Diamonds at Dinner (7 page)

I’d also been forewarned about what sort of clothes to bring. As a head servant, I didn’t have to wear a uniform like the housemaids or the footmen: instead, I was told that Her Ladyship expected me to wear dark colours. Now, my favourite colours were green and purple – I’ve always loved them and do so still. But at Croome Court such cheerful hues were not allowed and so the dresses hanging in the big mahogany wardrobe looked even more depressing than they might.

By the time I was bathed, clothed and ready to face the day it was almost 7.30am. I rushed down the three flights of stone stairs and positively burst into the kitchen. Everything there seemed to be chaotically busy, with Winnie presiding over her scullery staff as they boiled and grilled amid great clouds of steam and smoke. A tray was set on a table in one corner and no sooner had I arrived than a cup of tea was placed upon it and the whole lot was thrust into my hands with an upward jerk of a thumb to indicate that I needed to get it to Her Ladyship on the double. Back I went up the great stone steps – rather more carefully this time as I juggled the tea, a folded linen napkin and a little flower vase on the slippery tray.

When I got to my mistress’s door, I had a moment of panic: did I just knock and enter? Or wait to be summonsed? And would Her Ladyship be in bed with the Earl? Did they even share a bedroom? I knew from stories I’d read that lots of the gentry slept separately, only ever coming together to go about the business of producing heirs.

Would the Coventrys be like this? And if they weren’t, was I prepared for the sight of His Lordship in bed? You have to remember that life was very much more sheltered in those days and I don’t think I’d ever seen a man in his nightclothes. I knocked on the heavy oak door and tried to stop my heart beating so fast that it seemed likely to jump out of my chest and knock the whole tea tray flying.

In the end, my fears were groundless: I heard the deep rich voice of the Countess – ‘Come’ – and marched in to find her sitting up in bed alone. Now, at this point I should probably tell you a little bit about the arrangement of the family’s quarters on the second floor. If you go to Croome Court today – and since it’s part of the National Trust and open to the public, I really think you should – you’ll see that on either side of the Earl and Countess’s bedroom there are doors leading off into other rooms. In my day these were the Earl’s dressing room on one side and the Countess’s boudoir on the other. As I was to discover, as soon as he heard my knock on the door, the Earl would get up and retreat into his dressing room while I saw to my
mistress’s needs alone. I never did know whether he got a cup of tea delivered to him there: I certainly never brought him one and I never saw anyone else with a tray, so I rather think he missed out.

I plumped up the pillows behind Her Ladyship’s elegant shoulders while she adjusted a beautiful silk nightgown. In my dressmaking apprenticeship I’d seen some lovely fabric, even though we weren’t making clothes for the gentry, but I could see straight away that what the Countess was wearing was of a different class all together. Well, I said to myself, if this is what she puts on to go to bed, what will the rest of her outfits be like? Of course, those outfits were one of the main parts of my duties. While her ladyship drank her tea, I first nipped off down the corridor to her private bathroom and began the process of drawing hot water for her to bathe in. When that was done, my mistress got herself up, took the dressing gown (another piece of lovely material) I held out for her and told me what she wanted to wear that day. It was my job to lay all of her clothes out on the bed – every last stitch she would wear – in the order in which she would put them on.

Now, maybe you’re thinking that doesn’t sound like much: after all, everybody wears clothes and surely it couldn’t have been very different back then? But it was: it most certainly was. You see the way we dress now bears very little resemblance to what a lady would wear in
1935. For a start, there was a great deal more in the way of underwear.

The first thing a lady put on would, of course, be her knickers. These were nothing like the sort of panties that you buy today: they were big, baggy silk things you stepped into and which came down to somewhere between the calf and the knee, and what they lacked in being flattering to the figure I suppose they made up for in terms of comfort. In themselves, these garments were a fairly new invention: until the 1920s, ladies’ knickers were open between the legs, which must have made them somewhat draughty.

But it was the next item of under clothing that seems outlandish to people today. The modern bra was only invented in 1913 and, by the time I was tending to Her Ladyship, it was very definitely not in widespread use. Instead, she, like most women, wore a sort of complicated corset known as a girdle: this combined a basic brassiere with an elasticated middle section – to compress the tummy and waist into a slim, narrow shape – to which were attached straps for keeping up stockings. These, like the girdle itself, would be made of rayon. Now, I don’t think most people today have ever heard of rayon – or if they have, they won’t know what it was – but before the Second World War it was used for just about every sort of women’s clothing, and especially underwear. It’s really a
sort of halfway house between completely natural fibres like wool or cotton and the synthetic materials we take for granted today. Nylon, for example, wasn’t even invented until 1935 and it wasn’t until American soldiers brought nylon stockings to Britain after 1942 that women here ever saw it. Of course, tights hadn’t even been thought of then, so rayon stockings were what everyone was used to and it was known to common people like me as ‘artificial silk’ because that’s how it felt on the skin.

