The Time for Change Has Come

Cavendish Mews is a smart set of flats in Mayfair where flapper and modern woman, the Honourable Lettice Chetwynd has set up home after coming of age and gaining her allowance. To supplement her already generous allowance, and to break away from dependence upon her family, Lettice has established herself as a society interior designer, so her flat is decorated with a mixture of elegant antique Georgian pieces and modern Art Deco furnishings, using it as a showroom for what she can offer to her well heeled clients.

 

Tonight, we are in the little maid’s room off the Cavendish Mews kitchen, which serves as Edith, Lettice’s maid’s, bedroom. The room is very comfortable and more spacious than the attic she shared with her friend and fellow maid, Hilda, in her last position. The room is papered with floral sprigged wallpaper, and whilst there is no carpet, unlike Lettice’s bedroom, there are rugs laid over the stained floorboards. The room is big enough for Edith to have a comfortable armchair and tea table as well as her bed, a chest of drawers and a small wardrobe. Best of all, the room has central heating, so it is always warm and cosy on cold nights.

 

Edith has returned to Cavendish Mews after spending Christmas with her family in Harlesden and New Year with her beau Frank at a pub in Rotherhithe, arriving a few days ahead of Lettice who will shortly return from her own Christmas holiday spent with her family at their country estate, Glynes, in Wiltshire. Edith is luxuriating in the silence of the flat with no Lettice present. Although not overly demanding and a very good mistress to work for, Edith always knows when Lettice is home, sensing her presence in the soft clip of her footfall on the parquetry floor, the distant sound of her favourite or latest American records on the gramophone, the waft of her expensive French perfumes about the rooms of the flat, the peal of her laughter as she giggles over tea or cocktails with visiting friends or the jangle of the servants call bells bouncing about in the kitchen near the back door. For now, it is just Edith with only the tick of the clocks about the house and the distant burble of late night traffic along Bond Street to disturb her quiet.

 

She sighs and takes a sip of tea from the Delftware teacup, part of the kitchen set she uses and places it back on the tea table next to the pot, covered with a cosy knitted for her by her mother three years ago as a Christmas gift. She glances around the room at her possessions. In comparison to her mistress, what she has amassed is meagre to say the least, but she is very happy with her own personal touches about her little bedroom. Her hat, a second hand black straw cloche she came by at Petticoat Lane* decorated with bits and bobs she picked up from her Whitechapel haberdasher Mrs. Minkin, sits on her hat stand, also acquired from Petticoat Lane, on one end of the dark chest of drawers. Her lacquered sewing box, a gift from her mother when she first left home to go into service, sits at the other. Behind it is wedged her latest scrapbook that she fills with newspaper articles about fashion, films and the advances of women. Next to the sewing box sit the latest editions to her library, three romance novels from Lettice as a Christmas gift. Next to her hat stand, her collection of hat pins, and next to that, the brass framed portrait photo of she and her parents taken at a professional photographic studio in the Harlesden High Street. If she squints and concentrates hard, Edith can just remember the occasion, with her pressed into her Sunday best white pinny with lace, made for her by her mother, and starched by her too, being a laundress. The needlepoint home sweet home Edith made hangs on the wall in a simple wooden frame above the drawers. Her eyes return to the chest of drawers’ highly polished surface where the eau de nil Bakelite**dressing table set from Boots***, a gift from Lettice the previous Christmas, sits and then she sees the face of Bert, her first love, gazing out at her. Although he is sitting stiffly and was possibly ill at ease dressed in his Sunday best when the photograph was taken, it cannot hide the kindness in his eyes, or the cheeky smirk that plays at the corners of his mouth.

 

“I wonder if it’s time.” Edith muses quietly to herself, taking another sip of tea.

 

Edith’s young man was the local postman in Harlesden, and that was how Edith first met him, delivering mail in her street. The Watsfords, Edith’s family, never had much post, but Bert would always find an excuse to stop if he saw her in that last year before the war before she had her first live-in post as a maid and was still living at home. She was fourteen and he was eighteen, and Edith’s parents, George and Ada, said they were both too young to be tethering themselves to one another, what with all their lives ahead of them. Bert’s mother wasn’t too keen on him courting a laundress’ daughter about to go out into service either. She had expectations of Bert. She always felt that being employed in a steady job with the post office, he could make a successful career for himself, and could do better than a local girl with a father who baked biscuits at the McVitie and Price factory and a mother who laundered clothes for those more fortunate than she. But they didn’t mind what their parents said. They loved each other. What might have been, Edith was never to find out, for then the war broke out, and Bert took the King’s shilling****, like so many young men his age, and he died at the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917.

