The Housekeeper's Tale

by Tessa Boase

  I am beginning to wonder whether you are through your troubles yet…You seemed to think it might be very soon when we left you…It is a pity that I who really adore tiny babies should miss seeing yours. Never mind, it will be fairly small still I daresay by the time I do see it.

  She then gave instructions about a wardrobe being removed, chair covers and china delivered and a request for Grace to write to Foley China at Stoke-on-Trent to chase an order. As if that might be too much of an imposition for a woman about to give birth, she added:

  Walter will be able to see to all these things if you can’t I suppose. Or else I wouldn’t bother you. You will have enough to do for the first fortnight at least I’m sure with Peter John. Or Elizabeth. Or both! Take care of yourself.

  Heaven forfend there should be twins in the attic. Peter John was delivered on 10 May 1935 in his parents’ bed in the eaves of Charleston. The farmhouse had been rented out to friends by Vanessa (ever canny with money), leaving Grace and Walter in their new home on ambiguous terms. Clearly Grace could not be expected to work, but the tenants needed their maid to use the kitchen, which was also the Higgenses’ kitchen. The one bathroom could be used only by the tenants, so Grace and Walter would have to forgo their weekly bath (as negotiated with the Bells, between 8 and 10 p.m. on Friday while the family ate their dinner), and rely instead on cans of hot water which Walter would have to carry up the vertiginous twenty-six stairs to the very top. The attics at Charleston are surprisingly roomy–at one end is Vanessa Bell’s studio, at the other a small sitting room and bedroom, plus space for visiting children on camp beds and maids needing a berth. But for a family of three, the steeply pitched walls seem to contract. You can never forget where you are (so says Mark Divall, the gardener who lives there today): car tyres on the gravel outside, voices in the rooms below, the creak of those wide oak floorboards as anyone moves across them. Every window overlooked the Bells’ realm below–hence Grace’s nickname for the attic, ‘High Holborn’, since it ‘looked down on Bloomsbury’. By the same token, those in the bedrooms below would hear every squeak of the Higgenses’ bedsprings, every footfall across their sitting-room floor, every murmur of conversation. The cry of a newborn baby would have carried throughout the house.

  ‘How I wish I could see him’, wrote Vanessa Bell with touching warmth from Rome that May.

  You must write when you can & tell me exactly what he’s like. The colour of his eyes & hair & whether he’s good or naughty. Boys are generally said to be naughtier than girls. I hope he’s gaining weight properly, perhaps my old baby scales will come in useful…I’m afraid you’ve had horrid cold weather for the first few weeks of your baby’s arrival but I daresay he takes after you & enjoys the cold…When you’re quite well enough & have a minute to spare do send me a short letter & tell me about yourself & the baby, as you know men aren’t much good at describing babies.

  We assume that Grace wrote back to her mistress, though no letter survives; a proud little paragraph about her baby, nothing flowery. Now she was a mother just like Mrs Bell. Who knew how the relationship between housekeeper and mistress might change? Vanessa was asking herself the same question, but in an altogether different way. On 18 July she wrote again to her housekeeper from Rome: could Grace get the electricity company to come and read the meter in London–‘see about it as soon as possible’. She was, as usual, vague about her plans–‘We will be back I think at the end of August or beginning of September’–and would come straight to Charleston, but was thinking of asking Lottie and Louie to come to help. In the course of the long letter (mostly filled with instructions) Vanessa circled, warily, ever closer to the nub of the issue: what use was Grace going to be with a small baby, and when could she properly get back to work? ‘Perhaps it will be best’, she suggested,

  if you don’t try to do anything for us, but lead a separate life. What do you think? I expect John Peter gives you plenty to do…We could get Mrs Stevens I suppose if we wanted her. Mr Bell won’t be there & I don’t know about Julian. But it shouldn’t be a very large household most of the time.

