Below Stairs by Margaret Powell (1968)

Last week Radio 4X had an episode of “The Petticoat Line” from 1969. I had to check the date: it seemed to belong to an earlier decade (if not century). However there was one panellist I had vaguely heard of – Margaret Powell, sounding like Mrs Premise and Mrs Conclusion rolled into one – whose view on the British empire’s exploitation of overseas people and their countries’ wealth could have come straight from a Guardian leader. So I was intrigued.

This book covers her years (approx 1920s) working as a kitchen maid (lowest of the low) and then a cook in Hove and London until she escaped through marriage. She became a bit of a TV celebrity in her sixties after her book came out, and she obviously relished it. The book sounds as if someone gave her a tape recorder and asked her to begin at the beginning and go on till she came to the end. It’s entirely matter-of-fact – halfpenny plain, not penny coloured (which is the closest the book unintentionally(?) gets to metaphor). Every so often a bracing aperçu breaks through to remind you that the work and the poverty were real and not just a story. It’s all familiar: my grandparents and great aunts and uncles followed the same path until they too escaped into marriage or the factory. As social history it’s interesting, but as literature it’s dead. Monica Dickens – from the opposite end of the social spectrum a decade later – is a much better read, but it was never a matter of survival for her as it is for Powell.

There’s no sentiment or cant. Her employers are “Them” – just as she was a lower form of human being from their perspective. The business of finding a suitable husband when your time, dress and behaviour is constantly policed is baldly stated. I underlined lots of passages; this is just one:

In fact, all my life in domestic service I’ve found that employers were always greatly concerned with your moral welfare. They couldn’t have cared less about your physical welfare; so long as you were able to do the work, it didn’t matter in the least to them whether you had back-ache, stomach-ache, or what ache, but anything to do with your morals they considered was their concern.

And here’s one to be embroidered or engraved on anything pink:

After all, if a man doesn’t spend much on you when you’re not married to him, it’s a sure thing he’s not going to afterwards.

There were echoes of other books: Moffat the butler, aligning himself with his aristocratic employer, was from “Remains of the Day”. Gladys, one of 19 from a Stepney family, had stepped out of “Three-a-Penny”.