 

“I think you’d like Frank,” Edith addresses Bert’s photograph. “He’s a hard worker, just like you were, and he rides a bike too.” She smiles. “He thinks he’s on the make, and maybe he is. He’s certainly trying to improve and better himself, and me too if he has his way. He wants to take me to an art gallery or two this year. He told me so on New Year’s Eve when we were down at The Angel by the Thames. Can you imagine me going and looking at paintings in a big gallery? I can’t, any more than I can imagine you doing it, Bert, but I’m willing to give it a go for him.”

 

She sits and thinks for a while, recalling moments spent with Frank on their days together.

 

Edith chuckles to herself again. “Last summer when the weather was fine, Frank and me, we would sometimes go to Hyde Park on our Sundays off rather than going to the pictures up in West Ham, and listen to the brass bands play in the rotunda. Frank paid for our deckchairs – he’s a gentleman like that you can rest assured – and we’d sit and listen to them play.” She sighs. “Oh it was grand! The sun shining warm on my face and only the distant burble of the traffic to even remind me that I was in London. And then on the way home, we’d stop and listen to the speakers***** if Frank thought they had anything decent to say. I bet you can’t imagine little me, your sweet and gentle Edith, listening to political speeches. If you had kept your head down over there in France, I might never have. We were never into politics, you and I, were we, Bert?” She takes another sip of her tea. “Not that we really knew each other all that well. We were both so young and probably really still finding out who we were ourselves, never mind each other.” She sighs more deeply as she ruminates. “The truth is that quite a lot of it goes over my head, Bert, but Frank takes the time to explain things to me so that I can understand it too. Frank is quite a political chap really, and he says that I should show an interest too. I asked him why, when I don’t even have the vote******, but he says it won’t always be the way it is now. He says that now is the time for the working man, and woman. He believes in the emancipation of women. There you go, Bert! That’s a big word for me isn’t it? Emancipation!” She smiles proudly. “It means to be set free from social or political restrictions.”

 

Edith stands up and wanders over to Bert’s photograph and picks it up. The Bakelite feels cool in her hands as she traces the moulded edges of the frame.

 

“I wonder if you’d come back from the war whether you would have come back a changed man, Bert, and whether we’d even still be together. Would I have been enough for you? Would you be a man like Frank, not that he went to the war. Being the same age as me, he just missed out on being old enough to enlist. Would you have come back different? So many did. I mean some came back with the most awful injuries you can imagine, and then there were the injuries you couldn’t see, which doctors are still considering.” She looks into Bert’s frozen face. “Mental damage, I mean – something the doctors are now calling shellshock. But for all of them, there were plenty of men who weren’t hurt in the war, and they all seem to want change. They haven’t gone back to their old jobs as footmen or other domestic staff or working on farms. Women too. Women who worked in the munitions factories during the war. Canary Girls, they called them, because their skin turned yellow from building the shells. They all want better jobs, better pay and better standards of living. Would you have joined their ranks, I wonder, and would I have been there to support you? I just did what Mum told me to do and went into domestic service proper, and I tell you what, Bert, with less men there to do the jobs in big houses, the work falls to women, and there are fewer of us too. Older staff mutter about women waiting at table and answering doors nowadays, because there are fewer footmen and butlers, but there are fewer parlour maids and kitchen maids too. I’ve read in the newspapers that it is called, ‘the servant problem’. I still keep scrapbooks, Bert, but the things I paste in them are different these days. There is less about Royal Family and more about fashion and the pictures, and ladies doing things they’ve never done before. Have I changed? Would you like the Edith Watsford I am today, I wonder?”

 

Edith runs her hands over Bert’s face, forever young, forever captured with that slight hint of smile and sparkle in his eyes.

 

“Frank wants me to meet his granny, Bert. His parents died of the Spanish Flu after the war, and he only has his granny now. I’d like to meet her, but at the same time I’m terrified. I’m not frightened of her, in fact I want to meet her.” She takes a deep sigh. “No, what I’m frightened of is the significance of meeting her, and what that meeting means. Mum and Dad have been crying out to meet Frank. They wanted him to come and join us in Harlesden for Christmas dinner, since my brother was at sea on Christmas Day, but I told them that Frank wants to do things correctly, which means I meet his family first and then he can meet mine. Meeting Frank’s granny means that I will have to let go of you, and I can’t really ask you how you feel about that. When you died, Mum just told me to get on with things, and not to worry about the past. Now I’m doing that. I didn’t think I’d ever find someone to love again, Bert, but I do love Frank. If I’m honest, now I’m older and know myself and the world a bit better, I might love Frank even more than I loved you. I was only fourteen after all, and didn’t really know much about love, other than what I’d read in romance novels.” She looks at the brightly coloured paper cover of one of the novels Lettice gave her for Christmas. “I still read them, but I know that what appears in those pages isn’t necessarily really love. I don’t expect a man to sweep me into his arms and confess his undying love for me. No, a mutual understanding and agreement about where we are going in life is what love is, or part of it anyway. Just look at Mum and Dad. Not that I don’t want a bit of romance along the way, and Frank is a good kisser. I’m sure he’d be happy to do a little more than kiss if I let him, but Mum told me not to let that happen until after I get a ring on my finger. By meeting Frank’s granny, Bert, it means it’s a big step closer to getting that ring on my finger. It means that I’m serious about him, and he me. It means that we are sure we want to be together and get married.”