  This pragmatic letter might well have panicked Grace. What did Mrs Bell mean, ‘lead a separate life’? Would she still get her wages? Would she and Walter have to pay for board? She was on maternity leave, of a kind–yet she was being asked to scurry around getting the London house ready, having windows cleaned and meters read. How was she to manage this with a new baby? Perhaps, in her sleep-deprived state, she could focus on just one thing in Vanessa’s letter. ‘I expect John Peter gives you plenty to do.’ Hadn’t Grace written to Mrs Bell about her baby Peter John? Hadn’t she even sent a precious portrait of him, taken in Eastbourne at great expense by a studio photographer? It was just a careless mistake, of course; but somehow a telling one.

  VII

  Peter John

  As it turned out, the Higgens family did get to live a separate life of sorts. When Vanessa and Duncan were in London, which was much of the time in that decade before the Second World War, the Higgenses had Charleston to themselves. It was as much Peter John’s home as it was Vanessa Bell’s. Photographs from Grace’s albums show a beautifully dressed toddler with buttoned Mary Jane shoes and a cream double-breasted swing coat, sartorially every inch his mother’s son. Walter lounges on the lawn next to him with a magazine. There he is again, Peter John, a little older now and stark naked, dangling his legs in the Charleston fish pond, a wooden toy truck by his side.

  Half the time they could lounge by the fish pond in deckchairs. The other half, they had to make themselves scarce. When Grace had lived in London, Vanessa would often refer to ‘the Grace problem’ in letters to Duncan, a problem that by 1930 was beginning to make her lose her ‘reason’. Her servant would suddenly intrude just when she was in the middle of painting and start chatting about some household business, oblivious to Vanessa’s silent concentration. Or else Grace would come in to tidy up and find a nude model posing on the divan. The solution was a large pair of curtains, erected across the entrance to the studio at 8 Fitzroy Street. ‘I don’t mind hearing her as long as I know I’m inviolate.’ Vanessa wanted a servant, but at the same time didn’t want to be constantly reminded that she had one. The ideal was a sort of absent presence.

  Peter John grew up to be a gangly little boy, ‘shy and self-conscious, like a spider, all arms and legs’, as he said of himself. He was good at making himself invisible, shrinking back into the shadows and keeping quiet when the mistress of the house approached. This was a potent memory that stayed with him all his life. He remembered playing football in the kitchen, kicking his ball hard against the painted cupboards (now encased in Perspex to conserve the artwork). ‘I used to be kicking or pinging a ball about in there, and would hear Mrs Bell coming through from the other side, and would have to stop, or think about stopping.’ He would also play in Vanessa and Duncan’s old car, left in the apple room throughout wartime due to petrol rationing. ‘I didn’t do it if Mrs Bell was going to possibly come round the corner. No, I’d leap out again! I had good ears in those days.’

  Vanessa used to gaze out from her attic studio, deep in thought–only to snap to when she spotted a small boy climbing the wall by the chicken run, hand outstretched towards a juicy pear. A Bell pear. ‘Would you stop Peter John helping himself to our fruit?’ she would say to Grace, who would have to nod her head and bite her lip. When visitors were sitting round the dinner table, Vanessa objected if the Higgenses cut across the garden in front of the house, past the small dining-room window. They were supposed to go the long way round, by the chicken run.

  She was a dominant, rather terrifying figure to young Peter John. Mrs Bell had, as he put it, a ‘foreboding appearance’. She was ‘strange with her attire. She struck me as one of the original hippies, long before the hippy people came about, with her large hats and shawls and scarves.’ When he became a father, his young daughter Jacqueline refused to visit the farmhouse because she was convinced there was a witch, even though Mr
s Bell was no longer alive.

  For all his skulking in the shadows, Peter John enjoyed a childhood of tremendous freedom, playing in the outlying fields and barns with his friends, servants’ sons from the local big houses Tilton and Firle Place. He was allowed to use Vanessa’s piano, although he hated the lessons Grace forced upon him at great expense. She tried him at the piano and she tried him at the violin, but Peter John did not excel in music. He didn’t have an ear. He would nervously knock on Clive Bell’s study door, where the master of the house sat at his desk surrounded by piles of books, to ask for help with some esoteric piece of schoolwork. ‘He was a charming person, but he would be very aloof if he had any of his friends…then I’m afraid you were just a little boy and you were not to be seen.’

