Below stairs The classic kitchen maid's memoir that inspired "Upstairs, downstairs" and "Downton Abbey"

THE British costume drama "Downton Abbey," shown here on PBS, is now unfurling in all its magnificence, and I, like its millions of American fans, will again be reminded of what it would take for my life to be truly suitable: - Everything brought to me on a silver salver. - Breakfast in bed daily, because I am a married woman and that is my prerogative. - A steward's room boy whose entire job it is to watch a panel of bells, each connected to a different room in the house from which I might ring for service. Since I live in a 1,500-square-foot co-op, this isn't such a bad job. - The soles of my shoes polished. - My newspaper ironed. - My sheets ironed. - My shoelaces ironed. Until "Downton Abbey," I never realized how many of my deepest desires involved ironing. True, it would also be nice to have a great deal of furtive sex with my social inferiors, preferably in crinolines. But at this point, I'd settle for a crisp newspaper. I know I should feel guilty about my cravings for these things. But that's the beauty of shows like "Downton Abbey" and its venerable ancestor "Upstairs, Downstairs": the lives of the gentry are filled with so much intrigue, excruciating protocol and silent suffering that it would be churlish to resent their unimaginably comfortable existence. And there's another draw for Americans, particularly in an election year. We continue to labor under the delusion that we live in a class-free society - that social mobility is a birthright, not a remote possibility. If we're not continually upgrading our circumstances, as Newt Gingrich reminds us, it's our own damn fault. We are expected to be "Oprah"-ishly self-actuating and self-improving, and only sloth prevents us from achieving spiritual clarity and financial success. How perversely comforting, then, to turn our attention to a world where you will die where you are born and where the heroes are the rare overachievers who work their way up to butler from footman. The merchant class, which is to say the publishing industry, is mining the popularity of "Downton Abbey" with the release and re-release of two books that inspired the show, and the inevitable companion volume to the TV series (inevitably titled "The World of Downton Abbey"), One memoir is written from the point of view of upstairs, one from downstairs. See if your keen discerning eye can spot the difference: "Highclere was a symbiotic system, and mutual respect was the key to its success. The fifth Earl prided himself on an Old World courtesy, and that set the tone for the entire household. He took an interest in the well-being of the staff and the cottagers on the estate; often a donation would be made towards a fund for a tenant whose livestock had died, and money was also made available for the staff to have medical treatment." "On Christmas Day after breakfast ail the servants had to line up in the hall.... Mr. and Mrs. Cutler, and the daughter and the grandchildren, were assembled complete with Christmas smiles and social welfare expressions. The children looked at us as though we were beings from another world.... When we got to the Christmas tree we deferentially accepted the parcels that were handed to us by the children, and muttered, 'Thank you, Master Charles, thank you, Miss Susan.'" The first selection, from "Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey," is written by the former fashion designer Fiona Aitken, now the eighth Countess of Carnarvon. She and her husband, the earl, are the current residents of Highclere, the 1,000-acre Hampshire estate that, not surprisingly, resembles Parliament, considering they share an architect, Charles Barry. Highclere is also the fuming location of "Downton Abbey." The countess's book tells the story of the beautiful and diminutive "Pocket Venus," Almina Victoria Marie Alexandra Wombwell, who lived at Highclere from 1895 to 1923 with her husband, George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert, fifth Earl of Carnarvon. He is best known as the co-discoverer of King Tutankaraen's tomb - after a series of expeditions financed by Almina. Because, like many aristocratic families of the time, the Carnarvons were long on lineage and short on cash. So he did what every self-respecting gadabout did: look for an heiress who could rescue him, and his family pile, from ruin. Enter Almina, for Burke's Peerage the child of Capt. Frederick Charles Wombwell and Marie Boyer but rumored to be the illegitimate daughter of Sir Alfred de Rothschild. A director of the Bank of England for 20 years and the first Jew ever to hold that position, Rothschild doted on his "godchild" and made it known that he was prepared to give her a "fortune" on her marriage. He also wanted to solidify both her standing in society and his own. He paid up Lord Carnarvon's debts and settled on her a sum of £12,000 (roughly $1.5 million in today's currency) a year. Almina proceeded to turn Highclere into a social epicenter of Edwardian England. When World War I broke out, the perfect society lady became the perfect nurse, opening her home to the wounded and transforming it into a hospital. Loyal servants who wanted to go off and fight were promised that their jobs would be available upon their return. Does oblige ever get more noblesser? When Lord Carnarvon died, allegedly of a mosquito bite