My mother died aged ninety-six, just after my fiftieth birthday. She had survived my father by nearly thirty years. She was active almost to the last, the only difficulty being her failing eyesight; her movements had slowed down a bit. But really she was, as everyone said, wonderful for her age. She died quickly of a stroke. To the last she was still wondering why I hadn’t found the right woman to marry. Maybe she’s wondering even yet. She belonged to the wondering generation.
My mother, originally mistress of a great house with countless servants, had moved down with the times like everyone else, each move to a smaller house and fewer servants being somewhat of a trauma to her. She called every new house poky, every domestic arrangement makeshift. It was not till well after the First World War that she got used to only four indoor servants including a manservant and three outdoor. Somewhere about the end of the fifties she was reduced to a compact Georgian house in Sussex with twelve bedrooms surrounded by woodland. It became more and more enormous for one person as time went on. Her means were sufficient but she couldn’t get the staff she needed. A few rooms were closed off entirely. Some years before she died she was doing very well with a gardener to keep going a token piece of lawn and some kitchen-garden patches, and, indoors, her cook-housekeeper, Miss Spigot, and Winnie the maid. By the end of her life, two years ago, she was left with only Winnie.
After Miss Spigot’s death Winnie struggled on, in deep chaos, burning the food and quite unable to shop and clean. My mother wouldn’t lift a finger beyond picking flowers; she sat calmly with her eternal sewing, which she called ‘my work’, giving orders. Up to then I had been accustomed to go down to spend Sunday and Monday with a few friends to cheer Ma up, and she had always looked forward to these visits. She had outlived her sisters and her friends, and she enjoyed company. My own work, a regular theatre column, prevented me from spending much more time with her. I don’t notice dust but I do notice bad food; I must say Miss Spigot, who was already in her late seventies, had cooked very well. Our rooms had always been ready and bright when we arrived during Miss Spigot’s lifetime. But suddenly all that ended. Winnie was frantic. I could see that my mother would have to move again. I begged her to let me get her a small flat in London. She was very old but by no means infirm, especially of purpose. ‘Winnie can manage alone. I shall have a Word with her,’ said Ma, and went on with her needlepoint or whatever. I could have killed her, but Ma wasn’t the sort of person you could easily be nasty to.
I decided to stop bringing my friends to my mother’s. My own visits were hell. There was a terrible smell everywhere of burnt food, unaired rooms and sheer neglect. My mother’s tastes in food were simple and I dare say so were Winnie’s, but as for me I like my square meals. The dining-room floor was littered with old bits of toast and egg-shells. The table hadn’t been cleared for weeks, the place-mats were greasy. I did my best to help clear up on my miserable Sundays and Mondays. Personally, I’m quite used to shifting for myself in London; in fact, having been brought up with servants, I hate them. Your life’s never your own. In London I always managed with a morning woman.
But I wasn’t up to coping with a vast house like Ma’s. Nothing would disturb Ma’s resolve to put up with it or Winnie’s exasperating loyalty; she took my mother’s part. It went on for a month. I spent all my spare time in employment agencies and on various other means to get someone to replace Miss Spigot, but nothing came of my efforts or those of my friends; nothing. ‘I am going to have a Word with Winnie,’ said Ma.
On the fifth Sunday I drove down to Sussex late intending to cut short the horror of it all. Amazingly, there was no horror. Winnie had become a super-efficient cook-housekeeper all in the course of a week. As I passed the dining-room I could see the table was laid ready, sparkling with silver and glass, and the table-linen was up to Ma’s best standard. The drawing-room was fresh and the windows looked like glass once more.
Ma was knitting. It was almost time to go in to dinner.
‘Have you found someone to help?’ I said. ‘No,’ said Ma.
‘Well, how has Winnie managed all this on her own?’
‘I had a Word with her,’ said my mother.
Winnie served an excellent dinner on the whole; perhaps it wasn’t quite up to the late cook’s quality but certainly ambitious enough to include a rather flat soufflé.
‘It’s her first soufflé,’ said Ma, when Winnie went to get the meat course. If she doesn’t improve I’ll have a Word.’
