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only way you could learn to be one was by starting as a kitchen maid.
    I was offered various posts and eventually I settled on one in Adelaide Crescent in Hove, because it was fairly near to where we lived. It was the home of the Reverend Clydesdale and his wife. My mother came with me for the interview.
    They were tremendous houses in Adelaide Crescent; they started off with a basement and went right up to an attic, there were a hundred and thirty-two stairs in all, and the basements were dark and like dungeons. The front of the basement, with iron bars all down the bay windows, was the servants’ hall. When you were sitting in there all you saw going by was people’s legs, and when you were on the other side of the basement hall, which was the kitchen, a big conservatory overhung that, so you saw nothing at all. It had one tiny window high up in the wall which you couldn’t see through unless you got a ladder. The light had to be on all day long.
    The Crescent is one of the most imposing in Hove. The houses were Regency style, and even now, although they are all flats, they haven’t altered the façade, and it still looks very much as it did with gardens right down the centre. Of course, at that time only the residents had keys and were allowed to use the gardens, but that certainly didn’t apply to the servants, I can assure you.
    When my mother and I arrived at this house for the interview we went to the front door. In all the time I worked there, that was the only time I ever went in by the front door. But the front door it was on this particular day. We were ushered into a hall that I thought was the last word in opulence. There was a lovely carpet on the floor, and tremendously wide stairs carpeted right across, not like the tiny little bit of lino in the middle we had on our stairs. There was a great mahogany table in the hall and a mahogany hallstand, and huge mirrors with gilt frames. The whole thing breathed an aura of wealth to me. I thought they must be millionaires. I’d never seen anything like it.
    A butler opened the door to us and my mother said that this was Margaret Langley who had come for the interview as a kitchen maid. A very tiny little butler he was. I’d always thought that butlers were tall, imposing men. In the hall we saw a rather elderly gentleman and the lady who was to interview us. We were shown into what was obviously a nursery – a day nursery.
    My mother did all the talking because I was overcome with wonder at this room, for although it was only a nursery, you could have put all the three rooms that we lived in into it. Also I was overcome with shyness; I suffered agonies of self-consciousness in those days. And the lady, Mrs Clydesdale, looked me up and down as though I was something at one of those markets, you know, one of those slave markets. She seemed to be weighing up all my points.
    My mother told her that I had been doing daily jobs. She didn’t mention the laundry because she didn’t think that was any recommendation. People thought that laundries were hotbeds of vice in those days because of the obscene language of the girls who worked there.
    Mrs Clydesdale decided that because I was strong and healthy I would do. I was to have twenty-four pounds a year, paid monthly. I was to have one afternoon and evening off from four o’clock to ten o’clock, and alternate Sundays off the same hours, and I was never to be in later than ten o’clock under any circumstances. I was to have three print dresses, blue or green; four white aprons with bibs, and four caps; stockings, and black strapped shoes. I was always to say ‘Sir’ and ‘Madam’ if I was spoken to by Mr and Mrs Clydesdale, and I was to treat the upper servants with great respect and do everything the cook asked me to do. To all these things my mother said, ‘Yes, Madam, no, Madam’, and all these things she promised on my behalf that I would do. My spirits sank lower and lower. I felt I was in jail at the