but I know Dear Joe cannot afford a servant.’
On giving birth, the first thing she heard was a voice saying, ‘It is dead.’ But then the midwife hit the baby, plunged it in a warm bath and brought it back to life. She called the child Fanny, after her old mistress, and she turned into a delicate little girl, prone to whooping cough and chest complaints. Two more children followed; Frank in 1857 and Freddy in 1862, and life settled into a grimly circumscribed routine.
Did not take children out today.
Did not get out. Cold snowing.
Boisterous winds did not go out.
Took children out after dinner. JW Cricket.
Ironed. Did not go out today.
Joseph Wells worked as a haphazard market gardener then as a shopkeeper and china salesman, but above all he was a cricketer. He was an extraordinarily fast round-arm bowler, and he played for the West Kent Club and the County of Kent, travelling the country each summer and earning what he could, bowling on village greens under scudding clouds and blue skies. The indoor life of his wife stood in stark contrast to his own. ‘Busy preparing the children’s winter clothes’, she would write in her diary. ‘I feel I cannot work fast enough.’ Or, ‘Char woman ill, had all my work to do myself–very tired–oh how hard I work, others have servants.’
On 26 June 1862 Joseph Wells made history when he bowled out four Sussex batsmen in successive balls. It turned him into something of a local celebrity. People visited his china shop in Bromley just to see this bowling legend in the flesh. Working in the background was Sarah Wells, long resigned never to learn French, own a silk dress or be waited on by a maid while genteelly entertaining relations in the front room. There was no front room: it was given over to the shop.
In 1864 nine-year-old Fanny Wells came home from a birthday party with a stomach ache. Three days later she died of ‘inflammation of the bowels’ (as appendicitis was called). Sarah Wells recorded her daughter’s death as it happened, on a blank sheet of paper, as she sat in the sick room. This sheet, marked with tear stains, she then copied conscientiously into her diary word for word, as if this was a way of making things count.
My firstborn child expired in my arms. God’s will be done.
My darling dearest pet pet, in her coffin, my darling only child.
Fanny was not her only child, but her favourite: her close companion. Sarah Wells needed to hold herself together for the sake of her boys and her husband, but she unburdened her grief in a series of agonised diary entries.
Oh never did I feel such sorrow–my own beloved mother dearest was severe. But this. Oh this. Is worse. Oh God…
It’s like a dream, her toys & little clothes lying about…her precious drawings…
In a diary that confines itself largely to the mundane, her raw emotion is shocking. High child mortality is one of those Victorian statistics trotted out by historians–but here we get a glimpse of how it felt to be the mother of that child. It was common, but it was still appalling to go through.
Two years later another child was born to Sarah and Joseph–Herbert George or ‘Bertie’. This son grew up to be H. G. Wells, phenomenally successful Edwardian author of novels such as The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, Kipps and The War of the Worlds. He was an observant child from the start.
The family home was Atlas House on Bromley High Street in Kent, a ‘gaunt and dismal’ place, according to Bertie, with a china shop at the front, a business bought from a cousin that proved impossible to invigorate. ‘My mother in my earliest memories of her was as a distressed overworked little woman, already in her late forties’, wrote H. G. Wells in his Experiment in Autobiography in 1934. ‘All the hope and confidence of her youth she had left behind her.’
In 1866, the year of Bertie’s birth, she recorded buying two pairs of sheets and three pillows–‘the first since I married, poor dear mother’s nearly all worn out, how poor we are, not able to buy common necessaries’. She also went to London ‘about my teeth’, which were falling out. ‘Had nothing done, expenditure great.’ A note of desperation and injustice had by now crept into his mother’s diaries. ‘Very boisterous dark day…what a miserable house this is to live in and how hard I work. What shall I have to do soon!! God help me.’