But now something had happened to Winnie. She was perfectly happy, indeed almost blissful. She went around whispering to herself in a decidedly odd way. She served the vegetables with great care, but whispering, whispering, all the time.
‘What did you say, Winnie?’ I said.
‘The soufflé was flat,’ said Winnie.
‘Turn on the BBC news,’ said my mother.
For the whole of Monday Winnie went round chattering to herself. Breakfast was, however, set out on the table with nothing forgotten. The house was already in good order before half-past eight, the fire new and crackling. And Winnie conversed with herself, merrily, and quite a lot. I supposed that finding herself alone in the kitchen was now showing. However, my mother seemed to have solved her domestic problem which had fast been developing into mine. I didn’t give time to worrying lest Winnie was turning a little funny.
I went back cheerfully to my own bachelor life and regaled my friends with the news of the change that had come over Winnie and of how well she was coping. They were quite eager to come and join me in Sussex again, assuring me they would make their own beds, help with the shopping and generally refrain from giving Winnie a hard time. I thought I’d better wait a few weeks before making up a party as of old. These visitors to my mother’s house were either unmarried and younger colleagues of mine who, like myself, had to work on Saturdays for their newspapers, or middle-aged widows who had nothing to tie them to any day of the week. All were very keen to come, but I waited.
Winnie was even more efficient the next week. I came to the conclusion that it was Winnie who had been the guiding spirit in the kitchen all along; she was a good cook. Ma took no notice of her whatsoever, as was always her way, preferring not to praise or blame, just to give orders. Winnie was an unguessable age between fifty-five and seventy, her face was big with a lot of folds, her body thin and angular, her hair chocolate-rinsed. My mother who long ago had been used to picking and choosing maids ‘of good appearance’ had taken some time to resign herself to uncomely Winnie, and, having done so, she was not now inclined to waste consideration on any further divergence from the norm that Winnie might display.
Winnie in fact could now be heard in the kitchen kicking up a dreadful racket. One evening the noise filled the house for about ten minutes. My bed was turned down neatly. The stair carpets were spotless as of old, and the furniture and banisters shone. Winnie conducted a further brief altercation in the kitchen and then was quiet till tea when my mother went to bed and so did she. I had a comfortable night. In the morning Winnie started fighting with herself again, or so it seemed. On investigation, I found her smiling while she argued. My mother’s breakfast tray was all prepared and Winnie was about to carry it up to Ma’s room. ‘What’s the matter, Winnie?’ I said.
‘Oh, the butter was forgot to be put on the tray. Too old for the job.’
‘Would you like to leave, Winnie?’ I said, somewhat desperately, but feeling that this was Winnie’s way of saying just that.
‘How could I leave your mother?’ said Winnie, marching off with the tray.
Well, my mother, aged ninety-six, died suddenly during the following week. Winnie phoned me quite calmly from Sussex and I went down right away. There was a little quiet funeral. The house was to be sold. Winnie was still having occasional outbreaks against herself, such as ‘The Times didn’t get cancelled at the newsagent like I said,’ and she muttered a bit as she went around. However, I spent a last, comfortable night in the house and after breakfast
prepared to settle Winnie’s pay and pension. I believed she would be glad of a rest. She had relations in Yorkshire and I thought she would probably want to return to them.
‘I’m not leaving the family,’ said Winnie.
She didn’t mean her family, she meant me.
‘Well, Winnie, the house will be sold. There’s no family left, is there?’
‘I’m coming with you,’ Winnie said. ‘I’ve no doubt it’s a pigsty but I can live in the basement.’