  His first birthday in May 1936 marked the last blithely hedonistic summer at Charleston. While Grace laboured in the kitchen and the stuffy attic, cooking the food, changing the bed linen, keeping herself, Walter and the baby out of the way, Vanessa wrote letters describing gay house parties and bright young things. Angelica was now a strikingly beautiful 18-year-old who had made her ‘debut’ in Bloomsbury in a hat ‘which she said (and I believe it!) had caused a sensation in Paris’, as Vanessa wrote to her eldest son Julian, who was teaching in China. Charleston, she told him, was

  in a state of pandemonium…full of young people in very high spirits, laughing a great deal at their own jokes, singing and playing all the time and lying about in the garden, which is simply a dithering blaze of flowers and butterflies and apples…Everyone has been going about half naked and getting brown, Angelica looks very well and wears hardly any clothes.

  By the summer of 1937, everything had changed. When Peter John was two, Julian Bell set off hot-headedly for the Spanish Civil War, despite the anguished warnings of his mother. ‘It can happen so easily,’ she had prophesied that February, ‘but it mustn’t happen to the really valuable people if one can possibly help it.’ Six weeks later, aged 29, he died of a shrapnel wound to the chest while driving an ambulance. Vanessa broke down and took to her bed at Fitzroy Street. Grace wrote to her mistress about her loss–this same teenage boy she had once sat close to at the top of Firle Beacon, seeing the sun rise gloriously. She still had two schoolboy portraits of a brooding, bespectacled Julian, probably pressed upon her that flirtatious summer of 1924. She kept these to her death. It is the only letter from Grace to Vanessa to survive, kept as it was with her mistress’s letters of condolence.

  Dear Mrs Bell,

  Please forgive me writing to you now, but I wish to tell you, how terribly sorry I am to hear of Julian’s death, & how deeply I sympathise with you. I’m afraid this is not a time, when I can do anything to help you, although I wish I could.

  Yours sincerely,

  Grace8

  When Vanessa was well enough to return to Charleston, Grace found her weeping uncontrollably in the garden. No one understood her need to talk about Julian.

  VIII

  Wartime

  In 1939 the Bells purchased a wireless: heavy, chunky, in a Bakelite frame. It benefited the servants more than their masters, for while Vanessa and Duncan lived their lives in London, Grace and Walter took to sitting around this new and extraordinary device that brought them a sense of connection with the wider world. Short plays, organ music, seaside songs and Children’s Hour at 5.15 p.m. were wonderfully entertaining, but the six o’clock news brought with it an increasing unease. Grace, working on a succession of rag rugs, listened anxiously to the escalating fears of another war with Germany. ‘We are naturally all rather agitated about the news here & you must be too’, wrote Vanessa to her housekeeper on 13 March that year. ‘I do hope things will calm down soon but one simply doesn’t know what to think or expect. The world is certainly mad.’ She signed it with her customary formality, ‘Yours sincerely, Vanessa Bell.’

  The Second World War was the most turbulent episode of Grace’s life–as it was for every working woman in Britain. It blew all the old certainties about class distinctions out of the water. As the Blitz bombs rained down, ladies sheltered with their maids for hours on end in Anderson shelters and mansion basements, making small talk to ward off hysteria. Servants in their thousands, men and women, gladly left to join the war effort. Who could say who Vanessa Bell’s ‘really valuable people’ were, now that half a million ordinary women were employed by the services and countless more in essential war work on farms and factories throughout the country?

  As a married mother of a small child, Grace was exempt from war work. But as housekeeper of a farmhouse lying directly on the predicted route of invasion, just three miles from Newhaven, the war insinuated itself into her every living moment. Britain had long held dear the idea of the home as a fortress, a place of sanctity and safety. The housekeeper’s role was to safeguard this fantasy; to keep the wheels running smoothly and the rituals unchanged. But if a single bomb could destroy a house in seconds, what fundamental value did her job hold? Was this a time to give up on slavish attention to floor waxing, mattress turning and silver polishing and put other, more vital priorities at the centre of one’s life?

