The Housekeeper's Tale

by Tessa Boase

  Both Vanessa and Virginia fought against their ingrained social reflexes–they were part of a group, after all, that celebrated the flowering of working-class culture. Doesn’t the charlady’s life have as much validity as the barrister’s? Virginia Woolf asked in A Room of One’s Own–yet at the same time she hated living in such close quarters with working-class women and found it ‘detestable, hearing servants moving about’. Vanessa wrote to Virginia from one early holiday home, Studland, that ‘My brains are becoming as soft as–yours?–by constant contact with the lower classes…I shall be glad to have one floor beneath & one above between me & them again.’

  Angelica absorbed her mother’s snobbish attitudes, reproducing them in her autobiography many years later. Nellie Brittain, her strikingly beautiful first nursemaid (Grace kept a photo of her, playing affectionately with a naked Angelica), was connected ‘with the peculiar smell of linoleum, of a back lavatory and a dark little bedroom on the ground floor’. She was shortly after replaced by Louie Dunnett, with ‘a face like a squashed red apple with pips for eyes’. Louie cowered from her master and mistress, blushing all over her neck when she passed Mr Grant or Mr Bell on the stairs–unlike Grace, ‘who was always ready to pass the time of day, and perhaps say something foolish which was repeated with laughter at the lunch-table’. Louie would do, wrote Vanessa to Duncan, but ‘she isn’t half as aristocratic as Grace’.

  Grace replaced Louie as Angelica’s nursemaid, and Vanessa seemed to find the guilt-ridden relationship easier to navigate by treating her almost like another daughter–almost. In January 1927, Vanessa took the two to Cassis in the South of France. ‘Angelica and Grace are in a wild state of excitement’, she wrote to her ex-lover, the art critic Roger Fry, ‘and enjoy everything, food and travelling and all they see and do.’ The two are lumped together both in letters and in photographs; one picture, kept by Grace, shows them rolling around in the long grass, arms around each other. They were packed off for French lessons together, one hour a day, like a couple of schoolgirls. And yet, as soon as Angelica went to bed, Grace’s company began to grate. Vanessa let off steam to the only woman who would understand and forgive her uncharitable sentiments: her sister. It is Vanessa Bell’s most detailed assessment of Grace.

  22 February 1927: ‘I shall be very glad to have some grown up educated companions again, which I haven’t had since Charleston early in January, not to live with, that is to say’, she wrote.

  Angelica is so intelligent and vivacious that she’s much better than most grown ups in many ways, but of course no child, however charming, can be talked to equally.

  Since we have been here I have had practically to live with Grace–she has had all her meals with us, generally alone with me in the evenings, as it seemed too absurd for her to bring in my food and then have her own rather later in the next room. But it is curious. Though extraordinarily nice and free from any of the tiresome qualities of many of our friends she is, like all the uneducated, completely empty-headed really, and after a bit it gets terribly on one’s nerves. She either asks me questions, which it is obvious she could answer as well as I can, or she tells me things she has already told me dozens of times about the Harlands. One has practically no ground in common.

  I am rather interested to see what does happen with the lower classes, as she is a very good specimen, not only unusually nice, but much more ready than most to try to understand other things, reading all she can get hold of and making desperate efforts towards culture. But there’s something I suppose in having educated grandparents, for already Angelica is capable of understanding things in a way one can see Grace never will. However my enquiries into the lower class mind will come to an end in a few days now I’m glad to say, for I shall relegate her to the kitchen again when Duncan comes here.

  Pity Grace with her doomed gestures at culture, struggling to make awkward conversation with her taciturn mistress when she’d much rather be laughing with Louie or reading Gulliver’s Travels on her bed. But also pity Vanessa Bell, longing to be alone with her intelligent thoughts and the background cicadas, but feeling duty bound to make an effort with dear Grace, now almost seven years with her family.

  V

  The Dolt

  Between 1924 and 1944 there is a gap in the Grace Higgens diaries. Did life get too busy, or just too humdrum to record? The missing years covered a period of many boyfriends, including two proposals in the South of France. Right in the middle of this twenty-year period came Grace’s decision to get married, to have a life outside her work. For most women this would spell the end of service. In 1934 it was unconventional to continue working once married; husbands liked to be seen to provide for a wife kept at home. Given Grace’s commitment to Vanessa Bell and the family, choosing Walter was a brave assertion of self. But she was torn. The Bells had become like family to her–now 30, she’d spent half her young life with them, and was anxious at the thought of leaving their protection.