 

Tears well in Edith’s eyes, even as she speaks.

 

“If I have to leave you behind in order to move on with Frank, would you let me, Bert? Would you be happy for me? Would you wish me well? Would you wish us well?”

 

Carefully Edith moves the latches on the back of the frame holding Bert’s image in place. She feels the backing come away and fall slightly into her fingers. The glass tilts, reflecting back a ghostly image of herself across Bert’s smiling face. She realises that no matter how she feels about Bert, there will never be a photograph of the two of them together. She thinks of her friend Hilda, who now works for Lettice’s friends Margot and Dickie Channon in a flat within walking distance of Lettice’s flat. Hilda longs to meet a man whom she can step out with the way Edith and Frank have been ding for almost a year now, yet she has no prospects. There are far fewer men to choose from than before the war, and plenty more women vying for interest in those who have returned from the conflict. Edith considers herself lucky to have such an opportunity with Frank. Perhaps the time for change has come.

 

Gently she slips her fingers between the photograph and the glass. She withdraws Bert’s photograph.

 

“If I’m serious about Frank, Bert, which I am, I can’t keep carrying you around in my purse, or in a picture frame. It’s not fair to Frank, or to me really. But, I’ll always carry a little of you in my heart.”

 

She opens one of the small top drawers of the chest of drawers, which squeaks on its rungs as it is pulled out. A waft of lavender from a small muslin sachet inside drifts up to her nose. She slips Frank’s photo underneath a stack of clean pressed handkerchiefs and then closes the drawer firmly. She opens the next drawer and places the frame into the empty space.

 

“I’ll take you out again when I have a photo of Frank to put in you.” she assures the frame as she closes the drawer again.

 

*Petticoat Lane Market is a fashion and clothing market in Spitalfields, London. It consists of two adjacent street markets. Wentworth Street Market and Middlesex Street Market. Originally populated by Huguenots fleeing persecution in France, Spitalfields became a center for weaving, embroidery and dying. From 1882, a wave of Jewish immigrants fleeing persecution in eastern Europe settled in the area and Spitalfields then became the true heart of the clothing manufacturing district of London. 'The Lane' was always renowned for the 'patter' and showmanship of the market traders. It was also known for being a haven for the unsavoury characters of London’s underworld and was rife with prostitutes during the late Victorian era. Unpopular with the authorities, as it was largely unregulated and in some sense illegal, as recently as the 1930s, police cars and fire engines were driven down ‘The Lane’, with alarm bells ringing, to disrupt the market.

 

**Bakelite, was the first plastic made from synthetic components. Patented on December 7, 1909, the creation of a synthetic plastic was revolutionary for its electrical nonconductivity and heat-resistant properties in electrical insulators, radio and telephone casings and such diverse products as kitchenware, jewellery, pipe stems, children's toys, and firearms. A plethora of items were manufactured using Bakelite in the 1920s and 1930s.

 

***Boots the chemist was established in 1849, by John Boot. After his father's death in 1860, Jesse Boot, aged 10, helped his mother run the family's herbal medicine shop in Nottingham, which was incorporated as Boot and Co. Ltd in 1883, becoming Boots Pure Drug Company Ltd in 1888. In 1920, Jesse Boot sold the company to the American United Drug Company. However, because of deteriorating economic circumstances in North America Boots was sold back into British hands in 1933. The grandson of the founder, John Boot, who inherited the title Baron Trent from his father, headed the company. The Boots Pure Drug Company name was changed to The Boots Company Limited in 1971. Between 1898 and 1966, many branches of Boots incorporated a lending library department, known as Boots Book-Lovers' Library.

 

****To take the King’s shilling means to enlist in the army. The saying derives from a shilling whose acceptance by a recruit from a recruiting officer constituted until 1879 a binding enlistment in the British army —used when the British monarch is a king.

