Diamonds at Dinner (8 page)

But, just as my heart was warming to this warm and personable man, my mind sounded a very sharp note of warning. Since you’re reading this, I think it’s a fair bet that you’ve watched some of the television programmes about life below stairs. They always seem to have storylines involving various members of the staff getting involved and having love affairs. But that’s just television for you because, in my day, romances between servants in the same house were not just frowned on but absolutely forbidden. If friendships between head servants like me and housemaids like Dorothy Clark were actively discouraged, for most of the gentry of the time, an actual relationship between a man and woman in their employ would have been unthinkable.

‘Listen, my girl,’ I said to myself, ‘If this goes any further and you allow these feelings to develop between you and Roland, one or other of us – possibly both – will find ourselves in very hot water indeed. Why, you could even be dismissed on the spot.’ And, of course, in those days there was no such thing as employment rights or even a
written contract: if your master or mistress decided to give you the sack, you were out on your ear faster than you could say jack rabbit, without so much as a reference, never mind an industrial tribunal.

‘You’ve made your bed, Hilda Mulley,’ I thought, ‘and you jolly well just better get on and make the best of it.’

With that I made my mind up to abandon any idea of romance with the handsome chauffeur. Instead, I buried myself in improving my relationship with the Countess.

This, in fact, was already beginning to improve. As well as asking my advice on what she should wear each day, as I stood and brushed and rebrushed, my mistress had begun to talk a little more freely about the life at Croome Court. Now, of course, she would never discuss her husband – although I did detect that there was something about His Lordship to be found out – but she talked about her children and it was very clear that she loved them dearly. It must have been terribly difficult for a woman like her to be so separated from her girls and her baby boy, and at the same time to know that they were in the same house. I know it was the tradition and the way the aristocracy had always brought up children but it seemed to me that the Countess was, in some way, just as much a prisoner of her class as I felt in the grandeur of Croome Court. And so, perhaps, chatting to me about her children in some way made her feel closer to them. It wasn’t that we were friends
– you could never be friends with someone from such a different class and on whose whims your employment depended – nor that I became her confidante. But I think, in her own way, she came to trust and rely on me both as her servant and – despite my young age – as someone she could talk to.

Occasionally, she would ask about my family and I would tell her a little about growing up in Stamford. After all, if the formality and magnificence of Croome was an alien world to me, the everyday life of working-class people in a small terraced cottage in Lincolnshire must have been like something out of a storybook to Milady.

I wrote to Mum and Dad almost every day and my letters were included in the bundle of post to be taken by a footman (or by Roland) to the nearest post office. I’d tell them about all the comings and goings at Croome, about the hustle and bustle of the servants’ hall and about what duties I’d been up to. Mum wrote back to me with news of my sister and my brother, of how Dad’s work was going and of day-to-day life in Stamford. All of this I duly imparted to my mistress on such days as she cared to enquire.

She began, too, to grasp that before I had joined her service I had acquired a skill and a training that could be of greater use than simply sewing on buttons and mending rips in her stockings. She began to ask me to make clothes – mainly for the children but sometimes for herself. And I
was proud to do so: I felt as though I was making use of my apprenticeship and the £25 Mum had somehow cobbled together to buy me in was at last bearing fruit.

As the summer turned to autumn, that year of 1935, I also began to explore the grounds of my new home. And what grounds they were! From my first venturings out to sit by the river and watch the swallows dart back and forth, snatching midges and mosquitoes off the very surface of the water, I gradually expanded my adventures to the buildings dotted around the estate. Now, when I say this, it really doesn’t sound like very much: but if you go to Croome, you will see for yourself just how far I had to walk and how hidden from view these extraordinary pieces of architecture were.

The Court itself had a library and, as befitted a head servant, I was allowed to browse its extensive shelves. Among the many rare volumes was a guidebook, printed more than a hundred years before, which would serve to guide my exploring feet.

Who wouldn’t want to explore such a place? I laced up my sensible shoes and set off to the east in search of it. I think it must have taken a good half an hour of steady marching through open parkland and dense shrubbery to track it down. When I did, my first thought was, ‘Why would anyone build such a structure?’ And the second was, ‘What is it for?’

Of course, I was being both silly and sensible all at the same time. The Rotunda – like so many buildings on the estate – wasn’t ‘for’ anything: it had no real purpose and the rich ornamentation promised by the guidebook had long since disappeared – probably for the eminently sensible reason that no one would want to trek for half an hour simply to sit there in splendid isolation. The real reason for the Rotunda, of course, was simply that there was no reason: when it was designed and built, the gentry had a great love of creating what they called (with unabashed accuracy) follies.

