We've Come to Take You Home

by Susan Gandar

  The door closed. Jess sat on the edge of the bed. She bounced up and down. She turned back the coverlet. A pillow, a lower sheet, an upper sheet and not one but two blankets, both clean.

  She opened the book:

  “Chapter One. As with the commander of an army, or the leader of an enterprise, so is it with the mistress of the house. Her spirit will be seen through the whole establishment; and just in proportion as she performs her duties intelligently and thoroughly, so will her domestics follow in her path. Of all those acquirements, which more particularly belong to the feminine character, there are none which take a higher rank, in our estimation, than such as enter into a knowledge of household duties; for on these are perpetually dependent the happiness, comfort and well-being of a family…”

  And so it went on for over five hundred pages.

  She knelt up on the bed, unlocked, and then slid open the window. Seeing the towers, steeples, roofs and chimney pots disappearing off into the distance, the same view her mother must have seen when she slept in the same room, perhaps in the same bed, she allowed herself to believe that she did have some chance of happiness in this new and better life.

  ‘I’m Ellie. Who are you?’

  A snub-nosed girl, wearing a maid’s black dress, a white cap perched on top of a mop of frizzy, black hair, was leaning out of the attic window of the next-door house.

  ‘I’m Jess.’

  ‘So what are you – stupid or desperate? You’ve got to be one or the other to be a maid-of-all-work…’

  A deep thump vibrated across the rooftops. The glass in the window above Jess’ head rattled. Clouds of pigeons flew up into the air. A second and a third thump followed. There was silence and then it started up again, repeating itself, on and on, until the individual thumps had joined up to become one, long, continuous, moaning roar. Whether it was coming from down inside the earth or from up in the sky, it was impossible to tell – it was everywhere.

  ‘What’s that?’

  Ellie snorted.

  ‘Needs must when the devil drives.’

  Her head disappeared back inside. The window slammed shut.

  TWENTY

  June 1917

  “THE GENERAL SERVANT OR maid-of-all-work, is perhaps the only one of her class deserving of commiseration: her life is a solitary one, and, in some places, her work is never done.”

  She’d got up at five o’clock, but already, just two hours into her day, she was running out of time. She’d only been at Eaton Villa for six weeks but each night, when she finally crawled up the stairs to her bed, her back ached so much she thought it would break. Her cracked and bleeding hands were so bruised from carrying coal, cleaning grates, turning mattresses, washing windows, wiping down floors, sweeping carpets, dusting china, polishing glass and scrubbing sheets that she could no longer feel them. Her new home was nothing more than a prison. And she, its only servant, the maid-of-all-work, slaving eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, was its prisoner.

  “The general servant’s duties commence by opening the shutters (and windows, if the weather permits) of all the lower apartments in the house; she should then brush up her kitchen-range, light the fire, clear away the ashes, clean the hearth, and polish with a leather the bright parts of the range, doing all as rapidly and as vigorously as possible, that no more time be wasted than is necessary. After putting on the kettle, she should then proceed to the dining room to get it in order for breakfast.”

  Upstairs, the Major’s wife enjoyed showing off the house’s newly-installed electricity to her guests. But downstairs nothing had changed. The Improved Leamington Kitchener had always been a monster – and still was a monster. Jess stepped forward.

  ‘If you want a fight, I’ll give you a fight,’

  The monster glowered at her.

  ‘Close this one down…’

  It belched out a huge cloud of soot black smoke.

  ‘Open this one up.’

  It gave out a long, deep, angry whistle.

  ‘A bit more coal.’

  A jet of blisteringly hot steam narrowly missed hitting Jess in the eye.

  However hard she tried to obey the Major’s wife’s instructions, however much or however little coal she put in, whatever valve she closed or opened, somehow she never quite got it right. The range had been there when Jess’ mother had first arrived to work at the house. That was well over twenty years ago. The hot plate; the roaster with moveable shelves, which could be turned into an oven; the double dripping-pan; the flat grid irons for cooking chops and steaks; the ash-pan; the meat-stand; and the large metal boiler with a brass tap and a steam-pipe had been the Major’s wife’s pride and joy. Right now it looked and sounded as if it was about to explode.