and blood poisoning, a pall fell over the dozens of grieving servants. At least this is the eighth countess's story. Almina was a woman of great charm and courage, and the family universally beloved. This account differs somewhat from that in a biography of Lady Almina that came out last year. William P. Cross's "Life and Secrets of Almina Carnarvon" tells of a woman who traded her money for a prestigious but arid marriage, took lovers young and old (including her husband's best man) and burned through Rothschild's dowry, leaving her feckless son enraged and penniless when he finally inherited the estate. Lady Almina did, in fact, open her home to the wounded, and went on to open a series of tony nursing homes (and discreet abortion clinics) for the rich and famous. But the homes never paid for themselves, and she and her second husband, a military officer named Ian Dennistoun, whom she married a few months after Lord Carnarvon's death, ended up in bankruptcy court. Almina died in greatly reduced circumstances in Bristol in 1969, at the age of 93. I suspect the real story of the relationship of servants to their masters is more accurately told by Margaret Powell, in her simple and quite brilliant "Below Stairs." Here she throws the last shovel of dirt on the myth of the devoted help and their unfailing love and respect for the stately home. Powell notes that G. K. Chesterton "wrote about the malignity of inanimate objects," and then adds that she thinks "they are malign because they take up so much of my time dusting, polishing and cleaning them." First published in England in 1968, Powell's memoir was an inspiration for the classic television series "Upstairs, Downstairs." She recalls her years "in service" from the time she was a desperately poor girl from a family of seven, growing up in a few rented rooms in Hove, to her years working long days as a kitchen maid and eventually cook in the houses of the good and the great. Apparently she was sufficiently immune to the charms of her employers to seek escape through marriage, children and higher education. "Below Stairs" was a hit, and Powell went on to write other books about her experienees. But perhaps none were quite so powerful as this one, which describes in simple and often excruciating detail the divide between Us and Them. "We always called them 'Them,'" Powell writes. "'Them' was the enemy, 'Them' overworked us, and 'Them' underpaid us, and to 'Them,' servants were a race apart, a necessary evil." In those carefree days before nondisclosure agreements, it was assumed by everyone that "what they upstairs did, although it was a subject of scandal and gossip and laughter, was their privilege. Not because they were better than us, but because they had money and it was no good having money if you couldn't deviate from the norm." What makes Powell such a credible narrator is the fact that she's never reflexively bitter or nasty. When she worked for a family that treated her with kindness and without condescension, she was deeply grateful and desperate to please. These families were rare. More common were those that showed their utter disregard for the servants by practicing necessary "economies" on the staff, monitoring their food and furnishing their rooms with broken castoffs. As the arbiters of morality for the heip, a girl's employers could dismiss her for paying too much attention to her appearance, since there was a slippery slope from wearing makeup to having an out-of-wedlock child (cause for immediate dismissal, of course, without pay and indeed, usually, without anyplace to go). In one home, Powell was excoriated for passing the day's mail to the lady of the house by hand: "Tears started to trickle down my cheeks; that someone could, think that you were so low that you couldn't even hand them anything out of your hands without it first being placed on a silver salver." Well. It made me kind of rethink my whole silver salver fantasy. Though I still want my sheets ironed. All these years later, "Below Stairs" retains its peculiar fascination. Powell does nothing to romanticize poverty or domestic service, and considers the few servants who Stockholmishly identified with their masters as jackasses. But she also makes us understand that service could be tolerable and, in some cases, almost pleasant. There's a certain freedom from stricture, at least in your life outside work, and a certain pleasure in knowing you're a capable person, while the people you serve are not. Later in her career, Powell had occasion to work for older ladies in reduced circumstances - perhaps ladies like Lady Almina. "I can't help thinking that people who were once wealthy and now have to live on a fixed income are worse off than ordinary working-class people," she observes, while "people who are living on fixed incomes like these old ladies have got to keep on trying to keep up some sort of show." And that, perhaps more than anything, is what united servant and master. Not love, not admiration, not even fear - but a certain measure of pity. That man standing at attention in the white gloves may be feeling just a little bit sorry for you. "We always called them "Them." "Them" was the enemy, "Them" overworked us and . . . underpaid us.' Dame Maggie Smith as the Dowager Countess of Grantham in 'Downton Abbey.' Judith Newman is the author of "You Make Me Feel Like an Unnatural Woman: Diary of a New (Older) Mother."

