The Housekeeper's Tale

by Tessa Boase

  But Grace never had to reconstitute the dreaded dried egg, whisking hard to get rid of the lumps. She had no need of dried milk, and probably did without sheep’s tongue too. She was lucky to have at her disposal fresh and bountiful ingredients, thanks to the neighbouring dairy farm and the forward planning of the household. ‘I suppose the sensible thing to do would be to grow as much food as possible at a place like Charleston’, Vanessa had written to Grace in October 1939 (the ‘phony war’ having lured her and Duncan back to London); ‘vegetables, pigs, ducks & all we can–anyhow it could do no harm–we might be very glad of such things as we would have been in the last war.’

  Vanessa hired Walter reluctantly as part-time gardener and odd-job man, thinking she was doing him a favour, when she would far rather get someone else–such as Mr White, ‘the old man who brings the washing. He buys a new pony every week, Grace says, and he keeps hens and he’s a jobbing gardener. If only I could employ him instead of the D[olt]! Isn’t it tempting’, she wrote to Angelica, who was staying with her 48-year-old lover Bunny Garnett. Walter did not relish being at the beck and call of Mrs Bell. By the following summer, as she wrote to her friend Jane Bussy, she had ‘driven the Dolt with such an iron rod all these months that we really have plenty of cabbages…Poor man, I have no mercy on him.’ Walter knuckled down and built goose pens, chicken runs and a pigsty for an old sow called Hannah who produced an annual litter of piglets. He dug and sowed new vegetable plots, pruned and fertilised the gnarled fruit trees, and Charleston became largely self-sufficient.

  Clive Bell played his part too, dressing up like a country squire and coming back at the end of the day, rifle cocked over one arm, with rabbit, hare, pheasant or partridge dangling from his hand. These would be hung in the larder for a week before they could be cooked, and as Peter John remembered ‘they were high. They’d be hanging with newspapers underneath to catch all the nasty drips. They really smelt terrible. The flies would be buzzing around the newspaper on the floor–and Grace dealt with it all.’ Or else they’d be used for still lives, young cock pheasants hung up against a looking glass by artists Angelica and Quentin with a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign propped up to warn off Grace.

  The red and white cows continued to produce their thick, creamy milk, delivered to the kitchen straight from the dairy. While the nation sank its teeth into ‘corned beef toad in the hole’, or ‘tripe au gratin’ (Daily Express Wartime Cookery Book), at Charleston there was–as Angelica remembered–‘a defiant abundance of food and drink’. The climax was her cordon bleu twenty-first-birthday dinner party in December 1939. ‘Everyone was determined to make it a remarkable occasion, from Lottie, who slaved for a fortnight beforehand, to Vanessa, who thought of and organised it.’ Oddly, she doesn’t mention Grace.

  Lottie Hope, Clive’s cook, was 49 years to Grace’s 36 at the start of the war and they knew each other of old. As young maids they had often shared a bed at Charleston, whispering about boyfriends in the dark. Lottie was all hot, dark intensity to Grace’s cool, freckled calm. She was a foundling, left in a cradle on the doorstep of the hospital; that was why she was called Hope. Lottie drank, so the rumour went, and sometimes lost her temper with violence.

  After five years of having the kitchen the way she liked it, Grace opened her door to Lottie and her strident laughter. Previously she had worked beneath Lottie as kitchen maid. Now she was cook-housekeeper: the king pin. This wasn’t going to be easy.

  Although the niece of a fellow servant remembered Lottie to be an awful cook (based on visits to Gordon Square in the 1930s), according to Quentin she was a gifted one, producing rich and elegant meals for Clive, who was something of a gourmet and had been known to order a butler from Fortnum’s when entertaining at home. Grace’s style was different. She is remembered for her good, unpretentious English cooking: succulent roast joints, wonderful soups, seed cakes, spotted dog. The two locked horns in a culinary battle that was to last a year and a half, each vying to out-trump the other with their wartime specialities.

  As the Government sought to control every aspect of domestic life, so tensions mounted in communal households where ration books were pooled and commodities shared. How dare Lottie use up the precious sugar allowance on another wholly unnecessary iced cake? Who had been at young Peter John’s ration of concentrated orange juice? Was it right that the best cuts went to the family, when rationing had introduced a scrupulous equality to the table? Not only food, but other goods too became hard to obtain: safety pins, knitting needles, saucepans, Vim. Sanitary towels, face powder, contraceptives, soap. Toothpaste, toilet paper, floor cloths, hairpins. Every intimate corner of domestic life was brought under official scrutiny. Charleston was not a particularly spacious country house: there were nine people sharing its rabbit warren of low-ceilinged rooms. The potential for petty grievances was high.

