At Golsoncott, the very architecture assumed an infrastructure of service – a medium-sized country house with one wing dedicated to kitchen, pantry and sculleries, laundry room, staff sitting-room, sewing-room, staff bathroom and bedrooms; nursery and night nursery for visiting grandchildren were in the same wing, expediently hived off from the front-ranking areas of the house. I remember lying in bed with measles in the night nursery in the summer of 1939, with the comfortable companionable sound of chatter wafting up through the floor from the kitchen. Douglas Kane, who arrived not long after in his alter ego of Otto Kun, describes in his memoir the full complement of staff at Golsoncott. Living in were the cook, a parlourmaid and a housemaid, both of these Swiss (and in a sense, I suppose, precursors of the au pair system of today). There was also a daily houseboy. Outdoor staff consisted of the head gardener, two under gardeners, a chauffeur and a groom. Mrs Willis came in two days a week to do the laundry.
By 1945 this entire panoply was a distant memory. At Golsoncott, there was a sense of weary accommodation. For a while, in the late forties and throughout the fifties, my grandmother attempted defiance of historic conditions. She scoured the pages of the Lady for ‘couples’ – the wife to cook, the husband to lay fires, set the table, serve, clear away and wash up, along with a good deal else. Food was the intractable problem – how to eat three times a day when to set to and provide for yourself was unthinkable. My grandmother couldn't cook anyway; my aunt had better things to do. Few of the ‘couples’ lasted longer than a matter of months. In the nature of things, they tended to be people who were either footloose, feckless or whose situation did not bear too close inquiry. My grandmother's letters of the period – mainly stoical, occasionally plaintive – are filled with accounts of this perpetual state of negotiation. Visitors have had to be put off because the current ‘couple’ have absconded, and hoped-for replacements have ‘let us down’. There are dark periods of total deprivation – tins, packet soups, strange stews impatiently knocked up by Rachel, who wanted to be out in her studio, working. Rosy dawns when salvation arrived, along with proper Sunday lunch and home-made cakes for tea; disillusion as yet another pair proved dubious or inconstant.
For some odd reason, it was washing-up that mainly broke the spirit of the post-war middle class. Confronted with a sink of dirty crockery, robust women were reduced to gibbering wrecks. My grandmother would refer with shuddering sympathy to friends whose circumstances were even more straitened than her own: ‘Poor dear, she is having to do all the washing-up…’ This from a woman who thought nothing of an afternoon's heavy digging in the garden. It was not, then, that physical labour was unacceptable – simply that there was some taboo about housework. To my mind, washing-up on a normal domestic scale is a rather satisfactory job: you can see what you've achieved. For my grandmother and my aunt – both vigorous and energetic women – it was a personal affront. My aunt, younger and always more flexible in her outlook, came in time to accept the situation, though retaining a dismissive disdain for domestic chores. For my grandmother, it was the final rupture with the world in which she had grown up.
My grandmother features strongly here, and elsewhere in this book. For good reason. She is a prime source of evidence in this attempt to make a house and its time bear witness to social change over the century. Furnishings are the prompts and the props, but it is people who are the players, who drive the narrative, who give character and identity to time and place. When I summon up the late 1940s, the vision is a profoundly confusing one. There is a sense in which I am still there, a lumpen teenager, gripped by the roller-coaster emotions of that turbulent period in life. I am too tall, too tongue-tied, my hair is frizzy, my legs unshapely. I wear glasses and, down here in Somerset, where such things matter, I am no good on a horse. On the other hand, Golsoncott is the safe haven, the calm security from which I can mull over my own deficiencies, take stock of a perplexing world and undergo the slow metamorphosis into adult life.
All the while, my grandmother is an abiding presence – brisk, merry, unshakeable in her convictions. On public occasions, I take shelter behind her rock-solid confidence in the society with which she is familiar. She knows what to say when and to whom, she is never stuck for a comment or an opinion, she is deft about such stultifying embarrassments as how to locate the lavatory in an unfamiliar environment. I was devoted to her, and still am. But I was beginning to question her assumptions: about religion, about social structure. We argued good-humouredly. For my part, I was increasingly less certain that she was right about everything, though that in no way diminished my regard for her; she saw me as a normally disaffected schoolgirl who would come round to a proper outlook in due course.
