Below Stairs by Margaret Powell Page B

tired to go and look. Yet before I went I got a book on various aspects of old London. Where people had stayed, like Carlyle, Wells, and Dickens, and I thought how marvellous it would be to walk around and to be able to say that I’d been there, because I was always mad on history and reading.
    But I was always too darned tired, I just wanted to go to the films where you could sit in darkness, where it didn’t matter that you hadn’t dressed up.
    On my day off I used to go to the nearest cinema and get all my romance second-hand. It took a lot less energy. I often thought I wouldn’t have had the strength if a marvellous lover had swum into my life. I couldn’t have done anything about it.
    Once a fortnight I used to get a Sunday evening off with Gladys the under-housemaid, and we used to stroll around Hyde Park.
    Gladys was a year older than me and she’d lived in London all her life. Her home was in Stepney, she had eight brothers, and ten sisters. She could hardly remember when her mother wasn’t having a baby. She told me lurid tales of life in Stepney, the overcrowding that there was, and bugs in the beds, the filth, and the drinking, and the fights on Saturday nights. I thought it was marvellous to listen to, although I wouldn’t have wanted to be there.
    According to Gladys, her father drank like a fish and he came home most nights roaring drunk and incapable. I used to think he couldn’t have been so incapable otherwise her mother couldn’t have had nineteen children, could she?
    Gladys wasn’t a pretty girl by any means, neither was I, but she had a very lively personality and she certainly knew how to look after herself. Coming from a place like Stepney I suppose she had to, with all those brothers and sisters and a father who drank. She’d learnt how to take the buffets of life and still come up smiling. No one could put much over on Gladys. She used to give me a lot of good advice. One of the things she told me, she said, ‘Never, never at any time when you meet a boyfriend, let on that you’re in domestic service, because if you do you’ll only be called a skivvy and you’ll never keep him.’ So I said, ‘What shall I say I do then?’ ‘Oh tell them any old yarn, tell them you work in a shop or in a factory.’ I said, ‘Well, factory girls aren’t any better than us.’ ‘They are in a boyfriend’s eyes,’ she said. ‘Anyone that works in domestic service is a skivvy and they never bother about them. The very fact that our hours are limited is enough to put anyone off for a start.’ I followed all this instruction but I really couldn’t see it mattered much because the only young men that we ever met were the Red Coats from the Knightsbridge Barracks, the soldiers.
    They never had any spare cash at all, or if they had, none of them ever spent a penny on us. All we ever did was wander round the park for hours on end or listen to the soapbox orators at Marble Arch. We had to be in at ten o’clock sharp, so the goodbyes weren’t prolonged. A lot of inane remarks from the men and a lot of giggles from us, a few kisses and further promises to be sure to meet them at the same time next week, but neither Gladys nor I had any intention of having permanent dates with such ill-paid escorts. It wasn’t our idea of romance to walk around Hyde Park for hours on end with a couple of Red Coats and never get anything out of them.
    Gladys and I were avid readers of those women’s magazines of the time; things like Peg’s Paper , The Red Circle Magazine , and the Red Heart . Between their pages many a poor and lonely heroine ended up marrying some Rudolph Valentino sort of man, or a Rothschild with loads of money. Of course the girl, in spite of her upbringing, always had a lovely almond-shaped face and beautiful liquid violet eyes, and although Gladys and I hadn’t got these attributes, it didn’t prevent us from dreaming that we had and that one day our prince would come. My idea of heaven at