By the summer of 1880 Mrs Wells was a thwarted, worn-out woman of 57. Her two eldest sons, adults now, were in and out of employment. Bertie was 13 and unhappily apprenticed to the Southsea Drapery Emporium, where he worked a thirteen-hour day and slept in a dormitory with other boys. Her husband was unable to play cricket, having broken his thigh bone falling off a ladder in 1877. The family’s supplementary income gone, they were barely scraping by.
‘And then suddenly the heavens opened’, wrote H. G. Wells, ‘and a great light shone on Mrs Sarah Wells.’ A letter arrived in the post, stamped with a coat of arms, written in ink on heavy cream paper. It was a letter from ‘Miss Frances Fetherstonhaugh’, and it contained the suggestion of a plum job at Uppark. Mrs Wells had no experience of housekeeping for a country house, but she was in no position to turn it down. She snatched at the offer like a drowning woman.
V
1880: The Return
Mrs Wells must now journey from Bromley in Kent to Petersfield in West Sussex, to take up her new position. Much has changed since the young lady’s maid left Uppark by pony and trap twenty-seven years ago; there is now a train station at Petersfield (and two at Bromley, for that matter), so she will travel into London and out again.
The London newspapers of the day record Wednesday, 4 August as a cool day of thundery showers. Mrs Wells anxiously bids her husband and sons goodbye, unsure when next she will see them, as this job comes with a harsh, if common proviso: no attachments. I have tried to imagine her journey back to the big house–an important one in every sense. She boards a steam train at Bromley North for distant Charing Cross, then jolts in a horse-drawn hackney cab over the River Thames to Waterloo Bridge station. There are omnibuses making the same journey, but Mrs Wells has a large black trunk with her and so must pay for a cab. One of her older sons is there to help her, for this is an immense journey for a woman who has scarcely left her basement kitchen for almost thirty years.
Mrs Wells dreads missing her train. The Central station is cavernous, echoing with shrieks and hisses, shouting porters and the urgent, clicking heels of men in bowler hats. She has on her best and only black dress and bonnet, which makes a pretty poor show next to the fashionable ladies in elaborate hats and bustles (the ‘mermaid’s tail’ being the latest trend, with thirty-six yards of fabric cascading from the rump).
She runs anxiously after the porter as he trundles her poor old trunk down the platform and onto the train. Is it the right train? The whistle screams. Frank, or Freddy, waves her off with his handkerchief. She pokes her bonnet out of the wood-framed sash window. ‘I’ll be sending money! Look after your father! Remember to go to church…’ Her eyes fill with tears. But still–what an adventure! For two hours she clickety-clacks south into the new commuter belt of lush and prosperous Surrey: Surbiton, Woking, Guildford, Godalming…
I can see Mrs Wells shaking out her copy of The Standard, bo
ught at Waterloo and all her own to savour. Cowes Regatta began yesterday, she reads, while over in New York Dr Tanner’s ‘Fasting Experiment’ is now in its fifth week (he is said to resemble a desiccated side of bacon). Poor Mr Gladstone, 70 years old and just two months into his second tenure as Liberal Prime Minister, is seriously ill in bed…Meanwhile various bills are being rushed through Parliament: the Irish Disturbance Bill, the Employers’ Liability Bill, the Hares and Rabbits Bill, the Burials Bill. As to the interminable Afghan war, General Burrows has been defeated at Cabul and Candahar: driven back by savage enemy forces of 12,000.
With a jolt Mrs Wells sees she is drawing into Petersfield station in West Sussex. Here she is met by Miss Fetherstonhaugh’s own carriage, not any old pony and trap. Coachman William Gray gives her the once-over: patched and dusty travelling coat, boots in need of resoling, trunk positively ancient. So, this is the new housekeeper.
It is a six-mile ride to the village of South Harting, at the base of Uppark’s beech woods, and as the horses strain up Harting Hill Mrs Wells begins to remember with fond nostalgia her old mistress and the great house. The gardens are entered through a pair of golden gates–gilded ironwork in delicate scrolling curls–and it seems to Mrs Wells that, at last, some kind of fairy tale might be about to begin. Her life is about to turn good again.
