Diamonds at Dinner (15 page)

Civilian scientists, flying from Defford with aircrews from the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy, tested the
radar systems that were to revolutionise the operational capability of Allied aircraft. From the first early successes with Airborne Interception (AI) systems to Air to Surface Vessel (ASV) radar, which enabled the German U-boat menace to be effectively countered by the end of 1943, the work of the TFU was critical to Britain winning the Battle of the Atlantic and, later, to our bombers being able to target German cities accurately. All in all, without RAF Defford – or Croome Court, as we still thought of it – we might never have won the war, or at least would have paid an even greater price for doing so.

Not, as I say, that Roland and I – or anyone else – knew a thing about it. So secret was the work being carried out at our old home that not a word of it leaked out. Looking back, I find it strange to think of the Croome estate – the place where I met and courted and fell in love with my husband – being so vital in bringing the war to an end.

By the time that end came and I was able to hang up my khaki ATS uniform for the last time, we had been joined in our little cottage by the first of two sons. We christened him Roland Allan, in honour of his father, but the first name never stuck and from his earliest days he was Allan.

It would be nice to say that life changed immediately for the better that day in May 1945 when all of Britain celebrated victory in Europe. But there were still terrible scars left by the war. My brother Jim was one of those who
never came home, killed in a tank on the borders of Holland in 1944. A little cross in a military cemetery with his service number – 7635107 – and his rank (Sergeant) is all that marks the contribution he made and the place where he gave his life for King and country. And the privations of wartime life continued long after peace broke out, with rationing reduced but then stepped up as the chill economic winds of the new post-war world blew through the broken and blasted landscape of Britain.

You might wonder, as I did, whether I might have returned to Croome: it certainly crossed my mind in the months after the war’s end whether I might receive a summons from Her Ladyship. And, in a manner of speaking, I did.

I had not heard from her at all during the nearly six years we both were in uniform but at some point in 1947 word was sent asking me if I could go up to Croome and visit the Countess. Perhaps you might think that she was about to request that I resume my duties as her maid? Or, failing that, at least to enquire as to my welfare. But no: I was sent for to see if I would undertake a little sewing – a few buttons here, a few repairs there, nothing more than that. Of course, I agreed and in time the little trickle of seamstress work from Her Ladyship was supplemented by the occasional request from Lady Joan. This, too, I was pleased to help with.

As with the Countess, I had not seen Lady Joan since leaving Croome back in 1939. I would like to be able to say that I noticed a change in her – perhaps the war might have made her a little less wilful than before: after all, she had joined up and served with her mother in the ATS. But if I did, I cannot say I recall it. And so, perhaps, I was not surprised that day in May 1948 when the newspaper front pages carried reports of her suicide. After the
Daily Express
broke the story, the
Daily Mirror
took it up.

It was, I thought, a terribly sad and lonely end to a young woman who – by the luck of breeding and aristocratic connections – might have had the world at her feet. I thought, too, of the old curse of the Deerhursts and the number of lives this had blighted for the Coventry family. And I also reflected that, in some way, the death of Lady Joan in a shabby little hotel, far away from the grandeur of her ancestral seat, marked the passing of an age. In just six years the once mighty had now fallen and become as mortal and as vulnerable as the rest of us. The war had, indeed, changed everything. Forever.

L
ast night I dreamed of Croome Court.

In the years since I left service I have rarely visited the house or the estate – though it is open to the public these days and guests are welcomed into its surviving rooms and parkland. But I had been there with my son Allan and his wife – now pensioners themselves – to help my fading memory conjure up the recollections of a long-ago age.

We have come a long way since I began this tale. And you, reader, what have you taken from my story? Has it been what you expected from someone who began her working life, as no more than a slip of a girl, in one of the greatest houses in the land and in the service of one of the oldest aristocratic families in England?

It has not, I think, been the sort of story that would have
fitted easily into the neat television dramas of life below stairs. I have tried to give you not just a sense of what it was like to be a lady's maid with the constant demands of tending to the needs of a Countess. I hope you have had some sense of what it meant to be one of the gentry in those long-ago days – and what it meant also to be called to be in their service. I also hope I have painted some colours into the fading picture of what life was – and what it meant – nearly 80 years ago.

For England was very different then. We were a nation – or, more accurately, two nations – of people who knew and understood their place in the scheme of things. And if that place was harsh and – as it undoubtedly was – unfair, the counterbalance to this social injustice was a sense of some stability: however restrictive the hierarchy and order of things, it was at least ordered and, with that, came a feeling of security even in the worst of economic times, when hunger was never far from our door.

We were a nation of churchgoers – as I have remained all of my life – and a people who had values and standards, which (whether wrong or right) we stuck to. Phrases from my childhood still come back to me. FHB is a particular one – it stood for Families Hold Back – and meant that, when guests came to eat at our table, it was they who filled their plates first (however meagre the rations) while we waited our turn.

