Climbing the Stairs by Margaret Powell Page A

married daughter with three
children living with them, which meant having both a nanny and an under-nurse. We disliked all nannies, nurses and under-nurses because they were neither flesh, fowl, nor good red herrings as you
might say. They were not the kind of people you worked for and they were not of the kind of us. They were sort of out in limbo. Perhaps this wasn’t true of the under-nurse. She got the
worst of both worlds – not rated by the nanny and we classed her as if she were, as she had to be with the nanny. Yet even nanny wasn’t one of them because she had to work for
her living. I suppose in fact nannies didn’t have much of a life, but we thought they did, and we disliked them intensely in the kitchen because we had to prepare different meals for
them.
    The nurse would come down and tell the cook what menu she wanted, and cook would be awkward and bloody-minded because as far as the cook was concerned only one person should give orders and that
was the madam. But if the nurse thought that the day’s meals were unsuitable for the children she’d come down and say so and others would have to be cooked specially for them. Then when
the nurse went upstairs cook would explode and I got the blast. No, we didn’t like nannies.
    But as I say the under-nurse really had a horrible time of it because she was stuck up there with only that nurse for company and she had to work hard. There was a day nursery and a night
nursery; the under-nurse had to scrub both these out each day and when I say scrub I mean scrub, because in those days there was linoleum on the floor. She had to do the washing for the children,
the napkins and the rougher stuff, while the nurse did the dainty things.
    I hadn’t been at that job long when another baby was due, which made it four children. Never in all my life had I seen such a carry-on about somebody having a baby. I wouldn’t have
believed people could have made all that fuss. To begin with there was a shuffling round of rooms because our nurse didn’t take children from birth – so another nurse arrived, took her
room, and ours had to sleep in with the under-nurse. And the room had to be redecorated which was another thing that annoyed our nurse because, as she said, it hadn’t been redecorated for her
who had been with the family for three years, so why should it be redecorated for someone who was only going to come for a month or two. I said to the cook, ‘She’ll reap the benefit
when the nurse has gone, she’ll go back into it.’ I should have kept my mouth shut. The cook picked up the carving knife and made a gesture and uttered something too horrible to
repeat.
    Anyway two weeks before the baby was expected this nurse who took babies from birth was installed – so you can just imagine what it was like in the household: two nurses and an
under-nurse, three kids and one on the way. That was when I made up my mind never to go to another place where they had children. With the hostility that there was between this new nurse and the
old one, you could have cut the atmosphere with a knife. Yet they had to be outwardly polite. It was ‘Good morning, Nurse’ and ‘What do you think of this, Nurse?’ But the
old nurse wouldn’t let the new one do anything so she just sat around getting in the way, waiting for the baby to be born. And what with the fact that the baby was a week late as well –
she was left hovering for three weeks. The only one that benefited was the under-nurse because our nurse joined forces with her against the other one, so for once in her life everything that she
said and did was right. This changed of course as soon as the other nurse went.
    Then after the baby was born, yet another nurse came – a wet nurse to feed the baby, you see. She had a month-old baby of her own but she came in several times a day to feed ours as well.
I must say I found this procedure most peculiar at the time, but I didn’t after I’d had my first