Every now and again she was summoned upstairs to make a last-minute mend, or adjust a hem or a dart which the ladies’ maids or valets didn’t have time for, and this turned her into a right flap. When she got back she would be flustered and huffy, snapping at anyone who dared to talk. It would take her a good hour or so to recover her nerves.
As Coronation Day came closer there was more and more work for us, and Miss G got called more often, to the point that one day we thought she might just go pop with the stress of it all. She never said what she had been doing or who she had been helping, and we wasn’t allowed to ask her, but my curiosity was so keen I felt like a kettle boiling with its lid clamped on tight. When she went out and left us on our own we had a good laugh, Nora and me, and would sometimes get up and jump about a bit just to let off steam.
On the big day even the underlings like us was allowed to look out of a window on the fourth floor which overlooked the palace gates and The Mall. Well, I’ve never seen so many people in one place, not before nor since. There must have been millions, like when you stir up an ants’ nest by mistake and they all come swarming about, only this lot were so packed in there was no room for them to move, so they were just standing and waving.
There was a long procession of red and gold uniforms on horseback and eventually there was the top of the coach which looked like a crown itself, and though of course we couldn’t see inside ’cos we were looking from so high up, they told us it was Prince George and Princess May, who would come back as King George and Queen Mary. When the crowd saw the coach we could hear a cheer like a roar of thunder which went on for the whole time till everyone had passed, and then we had to go back to work.
In the evening we was told there’d be a ten-course banquet for a hundred guests and the chefs and kitchen staff were frantic so we kept well out of their way, and after our supper we were sent back to work because Miss G kept getting summoned upstairs to help the ladies’ maids and valets with emergency repairs to ballgowns and penguin suits.
The following day the fuss and bother continued, what with all the visiting royalty, and our meals were weird and wonderful left-overs from the banquets: I had never eaten venison before and I was enjoying it till they told me it was deer, them pretty little animals we used to spy in the parks in the early mornings, and then I lost my appetite for it.
That day we overheard conversations in the staff quarters about the prince’s birthday celebrations, and how because he was next in line to the throne he would become king when his father died. There was a deal of discussion about who he would marry – German royalty or Russian? I remember feeling sorry for him, thinking how strange it must be to have your life all mapped out for you. Of course I never understood that I had precious little control over what happened to me, neither. Like all young girls I believed I would fall in love and marry who I liked, and if they had enough money we could have our own little place and not live in servants’ quarters for the rest of my life. If only I’d known what life had in store – what a joke fate would play on me.
A couple of days later after the Coronation, Mrs Hardy calls us servants together after breakfast and tells us to make sure we’re dressed extra-smart, polished shoes and the rest because we had been summoned. We hadn’t a clue what this meant, but there was such an air of excitement it felt a bit like a holiday. We were gathered in the main hall at eleven o’clock sharp and it took a while for all two hundred of us to traipse up the stairs. At the top we went through a door into another world, a world of thick carpets and high ceilings, tall windows and larger-than-life paintings of grand people from history. Imagine two hundred people all walking in silence, and no footsteps to be heard because the carpets are that deep they swallow all the sound. I got ticked off for gawping with my mouth open at the mountains of glittering glass hung in the ceiling what I later found out were called chandeliers, not to mention the dazzling redness of the wallpaper and the glowing gold of flowery carvings where the ceilings met the walls. It was like what I imagined heaven to look like, not just someone’s home – hard to get your head around for an orphan girl like me.
Then we arrived in a room the size of a football pitch and got ourselves arranged in rows. I was at the front because I was so short, and Nora was right behind me. After a bit, in came Miss Hardy the head housekeeper, followed by the new king and queen and their children herded by a nanny. I couldn’t stop goggling at the lot of them, but it was the eldest boy who really caught my eye. He would have been about sixteen then, not tall but fair like a Greek god, and with a mischievous look on him.
They stopped in front of us and we all bowed or curtseyed like we was taught, only I put the wrong foot behind and realised too late and stumbled a bit as I tried to change it, and Nora caught me from behind to stop me falling over. When I dared to look up again my cheeks were burning but the golden-haired boy was smiling at me with a face like an angel giving me a blessing, and I couldn’t help but smile back till I caught the nanny glaring at me, and had to study my shoes again.
The king made a speech with that prune-in-his-mouth voice thanking us lot for the hard work that we had all put in to make their Coronation Day run smooth as clockwork, and the queen (our very own May) said something of the same, and then they went to leave, except that just as she turned, May looked directly at Nora and me and said quietly, ‘You two are my little needlework orphans, are you not?’ We both blushed fit to match the carpet but Nora was the first one to find her voice. ‘That’s right, Your Majesty,’ she said, nipping in an extra little bob curtsey.
May said, ‘I hope you are settling in well?’ and this time I managed to reply, ‘We are very happy, thank you, Ma’am.’ She smiled and said, ‘Very good, very good,’ and walked out with the rest of them.
Well you can imagine that Nora and me was on cloud nine for days afterwards; she because the queen had talked to us, and me because I was head-over-heels in love with the boy. Of course I knew this was stupid, but if others could idol-worship their music-hall heroes I reckoned that surely I was allowed my own?
Over the next few days, by sneaky questions, I managed to find out that this was the same boy whose birthday they celebrated the day after the Coronation Day, the boy who will marry some German or Russian princess and eventually become king. Apparently he attended naval college and now was going to become Prince of Wales, which I thought rather curious. Wales is part of Great Britain, so why should it have its own prince? And why not Scotland or Ireland? It was very confusing.
After the fuss and bother of the Coronation it went quiet for a few weeks, which was just as well because there was a summer heatwave and we sweltered in the sewing room with its high windows barely catching the breeze. Miss G felt it the worst and had to have a cloth nearby to wipe her hands on every couple of minutes to save staining her sewing with sweat. Then one day she didn’t turn up for work, and Nora and me just got on with the mending pile, only it was more fun because we could chatter all we liked and play our favourite game of ‘happy ever after’.
Nora’s changed each time we played it, but usually involved marrying someone she had read about in the newspapers which got left lying around the servants’ hall, a music-hall star, or perhaps an explorer, like Shackleton or Scott, having six children and living in a large, comfortable house in the country with servants who never gave her any lip like we did.
My happy-ever-after dreams also came from the newspapers: I wanted to be a suffragette like Emmeline Pankhurst, and I would win the respect of women all over the country by persuading the prime minister to allow votes for women and after that, having become famous, I would marry Prince Edward and become queen. Or, perhaps it would be better to become queen first, and then I could change the rules however I liked.
Miss Garthwaite didn’t return the next day nor the next, and we were told she had been taken poorly with her nerves, and might not be back for a few days. The days stretched into a week and then two, and we were working all hours to keep up, but we didn’t complain because we had no one to interfere or bother with us, a kind of freedom we hadn’t never enjoyed before.
That night I had just climbed into bed, weary as a sack of potatoes, when there was a knock on our door and there was Mrs Hardy, the chief housekeeper, with a gentleman in valet’s uniform beside her, whose face I vaguely remembered from the servants’