On top of all this, there would also be a slip and possibly a petticoat before the whole complicated business was hidden from view with a dress. Trousers were, in theory, a possibility but in those inter-war years only what we called ‘fast women’ really wore them: they were seen as something not really respectable and it would take the war – when women were pressed into service in industry, on the land or in the forces – before they lost their rather risqué image.

When Her Ladyship disappeared to bathe, my duties began in earnest. I would first tidy and prepare the various pots of face preparation, powders and other make-up on her dressing table. An aristocratic lady like the Countess would never dream of keeping her own dressing table clean and tidy: that was my job, every morning and evening. Next, I would go into her boudoir to collect up what she had been wearing the day before. Mostly this would be her
evening wear – for in those days ladies dressed formally for dinner. The Countess had some truly beautiful evening dresses, made of the most gorgeous and expensive materials but, in the way of things back then, she would simply shed these when she came up for bed, leaving them in a higgledy-piggledy mess on the floor. I bundled up the garments that would need to be washed and carefully folded the rest to take back to my room. Here I would press them to within an inch of their lives so that they looked as good as new (despite their night on the floor), ready to be worn again that evening if Her Ladyship so chose.

And then, once my mistress returned from her bath, I would help dress her in whatever outfit she had chosen for the day. Now, if all of this makes the Countess seem very pernickety, it’s only fair to point out that, by reputation, she was a great deal less fussy about what she wore than most ladies of her station. In fact, I was horrified to hear from Dorothy that it was far from unknown for Milady to wear the same dirty pair of knickers several days in a row: that was not the way I’d been brought up – and the Mulleys of Stamford had a great deal less money (not to mention a rather more basic method of laundry) than the Coventrys of Croome Court. It just goes to show, I told myself, that money isn’t everything in this world.

Then came the part of the morning that I would come to dread: brushing my mistress’s hair. She had, of course,
warned me about this but, even so, I found this morning ritual to be terribly tiring and distinctly boring. I wonder, do you ever take the time to calculate how long you spend brushing your hair of a morning? I rather think that most of us won’t spend more than a minute or so – unless we’re using some of those fancy hair tongs or straighteners that young girls seem so keen on today. There weren’t any such things back in the 1930s: the only tool I had at my disposal was Her Ladyship’s silver-backed hairbrush – that and good old elbow grease. So I stood there behind her as she readied herself for the ritual. Brush, brush, brush – and then brush again. Stroke after stroke, minute after minute until the full hour – and believe me, Milady timed me – of brushing had been accomplished. My feet ached from standing still so long and my brushing arm felt ready to drop off by the time I’d finished and my mistress had declared herself satisfied. Then, and only then, was I dismissed from her presence.

And what, do you suppose, the Earl was doing all this time? From the moment I’d knocked on the door with his wife’s morning cup of tea he was nowhere to be seen. The answer turned out to be that he was receiving very much the same sort of treatment from Mr Latter: the whole routine with the clothes (though not, I think, with the hair brushing, since His Lordship sported the short back and sides of all respectable gentlemen). But, incredible as it may seem to us today, both of these grown adults – and Her
Ladyship was almost twice my age – were apparently unable to decide for themselves what clothes to put on of a morning, much less to get themselves dressed on their own.

At 9.30am the Earl and Countess descended the big stone staircase and settled themselves in the dining room to take breakfast. As a lady’s maid, I never saw what went on in there – although I would see Winnie and her kitchen maids working up whole silver salvers of bacon, eggs, devilled kidneys, kedgeree and the like: it was the footmen and Mr Latter who waited on the family when they took their meals and, though we weren’t meant to gossip about the family, I soon found out that, before they ever undid a napkin or plunged a knife into the butter, the Earl said prayers. And when he finished, Her Ladyship would add her own appeal to the Almighty: ‘God, make my servants dutiful.’ Since there was no ‘please’ in that sentence, I realised not only that our duties were a matter of the strictest requirement but that the aristocracy were evidently on first-name terms with God.