‘Well,’ I thought to myself, ‘it must be very good to have the money to put up a fine stone building like this without any use for it.’ But if I’m honest, the thought also slipped into my mind that here would be a very fine and private place to sit with a young man, if a girl happened to be courting.

The same rather risky thought crossed my mind on another expedition when I crossed the river and the ha ha – a sort of deep turfed ditch, which split what the guidebook called ‘the pleasure grounds’ in two – and made my way over the vast expanse of parkland to find the Temple. This turned out to be a truly stunning limestone building, constructed to look like an ancient Greek temple, with six huge columns supporting a frontage on which intricate stone carvings had been sculpted. When it was built, it was intended as a greenhouse and, so I learned, it had vast sash windows to protect the flowers within, while catching and magnifying the sunlight. It also had a highly innovative system of under-floor heating, powered by a brick ‘bothy’ at the back. It struck me that here was a measure of the eccentricity of the English aristocracy: they would spend a fortune to keep their flowers warm, while the house they and their servants occupied froze them to the bone. It is as they say: the rich are different. But to my mischievous mind, the Temple was admirably remote and just the sort of place where a boy and girl could meet – not, of course, that I would allow any such thing but, if I did, well, this would be quite the location for it.

I think I need to tell you a little bit about courting when I was young enough to think about it. Because times were very, very different then and the more open – not to say forward – way young people behave in our modern
world was quite unthinkable in the 1930s. When we – and by that I mean girls and boys of my age – talked about ‘courting’, it meant nothing more risky than walking out together, talking and – perhaps, once there had been a great deal of walking and a significant amount of talking – occasionally holding hands. Kissing was very much an advanced stage in any budding romance and not to be entered into lightly – at least not by respectable people, and I had been brought up to value respectability. Why, kissing practically meant that you and your chap were engaged – or at least very definitely thinking about that. Certainly no one (or at least no one that I knew) would ever have considered anything more intimate than kissing: sex before marriage was something which, even if was ever mentioned, was spoken of in hushed tones of absolute horror and disapproval. So even if I had been considering any sort of romance – and, I kept telling myself, that was most definitely not to be entertained, no matter how attractive Mr Roland Newman might be – it would have involved very chaste and very proper behaviour of a sort you really don’t see today.

As I look back on my life and the times through which I have lived, I wonder when all this changed. Even the films we went to see at Stamford picture house were scrupulous never to hint at any form of hanky, much less panky. Such kisses as were shown were fleeting or glancing
moments and, if ever anyone was depicted in a bedroom, the rules of the day – rigidly enforced by the censor – meant that one foot had to be seen to be firmly rooted to the floor.

They were, I feel comfortable in saying, much more innocent and much less threatening times. And, looking back, I think it was the war, with all its terror and trembling and the need to live for today because the morrow might never come, which swept away the innocence of courting – and, with it, much else of my life and those around me. But I am getting ahead of myself once again. There was one place on the Croome estate where I could be sure no wicked thoughts would intrude. And it was a place that I was required to go every Sunday.

In theory, Sundays were the one day a week I had off (I never quite worked out how Milady managed on those days when my services seemed indispensable every other day of the week) but every member of the
household
was required to attend church in the morning. Now, as it happened, this was no great burden to me: I loved church and had gone every Sunday back home in Stamford, even though Mum, Dad and my siblings rarely attended services. It wasn’t that I was a pious,
holier-than-
thou Christian: my faith was the quiet sort and very personal to me. No, what I loved best was the singing of hymns and the sense of peace with the world
that seemed to imbue me from the moment I stepped across the threshold.

Croome Court, of course, had its own church – the Church of St Mary Magdalene, a neo-gothic building created, inevitably, by Capability Brown with a dominant tower, which was designed to be seen from miles around. Inside, it was a sober and quite small affair with traditional leaded windows and a floor made of stone flags. The three things that struck me immediately on the first day I went there were the pulpit, the pews and the looming presence of dead Coventrys.

The pulpit was a masterwork of intricate wooden carving, set – as with so many churches of the period – up a short set of stone steps to allow the vicar to look down upon his congregation as he (doubtless) chided them for their sins. Croome church also boasted its own priest – not an itinerant parson who held services in a series of churches across the parish. The ordinary pews were nothing special – neither more nor less splendid than in any other church of this size. But what made their arrangement different was the presence of two raised boxes – one on either side – at the back of the church. These were solely for the use of the family and their guests and it rather summed up the whole situation to be looked down on by both my spiritual and temporal betters on my one day a week off.

