I have given in at last. After holding out since forever, we have finally hired a maid.
We’re not talking Regency levels of staffing here. Then, even relatively poor gentry would have kept several servants. My maid simply pops around for three hours (in Orpington, Kent) quietly restores everything to its proper place, and leaves the house serenely glittering. She reminds me of the elves in the “elves and the shoemaker” fairytale; she does everything so quietly and so effortlessly. She just loads up on coffee – every half-hour – and away she goes!
This means that the days of me (or Simon) going down on hands and knees to clean the tiled floor, the shower etc. are over. Since we both still play tennis four times a week – I generally play tennis while Sarah’s doing the house, in fact – this feels crazily luxurious.
I mean, I can clean floors – the trouble being (a) that I do it badly and (b) it drives me mad. In fact, my domestic skills are non-existent. Had I lived in Regency times I wouldn’t have been allowed near the ‘sewing for the poor’ basket. I failed knitting in Girl Scouts, ditto the crocheting badge. I can’t even hem trousers properly, and the skirt I was forced to make in home economics was a pretty bad joke… I’m not artistic, either. I could never cover a screen, sketch my sister, or paint, except maybe by numbers. I’m the exact opposite of Sarah, our domestic goddess, who only has to give a room a rather severe look for every mug to nestle into its proper place and every volume to magically find its space on the bookshelf.
In short, my only Regency advantages are that I’m an excellent cellist and exceedingly well-read.
My aged mother (93) has had to find a live-in maid/carer, as well as a gardener. The last time I visited the US from London, she said wistfully, ”I started my married life with servants and I’m ending my life with them.”
I remember the ‘starting’ part well. We had servants in various US embassies in Asia, when I was a child. In fact, we had so many in Myanmar that my mother suggested that my dad dismiss a few. (We had nine, counting the chauffeur, so not exactly Pemberley levels, but it did feel as if you couldn’t escape them.)
My father sympathised but refused to dismiss any because, in the seventies, it would have made America look bad. In other words, Mom had to trip over more servants than she wanted, because otherwise we’d look tight-fisted, and America would look Second-World. (Go figure.)
My sister and I had two favourite servants when we lived in Myanmar: Charlie, the amusing number one houseboy, and Mona, our brother’s beautiful ayah, both in their twenties. Imagine our shock, having returned to McLean, VA., to learn that Charlie and Mona, who was married to another guy, had had an affair in our servants’ quarters, and that Mona’s husband had killed Charlie in revenge.
My sister and I (then 12 and 13) were very naturally so upset to hear this that, in retrospect, we were probably too young to have been told. But there you go. Though never common, scandals probably occurred among Regency servants as well, just as they do in my latest, Pride and Perjury. (No violence/murder though. I’m just not into it.)
Instead, just now, I’m enjoying having my very own shoemaker’s elf…
(Alice McVeigh’s Warleigh Hall Press Jane Austen Series – described by Publishers Weekly as “McVeigh’s celebrated series” – won First Place in Chanticleer International Book Awards’ Book Series (historical), last April. The first three novels in the series are now available in a box set on Amazon.)
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