  People were irritable, and they were fearful. Hundreds of East End children from Bermondsey had been evacuated to Lewes with satchels and gas masks (shoplifting, so they said, proliferated).10 The wailing night sirens followed by the continuous flute-like all-clear began to be a fact of life in town. The Bells and their servants hunkered down behind the blackout smoking, knitting, keeping nerves at bay–the Bells by the dining-room fire, the servants next door in the kitchen. By the summer of 1940 a German invasion at Newhaven was expected imminently, the tension mounting inexorably after France’s surrender in June. Virginia Woolf was close to hysterical: Leonard was a Jew–what was the point of going on living? Women everywhere felt near to breakdown. How would you save your child from German soldiers? A mother in Essex writing a diary for the Mass Observation Project decided she would put aside a bottle containing a hundred aspirins, which she would dissolve in milk and give to her four-year-old daughter if the Germans came.11 Grace and Walter, sitting around the wireless for the six o’clock news, tried to keep such fears from their five-year-old son.

  That summer, the blue skies of southern England were criss-crossed with smoke and fire from swarms of German Messerschmitts and British Spitfires: the Battle of Britain had begun. On the evening of 7 September, close to a thousand aircraft attacked London, lighting up the sky like a sunrise as the East End burned. The bombing continued for the next seventy-six nights. Vanessa Bell’s studio at 8 Fitzroy Street was destroyed that September: most of her early work went up in flames.

  Vanessa retreated physically and mentally within the four walls of Charleston, calming her nerves by painting. Interior with Housemaid is an early wartime work; more accurately, interior with housekeeper. Grace is slim, her hair bobbed, her posture young for a 36-year-old. She stands by Vanessa’s mahogany writing cabinet, its pot of fountain pens contrasting with her own tool of work: a broom. It must have been hard to carve out the time to pose, what with the demands of the kitchen and her young son at her heels. Vanessa, who would nab anyone in the house for a life model, also painted the little boy; his was one of the first portraits done in her new attic studio. ‘Peter John’s not a very good sitter,’ he remembered her tutting to Grace. ‘He’s so restless.’ He was always desperate to get back downstairs to the kitchen and his mother.

  News worsened daily. Bombs came close enough for the blacked-out windows to rattle. Outside, rolls of barbed wire cut off Grace’s blackberry-picking walks along the cliffs. Life, necessarily, contracted. By the end of 1940–a winter of power cuts, worsening queues and a dozen bombs dropped on Lewes–tensions at Charleston finally exploded. As Vanessa and the family sat at the round dining table one evening eating pot-roast pheasant, drinking French wine and making erudite conversation, there came the sound of raised voices from the kitchen across the hallway. Two women arguing–no, shouting at each other. There was a scuffle and a scream. Duncan put down his knife and fork and went to investigate.

  ‘Terrific domestic upheavals’ at Charleston, wrote Vanessa Bell to her old friend Jane Bussy after the event. Lottie had, she said, ‘got at odds with the Higgens family (Grace and the Dolt) and our sympath
ies were divided. But when it came to the point of loud shrieks during dinner and terror lest a carving knife should be brought into play something had to be done.’

  When forced to make a choice, Vanessa couldn’t envisage life without her right-hand woman–and so it was Lottie Hope who was dismissed without a pension after twenty-five years in Bloomsbury. Grace won the battle over Lottie, but there were other discontents. She wanted more privacy: a separation between work and her own domestic life. Taking strength from her victory, she became more assertive. ‘The Higgens family remain’, Vanessa continued,

  but have a separate ménage of their own. Grace in fact has become a daily, and in consequence I cook the evening meal. The result is most of my stray thoughts are given to food, and in spite of all I must say we live very well…With unlimited quantities of milk, potatoes, bread, vegetables, apples, coffee etc, I don’t want to make your mouth water, but one can do without Lottie’s spate of iced cakes and not starve.

  X

  Small Pleasures

  Peter John recalled nothing of the kitchen conflict when asked for his memories of the war. Grace’s son was four years old when war broke out, ten years old when it ended. As an adult he could still picture himself lying in bed at night, looking up through the rusting attic skylight and seeing German doodlebugs zooming over Charleston en route to London.