In my head, my grandmother is always aged around seventy. Her grey hair is set in neat rolls and confined within an invisible net. She wears a tweed skirt, a blouse and cardigan in winter, linen dresses in summer. Lisle stockings, always. A large hessian apron is tied round her waist for gardening, its pockets bristling with secateurs, raffia, pruning knife. When I hugged her I could feel the carapace of her corset, never discarded, even in the hottest weather. For the evening, she changed into a long red velveteen housecoat, worn with a rope of ivory beads. Her presence seemed to animate the house. When she was out, the whole place went very still; when she was at home, her brisk step rang on the stairs and along the passages, you heard her humming and singing, you heard her laughter. She could share a joke, and had a sense of the ridiculous. But there was an implacable code of conduct, and minefields on all sides. Good manners were considered paramount – the decent consideration of each towards all. Excessive behaviour or bad language brought instant disapproval: once, a young woman visitor, inflamed by sherry, tossed a cushion across the Golsoncott drawing-room to a friend, and was never invited to the house again. My grandmother became tight-lipped at any sexual inference. On another occasion, when she was in her eighties, we had to leave a concert in the interval because a couple in the row in front had been kissing. Sheltered from the tabloid press, and listening only to the BBC Home Service and Third Programme, she was immune to much of the changing climate of the fifties, let alone the sixties. But occasionally the licence of the times filtered through to her; her condemnation was absolute and unrelenting. Skimpy clothing on women was a particular affront. The miniskirt made public outings an ordeal. But then, bizarrely, she rounded on the ankle-length skirts and coats of the seventies: ‘Ridiculous! Why go back to all that clutter!’
That vigorous presence entirely eclipses my memory of her bedridden final years. I am glad of that. But even then, when her mind was gone and she was often in a coma, her old self would flicker to life. My husband Jack was sitting with her one day during that time, when she suddenly surfaced. She looked at him in surprise and at once became the concerned hostess: ‘I'm so glad you've been able to get down to us for a few days. Are they looking after you all right?’ And then a thought struck her: ‘I believe my granddaughter Penelope is staying too. Have you met her? I'm sure you two would get on.’
Today, the continuous present of the late 1940s is overlaid by re-interpretations. Sometimes, it seems to have been drained of colour by the insistent imagery of old film. A raw January morning. Sunday. We are setting off for church. I can feel the itchy texture of my lisle stockings, see the metallic glint of my grandmother's dark-green chenille turban, hear the irritable cough and grunt of the Standard, which is a bad starter. In the car, the smells are of dog and damp raincoats. My grandmother remembers that she has not yet given me sixpence for the collection and passes the coin over her shoulder to me, in the back. It is cold against a chilblain on my finger. But with another pair of eyes I see that whole scene differently: the car has become very small and chunky, whisked into vintage mode, and we too are consigned to some time warp, distant stilted figures in our clothes of another era, me in my belted mac, my grandmother and aunt in their boxy tweed coats and skirts, worn only on Sundays. The past has become impersonal, redefined by film, n
ewsprint, television documentaries, and an archive of commentary. Was I really there? Were we really thus?
But now I am the commentator, and when I see and listen to my grandmother, she has become someone conditioned by her time and place – as am I, as are we all. I have double vision: fifty years ago is both now, and then. It is all still going on, quite clear and normal, the world as I know it, but those other eyes see a frozen moment, a time of innocence: ahead lies everything that will happen to the three of us, life and death, and beneath that the shifting sands of public events. The Cold War, the Cuban missile crisis, Vietnam. The end of Communism. The mutation of attitudes and expectations in our own country that will set in context the way we lived then.
‘The most class-ridden country under the sun,’ wrote George Orwell. Academic discussion of the nature of class and class distinction in Britain tends to focus on analysis: society as a hierarchy, a seamless progression from low status to high; or the triadic version with lower, middle and upper collective groups; or the dichotomy, the adversarial ‘us’ and ‘them’. All three systems can be identified historically; all three could be identified today, depending on how you dissect society. Writing at the dawn of the twenty-first century, the climate of the early 1900s, in so far as I can apprehend it, seems alien indeed – a swirling perception derived from literature, from paintings, from photographs, from statistics. There are the facts and figures of a polarized society: before the 1914–18 war about 70 per cent of all wealth was held by the top 1 per cent of the population (by 1990 the richest 5 per cent owned 37 per cent). There are the grim conditions of the poor in London and in York as described in the pioneering surveys of Charles Booth and Seebohm Rowntree. In York, in 1901, Rowntree found that 28 per cent of the population lived at a nutritional standard below that needed to maintain mere physical health. It is the chasm between what was eaten by ordinary middle-class Edwardian households and the normal consumption of those below the poverty threshold that perhaps gives most pause for thought: the substantial, meat-heavy three-course meals of the new suburbias; the bread with jam or dripping and a pot of tea consumed three times a day by a labourer's family. Above all, it is hard now to conjure up the visible effect of this divide. In 1899 12,000 men were examined for military service. Eight thousand were rejected out of hand as failing to meet the required physical standards for infantry: height 5 feet 3 inches, chest 33 inches, weight 8 stone 3 pounds. Even in 1945, Labour members of Parliament were on average three inches shorter than Conservative members.
My grandmother was a young woman in that Edwardian society and must have experienced in old age the same double vision with which I see the 1940s. That time had the same validity for her as the mid century has for me, and she was still fingered by its customs, decades later. I doubt that she ever knew of either Booth or Rowntree and may never have appreciated that a third of the population lived at the lowest level of human tolerance, but she was a person of humanitarian instincts, whatever her social perceptions, and those raw contrasts must have been always with her. She died in 1976, aged ninety-seven, in the thick of the affluent society, amazed at the ubiquity of cars, washing-machines and foreign holidays, retaining an outdated sense of social hierarchy, but generally acknowledging a change for the better. She would have been shocked and perturbed by the street beggars of the 1990s.