The popularity of Sunday school among the working classes had less to do with religion than parents' much-needed private time, according to Margaret Powell. Such revelations are rampant in Below Stairs, a fascinating and feisty memoir of Powell's life as a kitchen maid and cook in 1920s England. Originally published in the UK in 1968, it's again a best-seller there after the debut of the Emmy Award-winning series, Downton Abbey, which, along with Upstairs Downstairs, took inspiration from the book. Powell writes conversationally, offering cutting and humorous insights. She piles on the details of a domestic servant's day up at 5:30, work enough for six people, and don't forget to iron the bootlaces but stops before she falls into self-pity. Running through it all is the divide between the servants and Them, manifesting itself in everything from the sad parade of practical Christmas gifts to the employer's order that nothing be served from a servant's bare hands. Powell reminds readers that these things shouldn't be forgotten, and she is an honest, saucy, and skilled storyteller.--Thoreson, Bridget Copyright 2010 Booklist

If this book was the basis for the wildly successful Upstairs, Downstairs television series, then we must ensure that the show's writers and producers get all the credit they deserve. Here, the stories are lackluster and occasionally insulting to anyone under the age of 65, when Powell starts in on "kids these days." Powell, the second of seven children, grew up in a small English town where class separation was rampant. Despite her claims that it was better back then, money was tight, the family was too big, and she was ushered into domestic service at 15. Her use of many oblique references- like "hair sieves" and "aspic jelly"-will likely leave her readers cool or confused; the book is, above all, a litany of work the author hated to do. Powell fulfilled her lifelong ambition by marrying and, fortunately for us, left domestic service soon after that. Fans of the TV show who hope to find the same illuminating detail and descriptions of period life will be sorely disappointed. Agent: Jennifer Joel, ICM. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

1     I WAS BORN in 1907 in Hove, the second child of a family of seven. My earliest recollection is that other children seemed to be better off than we were. But our parents cared so much for us. One particular thing that I always remember was that every Sunday morning my father used to bring us a comic and a bag of sweets. You used to be able to get a comic for a halfpenny plain and a penny coloured. Sometimes now when I look back at it, I wonder how he managed to do it when he was out of work and there was no money at all coming in. My father was a painter and decorator. Sort of general odd-job man. He could do almost anything: repair roofs, or do a bit of plastering; but painting and paper-hanging were his main work. Yet in the neighbourhood where we lived, there was hardly any work in the winter. People didn't want their houses done up then; they couldn't be painted outside and they didn't want the bother of having it all done up inside. So the winters were the hardest times. My mother used to go out charring from about eight in the morning till six in the evening for two shillings a day. Sometimes she used to bring home little treasures: a basin of dripping, half a loaf of bread, a little bit of butter or a bowl of soup. She used to hate accepting anything. She hated charity. But we were so glad of them that, when she came home and we saw that she was carrying something, we used to make a dive to see what she'd got. It seems funny today, I suppose, that there was this hatred of charity, but when my parents brought us up there was no unemployment money. Anything you got was a charity. I remember my mother, when we only had one pair of shoes each and they all needed mending, she went down to the council to try to get more for us. She had to answer every question under the sun and she was made to feel that there was something distasteful about her because she hadn't got enough money to live on. It was very different getting somewhere to live in those days. You just walked through the streets, and there were notices up, 'Rooms to let'. When we were extra hard up, we only had one room or two rooms in somebody else's house. But when Dad was working, we would go around looking for half a house. We never had a house to ourselves. Not many people could afford a house in those days, not to themselves. As for buying a house, why, such things were never even dreamed of ! I know I used to wonder why, when things were so hard, Mum kept having babies, and I remember how angry she used to get when a couple of elderly spinsters at a house where she worked kept telling her not to have any more children, that she couldn't afford to keep them. I remember saying to my mother, 'Why do you have so many children? Is it hard to have children?' And she said, 'Oh, no. It's as easy as falling off a log.' You see that was the only pleasure poor people could afford. It cost nothing - at least at the time when you were actually making the children. The fact that it would cost you something later on, well, the working-class people never looked ahead in those days. They didn't dare. It was enough to live for the present. People didn't think about regulating families. The whole idea was to have big families, a relic of Victorian times perhaps. The more children you had, in some ways, the more you were looked upon as fulfilling your duties as a Christian citizen. Not that the Church played much part in my mother's and father's lives. I don't think they had much time for it or, perhaps it's truer to say, they had time but no inclination. Some of us weren't even christened. I wasn't, and never have been. But we all had to go to Sunday School, not because my parents were religious, but because it kept us out of the way: Sunday afternoons were devoted to lovemaking because there was not much privacy in working-class