Uncommon cook
DAVID WILLIAMS
It's a pity Margaret Powell and Mayhew couldn't have coincided on the time-scale. She'd have made such a marvellous interviewee. 'I went to hand [Mrs Clydesdale] the papers. She looked at me as if I were something subhuman. She didn't speak a word, she just stood there looking at me as though she could hardly believe that someone like me could be walk- ing and breathing. . . . She said, "Langley, never, never on 'any occasion ever hand any- thing to me in your bare hands, always use a silver salver."' Margaret Powell was Margaret Langley at the time of receiving this bloody instruction, and fifteen years old. She was a kitchenmaid in a Regency house in Adelaide Crescent, Hove (132 stairs from basement to attic). She rose at 5.30, cleaned flues, lit fires, blackleaded grates, cleaned boots (not forgetting the insteps), ironed the bootlaces, laid the servants' break- fast, and sat down to eat it at 8 a.m. After that the real work of the day began. In return for it all, Margaret got board and lodging and 12 a month, with 4 p.m. to 10 p.m. off one day a week, and alternate Sundays (also from 4 to 10 p.m.).
She stayed with Mrs Clydesdale of Hove and her husband, the insufferable Reverend, for a year. Then she tried her luck (mostly bad) in London. She became a cook, came a cropper with beef olives, and enchanted Mrs Bernard with her kipper savoury (pound your kipper well in pestle and mortar, having first soaked it in sudsy washing-up water, whisk in that craftiest of old disguisers Escoffier sauce, titi- vate and serve). At last she got to Mrs Bishop in Brighton, whose husband was kinky about women in hair-curlers. Mrs Bishop didn't love the lower classes but did believe that a con- tented staff made for a well-run household (staff by this time weren't quite so easy to come by). Here Margaret 'realised my lifelong ambition, I did get married from this place.'
After raising a family Margaret got down to her 0 levels. 'I'm now taking Advance [sic] levels which I hope to get before I'm sixty. People say to me, "I can't understand you doing it." ' Well, I can understand perfectly well why she's doing it. Margaret Powell has fortitude and intellectual curiosity. Not a jam-packed drawing-roomful of Mrs Clydesdales could ever possibly trample the spirit out of her.
All the same, heroic and full of flavour though the book is, I missed the Mayhew touch Mrs Powell is on her own (unless perhaps Mt Leigh Crutchley guided the labouring pen-1 notice that the copyright is shared between him and Mrs Powell), and her solo performance has defects. A Mayhew would have boiled it down. Boiled it down and down to a thicker, more flavoursome, consistency. As it is, the book" is diffuse and repetitive. A blackleaded grate in Hove differs little from one in Kensington and mistresses are old cows whether they're overeating in Brighton or Belgravia.
And although the author can be delightfully blunt and justifiably aggressive she can also be coy. I could, for example, have done with far more dates. When exactly was all this? Mar- garet's mother was fourteen in 1895. Margaret couldn't have started her service during the war because in the Reverend Clydesdale's household it snowed of meat and drink, and 1914-18 were lean years even for fat clergymen.. So she must have started around 1920. But her descriptions of women's fashions don't tallyi, , with this (People had waists in those days..: Bosoms were stuck out, and rears stuck out ... you looked like an hourglass'—this is Edward- ian, surely?). So where exactly are we? Being led now and then, I suspect, up the garden— but agreeably.
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