  Jess took the plate down off the pantry shelf. There were two rashers of bacon and two eggs leftover from yesterday. The cheese soufflé that forgot to rise, the mayonnaise that curdled, the blancmange that collapsed into a heap; the list of her culinary failures went on and on. The first time she made salad cream, following Mrs Beeton word for word, the Major’s wife had called her away from the kitchen, to help sort out the laundry. When she returned she put in sugar, double the amount, instead of salt. The Major had sent back her mushroom soup saying it was lumpy. Yes, she’d sieved it, but she’d used the wrong sieve – the one made out of metal rather than hair. Whose hair she didn’t know, she didn’t even want to think about it. But, unlike the salad cream, the mushroom soup had been edible.

  Jess shivered. The dining room was a cold and depressing place even on a June morning but this was where the Major and his wife ate their breakfast, an egg or a rasher of bacon, sometimes a mushroom or even a tomato, on a slice of toast, so it was always the first room to be cleaned.

  “Nothing annoys a particular mistress so much as to find, when she comes downstairs, different articles of furniture looking as if they had never been dusted.”

  She laid out an old sheet on the floor in front of the fireplace. Back, at home, the same leaves were used to make tea, again and again, for over a week. At Eaton Villa, leaves, even ones that were just a day old, were kept, but not to make tea. Instead, they were scattered over the contents of a fireplace before brushing the ash out of the grate.

  On her first morning she’d followed all the instructions on Mrs Beeton’s long list – except this one. Three hours later, when the Major and his wife came down to breakfast, they had found every mirror, picture frame, ornament, trinket and box – and there were hundreds of them scattered over every available surface – covered in coal dust. It had taken Jess most of the rest of the day to wash, dust and polish the room and all its contents back to normal. She had never made the same mistake again.

  She’d buffed the marble fireplace, laid the fire, and rubbed and rubbed the grate, over and over again, until it was gleaming. Now it was time to sweep over the Major’s beloved Indian carpet. The first time she’d crawled underneath the dining room table, she’d knelt there, dustpan and brush in hand, entranced by the richly robed huntsmen on their long-legged horses galloping across the carpet’s jewel-coloured plain.

  But the huntsmen and the horses, which she had so loved and admired and had found so beautiful, had quickly, within just days, become things to be dreaded, even hated. Because however long and hard she brushed, however badly her back ached, however bruised her knees, the Major would always find, each and every morning, a speck of dust that had been missed. And if a single strand of the silk fringe, which edged all four sides of the carpet, hadn’t been combed out and wasn’t lying straight, there would be all hell to pay. An almost impossible task given the wooden parquet floor was so slippery.

  The brass carriage clock on the mantelpiece chimed the half hour. She crawled out from under the table. There was always one, often two, sometimes three clocks in every room, and, hour after hour, upon the hour, the half hour and the quarter hour, they chimed out their orders. And as the day got longer, and she became slower, the faster the clocks chimed.
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br />   “The hall must now be swept, the mats shaken, the door-step cleaned, and any brass knockers or handles polished with leather.”

  She picked up the hearthrug in front of the fireplace and carried it out into the hall. She threw it down beside the front door. The mats and rugs in the hallway would have to wait until after she’d taken the Major and his wife up their morning tea.

  Jess slid the heavy bolts back off the front door. She opened it and stepped outside. She’d polished the brass knocker a couple of days ago but it had already begun to tarnish. It would have to be cleaned again or the Major would have something to say. The mix of linseed oil and brick dust was hard on the hands but not as hard as the cleaning soda she had to use for scrubbing out the lead-lined sink down in the kitchen. And the steps leading up to the front door would have to be washed and then rubbed down with the block of hearthstone cleaner. White wasn’t enough. They had to be whiter than white. If the Major and his wife had their way she would be spending the rest of her life down on her knees.

