Suburban Residences, and How to Circumvent Them

by J. E. Panton

People are continually writing to me, and also to everyone else who gives advice on the special subjects of house management and decoration, about this servant question, and, moreover, as continually ask how to divide or apportion their special incomes to their special wants; but they cannot see how utterly impossible it is for a complete stranger to do more than vaguely generalise on either subject. The servant question has always been simplicity itself to me, and I cannot understand the difficulties which beset so many women in these days, simply because I have never come across them myself. But then, I do not expect perfection. I give fair wages, and am as considerate to the maids as they are to me, and I am not unduly dismayed or cast down when I discern faults and failings that are human after all, and denote that at present, at least, we have not reached the golden age. At the same time, I am convinced that the real trouble, as I said before, is caused in small houses by the ‘composite maid’ being called a cook, or house parlour-maid, when she is just either a general servant, or else a housemaid; and in larger ones by sufficient care not being taken to obtain the kind of maiden one really does want, and by expecting too much from her when she is in our service.

The life of the ordinary domestic servant, despite the delirious joy of the tradesman’s daily calls, is an extremely dull one. The routine is everlasting, the relaxations few, and the changes still fewer. In many households a friend to tea is a crime; an unexpected holiday an impossibility; while the days follow each other in a wearisome routine which would tell on the nerves of anyone even far more highly educated than is the orthodox maid-servant. How many brilliant summer days pass, and no one suggests an afternoon or evening stroll, or even a drive through the country lanes. How many dreary winter days go by, and no one says there is a good play at such and such a theatre, go and see it. Or who takes concert seats, and sends off the maids for a couple of hours from the everlasting kitchen and the weary round of unending duties? Well, some people do, and where this occurs there the maids often stay on and on, giving real and loving service, and doing their utmost for those who try to do their utmost for them.

Then once more how few maids really have and possess their mistress’s confidence. They hear a vast amount of grumbling about ‘the books,’ and the dreadful waste which does go on, often enough more through ignorance than through their carelessness; but they do not comprehend that there is an all-important reason why such waste should not be allowed, because the mistress has never explained matters to the maids, or told them there is necessity for great care in all the household departments. As a rule servants have what they consider the ‘honour of the house’ very near their hearts; and they cannot endure the notion that their mistress shall even be suspected of ‘meanness.’ And this is often the cause of the needless orders given in those establishments where the tradesmen are allowed to call; for, rather than send them away without an order, the servants will rack their brains to think of something, not because they really desire to swell the bills, but because they like their house to be one of which the tradespeople speak well, and because they will not have it spoken of as a ‘mean sort of place, where every halfpenny is counted and made to do the duty of a penny piece.’ Then too, at the bottom of a great deal of domestic mismanagement is the utter and really ghastly thriftlessness of the lower classes, which no one who has not seen it could credit.

I have had to be a great deal away from my own house, owing to long-continued illness, and in consequence I have seen a great deal of the way in which other people manage, and I boldly say that I have seen more waste and real extravagance among people who ought to save absolutely every bone and piece of bread than among those who could really afford to waste, did they not consider it wicked to do so. While the lower one goes in the social scale, the more one finds waste the order of the day; and not only actual waste, but the waste of having the best joints, the most expensive butter, and the continual variety of food that no one in the upper middle classes can afford, even should they think it necessary to have it. I have noticed real want existing among a specially improvident set of people, while, at the same time, I have been shocked to see great lumps of meat and bread (unpaid for) in the pigs’ tub. The young people of these households would have their boots blacked for them, their hot water and bath water carried up for them, and be waited on, before they went out to their shops or work, as one’s own children would never dream of being waited on, in a much much higher rank of life. In these households the servants have simply an awful time of it, and hence class prejudice is fostered terribly, while the unthrifty ways of the household leave their mark on all who pass through it, and help to build up a class that is in every way unsatisfactory.

We hear a great deal of the competition of the foreigner, and there are loud shouts for ‘protection’ and ‘fair trade,’ but the ‘protection’ we want is against our own wasteful habits and ways of living, and we can never have ‘fair trade’ until we comprehend what waste really is, and know what is necessary to keep a household going and what is not. And this servant question is the very crux of the whole matter, and, alas! is very little understood by the public at large, which seems quite incapable of grappling with the problem, although few people exist who have not a more or less loudly-expressed opinion on the subject.