  Why did she settle for the deeply ordinary Walter Higgens, ten years her senior? Here was this avowedly ‘exquisite’ girl, chased around the South of France by would-be suitors (two who presented themselves to Mrs Bell to ask for her hand in marriage–one the owner of a patisserie, the other allegedly an Eastern European count). Grace was a favourite artist’s model; her bone structure was so good that Duncan Grant once mistook her for society beauty Lady Diana Manners when he spotted her on the Lewes bus. She was an avid reader, a feminist, a pacifist and socialist in her instincts. She had her views. Bloomsbury could have been her jumping-off point, her springboard out of domestic service and into a marriage or career that might have seen her continue to bloom. Vanessa’s great-aunt, the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, saw her own maid (and favourite model) Mary Ryan marry a gentleman and become Lady Cotton. Another maid of Vanessa’s, pretty Trissie Selwood, had married a local well-to-do farmer’s son near Charleston. Grace’s employers thought she could have done so much better. Instead, this ‘very good specimen’ of the working classes reverted to type.

  But by the standards of Grace’s Norfolk family, Walter Alfred Higgens was a catch. He came from solid farming stock; his father had been a substantial Hampshire dairy farmer who employed extra men (and a housemaid). Like Grace he was the eldest of a large family–there were eight Higgens children. Walter had had an extraordinary Great War by any standards. With the Eighth Hampshire Cyclists (later Infantry) Regiment he had circumnavigated the globe, ever hopeful for active service but ‘never a shot fired in anger’. He went by boat to India and trained for mountain warfare in sweltering conditions with Nepalese battalions; he went to Vladivostok in Siberia and thence to Omsk: 4,000 miles on the Trans-Siberian Railway, 23 days in closed cattle trucks through temperatures of minus 40 degrees, arriving as the armistice was signed. Here Walter’s battalion joined the new Anglo-Russian Brigade, a mob of Russian peasants commanded by English officers to help the doomed Russian royal family. When cornered by the advancing Bolshevik army, they embarked hastily for Vancouver. Crossing Canada by train, Walter saw brown bears in the forests, a sight that would stay with him all his life. Four years after leaving home, he and his comrades returned to Southampton, soldiers with a mine of memories utterly unlike any other battalion’s. Walter had three medals and a glamorous past. He had lived a bit.

  As for Grace, perhaps she looked at her essentially solitary mistress’s world, with its fractured, complicated relationships and that slight unhappiness that afflicted them all, and made her choice. She had enjoyed her time in the Lyons tea shops and Tivoli Picture Palaces of London, but marrying countryman Walter was a return to her rural roots–and a chance, at her advanced age (for the times), to have a family. Grace had been so keen to preserve her job and her independence, shunning the approaches of so many young men, that she had perhaps found herself on the shelf. Her great friend Ruby, housekeeper to Lady Keynes at neighbouring Tilton, had married Grace’s old flame Edgar Weller. Men were in short supply after the First World War. Walter w
as available, and Walter was willing.

  He was not a man of great physical presence. He had a habit, when being photographed, of ducking his face down away from the camera and squinting upwards, compared to Grace’s direct gaze. As the years went by Walter grew a comb-over hairstyle to cover his bald patch–but then so did Clive Bell. He is remembered by Anne Olivier Bell, Quentin’s wife, as ‘a very boring little man, not at all attractive, insignificant’. Walter would have been in his mid-fifties when Olivier, as she was known, first visited Charleston. The younger generation was more forgiving: Angelica’s daughter, Henrietta Garnett, remembers being bounced on his knee and giggling at his jokes: he was ‘a honeypot’–very kind, very funny. Not once in her diaries does Grace complain about her husband; he is unfailingly recorded as supportive, protective, a bringer of fancy chocolates, ‘a great comfort’ all round.

