The Girl From The Savoy. Hazel Gaynor

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      I haven’t the foggiest what the house list is. I would ask, but my mouth is dry and my tongue feels as fat as a frog.

      ‘Second floor is live-in staff quarters,’ she explains. ‘Heads of department are accommodated on eighth. The governor – Reeves-Smith – keeps an apartment here, although he usually stays at our sister hotel, the Berkeley. Each guest floor has an assigned waiter, valet, and maid for floor service. You’ll take instruction from them, as necessary.’

      The corridor is brighter than the passages below. Electric lights shine from sconces along the walls. My sodden shoes squeak against the nut-brown linoleum as I walk, the sound setting my teeth on edge. I follow O’Hara to a panelled door, where she stops and takes a key from the impressive collection hanging from her waist. She opens the door and we both step inside.

      The room is neat, functional, and comfortably furnished. Far nicer than the sparse little room I’d shared with Clover at the top of the house in Grosvenor Square. It smells of furniture polish and lavender. A Turkey rug sits in the middle of the room, worn in patches from the footsteps of countless maids. Each of the four iron bedsteads is neatly made up with a white candlewick counterpane pulled tight across the sheets and mattress. O’Hara strides towards a narrow sash window and pulls it shut.

      ‘The maids’ bathroom is across the corridor,’ she says. ‘The necessary is to the right. You’ll be attending to guest rooms on floors four and six. All rooms are turned out daily, starting with unoccupied rooms for incoming guests, and then on to occupied rooms as soon as the guest departs for the day. Knock three times before announcing yourself by saying, “Housekeeping.” You’ll hang a MAID AT WORK sign on the door and always close the door behind you. Nobody wishes to see the work in progress, as it were.’ She tugs at the edge of a counterpane and plumps a pillow. ‘Should a guest return unexpectedly, you must vacate the room and finish it when instructed to do so. Things happen at peculiar and unpredictable times of the day in a hotel, Dorothy. You cannot expect the rigidity and routine of a regular household.’

      ‘No. Yes. Of course.’ My mind dances with thoughts of the hotel’s impressive guest list. Hollywood stars. Privileged American heiresses. The darlings of London society. Far more impressive than the stuffy old ladies who visited Lady Archer for boring bridge evenings and dreary at-homes.

      ‘You’ll attend to various other duties throughout the day – sorting the linen cupboards, occasional sewing for guests, that sort of thing. You’ll pull the blinds and curtains and turn down the beds in the evening. You must greet guests with a polite good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, and use their full title.’

      I try to take everything in as O’Hara reels off her endless lists of instructions, but I’m preoccupied with thoughts of who the other three beds belong to, whether my roommates are pleasant, whether we will become good friends.

      O’Hara chatters on. ‘I’m sure I needn’t remind you that the utmost discretion is required at all times.’ She raises an eyebrow. ‘Maids may occasionally see or hear things that are, shall we say, out of the ordinary. My advice to you is to turn a blind eye.’

      ‘Yes. Of course.’

      ‘You have a ten-minute morning tea break. Lunch is at twelve or one, depending on which relay you are on from week to week. Tea is at five, and supper – if all your chores are complete – is cocoa and bread and butter at nine. You have Wednesday afternoons and alternate Sundays off. I presume you’ll be powdered and painted and heading off to the picture palaces or the dance halls like the others.’ She tuts as she straightens the hearth rug. Her words fall off me like raindrops. All I can remember is cocoa and bread and butter at nine and my stomach rumbles at the thought. ‘Curfew is ten o’clock. Sissy Roberts will accompany you on your rounds today and tomorrow. Then you are on your own. Watch and learn, Dorothy. Watch and learn.’

      I set my bag down beside the bed where my uniform is laid out. ‘It’s Dolly,’ I mutter. ‘Dolly, for short.’ She doesn’t hear me, or if she does, she chooses to ignore me as she stoops to pick up a piece of lint from the rug.

      ‘Any questions?’

      I have dozens. ‘No. Everything seems straightforward. I’m sure I’ll soon pick it up.’

      ‘Very well. Then welcome to The Savoy, Dorothy. She is quite wonderful when you get to know her. I hope you will get along very well.’

      She closes the door behind her, leaving me alone with the sound of the rain pattering against the window and a nagging voice in my head wondering how I’ll ever remember everything.

      Hanging my sopping hat and coat on the stand beside the door, I take a better look at the room. Beside the beds, occasional items on the nightstands suggest a hint of the other girls who sleep here: a framed photograph of a soldier in uniform, a copy of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, a scallop-edged gilt powder compact that I can’t take my eyes off, a well-thumbed copy of The Sheik, and a pile of Peg’s Paper magazines. Clover’s favourite.

      Dear Clover. I wish she were here with me. She’d tell me to stop worrying. She’d say something to make me laugh. While I wonder about things, Clover just gets on with them, accepts her lot, and makes do. She teases me about my dream of a life on the stage, but she also believes in me. ‘There’s something about you, Dolly,’ she says. ‘Something in your eyes. I saw it the very first time I met you. And you’re as stubborn as an old Lancashire goat. If anyone can get onto that stage, you can. I’d bet my best knickers on it.’

      Her belief in me has only ever been matched by Teddy. He always said I would become someone special, that the little girl who twirled and danced her way through childhood when she should have been sitting still or feeding the chickens would find greater things. It was Teddy who found The Adventure Book for Girls in the laneway behind the house all those years ago when we were just children. ‘It’s yours now, Dolly,’ he said, brushing the mud off the cover with his elbow and pressing the book into my hands. ‘Finders keepers.’ And then he ran off to chase a butterfly. Teddy was always chasing butterflies. He never kept them though. Said he just liked to admire them close up before he let them go.

      The Adventure Book for Girls was heavy, filled with 236 pages of stories, but it was the inscription inside that intrigued me the most: Wonderful adventures await for those who dare to find them. With much love, Auntie Gert. Those words crept into my heart and since nobody knew who the book belonged to, or who Auntie Gert was, I kept it. My sisters squabbled about it, saying it wasn’t fair. My taunting response of ‘Finders keepers, losers weepers’ only made things worse. Mam eventually put the book out of reach on top of the grandfather clock and told us it would stay there until we could learn to be nice to one another.

      It was a week before that book came down.

      My sisters soon lost interest, but I read every page, a dozen times at least. As time passed, the book was discarded by all of us in favour of other things – bicycles and boys mostly. The last time I saw it, it was being used to balance out a wobbly leg at the kitchen table, but I’ve never forgotten those adventure stories, nor Auntie Gert’s words. They whisper to me still, blowing my dreams onward despite everything that has happened, and everyone I have loved and lost in the years between.

      Shivering against the cloying damp of my clothes, which now feel horrible against my skin, I step out of my shoes and strip down to my underwear, draping my brown serge dress, slip, and stockings over a wooden clotheshorse that stands in front of the fire. They hang there like a wilted version of myself in shades of tea and stout as I place my shoes on the hearth, despairing at the dull practicality of them. More than any cap or apron, I’ve СКАЧАТЬ