The Housekeeper's Tale

by Tessa Boase

  II

  Very Peculiar People

  There is, for this housekeeper, a wealth of material–almost too much material. After excavating the ghosts of Mrs Doar, Mrs Wells, Mrs Penketh and Mrs Mackenzie through census returns, prison records and shipping lists, delving into the life of Mrs Higgens was a very different process. There are the prolific writings of the incestuous Bloomsbury group: letters, memoirs, novels, biographies. But, as a counterweight, there are now the Higgens Papers. Grace’s early diaries allow us to see right into her young mind. She is obsessed with her hair, fashionably bobbed, and with her clothes (‘Bought a hat, it is quite charming all Black, with a black georgette streamer’). We witness her ‘getting off’ with the violinist in the ‘Lyons Popular’ orchestra in a London tea room, working her way through Moll Flanders and Gulliver’s Travels and battling her black moods (‘I have a restless longing which I do not know how to satisfy’). We are with her on her eighteenth birthday in St Tropez, feeling ‘very old & important’ until Mrs Bell ruins it all with an accusing look–it seems that Grace has eaten all the figs from the garden. ‘Oh, I hate, hate it all, I wish I never had come, something all ways come to damp my happiness.’ Mostly, though, she is upbeat, ‘full of fizz’, delighting in her new and extraordinary circumstances as housemaid and then nanny for the bohemian Bells.

  Clive Bell was captivated by this fresh, freckled girl with her slim 1920s figure, bobbed hair and soft Norfolk accent. ‘Mr Bell came to lunch, & as usual said some very idiotic remarks, making me feel very uncomfortable’, Grace wrote in her diary. He gave her for Easter a ‘lovely’ egg containing a pair of silk stockings. ‘I must not let Alice Mary know.’ (Alice Mary was another maid, attractive but prone to violent moods.) Grace paid to have a photographic studio portrait done every year, postcard-sized, which she signed in ink on the back. By the age of 18 she was already beautiful: serious mouth, full lips, intelligent eyes. Her looks were such a magnet that she often found it easier not to go out–‘Both Ruby & Mrs Harland think I will go mad, as I am turning Hermit, but every time I go out I have so many lies told about me that I dread to go out at all, besides, I am very happy with my books.’ Grace was to be an early sexual fantasy for the teenage Bell boys Julian and Quentin, who would return after long stints at boarding school to hang around in the kitchen.

  Today when visitor guides at Charleston evoke the memory of Grace Higgens, they conjure up the ‘Angel of Charleston’–a rheumatic woman in flowered overalls with grey permed hair; a ‘treasure’, rather like housekeeper Mrs Bird in A Bear Called Paddington (1958). They neglect to tell you that Grace was sexy. The Bells and Mr Grant saw her bloom and then fade over the decades, but the impression she made on random visitors, well into her thirties, was vivid. Friends of Julian, young graduates from Cambridge, remembered the frisson of this astonishingly good-looking woman bringing them cans of hot water in the morning and serving them dinner. She was not your average cook-housekeeper.

  Grace’s early diaries show us a girl young in manner, but she was no ingénue. She had left school at 13, a year before the Education Act of 1918 raised the leaving age to 14. There were seven small children at home in Banham, a village in the flat fenlands of Norfolk. Grace was the eldest, and she needed to earn a living. Her father George Germany was a warrener: a rabbit catcher and gamekeeper who worked the flat acres surrounding their cottage at Coppins Fen. Her brothers would eventually take over the family smallholding; Grace and her sister Alice would have to go out to work.

  And so she had travelled with her small leather trunk to a childless aunt’s house in Hayes, Middlesex, sent by her parents in the last year of the First World War. Here, in this industrial town ten miles from London, she tried them all: the Scotts jam factory, a stamp factory, a gramophone factory, a chocolate factory. She earned between 4s 7d and £1 a week, less than half of what a female factory worker might expect to earn in 1920. Grace, who had a brain, was crushed by the mind-numbing monotony of these sweatshops, and decided that domestic service had to be an improvement. She was wrong. She began working for a Dr Spowart in Norwich, a man with a temper so ‘awful’ (as she told her diary) that she gave this up too, returning home that May. Bessie and George Germany had not wanted Grace to go into service, but their eldest girl had no future in the Fens other than agricultural work. Within days she took herself off to the Collins employment agency on the Prince of Wales Road in Norwich. Here she was given Mrs Bell’s address: 46 Gordon Square, London.