 

*****A Speakers' Corner is an area where open-air public speaking, debate, and discussion are allowed. The original and best known is in the northeast corner of Hyde Park in London. Historically there were a number of other areas designated as Speakers' Corners in other parks in London, such as Lincoln's Inn Fields, Finsbury Park, Clapham Common, Kennington Park, and Victoria Park. Areas for Speakers' Corners have been established in other countries and elsewhere in Britain. Speakers here may talk on any subject, as long as the police consider their speeches lawful, although this right is not restricted to Speakers' Corner only. Contrary to popular belief, there is no immunity from the law, nor are any subjects proscribed, but in practice the police intervene only when they receive a complaint.

 

******It was not until the Equal Franchise Act of 1928 that women over the age of twenty-one were able to vote in Britain and women finally achieved the same voting rights as men.

 

This cosy room may be a nice place to keep warm on a winter’s night, but what you may not be aware of is that it is made up entirely with pieces from my 1:12 miniatures collection.

 

Fun things to look for in this tableau include:

 

The eau-de-nil dressing table set on Edith’s chest of drawers, which has been made with incredible detail to make it as realistic as possible, is a Chrysnbon Miniature set. The mirror even contains a real piece of reflective mirror. Judy Berman founded Chrysnbon Miniatures in the 1970’s. She created affordable miniature furniture kits patterned off of her own full-size antiques collection. She then added a complete line of accessories to compliment the furniture. The style of furniture and accessories reflect the turn-of-the-century furnishings of a typical early American home. At the time, collectible miniatures were expensive because they were mostly individually crafted.

 

The photo of Bert in the eau-de-nil frame and the family portrait in the brass frame on the chest of drawers are real photos, produced to high standards in 1:12 size on photographic paper by Little Things Dollhouse Miniatures in Lancashire. The brass frame comes from Melody Jane’s Doll House Suppliers.

 

Edith’s black dyed straw hat with purple roses and black feathers was made by an unknown artisan. 1:12 size miniature hats made to such exacting standards of quality and realism are often far more expensive than real hats are. When you think that it would sit comfortably on the tip of your index finger, yet it could cost in excess of $150.00 or £100.00, it is an extravagance. American artists seem to have the monopoly on this skill and some of the hats that I have seen or acquired over the years are remarkable. This hat is part of a larger collection I bought from an American miniature collector Marilyn Bickel. The hat stand it sits on also comes from her.

 

To the right of Edith’s hat is an ornamental green jar filled with hatpins. The jar is made from a single large glass Art Deco bead, whilst each hatpin is made from either a nickel or brass plate pin with beads for ornamental heads. They were made by Karen Lady Bug Miniatures in the United Kingdom.

 

Edith’s scrapbook wedged behind her sewing box is a 1:12 size miniature made by the British miniature artisan Ken Blythe, as are the three novels you can see on the surface of Edith’s chest of drawers. Most of the books I own that Ken has made may be opened to reveal authentic printed interiors. In some cases, you can even read the words, depending upon the size of the print! I have quite a large representation of Ken Blythe’s work in my collection, but so little of his real artistry is seen because the books that he specialised in making are usually closed, sitting on shelves or closed on desks and table surfaces. When open, you will find the scarpbook contains sketches, photographs and article clippings. Even the paper has been given the appearance of wrinkling as happens when glue is applied to cheap pulp paper. To give you an idea of the work that has gone into this scrapbook, it contains twelve double sided pages of scrapbook articles, pictures, sketches and photographs and measures forty millimetres in height and thirty millimetres in width and is only three millimetres thick. What might amaze you even more is that all Ken Blythe’s opening books are authentically replicated 1:12 scale miniatures of real volumes. To create something so authentic to the original in such detail and so clearly, really does make this a miniature artisan piece. Ken Blythe’s work is highly sought after by miniaturists around the world today and command high prices at auction for such tiny pieces, particularly now that he is no longer alive. I was fortunate enough to acquire pieces from Ken Blythe prior to his death about four years ago. His legacy will live on with me and in my photography which I hope will please his daughter.

 

The sewing box, the ‘home sweet home’ embroidery and the pencil all come from various online shops who sell dollhouse miniatures. The franked postcard in the foreground on the tea table comes from Mick and Marie’s Miniatures in the United Kingdom.

 

Also on the tea table, the tea cosy, which fits snugly over a white porcelain teapot, has been hand knitted in fine lemon, blue and violet wool. It comes easily off and off and can be as easily put back on as a real tea cosy on a real teapot. It comes from a specialist miniatures stockist in England.

 

The Deftware cup, saucer and milk jug are part of a 1:12 size miniature porcelain dinner set which I acquired from a private collection of 1:12 miniatures in Holland.

 

Edith’s armchair is upholstered in blue chintz, and is made to the highest quality standards by J.B.M. Miniatures. The back and seat cushions come off the body of the armchair, just like a real piece of furniture.

 

The chest of drawers I have had since I was a teenager. I bought it from the toy section of a large city department store.

Done