Rose: My Life in Service to Lady Astor by Rosina Harrison Read Free Book Online Page A

at remembering the detail. Sometimes we’d even make quick pencil sketches, though we were careful never to get caught doing this. When we got back home we wouldn’t make direct copies, we would take a feature of one dress and add it to a feature of another. Lady Cranborne’s favourite material was Mousseline de Soie; unheard of today, it felt like chiffon but was just a little heavier. Her ladyship was easy to fit and to sew for because as I have said she was tall and slim and had excellent and generally simple taste. She was a great credit to me, and I mean what I say, for ladies’ maids were very much judged by the way their employers were dressed; indeed it’s always been my opinion that that is how I came to work for Lady Astor, though she never would have said so.
    Much of Lady Cranborne’s underlinen came from Paris, mostly made from triple ninon, beautifully appliquéd by French seamstresses. The rest I made, copied from what she had bought. All the lace we bought there too, and gloves, and her shoes were from Pinet except for her heavy ones which were bespoke in London. For her tweeds and some suits she went to Lord Cranborne’s tailor in Savile Row. It was a wonderful thing to be a young woman in society at that time. You could afford to dress, indeed you were expected to dress, elegantly, expensively and in the fashion, and remember fashions changed every year; today with most women it’s only in their later years that they are able to buy good clothes, when their looks and their figures have deteriorated. I suppose that it why we see so much mutton dressed as lamb.
    Now that I was a proper lady’s maid I no longer wore print frocks. I was expected to dress simply, plainly, unassumingly yet in fashion. I wore jerseys and skirts with a cardigan in the mornings and afternoons; after tea or if I was going out earlier I changed into a blue or brown dress. A string of pearls or beads was permissible, so was a wristwatch, but other jewellery was frowned on. Make-up was not encouraged; indeed later I was rebuked for using lipstick. When ladies and their maids were out together there could never be any mistaking which was which.
    One habit that Lady Cranborne had that I didn’t care for was that she would drive fast and often dangerously; indeed it was a common fault of the upper classes. They wouldn’t be able to do it today, but they seemed to have a way with the police then. At the mention of their names constables would close their notebooks. Many’s the narrow squeak I’ve had in a car with her ladyship. I remember once we were driving through the New Forest in her Lagonda; we’d reached Cadnam and she swung round taking up two-thirds of the road and hit an oncoming Rolls Royce on its side as it tried to avoid us. We rocked from one pair of wheels to the other but we stayed upright. When I recovered from the shock I looked back and there was the Rolls in the ditch. Her ladyship ignored the whole incident and went driving on as if nothing had happened.
    ‘It’s no good, my lady,’ I said, plucking up my courage, ‘you’ll have to turn back. If you don’t you’ll get all the blame because the evidence is there on the road.’
    She didn’t reply, but a few moments later, after she’d thought about it a bit, she turned the car round and went back. It was as well she did because she’d hit Lord Wimborne’s car and he had recognized her. There was a good deal of talk all round, although my opinion was never asked or given. Eventually they shook hands and that was the last we heard about it. No court case, no nothing. I remember that on our way home we broke an axle on Hammersmith Bridge and had to complete our journey by cab – by the way Lady Cranborne spoke you would have thought it was the makers of the car who were to blame, not the punishment she’d given to it.
    And she did punish it; on another occasion when we were going to lunch with Lady Apsley, suddenly the car seemed to bounce all over