My pigsty, my paradise. It was a small narrow house in a Hampstead lane, which I had acquired over twelve years ago. I never got round to putting it straight. It was so much my life to be out late at night at the theatre, then usually some sort of supper after the theatre with friends; in the morning doing my notes for the theatre column, shuffling about in my dressing-gown; then after a quick lunch I would work in my study, or maybe go out to a cinema or an art show, or if not attend to something bureaucratic; or I would play some music on the piano. I worked hardest Fridays and Saturdays, for my last show was Friday and the column had to be in on Saturday at three in the afternoon. And since, until Ma died, I would go down to Sussex for Sunday and Monday with my friends, there was no time to put things straight. Sometimes there were people staying at my house and they would try to help. But it was better when they didn’t, for after one of those friendly tidy-ups I couldn’t find anything. Never, on any occasion, did I allow anyone into my little study upstairs. A sullen and lady-like domestic help called Ida came mincing in three mornings a week for a couple of hours, painful all round; that is, to herself, to me and to my cat Francis. Ida took the clean dishes out of the dishwasher and stacked them away; she changed the towels and bedsheets and left them at the laundry. She swept the kitchen floor, making short work of Francis with her broom, and sometimes she dusted the sitting-room and vacuumed the carpet. Francis cowered in the basement three mornings a week till she had gone.
It was not altogether the undesirability of Ida that persuaded me to take on Winnie. At first, I was decidedly dissuaded. The family fortunes had just managed to eke themselves out over my mother’s lifetime. I am comfortably off, I have a job, but I’m by no means wealthy. Like most of my friends I wasn’t in a position to take on a full-time housekeeper. And for another thing, I had no room. There was the damp basement full of rotting boxes which contained a great many other rotting objects that I always intended to do something about. These included some boxes of my mother’s that had somehow landed at my house during one of her moves, and never been forwarded; once I had looked inside one of them; it had held two ostrich feather fans falling apart with moth, some carved wood chessmen the worse for the damp, some soggy books and some wine. On that occasion I threw back the contents into the box, less the wine which was still enjoyable. But I never again opened one of those boxes. The basement contained two rooms, a little dank bathroom and a frightful kitchen. It had plainly been inhabited before I acquired the house.
‘I can’t put you in the basement, Winnie,’ I said, instead of saying outright ‘I can’t afford a cook-housekeeper, Winnie.
‘What’s wrong with the basement?’
‘It’s damp.’
‘I don’t need much money,’ said Winnie. ‘Your mother underpaid me, anyway. Old-fashioned ideas. You need me to cook for you. I can go into the attic and make it over for a room.’
How she knew about the attic I don’t know. I had once thought of making it into a one-room apartment and renting it, but it was just above the two bedrooms of the house, one of which was my study, and I hadn’t liked the thought of people moving about over my head. So the attic was empty. The other rooms in my house apart from my bedroom and my study were on the ground floor, a sitting-room and a dining-room with a divan where I put up occasional friends. The only place for Winnie was the attic, warm and empty. What made me waver in my resolve not to take on Winnie was that remark of hers, ‘You need me to cook for you.’ That was indeed a temptation. I visualized the effortless and good little supper parties I could give after the theatre. The nice lunches I would have, always so well-planned, well-served; and Winnie was a very economical shopper.
‘Save you a fortune in restaurants,’ decided Winnie; for it really was all decided. ‘And with the sale of your mother’s house, you’ll be in clover.
I didn’t go into the fact that death duties were taking care of my late mother’s property, she having stubbornly arranged her affairs so badly. But it was true that restaurant-eating in London was becoming more and more difficult as the food and service were ever more inferior. I just said, ‘Well, Winnie, you’ll have to settle yourself in the attic as best you can. I’ll help you up with your things but beyond that, I’m a busy man.’
‘I haven’t many things,’ Winnie said.
When she saw my house she said, ‘The Slough of Despond, if you remember your Bunyan.’ Nevertheless she settled into the attic. I paid off Ida and from then on was in Winnie’s hands.
It was true my life was transformed. It was amazing what Winnie could do. Except for the study which I locked up every time I left the house and where Winnie could not penetrate, she penetrated everywhere. A new kitchen stove was her only extravagance. I paid no attention to Winnie’s comings and goings but it was truly remarkable how she managed to clean out the house from the basement to the attic so well that I saw through the sitting-room windows as it seemed for the first time, and my bed was actually made every day. Winnie achieved all this in a very short time. Within a week I began to have friends to meals, delicious, interesting, just right.