  The woman who interviewed Grace Germany on that early summer’s day in 1920 was a curious mixture of the permissive and the repressed. With the children her word was law, yet ‘Nessa’ also hated them to feel restricted (clothes, school, manners, sexual relations). Her handmade outfits were loose and flowing, her shoes unfashionably flat and her handsome face bore an ‘awesomely noble resemblance to a Greek statue of the archaic period’.1 Vanessa Bell’s take on life was habitually ironic: when she spoke it was usually to give some dry utterance. She lacked an easy manner, and was painfully aware of this when interviewing nervous young housemaids. Her instinct was to summon all her mother’s Victorian reserve.

  Vanessa had grown up in a tall Kensington house where ranks of servants toiled in the basement and sweltered in tiny attic bedrooms. When their mother Julia Stephen died prematurely, the 15-year-old Vanessa had taken on the mantle of housekeeper for a controlling and parsimonious father. On his death in 1904, Vanessa, Virginia and brothers Thoby and Adrian moved boldly north to raffish Bloomsbury. Life at 46 Gordon Square was nothing short of a domestic revolution, and much has been made of this. But their new, apparently carefree and sensual existence could not work without servants.

  For all that she was the ‘Queen of Bloomsbury’, famed for her ribald wit, soulful looks and open sexuality, Vanessa Bell had an almost obsessive need for tidiness and cleanliness. She couldn’t paint surrounded by chaos. Although she professed to dislike the old ‘them and us’ stance with the servants, others found her so fierce with her maids–‘splendid, devouring, unscrupulous’ thought her sister Virginia2–that Maynard Keynes nicknamed her ‘Ludendorff Bell’, after the German Quartermaster General.

  Grace dipped her head meekly as Mrs Bell outlined her duties as house-parlourmaid. No white cap or uniform; no waiting at table; four bedrooms to do each morning, two sitting rooms in winter and three in summer; no church attendance compulsory. There would be regular travel to Firle in East Sussex for spells at Charleston, their country residence–a little dilapidated; no hot water or electricity, she was to understand, but it was a work in progress. Long periods would also be spent in the South of France each winter helping with housework, cooking and the children (Julian was 12, Quentin nine and Angelica just 18 months), while her mistress painted. She was to be known as ‘Mrs Bell’, not the conventional ‘ma’am’.

  Vanessa had seen so many unsuitable, flighty girls come and go that she rattled through these duties in a monotone. Was Grace Germany from Banham straightforward and trustworthy? It was the most she could hope for. The fact that it was Vanessa’s forty-first birthday might have seemed like a good omen. She decided to engage the tall, gangly girl with bobbed hair, slim face and direct, appraising gaze. If nothing else, she would do as an artist’s model. For a working-class girl, Vanessa thought her looks unusually ‘aristocratic’.

  Grace started work on 30 June 1920, sharing an attic bedroom with nursemaid Nellie Brittain. It took a special sort of servant to work for the Bells. The ménage was spread over two houses in Gordon Square: Clive (art critic and womaniser) at number 50 and artist Vanessa at number 46 with the three children. Also living at number 46 was the celebrated economist John Maynard Keynes, joined in 1925 by his new wife, the Russian prima ballerina Lydia Lopokova. Duncan Grant was a constant visitor–dark and tousle-haired, magnetically attractive to both sexes–though from Angelica’s birth in 1918 he no longer slept with Vanessa, preferring the male models that turned up at his Fitzroy Street studio. In 1920 Duncan
was held to be the ‘best painter in England’ (according to Clive Bell); Vanessa, meanwhile, was working determinedly towards her first major solo exhibition.

  Was Grace shocked by the permissive, bohemian world of her employers and their unconventional arrangements? She must have drawn conclusions: as a housemaid she changed the bed linen, sorted the dirty laundry and emptied the wastepaper baskets. Mrs Bell and Mr Bell lived apart. This was curious, but it seemed to be common in Bloomsbury. (Both addresses are entered in the flyleaf of Grace’s diary.) As with any big house, there was gossip in the basement. She writes in February 1924 of spotting Vanessa’s youngest brother Adrian and his wife Karin walking along arm in arm in Gordon Square: ‘Who would think they were living apart, & that Mr Stephen was broken hearted, & has considered taking his life, perhaps it is only talk, (I mean the broken hearted part) but I think they are very peculiar people.’