  The two cotton pads, which were now stitched into the insides of her stockings, had helped. But there was no such protection for her hands. At the end of her first day at Eaton Villa, she’d collapsed down, exhausted, on her bed in the room at the top of the house, and had woken up, five hours later, lying there, fully clothed, the coverlet stained with blood from her bleeding hands.

  She shook out the hearthrug and then paused. She stood there, eyes closed, face upturned, breathing in the air, dragging it into her body, lungful by lungful. She couldn’t hear the guns out in France, the wind was blowing in the wrong direction, but she could still sense them. The same way you could sense a storm coming. A quiver in the air, a gust of wind, a flash of lightning and then thunder would crack through the sky.

  But, if you could hear the guns here in London, what must it be like in France? Serving as a soldier out there on the Western Front, as her own father had done, having to live with the thunder of those guns, day after day, night after night; a continuous barrage of sound right over your head, the earth shuddering under your feet, seeing your friends and colleagues being blown apart? It was too terrible to imagine.

  A clock chimed, then another, calling her back into the house. Jess stepped inside. She pulled the heavy front door shut behind her. She went back down the hall and into the dining room. She laid the hearthrug out on the wooden parquet floor in front of the fireplace.

  She was working unpaid, just for her bed and board with one afternoon off a month, as she had no previous experience. But the Major and his wife had promised her mother that they would give her a reference. And a reference was what she needed in order to apply for a paid job. But for how long, how many days and hours would she have to work, to slave, before she got that reference?

  Her mother had been in service but that didn’t mean she had to be. Once she was sixteen there was nothing to stop her handing in her notice. With the men gone, it was the women who were now working on the land and in the factories: jobs that paid well. No one wanted to be a servant, the hours were too long and the pay was too bad. Which was why the Major and his wife had taken her on; they had been desperate.

  But she knew what her mother would say. She was lucky. She wasn’t cold and she wasn’t starving. What more could she, or should she, want? And her mother would have been right. So she would stay where she was – at least for the moment.

  “The servant should now wash her hands and face, put on a clean white apron, and be ready for her mistress when she comes downstairs…”

  She froze. A loud and insistent knock hammered into her head like a nail being hammered into the lid of a coffin. It was too early for a delivery but not too early for a telegram.

  ‘Jess. Open the door.’

  The Major was standing on the landing, his wife clinging to his arm. Both were still in their nightclothes.

  ‘But…’

  ‘Do as I say. Open the door.’

  She willed whoever was standing out there to go away, to find another house, another family to rip apart. It had happened to her family, to herself and her mother. And it had already happened to this family, twice, and it couldn’t happen again. The pain would be too great. They had no more men to give.

  She opened the door. A blonde-haired young man, dressed in military uniform, turned to face her. His eyes were the same piercing, bright blue as the cornflowers in her mother’s patch of garden.

  TWENTY-ONE

  ‘HAS HE LOOKED AT you? Really, and I mean really, looked at you?’

  The youngest son had been home for two whole days and Ellie had talked of nothing else.

  ‘Now come on, Jess, has he?’

  The shopping list the Major’s wife had given Jess that morning had been double its usual length. While the one and only surviving son was home on leave he would want for nothing.

  ‘I don’t know. How would I? I’m not allowed to raise my eyes from the floor…’

  ‘But Jess, there are ways…’

  Ellie lowered her head and keeping her gaze down to the pavement slid her eyes sideways.

  ‘You’ll get stuck, Eleanor Baxter, when the wind changes…’

  It was what her mother used to say whenever she caught Jess sticking out her tongue.

  ‘Being all prim and proper, Jessica Brown, will get you nowhere. There aren’t enough men to go round. I’d go with a chimney sweep if he’d have me…’

  Ellie slid her eyes to the left.