Then there was the question of Coventrys past to add to the sensation of being observed by Coventrys present. Just about every corner and wall of the church was occupied by the tombs of, or memorials to, previous Earls and Countesses. There were an awful lot of them and their ghostly spirit seemed to fill the church, as if demanding – as the Countess would murmur at breakfast – that God ensure her servants were dutiful and faithful. The latest addition was that of the 9th Earl and Countess: a carefully carved inscription on the wall pronounced that ‘they were lovely and pleasant in their lives and in their deaths they were not divided’. Which was, I’m sure, a true and moving sentiment but, as I look back on what was to follow for the 10th Earl and my mistress, I can’t escape the feeling that this was both a curse for the living, as well as a blessing on the dead.

It's hard to imagine picking up your local newspaper today and finding column after column devoted to the chasing of a fox across miles of countryside – and certainly not in the approving tones that characterise this typical report of the Croome Hunt. But as I settled into life at the Court, hunting – and the regular reporting of it – came to be a dominant feature of my life. The reason was that fox hunting – and, as we'll see, other types of blood sports – were meat and drink to my mistress.

I first heard the sounds one cold and dank day at the start of November. It was the early hours of the morning – no later than 5am and a good two hours before I should have been gently awoken with a cup of tea and a waiting bath – and outside my window it was still pitch black. But through that window I could hear the distant sounds of very excited dogs and the occasional blurt of a horn. The hunting season had started and, without wishing to sound too grumpy about it, my sleep was its first casualty.

I'd been told to expect this the evening before (not that this made my interrupted sleep any better). As I laid out her gown and jewels for dinner, the Countess said, ‘I will be riding to hounds tomorrow, Mulley. Please make sure
you lay out my clothes this evening: I shall be up with the lark in the morning.'

I quizzed Mr Latter about this downstairs in the steward's room. I knew, of course, that the gentry liked to occupy themselves with fox hunting but I'd never heard the expression ‘riding to hounds' and was distinctly unsure exactly which items of her extensive wardrobe Milady would need preparing. As ever, Mr Latter rode to my rescue.

‘Her Ladyship will rise at approximately three o'clock,' he said in his precise and calm way. ‘You will not be required to rise at that time and she will bathe when she returns: you must have her bath ready to draw from early afternoon onwards. As to her clothes, she will need her jodhpurs, her chemise, her white stock and her black hunting jacket. Please lay them out in her dressing room while she and His Lordship dine. I will have her riding boots prepared: you do not need to concern yourself with them.'

Well, that all sounded like words from a completely foreign language to me but I made a bee-line for the Countess's wardrobe and carefully explored every possible item of clothing which might correspond to the list Mr Latter had given me. ‘Let's hope you've got this right, my girl,' I muttered to myself. ‘Her Ladyship is going to be jumping fields and fences tomorrow morning and there's
nothing for it but that you have to make sure everything is spit-spot perfect for her when she rises. It wouldn't do for you to fall at this hurdle, so keep your fingers crossed and hope that these are the right togs for chasing foxes.'

I must have somehow managed to lay out the right outfit because Milady didn't summon me at 3am for a dressing-down (or redressing-up). I'm not sure, if she had, what would have happened – I've always enjoyed my sleep and after a day working at the Court I almost fell into bed with tiredness: being snatched from my dreams at such an ungodly hour might well have produced a perilously sharp response! And so Milady rode to hounds and I was woken by their baying and excitement from across the fields.

As with so much else, the Earl and the Countess had their own pack. The Croome Hunt had been founded by the 9th Earl in 1867 and had what it called its own ‘country'. This was a territory of about 20 square miles, taking in Worcestershire, Warwickshire and Gloucestershire, over which the hunt had the right to chase foxes. Previously, this land had belonged to the much older Worcestershire Hunt but, in the mysterious way of all things aristocratic, had been carved out and handed over to His Lordship. And what a busy hunt the Croome was. The hunting season began on the first Saturday in November and continued to the following April. In my time at the Court the Croome would set out in pursuit of
foxes as often as four days a week and, apparently, it was one of the most successful in the country.
The Complete Foxhunter
– which as far as I know was the closest thing to a bible for the hunting set – describes the territory as ‘wonderfully good, there being a fair amount of grass in both Ledbury and Croome domains, while the plough is not particularly deep. Some big woodlands there are, but for all that the bulk of the hunting is in the open, and the Ledbury is, on the whole, a fair scenting country.'