  Walter was immediately nicknamed ‘the Dolt’, or ‘the D’ by Vanessa and the family. When Vanessa Bell’s letters were published in 1993 and her contempt for Walter laid bare, it incensed son John Higgens and daughter-in-law Diana. But apparently Grace had always been relaxed about it. She knew the nature of the beast; she knew that nicknames at Charleston were an occupational hazard. Lettice, a girlfriend of Julian’s, was known as ‘Cabbage’; Duncan’s close friend Paul Roche was ‘the Cockroach’.

  Vanessa liked to think that Grace also found Walter a bore, but Grace’s diaries (and the memories of her son John) suggest this was her mistress’s invention. Vanessa writes to Angelica, for example, of ‘the D’ singing at a Victory in Europe party ‘to ill-suppressed giggles’, while ‘Poor Grace hid her head in the background’. When Walter tried to whirl Grace round in a waltz, she ‘simply sent him packing’. Walter was a fine singer, according to John: ‘Loved singing. Loved it. [He was] in various choirs, even on the radio from Lewes town hall at one time. Piano in the pub, he’d sing to it.’ Again writing to Angelica in 1952, Vanessa told the story of Grace ‘jumping up in a rage’ at three in the morning to get ‘the D’ some dyspepsia tablets, slipping on the stairs and falling all the way down on her behind (and cracking her spine). ‘The Dolt I imagine lying comfortably in bed all the time’, she adds drily.

  Probably Vanessa Bell had not wanted Grace to marry at all, and her aversion to Walter was in part simple jealousy. She felt proprietorial; felt she owned Grace. Marriage was a distraction from her service to the Bells. In this, Vanessa’s attitude was the same as the Duchess of Sutherland complaining about Mrs Doar a century earlier. ‘Her Ladyship will never again have a married House Keeper’, as one Sutherland agent wrote to another; ‘it is attended with many bad consequences.’ Vanessa’s treatment of Grace was necessarily more enlightened. She could not afford to lose her prop and mainstay at a time when servants everywhere were handing in their notice.

  VI

  So Glad I Need Not Say Goodbye

  Few women wanted to work as a live-in servant by the mid-1930s. It had become an embarrassing profession to admit to, particularly if you were in search of a husband. ‘If you said you were in domestic service it was still the same old story’, wrote former housemaid Margaret Powell of her attempts to snare a man in the thirties; ‘you could see their faces change. The less polite ones used so say “Oh, skivvies!” and clear off, and leave you cold.’3 Working women had a new sense of self-worth, fired by increased literacy and the rise of Labour politics. The hard-pressed middle classes began instead to rely on ageing ‘dailies’ and charladies. There were concerned debates in the national press and on BBC radio about ‘missing maids’, the decline of deference and the ‘class war in the home’. An advertisement for Fry’s Cocoa at this time shows a mob-capped maid cheerfully savouring her mid-morning cup, while her mistress’s bell jangles unheeded behind her. ‘Let ’em ring!’ is the disconcerting slogan.

  The upper classes fared better, since there was still a certain prestige attached to working in a large country house. Many estates remained generously staffed, still functioning on Edwardian lines both in opulence and attitude. Lady Astor’s personal maid Rosina Harrison routinely worked an eighteen-hour day, seven days a week, seeing to the needs of a woman who got through five sets of clothes in a day.4 At Shugborough in Staffordshire, the Countess of Lichfield told laundry maid Nesta MacDonald that her fashionably bobbed hair was out of the question, since the young ladies of the house had just had their hair bobbed.5 In June 1936 the MP Harold Nicolson, house guest at the Astors’ immense country seat in Buckinghamshire, wrote the unthinkable in his diary: what was all this show for?

  Cliveden, I admit is looking lovely. The party also is lavish and enormous. How glad I am that we are not so rich. I simply do not want a house like this where nothing is really yours, but belongs to servants and gardeners. There is a ghastly unreality about it all. Its beauty is purely scenic. I enjoy seeing it. But to own it, to live here, would be like living on the stage of the Scala theatre in Milan.6

  Vanessa Bell was made uncomfortable by her annual visits to Clive Bell’s large parental pile, Cleeve House in Seend, Wiltshire. Playing the role of conventional wife (though long amicably separated from Clive), she would retreat to her bedroom to write tartly comic letters to sister Virginia describing the ranks of humble servants and the household’s footling, pointless existence. ‘I don’t think this establishment can last very much longer’, she wrote at Christmas in 1929. ‘I suspect one’s trial at Seend will soon be over. Already it seems quite unreal and only hanging by a thread to the year 1929. It all belongs properly to 1870 and the wonder is that still servants can be found to keep up the illusion.’