  ‘But even if they tell you they want to walk you up the aisle, put a ring on your finger, take no notice, they’ll still want to sample the goods first. So you just have to get yourself in there, get yourself in the family way and then you’ll be looked after. It’s the only way to keep them. The nearer the bone, the sweeter the meat…’

  Standing right in front of them, propped up on a crutch, hand outstretched, was a skeletally thin boy dressed in filthy rags. At the end of his left leg, where there should have been a foot, there was a mangled mess of shattered bone.

  He must have slipped, in the middle of the traffic, exactly as she had done. But nobody had seen. Or if they had seen, they had just turned and walked away, leaving the boy lying there, helpless, as the cart, its iron-clad wheels sparking, rumbled towards him.

  Because it was the same boy, she was sure of it, the one she’d seen darting in and out of the traffic, so confidently, so quickly, outside the station the day she’d arrived in London. The boy who had taken her hand, pulled her up from where she had fallen and who led her to the safety of the pavement on the other side of the street. He was still wearing the red, grey and black tartan waistcoat, but it was so matted with dirt, so ripped and torn, it was barely recognisable.

  There had been a longer than usual queue at the bakers that morning. When, after over an hour, it had been her turn to be served there had been just one solitary loaf left on the shelf.

  She took the bread out of her shopping basket and walked over to the boy.

  ‘Jess? What are you doing?’

  He had saved her life. She couldn’t save his, that was impossible, but she had to do something.

  The boy’s eyes widened. He took the bread, hugging it to his chest and then turned and limped away towards an alleyway. He stopped and looked back, the crutch wedged under his arm. Jess nodded her head, so slight but still a nod.

  ‘He’s seen you, that Tom, the Major’s son. He’s right there, outside the house. He’ll have you for stealing…’

  And Ellie was off, running down the street, her shopping basket in her hand. And Jess was left standing there, eyes down, staring at the pavement, as the youngest son walked towards her. She was fifteen and his mother’s maid-of-all-work. He was twenty and the son of the house. She washed and ironed his clothes, cooked and served his meals, cleaned his room and made his bed.

  ‘Why did you give that boy the bread?’

  He was a young man with an old man’s voice. Its tone and depth had surprised her that first morning, standing t
here at the front door, eyes down and invisible, as he strode past her into the house to greet his parents.

  ‘Is giving a loaf to a starving boy something to be punished?’

  And except for a quick nod of the head or a curt, ‘Thank you,’ she had, since then, continued to be the silent and invisible servant – until now.

  ‘Some might call it stealing. Others might call it charity.’

  Head held high, she strode off towards the house.

  ‘Jess, where have you been?

  His mother was waiting for her in the hallway.

  ‘Why has it taken you so long?’

  The Major’s wife never went out shopping. Which was why she didn’t understand that Jess had to queue not at one shop but several, often three or four, if she had any chance of getting at least some of the items on the list the Major’s wife gave her each morning.

  Sometimes, after she’d been shuffling slowly forward for nearly an hour, the shopkeeper would come outside and pull down the shutters. There was nothing more inside the shop to sell. And then Jess and all the other women and children, lined up in front and behind her, would have to find another shop and join another queue.

  Her first day in London, following the Major home from the station, she hadn’t understood what had driven the women to rioting. But now she did. She was young and fit, and could stand there for hours, but for the elderly or sick it was impossible. Desperate people throw stones.

  ‘Did you get everything?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  That she came home with anything was a miracle.

  ‘The jam and the eggs…’

  Her mother had made her own jam from the strawberries and the raspberries she grew in their garden. And her father would often come home carrying some newly laid eggs, still warm with white and brown fluffy feathers stuck to them, as part-payment for the work he had done that day. But here in the city everything had to be paid for with pennies and shillings. The cost of the spoonful of jam and the two eggs she’d managed to buy that morning would have kept her own family fed for a month.