  As Grace walked her son across the fields to Selmerston school, they’d warily watch the dogfights overhead. ‘All those planes, fighting in the air above our countryside. I wouldn’t think of the danger,’ he said. ‘I was fascinated by what was going on in the air.’ At the end of the school day Grace would leave the kitchen and walk to meet him. He had a little bicycle, and she’d push it all the way to meet him so he could ride the bike down Barleymow Hill home. ‘We wouldn’t see a car, in those days.’ Once home, Peter John ran outside with a stick, ‘shooting’ at German planes flying low across the cornfields, chased by British Spitfires, ‘which petrified my mother because she thought they would shoot at me’. Grace had every reason to be anxious: a young Lewes mother had been fired at by a German plane as she pushed her six-week-old baby along in a pram.12

  A searchlight was stationed near the farmhouse, run by a dynamo that thundered away at night. It was manned by the Home Guard, trigger-happy local men who would fire at low-flying enemy aircraft with a mounted gun. Grace would shout at them, furious: ‘Of all the stupid things! You could hit one and blow us all up!’

  That was Grace: outspoken, opinionated, instinctively pacifist. She had ambitions for her son, the spider-limbed Peter John. Working for the upper middle classes had changed her outlook on life. She decided to take him out of Selmerston Primary and send him to a private school in Lewes for a ‘better education’; a ‘mainly girls school’ that took in boys. Broughton House School drilled him parrot-fashion in countries, capitals and rivers and coached him in sport, at which he excelled. He had no sense of being different to his classmates for being the son of a domestic servant. ‘I was just another boy from the country.’ This was a measure of Grace’s standing with Vanessa, Clive and Duncan. She did not feel inferior, so neither did her son. Nor was he aware that the ménage at Charleston might be of interest to anyone. ‘The Bloomsbury lot? They were just another family. “Bloomsbury” didn’t mean anything to me at the time. There was no mention at school of them…I never talked about them, and no one appreciated or realised who they were.’

  When Virginia Woolf committed suicide in March 1941 he was unaware of her great fame as a writer–he was, after all, just five years old. But he remembered vividly the change in atmosphere at Charleston at the time. Vanessa, ‘fragile but not overwhelmed’, broke the news to Duncan on his arrival from London. ‘We all three clung together in the kitchen’, wrote Angelica, ‘in a shared moment of despair, feeling that the world we knew, and the civilisation Virginia had loved, was rapidly disintegrating.’ Was Grace–who rarely left the kitchen–a witness? Was she physically included in this family moment? Angelica, whose memory was selective regarding servants, doesn’t say. Grace was so shocked by the news that she hid it from her small son. Some time later he found out that Virginia had drowned herself in the River Ouse.

  Grace’s voice is restored to us again in 1944, but her diaries have by this time shrunk in size–and scope. The little burgundy appointment books make no mention of the war. While the country tensely awaits ‘D-Day’ and the much-talked-of Second Front, Grace lists her outings–from Alice in Wonderland at Lewes Little Theatre, to a trip to the hairdresser’s; from a dental appointment, to a jumble sale at Selmerston. She visits her friend Betty Hudson in Hurstpierpoint, takes part in a local ladies’ darts match and sees her precious goslings hatch.

  In April and May of that year, trippers were banned from the coastal zone from East Anglia down to Cornwall, and the roads were clogged with an endless stream of military traffic. Sherman tanks rolled down the steep streets of Lewes. ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’ went the slogan, and Grace stuck to her own concerns. In any case, it was hard to keep a sustained interest in the larger picture of war and its various battles. The domestic front was too all-absorbing, with its ration books, registration cards, queues and petty domestic irritations. ‘Try to run a home without saucepans, frying pans, dishcloths, floor cloths, toilet paper, brushes, Vim, fuel of any sort, and, of course, soap!’ wrote Barbara Cartland in her memoir of the war years. ‘We never had enough.’13 Grace simply recorded day-to-day life, perhaps with a sharpened sense of gratitude for small pleasures.

