The Forgotten Seamstress. Liz Trenow

Чтение книги онлайн.

       Chapter Three

       Cassette 1, side 2

      That was a nice cuppa, thank you dearie. Much needed. So where was I?

       ‘You and Nora were going into service. You had just arrived at the big house.’

      Oh my lord yes. What a day! We was terrified, of course. Nora, me and Emily got bundled out and straight down some steps into the basement; the servants’ entrance, you see, away from the eyes of upstairs. We stood in a dark, echoey hallway for what seemed like an hour while they called someone to call someone else, and finally a maid came and said she was to take us to our room.

      We said goodbye to Emily and dragged our bags up hundreds of stairs to our room, which had four beds in, and the two closest the fire was already taken so Nora and me put our things on the other two cots and waited for someone to come and tell us what to do. The room was bare and the beds narrow and hard, but we weren’t much bothered by that ’cos we didn’t know any different. While we waited, we opened the little parcels Sister Beatrice gave us and ate the biscuits she had wrapped inside – oatcakes with a sprinkle of brown sugar – and the taste reminded me so much of The Castle that I started snivelling all over again.

      The maid came back and told us we must hurry now, as we must never keep Mrs Hardy waiting. It turned out that Mrs Hardy was the mountain of a housekeeper, the one who came to interview us. Her office under the stairs was not a large room and felt even smaller with her filling up most of the space.

      ‘Ah, you two, wherever have you been? Come and get your uniforms. Now!’ she bellowed. I started to say we haven’t been anywhere, Ma’am, but Nora dug me in the ribs and put a finger to her lips to remind me that we was not allowed to answer back, or do anything except be clean, neat, hardworking and obedient. Them nuns was so quiet spoken that we was petrified of the woman’s shouting but we soon learned that was how she usually talked to anyone beneath her station.

      We grew used to life at the new place pretty quickly, Nora and me, and it wasn’t a bad one. It was nothing near as friendly as at The Castle, mind, but we just had to get on with it and we had hardly any free time to dwell on anything. Our uniforms was plain pale blue with black stockings and we got new black shoes, too, and it was a relief to get out of the clothes what was growing too small for us anyway.

      There was hundreds of servants, not to mention the upstairs lot. The two maids who shared our bedroom had to get up early every morning to make fires so we barely had any time to speak with them. They was nice enough, but kept themselves to themselves, at least till we had been there a few weeks.

      We spent our days in the needlework room doing mending for the household, and for the rest of the servants too, and there was only the three of us: the chief needlewoman, Nora and me. It was a small white painted room with no furniture save for the three cutting tables and hard chairs, with high wide windows and the floor painted white, too, what we had to sweep and wipe clean every day. There was no fire, on account of the coal dust would soil our work. Instead there was hot water pipes which we put our feet on when we was working, it were that cold sometimes.

      The chief needlewoman, Miss Garthwaite, was surely the ugliest woman we’d ever seen. Not as large as Mrs Hardy, mind, but she made up for it with several double chins and warts on her eyelids and on her hands too. Though she tried very hard to hide them, if she ever touched us we’d shiver and have to make an excuse and run to the toilet to wash ourselves, just in case. Her voice was right posh and we wondered where she’d got that way of talking and how she’d ended up in service. We reckoned she must have been born СКАЧАТЬ