My concept of the years before the Great War is derived from those stark social realities and also that imaginative view fuelled by pictures in which people are defined by dress, instantly allocated to their role and function – grandees, bourgeoisie, workers. Top hats and plumes, sober suits, overalls and aprons. The triadic version of society seems to be operating, in the mind's eye. And then there is the backdrop of literature: if these people spoke, it would be with the cadences of the Jamesian drawing-room, or Kiplingesque stylized Cockney. There is a basic accuracy to what I see, but the whole thing is overlaid by subsequent perceptions and reinterpretations. Only when you have walked in a particular world, moved from day to day, can you retrieve its essential mood.
By the time my grandmother and her family came to live at Golsoncott, the Edwardian years were dead and gone, shunted beyond the great national trauma of the war. It was the early 1920s, and the climate had changed – though in many crucial senses it remained much the same: Golsoncott was liberally serviced; life there would have been very different from that led in cottages and farmhouses round about. This was the heyday of the gong in the front hall and the panel of bells in the pantry.
When I examine my grandmother's deepest assumptions, it is her attitude towards household management that seems to be the one that removes her farthest from me. Her vision of what was normal and proper stemmed from the late nineteenth century. Mine was formed during the questioning post-war decade. At points the difference can be nicely defined by beliefs about washing-up. My grandmother considered that it should be done for her by others, and furthermore that such others would always be available, in the natural order of things; I find this viewpoint almost as inaccessible as Creationism. Admittedly, I have lived in the age of the dishwasher, but I'm not sure that technological advance negates the underlying assumption.
Social structure is a quicksand; class distinctions are unreliable and in a state of perennial reassessment. Detached discussion of such matters is endlessly absorbing; this is after all the underlying narrative of historical change. But enlightenment by way of the historians and analysts is one thing; living it out as part of the tapestry is eerily other. The patterns so clearly detectable from afar become blurred and confusing on the ground. David Cannadine has described how most Britons, when thinking about society and about themselves, are ‘silently and easily shifting from one social vision to another’. He sees the history of class in Britain as ‘the history of multiple identities’, a perception which seems to nail not just the complexities of retrospective analysis, but also the mercurial experience of personal involvement. We see ourselves and others differently according to whether the negotiations are daily and immediate, or by way of the impersonal climate of politics and opinion. And, above all, the social landscape is in a constant state of reconstruction.
The physical landscape of rural Somerset in the 1920s looked much the same as it does now, except that it was more populous. My aunt remembered that a morning's ride when she was a girl would bring her into contact with many neighbours, who were working the fields, travelling the lanes. By the mid century, she and I could cover miles without exchanging greetings with anyone at all. A changed regime of farming meant many fewer agricultural workers; local journeys were made by car, rather than on foot, bike or horse. But the network of social relationships that gave significance to that landscape was infinitely more ordered in the early part of the century – the structures more rigid, the contrasts stark.
The staffing set-up at Golsoncott during the twenties and thirties reflected in miniature those elaborate gradations in grander establishments, where there would have been kitchen maids and boot boys, various ranks of housemaids (up to lady's maid) and, rising onwards and upwards, cook, valets, footmen, butler and housekeeper. This is a microcosm of society as hierarchy, a system in which everyone sees themselves in relation to those above or below, and is thus perceived. Even in a group as small as that at Golsoncott there would still have been an order of seniority. And it seems obvious that for many of those in domestic service this occupational class system must have done much to obscure or displace the wider inequalities of society. If you were involved in continuous dealings with an oppressive cook or butler, then that was likely to be the focus of your resentment, rather than the more distant figures of your employers and an abstract state of affairs in which the wealthy are waited on hand and foot.
Hierarchical systems have flourished in this country. We like processions; Americans favour parades, significantly. Richard Gough's seventeenth-century church seating plan was eminently hierarchical, with the parish dignitaries in the front pews, lesser ranks behind, cottagers
at the back. And within the parameters of the triadic structure – upper, middle and lower classes – are internal hierarchies: the rankings of the peerage, the ornate classifications within the professional classes that were a strong feature of the early part of the twentieth century, the subtle gradations of status within the old working class. My husband Jack grew up on a Newcastle-upon-Tyne council estate in the 1930s and could describe graphically the system of mutual assessment within his street; the engine-driver, commanding universal respect on account of his occupation; the family known to be always behind with the rent; the brawny matriarch, who policed the activities of roaming children and provided up-to-date information on who had acquired what and whose husband was out of work. Aspirations and comparisons are always centred upon those nearest to us; the more prosperous neighbour is an immediate object of interest and envy, whereas the unimaginable wealth of the stately home owner is so far removed as to be irrelevant for practical purposes. Hierarchical systems and customs have traditionally shored up class distinction.