It is also a problem which can never be solved until all have learned real thrift and carefulness, and until all classes learn how to trust each other, and the special conduct which should be maintained in all relations in life. Though the tendency nowadays to live in flats, and have as many meals as one can at a restaurant or hotel, may solve the servant question quicker than in any other way, regardless of the fact that a class of useful women will thus be improved off the face of the world in a manner I, for one, shall be extremely sorry to see. But flats are fleeting joys at best. I have heard of many people going to live in them, and have never known anyone renew his or her lease; so perhaps the pendulum may swing back again, and houses become the order of the day.

As long as servants are required, the best way to obtain them at first is for the young mistress to train them herself, always keeping on hand an under-study for the part of the upper-servant in the shape of kitchen and under-housemaids; in this way lie a sure success and comfortable domestic arrangements. Of course there are hundreds of small establishments where a couple of maids is all that can be allowed. These must be as described before, general and housemaid, then all will go rightly, providing care is taken to obtain good girls from good families, who have not been spoiled by a careless or bad mistress, or ruined by an unhappy and thriftless home training, which is often indeed worse than none. In a larger house where there are children; six maids and a boy to help, are the maximum; namely, cook and kitchen-maid, parlour-maid and housemaid, nurse and nursemaid; here again things will be all right, and there will be no over-work or under-work in the matter. Lucky is she who, by tie of birth or friendship, is connected with some country town or village, which shall act as her preserve, and from whence she can always draw fresh supplies should matrimony or other cause thin her domestic ranks and compel her to look out for another maiden.

But in all and every case should the registry office be most carefully avoided. If a servant or mistress has a ‘good name,’ exceptional indeed must be the circumstances that drive her to make use of these places. If a decent maid is leaving her place, the tradespeople know all about her and will tell her of the good places which may be open; and in the same way a really ‘good place’ doesn’t go begging. The tradesmen know of that too, and often act as a sort of informal registry-office which I have invariably found most useful in every manner. Then having caught one’s maids, let us consider how best to keep them, and undoubtedly is this done by making them as comfortable as we can, and by showing that we have a real interest in whatever they may have or do.

I have already written about the room they should have to sit in. Now let us consider those they should have for sleeping purposes, for often these are as badly arranged as they can be; economy is studied on the one hand, which on the other results in an amount of expenditure which is as unnecessary as it is worrying and distasteful to all concerned. One of these petty economies is that which consists of making a couple of maids share one bed, and that one anything but a comfortable place of rest and refuge. Now this should never be done. The economy consists in the saving of the washing of a pair of sheets, the misery comes in when the unwilling bedfellows quarrel and determine to move on elsewhere. In no case should more than two maids sleep in one room, and in every case such room should hold a couple of beds and a double set of washing-stands, drawers and toilet-table, and, moreover, there should be a good hanging wardrobe of some kind. If possible, once more the ever-useful P. T. C. from Wallace’s should be pressed into the service, and should decorate a couple of the room corners, one being devoted to the use of each maid, whose dresses will last twice as long if she have proper room for them, and if she have not to cram them into her small chest of drawers, shared all too often by her fellow-servant.

I consider Knowles’s sanitary papers quite ideal for the maids’ bedrooms, and there is a dainty ‘daffodil’ paper that no one can dislike or despise, and which can be wiped over once a month, if necessary, with a damp duster and come out as clean as a new pin. With this paper we could have earth-brown paint, and Liberty’s ever-useful dark blue and white butterfly cretonne, edged with frills, and blue and white dhurries on the stained floor. But if the floor is bad, and in the least degree draughty, it must first be covered with cork carpet, on which rugs or the ever useful dhurries can be laid down. Some suburban floors are amenable to no other treatment. We may plane them carefully, and ‘stop’ them as carefully too, but they will begin to gape at the smallest change in the weather, or at the sight of the first fire, and one can neither keep out the draughts nor the gently-drifting dust that penetrates at every corner, and spoils tempers and properties alike. Cork carpet I consider a most blessed invention, as it makes a capital background, and is warm and comfortable and quite spotlessly clean. This should be ‘gone over’ once a week in bedrooms of this class with a damp duster; and once a month should have a healthful polish with Jackson’s camphorated beeswax polish, made on purpose. The rugs should be shaken out of doors once a week, and, whenever possible the beds and bedding should be alike exposed to the sun and air in the garden; or, if not, in the rooms themselves, taking care that all windows and doors are open and a thorough draught ensured.