  For the servants, too, there was plenty of opportunity for intrigue. Vanessa’s parties were renowned in Bloomsbury, not just among her guests but among the domestics, who saw them as an exciting opportunity to dress up and put themselves forward. At Gordon Square you rarely got ticked off by the mistress for presumptuous behaviour–just by the cook, Mrs Harland. ‘We had a big dinner party tonight’, Grace wrote in March 1924, ‘& I had my hair waved, & it looked lovely, every body kept telling me so, & Mrs Harland was mad, especially when Mr Harland [the butler] said so, she was very jealous, was not that a catty thing to say, but it is true, everything went off lovely.’ There was a concert after dinner to which the maids were invited, sitting at the back until they could keep their eyes open no longer. In such a liberal environment Grace began to blossom.

  III

  The Kitcheners

  Grace went down to Charleston one month after she started working for the Bells, in August 1920. This was to be her home, on and off, for the next fifty years. The farmhouse lies at the end of a deeply rutted pale chalk track, half a mile long. It has a faintly Sleeping Beauty air, softened at the edges by feathery elms and weeping willows, half buried beneath a tangle of pink roses climbing up its ochre facade, topped by a steeply pitched red-tiled roof. Cows chew the cud in a large flint barn to one side, filling the air with the fermented, sharp tang of fresh manure. Behind is a cornfield, then the gently rising heft of the South Downs. In front are a pond prone to duckweed, a lichened apple orchard where children love to hide and a tousled, north-facing walled garden perfumed in summer with syringa, sweet peas, tobacco flowers and stocks.

  Visitors come to Charleston today primarily for the farmhouse interior: all those walls, tables and chairs covered in exuberantly painted nudes, vases and swirling patterns in blues and yellows, midnight greys and earthy reds: the fruit of Vanessa and Duncan’s excessive creative energy. But Grace would have seen none of this as she entered the side door into the servants’ quarters. A dark little hall, more of a vestibule really, opened to the right on to the dining room and to the left on to the kitchen. Here was the heart of operations, the only place in the house one could ever get properly warm. The kitchen at Charleston stood in stark contrast to the rest of the house. It was grubbily whitewashed, low-ceilinged and small-windowed, with a temperamental coke-fuelled stove and a gritty, sloping concrete floor. Lead pipes snaked along the wall over a small sink. A large scrubbed table, a place of work, stood in the middle, around which people would congregate.

  Grace was shown up a steep and creaking double flight of stairs to the attic bedrooms, where camp beds were lined up in a makeshift dormitory under the dusty rafters. They had one day to get the house right before Mrs Bell arrived with the children: one day to air the many mattresses by heaving them out of the windows, to dust away the cobwebs of the past few months, to sweep up the mouse droppings and scrub the brick passageways down on their knees. In Angelica’s imagination it was a swift and cheerful process:

  At the beginning of the holidays it took the house one short night to wake from its torpor: by morning, the servants, whose names–Grace, Louie, Lottie, Nelly–were so typical of their generation, had it singing like the kettle on the hob; without them, Vanessa’s creation would have been impossible.

  But hours before one could even make a pot of tea, the stove had to be cleaned out and stoked with coal from the cellar, which might–or might not–have been ordered by Mrs Bell in time for their arrival.

  What did Grace think, on entering the family’s exuberantly decorated rooms for the first time? She doesn’t say. After one month at Gordon Square strange things had, no doubt, quickly become ordinary. But really, it was as if a child had been let loose with several fat brushes and half a dozen cans of paint. The furniture was covered in experimental swirls, dots, chequered squares and overlapping hoops. The walls were similarly painted, roughly so, with damp spots now breaking through from beneath, crumbling the plasterwork to dust. Portly women splayed their legs on door panels; acrobats tumbled brightly down cupboards. A slightly shocking sense of fearlessness danced across the surface of every room. The effect on all entering, it is said, was one of intense liberation.

