Press the Bell

When I was a child we had breakfast, lunch and tea in the dining room.

I wasn’t old enough to have supper downstairs until I went to Eton. At lunch there were maids in the kitchen. The cooking was what’s called plain today and the Sunday roast lamb reappeared in different guises all week: cold, cottage pie, rissoles and the like. We helped ourselves at the sideboard under a large landscape portrait of van Dyck, his wife and secretary. The secretary has his hand on her knee under the table. My grandmother liked it because it was the right size to protect the wall from any greasy spattering.

When we had finished my grandmother would ask me to press the bell to summon a maid to clear away the plates and food and come back with pudding. This was always junket in the summer and tapioca pudding in winter accompanied by something else: stewed fruit, castle puddings, etc. Almost all the fruit and veg came from the kitchen garden.

I was reminded of this, staying with a niece in Northumberland last weekend. She remembered holidays at Barmeath with her mother and sister in the late 1970s. My grandmother and mother had died and my brother and sister-in-law lived at Barmeath with their children. In the summer if they went away for a week or two my sister and her daughters would stay to keep my grandfather company. There were no more living-in maids but Maisie came up every day to cook lunch. When it was time to press the bell the children invented a game. One of the girls would press the bell and race back to her seat. When Maisie came in she had to guess who had pressed the bell. The game reached a peak of excitement when my grandfather, in his late eighties, was persuaded to participate and managed to press the bell and get back to his place before Maisie came in. Maisie took the game in good part and would consider who had pressed the bell with mock-seriousness. It was always either Jeanie or Caroline and the bell presser was usually identified by her badly concealed excitement, although occasionally it was my sister. When she had tried all three and they all said it wasn’t them Maisie reluctantly turned to my grandfather. “Oh no, surely it wasn’t you, Lord Bellew?”

Jeanie said they were the best holidays of her life. There was a pony and my grandfather laid out some poles to teach them how to jump. If it was fine they would bicycle down to the sea with the children taking it in turns to ride the pony. On the return journey – uphill – it was my sister’s turn to ride the pony! They went out on the lake in the small aluminium rowing boat that a friend of my grandfather had brought back from Africa. I don’t know if they learned to roller skate in the old nurseries or went to the kitchen garden to eat nectarines until they got collywobbles both of which I did. When I took an audio guide around the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj in Rome, the commentary was by Prince Jonathan Doria Pamphilj and he says he and his sister used to roller skate in the picture galleries. I hope he did not do what I did. There were portraits propped against a wall in the old nurseries and I would stand between the picture and the wall and poke out the eyes so I could secretly see out.