There was one other very noticeable aspect to the Earl and the Countess’s breakfasts: they took them alone. By the time I joined the household in August 1935, the Coventrys had four children: three daughters and one son. The eldest, at 13, was Lady Anne; next came Lady Joan, aged 11, then Lady Maria, who was 4, and the youngest of all was George William (the family always called their first sons by those
names), who was barely 18 months and known to everyone simply as Bill. Lady Anne and Lady Joan had been dispatched to boarding school and were thus away from Croome for much of the year but, even in school holidays, neither they nor the two youngsters ate with their parents.

Coming from a close family such as mine where, even had there been room enough in the little cottage to send the three of us children to eat on our own, my parents would never have considered it. The way the Coventrys brought up their children seemed very odd to me. They rarely saw them from one day to the next: most often, their only contact would be for a few minutes after the children had eaten their supper and were brought down to speak to their parents before being whisked back up to their playroom. Even at bedtime it was Mrs Lovett who supervised everything and tucked them in for the night. To my mind, it didn’t bode well: even though I was just 19, I had enough about me to suspect that this very aristocratic way of family life might one day reap some less than respectable rewards. Little did I know how tragically that premonition was to be realised.

I
t took a week for me to stop crying myself to sleep at night.

The days themselves began to resolve into some sort of routine: up at 7am, drink tea, have bath, rush down the three flights of stairs, gulp down breakfast then whisk Milady’s tray upstairs and begin work on her daily needs. I found my way to the laundry – a huge bustling place where all the family’s bedding was washed and ironed every morning ready for the housemaids to make up again in the afternoon. I set up an ironing board in my bedroom so that I could press the Countess’s clothes. It was a relief to discover that I had an electric socket in my room and was issued with an electric iron: a vast improvement on the heavy old cast-iron implements I was used to at home.

I suppose that, if I’d wanted it, Miriam, the third housemaid who seemed to be looking after me, would have made up my bed for me. But I’d been brought up by Mum’s strict standards and I couldn’t bear to allow someone else to do this for me. The bedding, of course, was the old-fashioned type: no duvets in those days! And so every morning I started the bed from scratch and made sure the sheets were put back, neat as a new pin with hospital corners, just as Mum had taught me. Standards were important to Mum and, just because I’d landed in a place where I was treated as a superior being by the other servants, I wasn’t going to let them drop away.

Once Her Ladyship had breakfasted she would often return to her boudoir. She would summon me and give me my instructions for the day ahead and tell me what she wanted to wear for dinner in the evening. In those first few days it was just like that: firm instructions with no question of asking my opinion. But towards the end of the first week she seemed to thaw a little and for the first time spoke to me as if I was someone who might have something useful to say.

‘What do you think I should wear tonight, Mulley?’ was the first advice she sought from me one day. Well, I had only barely begun to comprehend the enormity of her wardrobe. It seemed to be absolutely stuffed with the most impossibly lovely gowns – mostly long but with a number
of very fashionable shorter cocktail dresses. I’d no idea what was required of an Earl’s wife when it came to evening dress and, at first, I played safe by suggesting either what I knew she had already worn or at least something similar. It would take a fair while before I felt confident that I knew enough to give any proper advice.

Then there were her jewels. In the corner of the boudoir was Milady’s safe. On my second morning with her she handed me a little key and told me I was to be responsible for laying out the jewellery she would wear in the evening, making sure it was clean and sparkling and that it matched whatever gown she had chosen to wear. Can you imagine my nervousness when I took the little key into my hand? Here was I, a 19-year-old girl earning just £13 a year, being handed the key to a safe that must hold tens of thousands of pounds’ worth of diamonds and pearls.

The first time I opened the safe her Ladyship stood beside me and took out a typed list of all that was in there. But I only had eyes for the precious stones, gold rings and sparkling necklaces: it was like finding Aladdin’s cave tucked discreetly in the corner of the room. The Countess must have seen my face and, in her mind, I suppose, tried to put me at my ease.

‘These aren’t the valuable ones, Mulley. I don’t keep them here. These are just the ordinary ones for everyday wear.’

Well, all I knew what that what I saw before me – what I was now in charge of – were the most beautiful things I had ever seen. If these were only the less precious ones, what on earth could the real treasures look like? I made a mental note to talk to Mr Latter about the whole business. It wasn’t too long before I had the chance to do just that. Bless him, he must have seen how anxious I was and he patiently explained the situation.