families. When you lived in two or three rooms, you had to have some of the children in the same room with you. If you had any sense of decency, and my parents did because I never, during the whole time of my childhood, knew that they ever made love, you waited till they were fast asleep or out of the way. The fact is I never even saw them kissing each other because my father was a rather austere man outwardly, and I was amazed when only lately my mother told me what a passionate man he really was. So, you see, it was only when the children were out of the way that they could really let themselves go. So, Sunday afternoon, after a mighty big dinner (and everybody tried to have a big dinner on Sunday), was the time spent lying on the bed, making love and having a good old doze. Because, as my Mum said later, if you make love, you might as well do it in comfort. So that's why Sunday School was so popular then. *   *   * My early school days don't stand out much in my mind. My brother and I began proper school together. They let you start at the age of four in those days. My mother sent me there as well because she had another baby coming along and she thought that would be two of us out of the way. We had to come home for dinner. There were no such things as school meals and school milk. You took a piece of bread and butter with you, wrapped in a piece of paper, and gave it to the teacher to mind, because many of us children were so hungry that we used to nibble it during the course of the morning when we should have been doing whatever we did have to do. It was then doled out to us at eleven o'clock. I always enjoyed going to school because I did pretty well there. I never found any of it hard except things like art, knitting, and needlework. Singing was hopeless, too. None of those things were any good to me at all. The needlework was my biggest hate. We had to make such ugly garments; chemises and bloomers - as they were called then. Both made of calico. The chemises were wide with sort of cap sleeves and they reached down to the knees. The bloomers did up at the back with buttons and were also voluminous. Whoever bought these awful garments when they were finished I really don't know. I should imagine they were given to the workhouse because I certainly never brought any home. But the great thing about school in those days was that we had to learn. I don't think you can beat learning; how to read and write, and how to do arithmetic. Those are the three things that anyone who has got to work for a living needs. We were forced to learn and I think children need to be forced. I don't believe in this business of 'if they don't want to do it, it won't do them any good'. It will do them good. Our teacher used to come around and give us a mighty clump on the neck or box on the ears if she saw us wasting our time. Believe me, by the time we came out of school, we came out with something. We knew enough to get us through life. Not that any of us thought about what we were going to do. We all knew that when we left school we'd have to do something, but I don't think we had any ambitions to do any particular type of work. *   *   * It was when I got to the age of about seven that I, as it were, took my place in life. You see, with my mother going off early in the morning to do her charring and me being the eldest girl, I used to have to give the children their breakfast. Mind you, giving them their breakfast wasn't a matter of cooking anything. We never had eggs or bacon, and things like cereals weren't heard of. We had porridge in the winter, and just bread and margarine, and a scraping of jam, if Mum had any, in the summer. Three pieces were all we were allowed. Then I would make the tea, very weak tea known as sweepings - the cheapest that there was - clear away and wash up, and then get ready for school. The two youngest I took along to the day nursery. It cost sixpence a day each and for that the children got a midday meal as well. I took them just before school time and collected them the moment I came out of school in the afternoon. At midday, I would run home, get the potatoes and the greens on, lay up the dinner and do everything I could so that when my mother rushed over from work, she just had to serve the dinner. Generally it was stews because they were the most filling. Sometimes Mother would make a meat pudding. It's funny now when I look back on it, this meat pudding. I would go along to the butcher's and ask for sixpennyworth of 'Block ornaments'. Hygiene was nothing like it is now and butchers used to have big wooden slabs outside the shop with all the meat displayed for the public and the flies. As they cut up the joints, they always had odd lumps of meat left which they scattered around. These were known as 'Block ornaments'. I used to get sixpennyworth of them and a pennyworth of suet. Then my mother would make the most marvellous meat pudding with it. Directly after she'd eaten her dinner, she'd have to rush back to work because she was only allowed half an hour. So I had to do the washing-up before I went back to school again. Right after I came out of school in the afternoon, I would collect the two children from the day nursery, take them back home, and then set to and clear up the place and make the beds. I never used to feel that I was suffering in any sense from ill-usage. It was just the thing. When you were the eldest girl in a working-class family, it was expected of you. Of course, Mum took over in the evenings. She came back about six and got us our tea which was the same as breakfast - bread and margarine. *   *   * Unlike so many people I've met, I didn't really make any lasting friends in my school days. But, being a member of a family, I wasn't worried and, you see, we had the town itself.   Copyright (c) 1968 by Margaret Powell and Leigh Crutchley Excerpted from Below Stairs: The Classic Kitchen Maid's Memoir That Inspired Upstairs, Downstairs and Downton Abbey by Margaret Powell All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.