Servants' view of world

Press, 11 August 1979, Page 17

Servants' view of world

Servant's Hall. By Margaret Powell. Michael Joseph, 1979. 185 pp. $13.25. (Reviewed by Lorna Buchanan)

From her own experience, Margaret Powell writes of a grand style of living 50 years ago, as seen through the eyes of the servants. Her tale is fact, thinly disguised as fiction, and in the end she draws her readers back to the present with a brief summary of her characters’ condition today when, like the author, they have reached the age of heart attacks and golden wedding anniversaries. Her story is that of Rose, an attractive teen-age housemaid, who marries Gerald, the son of the household. The couple are banished. Thrown on his own resources, Gerald demonstrates his ability to increase his wealth and status. Unfortunately, Rose remains static, stubbornly refusing to improve herself and uncaring that her attitudes and manners make her unacceptable to the society of which she should now form a part. Her one

redeeming feature is that she retains her fine appearance, suitably helped by a tasteful and expensive wardrobe. Rose refuses to accept that there is any other way of looking at the world

apart from that she has inherited from her tight-lipped mother. She confides to the author that she finds her husband’s amorous advances distasteful and adopts an attitude of “remember it’s for England." The author suggests that she, in the same circumstances, would not have given a thought for England. The marriage was doomed to disaster. Margaret Powell appears to be sad and a little envious. She suggests events would have turned out differently, had she been in Rose’s place. But she is honest enough to admit that she had not the good looks to achieve such a marriage in the first place. Such honest self-assessment helps to lift a modest little story into a delightful account of how domestic staff viewed the world, as well as the way they lived, in the servants’ hall of 50 years ago.