‘The Countess keeps only her less valuable jewels here. Some of it might, I think, be classed as costume jewellery and, however brightly it sparkles, it might not really be made of genuine stones. Nonetheless, since she has given you the key to the safe, you are legally responsible for its safe-keeping, and you must understand that Her Ladyship has placed a great trust in you.’

That didn’t exactly bolster my confidence. What if something should go missing? What if somehow someone got in and stole from the safe? What would happen to me? Would I be arrested and taken to prison? I should certainly lose my position – that much was beyond doubt. I gulped.

‘You must try not to worry yourself about this, Miss Mulley,’ Mr Latter continued. ‘I know you will do very well for Her Ladyship and I have every confidence that the trust she has placed in you will be fulfilled.’ His face relaxed into a smile and, in a manner that came as close to conspiratorial as his training and position would allow, he
leaned towards me and whispered, ‘Her Ladyship’s real jewellery is far away from here. It is kept in a vault in one of the oldest and most secure banks in London – so that should be a weight off your mind. And as for Croome Court: well, let me show you something.’

He led me through the corridors of the servants’ quarter and into his own sanctuary, the Butler’s Parlour. This room, I knew, was where he spent those parts of the day when he wasn’t attending to the family’s needs and fulfilling the duties of valet to the Earl. It was a very large room – larger even than my bedroom – and one whole wall was lined with sinks. This was where – under Mr Latter’s strict supervision – the lower footmen washed up the fine porcelain and silver cutlery that the Coventrys used for dining. There was a big coal range in the corner, gleaming with blackleading, on the sides of which were two oblong containers: these were where the fire heated the water, which would then be carried over in pans to the sinks. In the top of one wall there was a long glass panel that would have been at ground level on the outside of the front of the house. This was how the butler was able to see who was arriving at the Court in time to get upstairs and open the great front door to welcome them.

But what Mr Latter wanted to show me was a huge, heavy cast-iron door in the opposite wall. This really looked like something out of a Victorian prison.

‘This, Miss Mulley, is the strong room. In here we keep all the family’s silver – a collection much more valuable than the jewels for which you are responsible. Much more valuable by a very long chalk, Miss Mulley.’

As he continued, I began to understand just how cleverly Croome Court had been designed and built. There was, of course, only one door to the strong room and, as Mr Latter pulled it open, I could see just how heavy and secure it was. Inside, the ceiling was of a completely different design to anything else I had seen in the house. The bedrooms all had straightforward – if very high – ceilings and those for the servants’ quarters downstairs were arched. But the ceiling in the strong room was a complex series of mini-arches, intersecting and giving the room a very odd feel indeed. Nor was this an accident.

When Capability Brown and Robert Adam were rebuilding Croome Court 200 years earlier, they knew that gentry such as the Earl of Coventry would possess many thousands of pounds’ worth of silver and gold – the equivalent to millions of pounds today. And they knew that, in the lawless and poverty-ridden conditions of the time – when police forces hadn’t even been invented – this treasure would act like a magnet for burglars. I discovered that the favourite technique of house cracksmen (as burglars were known) was to dig their way into a strong room from above, and so, between them, the creators of
Croome designed a ceiling with multiple vaults and
inbuilt
strengths to ensure that any burglar would find it almost impossible to crack.

Nor was that the only security precaution. Every evening the strong room was locked shut – Mr Latter had the only key – and a cot bed was placed against it, just inside the butler’s pantry. On this bed, one or other of the footmen took turns to sleep, so that it would be impossible for anyone even to approach the strong room door without waking him up.

Well, of course, I was impressed and (as Mr Latter had no doubt intended) really quite reassured about the onerous burden of taking responsibility for Milady’s jewels. But I couldn’t help thinking how uncomfortable and cold it must be to spend the night on a little cot in the butler’s pantry. And I began to realise that, in many ways, I was being very well treated.

For a start, I was never hungry. Not only were all my meals provided – hot and nourishing and made for me – but Winnie Sapstead was always very generous, making sure I was provided with cake of an afternoon. We began to settle into a little routine where I would take the bits of sewing and mending the Countess had given me to do into the steward’s room and Winnie would bring up something additional for me to do – sew a button on a uniform here, or mend a tear there. In return, she would
be armed with a bit of fruit loaf or something she had made for the family. If nothing else, I was definitely getting more than crumbs from the gentry’s table.

