The
Invisible Servant
Convention
dictated that the upper classes act as if the servants attending them did not
exist. While upper servants had daily contact with their employers, lower
servants were to be neither seen nor heard (except of course, at the daily
family prayers). Because employers disliked seeing servants at work, much of
the housework had to be done before the family or their guests came downstairs
for breakfast. A strict timetable meant that both servants and family knew
their places and kept to them rigidly.
To avoid unexpected
encounters, servants used servants’ entrances and back corridors. Doors linked
to connecting corridors were covered by screens, fake bookcases or wallpaper,
so that servants could appear quietly and efficiently when called. The dining
room at Emo for example, has two servants’ doors, while an underground tunnel
which ran from the basement to the gardens also ensured that servants and
tradesmen were not seen approaching the house.
Servants’ quarters
and kitchens were located far from the main rooms of the house, in the gloomy,
damp basement, and the door to the servant wing was usually lined with green
baize to deaden any sounds and absorb kitchen odours. When needed upstairs,
servants were summoned using the bell-pull, a complicated system of wires and
chains which ran between ceiling and wall cavities and connected to a series of
bells in the servants’ wing. Each bell was marked to show which room had
called, and servants were expected to act immediately upon hearing the bell
toll.
In his novel set
at
“On the east side of the house there was a
basement out of which an underground tunnel led to the gardens…though its first
forty or fifty yards were completely covered, the roof then disappeared and the
tunnel changed into a trench which grew shallower and shallower as it
approached the garden…[I]ts purpose was simply to prevent the lawns and
terraces of the gentry being polluted by the print of a peasant foot, or the
eyes of real ladies from resting on the unpleasant sight of one of the
tradespeople who supplied their needs. As the family and their guests sat upon
the marble benches under the yews or walked down the paths that led to the
pleasure grounds or stepped into their carriage at the front door they were
blissfully unconscious of the helots who, laden with fruit and flowers, the
fish and game for their table, entered their house through the arched tunnel,
groping in the narrow darkness like animals in a burrow”.
Fr. M. Bodkin, Borrowed
Days (1942), 113-14