  Yet for all her poking fun at Seend, Vanessa Bell and her sister could not seriously imagine life without servants. When Virginia Woolf took to doing the housework as a way to manage her nerves during the Second World War, ‘I’d no notion’, she wrote to a friend in 1941, ‘having always a servant, of the horror of dirt.’ On a rare occasion when she found herself doing the dishes, she was amazed at the effort: ‘I’ve been washing up lunch–how servants preserve either sanity or sobriety if that is nine 10ths of their lives–greasy ham–God knows.’

  With Grace about to marry Walter, Vanessa thought hard about how they could keep her and whether this would work, weighing convenience (a live-in housekeeper for Charleston) against imposition (the Dolt in their attic). Grace must have worried too. Would she be allowed to stay? Should she leave service after fourteen years with the Bells? Walter would have preferred this, but he did not have a reliable income. After the army he worked in farming, for the council, then at the local brickworks, earning a slender living.

  When he and Grace got engaged he looked hard for a cottage to rent, but nothing comfortable could be found. Grace’s wages were low for a domestic servant (it is not remembered precisely what she earned at this stage; her son claimed she never once asked for a pay rise)–but at least board was included. From 1933 there was electricity at the farmhouse, too. With Vanessa Bell’s blessing, the newly-wed couple moved into the attics at Charleston.

  On 23 May 1934 Vanessa wrote to her servant from London.

  My dear Grace,

  I am sending you two cheques, one for your wages the other a wedding present from Mr Bell, Mr Grant & myself. I am so glad that I need not write to say goodbye, but only to send you every affectionate good wish from us all & hopes that you will be very very happy & make yourselves a lovely home.

  Yours affectionately

  Vanessa Bell

  Duncan Grant gave the married couple a painting of the Coliseum in Rome: his touch was always more personal.

  Grace wrote to Clive (who, earlier that year, had sent her a provocative postcard of a naked African woman with pendulous breasts posted ‘between Daka and Port-of-Spain’):

  Dear Mr Bell,

  I am writing rather late I’m afraid to thank you for the lovely and generous present which you sent me. It was very kind of you, I feel I have done nothing to deserve so much; I have never been so wealthy before, & alth
ough I had a great temptation to spend some of it, I put it all in the Bank. I am so glad that although I am married, I am still living at Charleston, it is very kind of Mrs Bell & yourself to allow me to stay on, I hope some day to be able to repay the many kindnesses to which I am indebted to you both.

  Yours sincerely,

  Grace Higgens7

  Both mistress and servant professed to be ‘so glad’ that nothing would change: it was a source of relief all round.

  Three months later, Grace was pregnant. Wearily Vanessa took this new yet inevitable development on board. As a rule, Bloomsbury did not like babies. ‘Sticky fingers, sticky fingers,’ Clive Bell would say with jocular distaste when young children clattered through the house. But he meant it. Children were anathema to clever conversation, to civilised mealtimes and silent hours in the studio or library. Although Charleston had been a haven for the wild antics of young Quentin, Julian and Angelica, those years were over. Now, when Julian and his Cambridge friends came to stay, they debated politics late into the night.

  In the spring of 1935–just before Grace reached full term–Vanessa and the household went to Rome for five months, promoting her servant to cook-housekeeper of Charleston. This was the top job; Grace could do no better with the Bells. And yet the role was nothing like the impressive equivalent of the previous century. Cook-housekeeper in the 1930s meant doing it all: the pastry making, the hallway scrubbing, the sheet changing, the household accounts, the chamber-pot emptying. Charleston always employed a series of ageing charladies who came weekly to ‘do the rough’, but Grace’s daily round was a relentless one.

  ‘Have you heard whether Grace has had her baby yet?’ Vanessa wrote to Virginia on 27 April. ‘I hope I shall hear somehow when it does arrive, but I doubt her husband’s capacity to write.’ On the same day she wrote to Grace, a letter quite delicate in tone: