Servants’ Hall by Margaret Powell

Rose.
    Anyway, as Lady Gibbons had returned from Yorkshire, I had far less time to think about Rose and her matrimonial problems. Lady Gibbons had brought back a sixteen-year-old girl from the remote village where they’d stayed; she was to be the housemaid and, as Lady Gibbons had her name down at three registry offices, she hoped soon to have a parlourmaid as well. The house was subjected to a thorough inspection, on Lady Gibbons’s return. She needed to be satisifed that the two month’s board wages she’d paid me, in addition to my monthly wage, had been worth the outlay. Actually I worked for her for only another four months before I decided to give in my notice. This was partly owing to the redcurrant jelly that I was expected to make. At that time I’d never in my life made jam, let alone jelly. I couldn’t get the stuff to set. I kept boiling it but still it was runny, so at last, in desperation I melted some sheets of gelatine in the redcurrants. After that it set so hard that when I dropped one lot on the floor it bounced. As the redcurrant jelly made by some previous cook was nearly all gone, I thought it would be better if I wasn’t there when my concoction was opened.
    Mary’s Aunt Elly asked why I didn’t get out of domestic service, I could easily get a job as a waitress in a Lyons teashop. I’d have a livelier time and see more people. But somehow I couldn’t fancy myself as a Nippy and the opportunity of falling into the arms of a wealthy widower – as Aunt Elly had done – was too remote even to contemplate. Besides, if I became a waitress I’d have to choose between living at home or in a furnished room; neither prospect appealed to me. In any case I’d decided to do temporary work as a cook; I wouldn’t stay long in any one place and I’d get a lot of experience. The first place I took was a disaster; not so the second. I was there because their cook was ill, not because they couldn’t get one. I was actually allowed to go into the library and borrow any books I wanted to read. To be able to do this was, to me, like an open sesame to Ali Baba’s cave. There were literally hundreds of books in huge bookcases lining the four walls. Not only the classics – I read those too – but modern books such as Aldous Huxley’s Antic Hay and Chrome Yellow ; authors like William Locke and Ethel M. Dell. When, after three months, their own cook was well enough to start work, I was certainly sorry to leave.
    I hadn’t seen either Rose or Mary for about six weeks. Where Mary was concerned it was because she’d met such a gentlemanly young man whom she hoped would become a ‘permanent’, and therefore all her free time had to be spent with him. Actually, I was in rather an invidious position. It was through me that Mary had met her Harold, who at that time was the boyfriend of Gladys’s. Gladys wanted me to meet this Harold, so one Sunday afternoon, taking Mary with me, we went to Hyde Park where we’d arranged to meet. We stood by Speakers’ Corner and I remember that there was a fat, red-faced man there, ranting on about the ‘rights of the common man’. Mary whispered to me that he looked about as common as could be so presumably he was speaking from a personal viewpoint.
    ‘My name’s Bill Robinson’, he bawled, ‘and I fought in the war to make this a land fit for heroes. And what have I got for it? What have any of us old soldiers got for it? A putty medal and goodbye, we don’t want to know you until the next bloody war. Get yourself a job or starve on the dole. The bloody government don’t care a damn about the likes of us working class people. But the day will come, my friends – ’
    Here he’d been stopped by another bawling voice, ‘I ain’t no bloody friend of yours Bill Robinson or whatever you call yourself, and by the looks of you, you ain’t starving neither.’
    Seeing that the barracker was only a weedy little man, the speaker told him to shut his bloody gob or