‘How lucky you are!’ was what I heard from one friend after another. There were few who would not willingly have taken Winnie away from me if they’d had the chance. My mother’s silver and crystal sparkled on the table. Winnie was quite up to serving at a late hour. And her meals were always marvellous. ‘Oh what elegance! How does she manage it?’
‘Who is she arguing with, there in the kitchen?’
‘Herself.’
For one could hear Winnie, after she had cleared away and served us coffee, muttering to herself meanwhile, in the sitting-room, still fighting her lonely battles in the kitchen.
I am a man of the theatre, and this oddity of Winnie’s certainly appealed to my sense of theatre. Nor were my friends unappreciative of the carry-on. They thought it was delightful. As soon as she had left the room they called her a joy and they called her a treasure. One of my younger friends, an actress who had formerly liked to visit my mother in the country, had the quick eye to notice, what I hadn’t noticed, that a couple of my chairs had been newly upholstered in genuine petit-point.
‘You’ve had your mother’s petit-point finished,’ she said. ‘I remember she was working on it all last summer. The last time I saw her just before she died she was sitting out on the terrace working at this.’
‘How do you know it’s Ma’s work?’ I said.
‘I recognize the pattern, look, that’s the Venetian design, she had it done specially, look at that red.’
‘Well she must have finished it.’
‘Oh, that’s impossible. It’s very slow work. For your mother, impossible.’
‘Well, Winnie must have finished it.’
‘Winnie? How could she have managed it with all the other things she had to do?’
‘One never knows what Winnie’s up to.
I was suspicious. But, looking back on it, I think that the truth is I didn’t want to know how Winnie did it. It was like admitting you didn’t believe in Santa Claus: all those lovely surprises might stop.
Winnie’s success with my friends wasn’t lost on her. She, too, developed a sense of her theatrical side, muttering ever the more as she served the vegetables or the coffee; and one evening when I had a few guests, for no apparent reason she entered the room with one of my mother’s mothy great ostrich feather fans in her hand and gave a performance of a pre-war debutante being presented at court, sweeping the fan before her and curtseying low, with th
e feathers flying all over the carpet. She solemnly left the room, backwards, treating us to another low genuflection before she left. Nobody spoke till she had gone, but Winnie’s dottiness occupied the conversation merrily for the rest of the evening secretly, I was a little embarrassed. Another time I was having a quiet game of chess with a friend when Winnie came in unnecessarily to tidy the fire. She had cleaned up those old chess pieces from Ma’s trunk, they were positively a work of restoration. As she passed us she cast an eye at the board and said, ‘Undemocratic.’ I suppose she was referring to the kings and castles. But where Winnie was getting beyond a joke was on those days when, after lunch, I sat in my study trying to compose my theatre column.
Winnie at that time of day was usually up in her room in the attic wildly remonstrating with herself. I could get no peace. Finally and reluctantly I had it out with her.
‘Winnie,’ I said, very tactfully, ‘you’re beginning to talk to yourself, you know. There’s nothing to worry about, many people do it, in fact there are great geniuses who go about talking to themselves. It’s only that I can’t get on with my work when I hear these arguments going on over my head.’
‘Well, I’m much provoked,’ Winnie said.
‘I’ve no doubt of that. And I think you really do too much for me. Will you agree to see a doctor?’
‘In an institution?’ Winnie wanted to know.
‘Oh, Winnie, of course not. Only privately. Maybe you need some medicine. Otherwise, I’m afraid we’ll have to part. But I do urge you —I urged her into going to a young psychiatrist I’d heard of, in private practice. I have no idea what account she gave of herself and her condition but I’ve no doubt he got some illogical story out of her. She didn’t appear to think there was anything wrong with her, and neither, apparently, did he. She refused to go into hospital under observation and he sent her away after a few visits with some medicine. I made enquiries of the doctor but he wouldn’t say much. ‘She has a few hallucinations, nothing to worry about. She should get over it. Of course I can’t diagnose in depth without her cooperation in a clinic.’ I settled his exorbitant bill. Winnie carried on in much the same way as before for about a week. She told me she was taking the medicine.