I have to say that fox hunting never held much appeal for me and I can't read something like that without feeling a twinge of sadness and sympathy for the poor beasts chased over hill and dale for the pleasure of the gentry. But then again, I had been brought up in a town and knew nothing of country pursuits and it's fair to say that the Croome Hunt included among its number a goodly proportion of local farmers who presumably had a good reason to get up at 3am and risk life and limb in pursuit of their quarry.

Ever since the 9th Earl founded the Croome, the Coventrys had always been installed as Master of the Hunt. This was no mere honorary position – though it was that too, since it reflected the fact that His Lordship was the biggest single financial contributor to the cost of running it and paid for the upkeep of the pack, as well as employing the staff necessary for maintaining it. 

The Croome was quartered at kennels over the fields from the estate in the village of Kinnersley. This was where the packs of hounds lived and where the hunt would gather in the darkness to prepare for their day's sport. Since the crackdown on fox hunting a few years ago, packs like the Croome have been reduced in size and in the number of times they meet. I suppose many people today will never have seen a big hunt gather. Whatever you think about the rights and wrongs – and, as I've said, I have my own views on that – it is a remarkable sight. Oscar Wilde may have called fox hunting ‘the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable' but to see those ‘unspeakables' in their bright red coats (confusingly called pinks) and the ladies in their smart black coats, their slim necks swaddled in white stocks – well, it's a piece of Old England and even for me it stirs the blood.

You might have noticed at the start of that article from the
Worcester Evening
News
that the Master was ill and not able to hunt that morning. As the season wore on, I began to realise that this was a far from unusual occurrence. Whilst my mistress was a dedicated and enthusiastic huntswoman, His Lordship was often ‘too ill' to join her and lead the pack.

In the three months I had been in service I had only caught rare glimpses of the Earl. Of course, attending to him was no part of my duties – that was Mr Latter's
responsibility as His Lordship's valet (as well as being butler to the house). But I did begin to wonder at how little Lord Coventry was seen. In my conversations, such as they were, with Her Ladyship, I had no doubt that she and her husband were truly in love: theirs was not one of those marriages of convenience or arrangement that the aristocracy so often go in for. But she would occasionally let slip that His Lordship wouldn't be doing this or that – whatever the day held in store for her – because he had taken to his bed. It all seemed a bit mysterious and I resolved to pick up what explanation I could from the snatches of gossip I sometimes heard in the servants' quarters.

Milady returned from hunting in the middle of the afternoon. She was flushed with excitement – if not with success, since a brace of foxes had eluded her and the Croome hounds – and covered from head to toe in mud. She stomped in, still wearing her boots caked with earth and, before I could step forward to greet her, Mr Latter had silently arrived and was helping her remove them. They disappeared together. A few minutes later the Countess emerged clad in her dressing gown.

‘I'm ready for my bath now, Mulley,' she said, striding across the floor. ‘Please see to it directly.' As I rushed to draw the water and prepare everything she would need, it dawned on me that, to the best of my knowledge, my
mistress had not eaten a thing all day, had ridden up to 20 miles and jumped countless stiles and fences. Yet, other than looking a bit like she had been dragged backwards through a hedge, she showed no sign of weariness or fatigue. ‘Well, now that just tells you something,' I thought to myself. ‘While the master is apparently so poorly that he can't even make it out of bed, Her Ladyship has taken half the county in her stride without so much as a pause. Your mistress is made of strong stuff, my girl, and you'll have your work cut out to keep up.'

While Her Ladyship bathed, I went back down into the servants' quarters in search of Mr Latter. I wasn't sure what was to be done about the Countess's muddy clothes but, since she might very well be needing them again the next day, I was determined to make sure everything was washed, dried and ironed ready, just in case.

I found the butler patiently scraping mud off Milady's riding boots onto an old newspaper. Of her jacket, chemise and stock there was no sign.

‘It's all right, Miss Mulley,' he said, sensing my uncertainty. ‘I take care of Her Ladyship's boots and her clothes have been taken to the laundry. If you would be so good as to iron them when they return that will be as much as your duties require.'

It only took me one look at the state of the boots and the mud-splattered newspaper to feel rather relieved on
that score. If my duties were as limited as this on hunting days, the Countess could ride to hounds every day of the week so far as I was concerned.

Since we're on the subject of duties and newspapers, I'd like to share with you an article published in the
Worcester Evening News
that year. It reported on an apparent trend among servants to demand – and be granted – lavish salaries and a whole heap of luxuries. I have to say that it made my eyes water because nothing in it matched my experiences at Croome Court – and I was pretty certain that, when Dorothy Clark or Mrs Sapstead saw it, they would explode with laughter.