  In 1943 Vanessa painted her housekeeper working at the square kitchen table surrounded by soothing domestic items: mixing bowl, onions, scales, turnips. The atmosphere is serene; Grace rubs fat into flour unhurriedly. Nothing suggests we are at war. It is a nostalgic, idealised version of domestic life, painted with a yearning for peace and normality. It’s also evidence of an unusually intimate relationship between mistress and cook-housekeeper: both silently at work, sharing this small space separately but harmoniously. Many women had their lives changed immeasurably by the war. Those who experienced war work, including thousands of former domestic servants, were tested to their physical and mental limits in both nerve-racking and exhilarating situations. They travelled widely, mixed widely and had their horizons permanently expanded. If Grace had been ten years younger, her story might have been very different. Instead, her war was intensely parochial. At Charleston she looked after what were, in effect, four male drones. Duncan, 54 at the outbreak of war, carried on painting. Clive, 58, enrolled in the Home Guard–as did Quentin, 29, whose past history of tuberculosis disqualified him from active service. Walter was willing to join the Home Guard if he could belong not to the Firle, but the Selmerston corps, which met conveniently in his regular haunt, the Barley Mow pub. ‘There is a great deal of feeling among the wives about the part the Barley Mow plays in the whole affair’, Vanessa wrote to Duncan in 1940. As it had seemed unpatriotic to keep Walter on as a full-time gardener, he found a job in the brickworks at Berwick, a ‘reserved occupation’ that kept him from conscription. By 1942, when Walter was 48 years old, men up to the age of 51 were being called up to fight.

  Grace would willingly have played her part by looking after an evacuee or two, since Lewes was bursting at the seams trying to accommodate them all. But the upper middle classes were notoriously chary about accepting East End children–it is hard to imagine Vanessa Bell sharing her studio attic space with a couple of bed-wetters from Bermondsey. No doubt Grace, soft-hearted and maternal, had her views, but these went unrecorded. Country houses all over Britain were doing their patriotic bit, after all, and soon the local big houses–Firle Place, Sheffield Park, Admiralty House, Southover Grange–were commandeered to billet British and Canadian troops.

  But Grace’s story of simply tending to a middling-sized house and its occupants was not untypical of many a woman’s experience during the Second World War. Good Housekeeping reminded the housewife of her essential, even heroic contributio
n:

  Yours is a full-time job, but not a spectacular one. You wear no uniform, much of your work is taken for granted and goes unheralded and unsung, yet on you depends so much…Thoughtlessness, waste, a minor extravagance on your part may mean lives lost at sea, or a cargo of vitally needed bombers sacrificed for one of food that should have been unnecessary…We leave it to you, the Good Housekeepers of Britain, with complete confidence.14

  That jittery summer of 1944, Walter had a hernia operation, Vanessa Bell had a mastectomy for breast cancer and Quentin had his appendix out. Charleston became a place of recuperation–and Grace was back at the stove, caring for them all. ‘Everyone here has come to the rescue’, Vanessa wrote to Leonard Woolf in August, ‘Grace doing all the cooking and others coming in to help, so that I need do nothing but live like a lady if I only knew how.’ Whatever Grace’s ‘live-out’ arrangement with Vanessa after the Lottie spat, she could not let her mistress continue cooking dinner for the family. From this point on, the balance of power between Grace and Vanessa slowly began to shift in the other direction. Vanessa needed her. Grace looked after her. From being a ‘hopeless amateur’, a girl who once travelled on the overnight train to Provence with her head in Mrs Bell’s lap, Grace was now a mother figure looking after a fragile woman of 66.

  XI

  Vote Labour

  Victory in Europe Day, 8 May 1945, was marked in this corner of East Sussex by a party held at Tilton House by Lord and Lady Keynes for their workers, local soldiers and friends. In torrential evening rain, beer, biscuits and cheese were handed out to the Wellers, Wests and Higgenses and all farmhands, surveyed by a giant effigy of Hitler made by Quentin. Vanessa and her family hovered awkwardly on the outskirts, listening to ‘a painful episode of songs by the Dolt which reduced nearly everyone to ill-suppressed giggles’, as she wrote to Angelica. ‘He assured us with deep passion and very flat notes that he would stand by us whatever befell.’ Peter John Higgens, about to turn ten, remembered ‘a bonfire on the hill, bananas and oranges, chocolate, a bran tub with treats’, and in the midst of it all Lord Keynes, walking around like a squire, ‘distinguished-looking with a little moustache and bushy eyebrows’. He also remembered seeing Mrs Bell smile ‘for the first time’ when Charlie, a cockney chef working at a nearby army camp, swooped in and gave her a smacking kiss.