  And yet perhaps this was precisely the time that the sanctity of home mattered more than ever; a time in which satisfying domestic routines were the only balm to the madness outside. Picking and bottling blackberries; transforming an army blanket into a winter coat; turning a worn collar on an old shirt: many women wrote of the fulfilment, even joy, that finite domestic tasks gave them during wartime. Both Vanessa Bell and Grace Higgens turned to their knitting needles, to bread making, to vegetable growing and pig rearing in an unforeseen merging–not always harmonious–of two previously opposite lives. At Charleston, mistress and housekeeper both rolled up their sleeves and made the best of it.

  There are no diaries from Grace for the outbreak of war; they resume in 1944. But there are letters from Vanessa Bell that fill in the blanks, describing how Charleston was transformed into the family’s retreat. For several months, as the country prepared for war, the Higgenses found their home turned upside down with building dust and chaos through every doorway. ‘Piles of brick and rubble arise and then disappear and there are holes in the floor everywhere’, wrote Vanessa to Virginia in June 1939. ‘Baths and WCs sit about in odd places…I dash into cupboards thinking they are passages…Clive is arriving presently and I rather dread his horror when he finds what a state it’s all in, though he has been warned.’

  Clive Bell was moving in–an unusual decision for a former husband, yet one that probably seemed perfectly logical to Grace, since she had always regarded him as her master. Vanessa’s close companion Duncan Grant was just a dear addition to the family, relaxed and informal in his relationship with the servants. Clive, used to far more luxurious surroundings, was to have the best: the whole north end of the first floor, including a bathroom, which pushed Vanessa downstairs into the old kitchen pantry, now with new French windows opening on to the garden.

  The Higgenses, too, were to benefit. For the first time in twenty years of service, Grace was to get her own sitting room on the ground floor. She would have somewhere to put her feet up while she waited all evening to clear the dining table. The family wouldn’t have to climb up and down twenty-six stairs every time they needed a magazine or a pair of knitting needles or a toy. This space–11ft by 8ft–was ‘so as to give you a place to put things in’, wrote Vanessa. But really it was somewhere they could stake out as their own, and it became the new hub of Higgens family life.

  They needed it, because their personal space was under threat. On Sunday, 3 September 1939, Vanessa, Duncan, Clive, Quentin and Angelica gathered round the wireless at 11.15 a.m. to listen to Chamberlain’s speech. ‘…I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.’ How unreal it seemed, with the garden outside ‘glowing with the reds and oranges of the dying summer’, Angelica remembered. She did not mention the Higgenses, but they would have
been there too. Servants all over the country were at that moment taking their places next to employers to listen, tensely, to this historic broadcast.9 Standing next to Grace and Walter was Lottie Hope, turbulent cook-housekeeper of 50 Gordon Square. Lottie had arrived along with Clive’s vast collection of books, his exquisitely tailored tweed suits and his eau de cologne bottles cluttering up the bathroom. She was to work alongside Grace in the kitchen.

  IX

  Too Many Cooks

  In a buff-coloured folder in the British Library is a collection of old recipes snipped from papers by Grace throughout her fifty years in service–from The Times, the Express and Woman’s Weekly magazine. There are dog-eared favourites, part of her reliable repertoire, for roast pork roll, beef in mustard sauce, cold veal and tomato soup and walnut and coffee slices. By the time of Lottie’s arrival, Grace knew what worked, what was popular and what was economical. But still she snipped out wartime suggestions, responding to the national mood of mounting anxiety. In January 1940 bacon, butter and sugar were rationed, followed shortly by meat, tea, jam, biscuits, breakfast cereals, cheese, eggs, lard, milk and canned and dried fruit. By August 1942 almost all foods, apart from vegetables and bread, were rationed.

  The Ministry of Food issued daily recipes via the press for housewives trying to rustle up a treat with poor substitutes, such as chocolate cake made with dried eggs and two ounces of margarine, or ‘mock cream’ made with milk, margarine and cornflour. Newspapers quickly brought out their own wartime cookery books full of ideas to stretch non-rationed food further, such as ‘savoury sheep’s tongue’, or ‘cod’s roe pie’ (livened up with an ounce of margarine and a teaspoon of dry mustard). Dried egg, pronounced the Telegraph, could be viewed as ‘a fascinating and progressive branch of present-day catering’.