She is shown by a maid into the sunny Little Parlour on the ground floor, where her mistress is waiting. How is their reunion, after all this time? I imagine the two women looking at each other with keen curiosity. Miss Fetherstonhaugh surveys a small woman whose face is lean and worn, with brows knit deep and blue eyes narrowed against misfortune. She has cheeks slightly sunken due to lack of teeth, and has learnt to press her lips together to hide the gaps. Mrs Wells stretches out both hands to clasp her mistress’s in delight: hands enlarged and distorted by years of scrubbing and damp. Should she curtsy? A moment of hesitation. It’s been decades since last she curtsied, and her knees are rather stiff.
‘Dear Miss Bullock!’ she begins.
‘Miss Fetherstonhaugh,’ murmurs old Ann Sutherland from behind, just a touch reprovingly.
Fanny Bullock was never a beauty–her eyes are somewhat dull and impassive, her nose beaky and cheeks rather heavy, much like her elder sister’s. But life has not been exacting for this 61-year-old spinster, and she has aged well. Photographs show that her skin is pale and doughy, her forehead smooth, if framed by grey. Her hands, to the touch of Mrs Wells, are exceptionally soft. Both she and Miss Sutherland are dressed in black velvet (this does not vary), and the effect is somewhat stern.
So much has passed in two decades, Mrs Wells does not know where to start! Marriage, motherhood, bereavement and two grown sons out in the world. But something in Miss Fetherstonhaugh’s impassive gaze discomfits her a little, and she finds herself looking around the room instead and exclaiming how nothing has changed; it is all exactly as it was. The gilded head of Bacchus and his succulent golden grapes carved into the chimneypiece; the little mahogany corner cupboard with its trinkets.
Should they talk of the past, or the present? What are her duties, as housekeeper? Mrs Wells has a rather hazy idea of what might be required–and Miss Fetherstonhaugh is, as it turns out, equally vague about her daily routine. But she is clear about one thing: the appointment of Mrs Wells as housekeeper, at £35 a year, is to mark a new era of prudence and sobriety at Uppark.5 There are to be no more rampant expenses, no more wads of cash handed out willy-nilly. Accounts are to be meticulous and servants brought under control. A new cook, Mrs Stewart, was installed just yesterday, and the butler, Mr Lambert, took up his post a fortnight past, replacing doddery old Mr Friend. Mrs Wells’s bonnet nods in assent and a note of panic rises in her chest.
I imagine a pause, the moment at which teacups might be refreshed. Instead, with a nod to the footman, the ceremony is over. ‘Old Anne’, the head housemaid, is called for and Mrs Wells–the new broom–is shown downstairs to the housekeeper’s room.
Tucked away to the left of the entrance hall at Uppark are eighteen wooden stairs leading down to the subterranean basement. Here, three corridors of service rooms are set like a horseshoe around an inner, whitewashed courtyard, sunk below ground level, and the visitor today can do the rounds much as Mrs Wells would have done on this cool Wednesday in August 1880. First on the left is the still room. It was gloomy back in the 1850s, and it is gloomy today, notes Mrs Wells, observing paint bubbling up on dun and cream walls. Water has darkened the flagstones in the adjacent scullery where a length of duckboard is set down on the floor by the sink. Rank coconut matting covers the floor around one large central table.
As a lady’s maid she had little to do with this room, where breakfast, tea and coffee trays are laid and rushed upstairs, cakes and sweetmeats produced, wines bottled and fruit preserved. Now it is to be her domain. She takes in the three high windows overshadowed by bay trees and the black kitchen range, decades old. A great wooden dresser takes up one wall, set with copper pans. It is dark in this room, and it is to get darker still as night draws in and oil lamps are lit. The clock ticks. Mrs Wells smiles with what she hopes is authority at the two girls uncertainly pounding lump sugar, and determines to keep cheerful. Why, you could fit her old Atlas House kitchen four times over into this great room.