I learned at my parents' knees to respect my elders, to listen to what they told me and never to answer back. And if that instruction was sometimes re-enforced with a clip to a youthful ear, I wonder really whether it did more good than harm. I see how family life has changed today – and not for the better – and struggle to understand how we got here in such a short passage of time.

Family life for people of my generation and of my class was all-important. It was the glue that held the nation together and, if it curtailed freedom, we at least learned that with rights come responsibilities and by the time you're ready to claim the former, well, you'd better be old and wise enough to accept the latter.

We learned, too, the value of thrift in an unforgiving world. We learned not to leave food on our plates because that was a waste which none of us could afford. We learned, in that famous wartime phrase, to make do and mend. And we learned to say – at least in public – ‘mustn't grumble', even in times that gave us every excuse to do just that.

The land itself was different too. Britain was still much more in tune with the old, rural ways and the seasons were marked, as they had been for generations, with church services and an understanding of what each meant. It is, I know, a cliché but, in my little corner of England at least, crime was all but non-existent. Doors were never locked
– I can't remember bolting up my house at night until at least the early 1970s – even in the grandest of mansions. Going back to Croome, I noticed the little door underneath the big stone steps leading up to the house itself: on those occasions when I – often accompanied by Dorothy Clarke – had been out late, we would sneak back in though this entrance. It was never locked, no matter what the hour – although on more than one occasion Mr Latter might be patrolling the long echoing corridor that ran off it to the staircases at either end.

Why was this, I wonder? I think the answer must be that we had values then. Now, that, I'm sure, isn't a fashionable idea these days when there seems to be little agreement on what's wrong and what's right. Perhaps we saw things too much in black and white back then but today I fear we have lost sight even of the varying shades of grey, until everything is just a sort of white that's got indelibly grubby. When we saw wrong, we said so and called it what it was: today people seem just to wring their hands and say, ‘We must talk about this or debate that,' and nothing gets done. Maybe it was our faith – and Lord knows as a nation we needed that during the war. Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting we should all start going to church again as we once did but maybe we could once again learn to live faithfully?

By contrast, I wonder how many of these lessons – and
how much of this code of behaviour – was either accepted or learned by those set above us in the social order. They, like us, knew their place and knew, as they knew that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, that they were our ‘betters'; that they were placed on this earth to lead and we to serve.

But we learned from our earliest years that life was a test and what mattered was the choices you made, never knowing whether you'd made the right one until it was too late: you might be right, you might be wrong but you had no option but to choose and, when all was said and done, you'd better be prepared to take the consequences. Did our masters and mistresses know that? I wonder.

The 1930s were, I know now, the dying embers of the once-glowing fires of the aristocracy. Generations upon generations had reaped the rewards from the social system of Britain but now the price of those rewards was being called in just as sure as the tallyman would call for the weekly instalments for purchases made on tick by the working classes. Death duties, the rising cost of maintaining vast 18th-century mansions and the willingness of each new generation to play more than it worked. Clogs to clogs in three generations was an old saying among my class of people and, if it took the gentry that I came to know a few more generations than that, well, it came to them in the end.

Only two of the Coventrys ever really came home to Croome after the war. In 1948 the Countess – my mistress – left the estate and I never heard a word from her ever again. Shortly afterwards the National Trust took over the house and the estate, and maintains its fading splendour as best as funds allow to this day. If you can, then do as I did recently: stand in the long, cold tunnel of the main servants' corridor, close your eyes and listen to the ghosts of those who served there. My eyes are old now and tired and my memory fades but, somehow, these walls and floors speak to me of days gone by: harder days, it is true, but better ones, I think. Days when, for all its faults, the country was a nation and the people who lived here knew that they were a part of it.

And when you have finished there – and heard, I hope, Mr Latter scolding a footman or teasing Winnie Sapstead about the quality of her cooking – follow my footsteps up the path that leads away from Croome Court and to the quiet church, set on a gentle rise where every Sunday I gave thanks for all that I received and prayed for the health and safety of all those I held dear.

Here on the wall you will find the evidence that the 10th Earl of Coventry came home, at least in spirit: a marble plaque bearing his name and the date of his death in service adding to the tombs and catafalques of his
once-mighty
predecessors. Stop a while here and breathe in the
air of an age which is long past, a time which is now history, a people who – but for me – are gone (I hope) to a better place.

Then step out and, negotiating the little bushes and briars which surround the church walls now, look beyond the wooden fence and the stile that mark the boundaries of consecrated ground. There, resting quietly and unremarked, you will find the grave of Lady Joan Coventry. Perhaps here, above all else, is the most telling symbol of what once was and how all things change.

This has been my story, one of the rich and powerful and the ordinary folk who served them; it has been the story of a mansion but also that of the smaller, meaner homes of ordinary people. I am old now and tired. I need, I think, to ponder a little on the memories that telling this little tale has stirred. If my words and my life have served any purpose, perhaps it had been to remind you who we once were and how we once lived. And if it does, then, if I may say so, that is all to the good, for, if we forget these, we will lose sight of who we are now – rich or poor, high born or working class, the servant or the served. Then I, at last, can rest easy.