Servants’ Hall Read Online Free PDF

been courting for three months before he asked permission to kiss her. We endeavoured to suppress our smiles, but in our bedroom we agreed that the late Mr Buller must have been a pretty poor specimen of a male. Then, thinking that Mrs Buller’s moustache might even then have been incipient, we invented various reasons why dear Mr Buller wouldn’t have been madly inclined to kiss her. Doris made us laugh even more by saying there was a seventeen-year-old girl at the orphanage who hadn’t any hair at all; not on her head, under her arms or down below. But it wasn’t the poor girl’s bald head that the matron cared about, it was the baldness down below; matron said it was indecent. Poor Doris, who’d been sent to the orphanage when she was only four years old, had received very little in the way of love and care as a child. In her last two years at the orphanage she worked long hours in the laundry. She still worked hard but at least she always had enough to eat; and Cook, although sharp-tongued occasionally, was never really unkind.

 
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    Cook was certainly in a bad mood on the morning following our dance. This was partly caused by the master wanting an early breakfast, eight o’clock instead of nine. Cook disliked having breakfast time altered, she said it threw her out for the rest of the day. Besides, how could she get the servants’ breakfast and cook for upstairs at the same time. Breakfast for upstairs was no simple matter of bacon and eggs. As well as the porridge, which had kept warm on the stove overnight, there were sausages, kidneys, bacon, eggs and often kedgeree as well. I used to wonder how it was that our employers never become inordinately fat on such a diet, but they seemed to keep their figures. Mrs Buller was also put out because of the upheaval in the scullery. The old smelly cement sink was being knocked out and a lovely deep, yellow glazed one put in. Needless to say, Doris and I were delighted for it was we who’d had to use the foul-smelling grey sink. Two plumbers from the village came, early in the morning, and promised to get it finished that day. Unfortunately, as the only other sink was in the butler’s pantry, we had to use it for all the washing-up. The fuss that Mr Hall made about having his pantry invaded by kitchen servants, you’d have thought we were suffering from some contagious disease. He refused to have Doris in there as well as me so I had to do all the washing-up. What was more, I had to wait to do it until he and Rose had done all the cutlery and glasses. Relations were quite strained between him and Cook, especially after he complained about me ‘splashing-up his draining-boards.’
    ‘Mr Hall,’ said Cook, ultra politely, ‘I’m sure I have no wish to inconvenience you in any way, but do you expect my girls to wash up in buckets of water in the yard? We are all on this earth to help one another, and live by the good Book.’
    Mr Hall walked out of the kitchen without saying a word but, if the expression on his face was anything to go by, he certainly wasn’t living by the ‘good Book.’ Actually, the only books he ever read were lurid detective stories. He’d got most of Sax Rohmer’s; Dr Fu Manchu, The Yellow Claw and others. I suppose those tales of the mysterious orient compensated for his own somewhat dull existence. Apart from the Bible, Cook had only four books which she read over and over again. A book called, Stepping Stones to Bible History ; then there was East Lynne, Little Women and Little Lord Fauntleroy. This last one, carefully covered in brown paper, she lent to me, and Rose, and Mary and I giggled at that impossible youth calling his mother ‘Dearest’. Rose said she couldn’t imagine what her mum would say if Rose called her Dearest. Why, she’d never even heard her father say ‘Dear’, let alone Dearest.
    Cook was very pious but, as Mary and I agreed, for a pious person she seemed to know of a great many girls who were now ‘living in