Past the butler’s pantry (dun and brown walls, Windsor chairs and a green baize table for shining up the plate), past the lamp room and silver safe. And here, at the southern corner, is the ‘housekeeper’s closet’ (more walls blistered with damp; industrial-sized jars and tins lined up on shelves; a strong smell of spice) and the housekeeper’s room. Here, I imagine relief flooding through her.
This is a pretty, double-aspect room, directly beneath the ladies’ Little Parlour (though with none of the sweeping views). The late-afternoon sun makes its way through the high, cross-barred windows–in need of a little brightening, thinks Mrs Wells, her mind running through possibilities with leftover chintz. She would also like to paint the walls white; get rid of this dreary goose-muck green that makes the spirits sink. On the dresser are blue-and-white patterned Dresden cups and saucers; the fire is lit and a tea tray has been set next to two easy chairs. Mrs Wells, weary from her day of travel and extremely anxious about her role, wants to lower her poor old body into one of those chairs, rest her feet on the fender and wait for the kettle to sing.
But the tour is not yet over. Old Anne (65 years old or thereabouts, an illiterate Sussex girl who’s spent a lifetime in service) takes her past the bell passage–fourteen bells for upstairs, much the same as two decades before–and past the large, vaulted distillery, set with great wooden barrels and brick bins for storing wine, to the upper servants’ hall. Mrs Wells remembers this comfortable, well-proportioned room with a shock. The lean years at Atlas House have erased the memory of that large, round mahogany table set with a dozen dark chairs and one armchair (for the butler); that worn but thick Brussels carpet; the walls hung with murky oil paintings; the gilt mirror over the fireplace and the porcelain on the mantelpiece.
She fancies she sees the ghost of her younger self, a short, shy lady’s maid in awe of this team of butler, under-butler, housekeeper, valet, head housemaid and Lady Fetherstonhaugh’s sharp-tongued personal maid, the elderly Miss Anne Austin. As lady’s maid to Miss Fanny Bullock, she had always been the most junior of the tribe. Now she would be joining the butler at the head of the table. Mrs Wells grips the back of a mahogany chair and blinks hard as this fact sinks in.
Finally she is led to the servants’ hall for the lower tier of domestic staff, set well apart from their superiors in the north-west corner of the house, with the advantage of three tall windows at normal height. You can actually see out. Over the fireplace is a goulish stag’s head, a kind of bas-relief trophy sliced through the cheeks with shrivelled ears and bits of flat wood in its eye sockets. Eight more pairs of buck’s horns decorate the room, which is starkly furnished with one long table and two benches. At any rate, she
won’t be spending much time in here.
The sun is setting, and Mrs Wells yearns to walk up those eighteen stairs and breathe in the old South Downs view. She wonders how the gardens have changed since Joe worked on them. Back then the fruit won prizes, it was so perfect: grapes and pineapples so sweet you couldn’t believe the taste of them, all grown in the glass-roofed hothouses. She remembers honey and figs, and deep-yellow milk from the Uppark Guernsey herd. She recalls pot-pourri jars in every room upstairs, filled with vivid carmine rose petals from the garden that never seemed to lose their fragrance. If only she could walk a little now and smell those summer roses once again!
But first the cook, Mrs Marion Stewart, is to be met. It is a little unfortunate that Mrs Stewart should have started her tenure one day before Mrs Wells, as this gives her an advantage she is likely to exploit (this, and the fact that her wage matches the housekeeper’s, though she is technically inferior). Miss Fetherstonhaugh had implied she’d had a run of ill luck with cooks in the years since her sister’s death, but Old Anne rolls her eyes and says not even a saint would last more than a year in Uppark’s kitchens, her mistress has become so particular.