  *

  This was the reputation of Charleston. It was a ‘paradise on earth’ of sensual pleasures and freewheeling conversation into the small hours, of music on the wind-up gramophone and a relaxed attitude in the bedrooms. The 1920s are remembered by those who were there as the heyday of Charleston, with its ‘holiday camp’ house parties. But was it really like that? By the 1920s Vanessa Bell led a celibate life while Duncan pursued his adventures elsewhere, ever nervous of censure. Angelica, a child at the time, distinctly remembered an atmosphere of constraint, even gloom in the house. She wrote of the adults’ ‘lack of physical warmth and animal spirits’, recalling her mother in particular as unable to show ‘human warmth’. This was compared to the ‘warm, earthy humour’ of the ‘harum-scarum’ girls in the kitchen. Grace’s summer diary for 1924 similarly suggests a more inhibited atmosphere. ‘Rained like the devil, & I laid on the bed, & read Hajji Baba. Mrs Virginia Woolf arrived after tea to the great joy of the household, as she is very amusing, & helps to cheer them up.’ (Her abiding memory of Mrs Woolf was of a ‘very frivolous’ lady–not the melancholy neurotic of popular imagination.)

  By contrast, Grace’s diary conjures servants’ quarters echoing with shrieks of laughter, practical jokes and flirtatious, physical horseplay. The kitchen was where the real sexual anarchy dwelt at Charleston, among what Vanessa called the ‘crop-haired generation’ of maids. ‘Arthur West, Will White, E. Kemp, Spenser Wooller called in & started chasing me, they were a terrible nuisance’, Grace writes in September 1924. ‘Tom West told Mrs Upp he was my young man & tried to kiss me, thereupon I called upon God to let me die, & he could not kiss me & gave it up as a bad hope. Arthur West did, the rotter. Mrs Upp so amused she made water, & had to go upstairs. Alice very mad.’ Teenagers Julian and Quentin lurked in the kitchen, watching the goings-on between the ‘kitcheners’ and local lads, waiting for a chance to insert themselves.

  At the end of that long, playful summer, the boys persuaded the 21-year-old Grace to come on a slightly risqué adventure. ‘Julian & Quentin very set on my climbing the beacon to see the sunrise tomorrow’, she wrote on 5 September 1924. Charleston stands isolated at the foot of Firle Beacon, the highest point in the range of Downs that extends, ‘like a row of half-submerged ancient elephants’, as Angelica put it, from the River Cuck in the east to the Ouse in the west. Julian and Quentin–heavy-breathing, fantasising adolescents of 16 and 14–hatched a plan to scale its summit.

  And so it happened: Grace and a blushing Louie Dunnett, Angelica’s nursemaid, met the two boys in the still small hours outside the back door and set off together through the dewy cornfield. One hour later and warm with the effort, the four sat close together on top of the Beacon and watched the clouds turn ‘a gorgeous Salmon Pink’, wrote Grace. ‘We came back by the Winding Path, and arrived back at Charleston, after Julian, Quentin & I had paid each other extravagant compliments,
about 7.30. Alice looked mad.’ The expedition was recorded in their home-made newspaper, the Charleston Bulletin, but as the boys told it just the two ‘intrepid explorers’ went up to the top. That two young maids came with them was too complicated, too unsettling to laugh off to the adults. Friendship with the servants was encouraged by Vanessa, but not intimacy.

  IV

  Practically No Ground In Common

  The joyful climate in the kitchen, and the flirtation between Grace and the boys, seems to suggest that old-fashioned rules for servants no longer applied and that a modern chumminess was the order of the day. But this was not the case. Vanessa Bell began the morning like a Victorian mistress. After breakfast she would appear in the kitchen to give her orders, just as her mother had done in Kensington in the late nineteenth century. For the fifty years that Grace worked for Mrs Bell the ritual never altered: Vanessa sat at a chair at the table and, notebook in hand, the cook (Mrs Harland, or Lottie Hope, then finally Grace) would stand by her side.

  Vanessa was ‘faced with half an hour in the kitchen’, wrote Angelica, ‘deciding whether to have spotted dog or treacle tart for lunch, and listening to Lottie’s suggestions, jokes and complaints’. Faced with: it was a chore, an effort, and somehow beneath Vanessa to engage on such corporeal matters as food and clean linen. Spotted dog or treacle tart–the hilarious banality of such a choice! Time spent with the ‘kitcheners’ was felt to be time wasted. Although Vanessa saw herself as an enlightened and egalitarian employer, she passed her class prejudices on very thoroughly to her daughter. The subject of servants formed a bond between her and Angelica (just as it did between her and her sister Virginia); an opportunity for eye-rolling, exasperation and cattiness, for jokes told at their expense.