Although Croome Court itself was always fearsomely cold – don’t forget it was a vast, cavernous place and there was no such thing as central heating in those days – my bedroom was always kept supplied with my very own bucket of coal. I knew from the snatches of gossip of the other servants below stairs that not all fine families treated their servants like this and that having an unrestricted supply of coal – no questions asked about how much I used – was a sign that the Coventrys took great care of their servants.

Still, it wasn’t home. After I had laid out my mistress’s clothes for the evening and helped her dress for dinner (I’d polished up her diamonds and pearls ready for her to choose what to wear), I would largely be left to my own devices. And warm though my bedroom might be, in the flickering gas light of an evening I was terribly homesick. And that’s why I cried myself to sleep.

During the day I was kept busy enough not to feel too low and, within weeks of starting my position, I began my hairdressing course. The place where I was to be trained was in Worcester – nearly ten miles away. Croome Court was, as I have explained, in a very isolated position in the countryside and, while there was a bus service from right
outside the London Arch, it only ran once a day and was plainly not going to be suitable. Instead, the Countess instructed that the family chauffeur was to ferry me back and forth for my once-a-week lessons.

Roland Newman had been the first of the staff that I’d met and – although I never said as much to him and probably didn’t even admit it to myself – I’d been rather taken by him. He was good looking and had tried to be friendly and, if he was a little older than me, in those days that was much less of a concern than it seems to be today. And so I was secretly rather looking forward to being chauffeured to Worcester. I did, though, hope we might have a rather better means of transport than that with which I had been met on my arrival.

Sadly, this wasn’t to be. The Coventry family owned – and Roland drove for them – a very smart car indeed: not a Rolls-Royce or a Bentley but a very swish Standard 20 with deep red coachwork and the finest leather seats. Over the years many people have commented on this and find it surprising that the Earl hadn’t splashed out on a Rolls – after all, in every film or television drama you see about the 1930s the aristocracy is always shown in the biggest and most luxurious Roller. But that’s fiction and real life for the Coventrys – especially in the straitened financial climate of the 1930s – was different.

For one thing, the Standard Motor Company was very
much a local enterprise: its cars had been built – sometimes hand-built – in Coventry for more than 30 years and I think the Earl was determined that he should support it. After all, he was the Earl of the town where they were constructed! And although the Standard name has long since disappeared (it was eventually swallowed up into British Leyland as part of the rationalisation of Britain’s motor industry in the 1960s and 1970s), before the Second World War it had a very good reputation for reliability and comfort. The Standard 20 was very much the top model in the range.

I’d caught a glimpse of this magnificent machine on the driveway outside and seen Roland open its big solid doors for my mistress and the Earl. And so, naturally, I hoped that this would be the way I would ride into Worcester. Perhaps I was guilty of giving myself a few too many airs and graces with this because, when the time came for Roland to take me to my first lesson, there was the smelly blue hound van again. ‘Ah, well,’ I told myself. ‘That’ll teach you to get ideas above your station.’

As it turned out, I didn’t really notice the rather basic nature of the vehicle too much – although I did enquire why it was called a hound van. The answer was that the Countess was a very keen huntswoman and that Croome had its own pack of hounds. Not only were these transported to and from meets in the back of the little
blue van but it was also used to collect offal and cheap cuts of meat for their daily suppers. This, at least, explained the rather odd smell. But as I say, as the weeks passed, I began to notice less and less about the van and more and more about the quietly dashing Roland Newman. I could also see that he was beginning to take a shine to me. I determined to find out a little more about him and his background.

Roland was, in fact, 11 years older than me. He was one of three brothers and one sister who had grown up in the nearby village of Severn Stoke – well, I say a village but it was really more of a hamlet. His mother and father had been agricultural workers on the Croome estate and lived in a little tied cottage next to the Rose & Crown pub. By the time I met Roland, his parents were retired, although his dad was still the ghillie, acting as a sort of unofficial official on the river. His brother Sid worked at a famous racing stables nearby, while Arnold, the other brother, was living and working on a local farm and Roland lived with them.

Roland had joined the Earl of Coventry’s staff several years earlier and, in addition to his duties as a chauffeur (and acting as a part-time footman whenever the local gentry came to dinner), he also looked after the Court’s water-pumping station – for a house that size and set in so rural a location had to have its own water works – and
helped out with just about anything that any of the other servants needed doing by way of mechanics. I’d discovered – in truth, I’d made it my business to find out – that he was a very popular member of the servants’ household. All in all, I began to look forward to our trips to Worcester and to miss his company on the days when I didn’t see him.