Cleaning Silver for the Soirée

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.

Today we are in the very modern and up-to-date 1920s kitchen of Lettice’s flat: Edith her maid’s preserve. Two of Lettice’s Embassy Club coterie of bright young things are getting married: Dickie Channon, eldest surviving son of the Marquess of Taunton, and Margot de Virre, only daughter of Lord Charles and Lady Lucie de Virre. Lettice is hosting an exclusive buffet supper party in their honour at the end of the week, which is turning out to be one of the events of the 1921 London Season. Over the last few days, the flat has been in upheaval as Edith and Lettice’s charwoman* Mrs. Boothby have begun cleaning the flat thoroughly in preparation for the occasion. Things have been so tumultuous that Lettice has decamped and fled to Margot’s parents’ house in Hans Crescent in nearby Belgravia. This leaves Edith with a little more time to do the chores that need doing in the led up to the party, without having to worry about Lettice’s needs.

Whilst Edith awaits the arrival of Mrs. Boothby, she takes advantage of the beautiful morning and gathers pieces of silverware from around the flat and sets them up on her green baize cloth in the middle of the kitchen table where a pool of beautiful sunlight pours through the kitchen window. She takes out her tin of Silvo silver polish paste and her cleaning rags and sets about polishing each piece. Taking up one of the tall, elegant candlesticks that sit on either end of the console in the dining room Edith applies the paste with a small brush and then proceeds to wipe it with her cloth, burnishing away any sign of golden tarnish until the piece gleams in her hands. She sighs with satisfaction as she sets it aside where it winks and shines in the sunlight.

“A job worth doing is a job well done.” she says quietly as she grasps the next candlestick.

Edith is grateful that unlike her previous positions, she does not have to scrub the black and quite chequered kitchen linoleum, nor polish the parquetry floors, not do her most hated job, black lead the stovetop, as Mrs. Boothby does them all without complaint, with reliability and to a very high standard. However, unlike the butler of the townhouse in Pimlico where she held her last position, Edith doesn’t mind polishing silver. She finds it more gratification in seeing the silver pieces shine, whereas for her a floor is just that – a floor. The items she polishes have elegant lines like the Georgian water jug and the Edwardian sugar castor, and in some cases, like the avant-garde Art Deco decanter and goblet set, are artisan pieces purchased by her mistress from the Portland Gallery in Soho. Putting aside the second candlestick, Edith reaches out and picks up one of the goblets from the drinks set. They each have several bands around the cup and have a sturdy weight to them. Applying Silvo paste she starts to hum ‘Look for the Silver Lining’**.

“Morning dearie!” Mrs. Boothby calls cheerily as she comes through the servants’ entrance door into the kitchen, a fruity cough that comes from deep within her wiry little body and her footfall in her low heeled shoes announcing her presence just as clearly as her greeting. “Oooh. Someone’s cheery today. Meetin’ a sweetheart this afternoon, are we?”

“Good morning Mrs. Boothby,” Edith replies without getting up from her Windsor chair. “No, I’m not meeting anyone this afternoon. I just happen to enjoy cleaning the silver.”

The older cockney woman shirks off her long dark blue coat and hangs it on the hook she has claimed as her own by the door. “You what?” Her eyes bulge from her wrinkled face as her mouth falls open in surprise.

“I enjoy cleaning silver.” Edith reiterates, holding out the half polished goblet. “See how nicely it burnishes up.”

Mrs. Boothby recoils from the proffered goblet with a disdainful look as she turns and hangs her pre-war blue toque up on the hook too. “Nah, just let me rest me weary bones for a few minutes before I start, Edith love!”

“There’s tea in the pot by the stove, Mrs. Boothby.” Edith indicates with a movement of her head to the stove behind her. “I’ve only just finished my own so it’s still warm and not too steeped.”

“Aah, nah that’s the ticket!” Mrs. Boothby drops her beaded bag on the table with a thud before bustling over to the dresser where she withdraws a Delftware teacup and saucer. “I’m parched after me trip up from Poplar this mornin’! Tottenham Court Road was a sewer of traffic! I swear I’m gonna get ‘it by a crazy cabby or lorry driver one a these days! Now, I’ll just sit ‘ere and ‘ave a reviving cup of Rosie-Lee*** and a fag before I get started.”

“What are you going to do this morning?”

“Give Miss Lettice’s barfroom a good scrub ‘n polish.” She pours tea into her cup and then walks over to the food safe where she takes out a pint of milk and adds it to her tea. “’Er makeup don’t half leave marks. Lawd knows ‘ow she gets that muck off ‘er face.” She shakes her head in disbelief.

“Snowfire Cold Cream.” Edith replies matter-of-factly as she puts aside the gleaming goblet and sets to task on an ornate Georgian lidded serving dish which has been borrowed from Glynes**** silver selection for the soirée.

“You know, in my day, a lady what painted ‘er face was, well, a you-know-what.” The old Cockney charwoman’s eyebrows arch over her eyes, wrinkling her forehead more as she gives Edith a knowing look.

“Yes, well, this is the 1920s, and some ladies paint their faces now.” Edith starts applying Silvo paste to the crimped edge of the serving dish’ lid. “It’s quite fashionable these days you know.”

“Don’t I evva!” Mrs. Boothby utters another barking cough. “It’s indecent the way some girls dress an’ paint their faces nowadays. Not that Miss Lettice is one of ‘em girls. She’s got a bit of class what does our Miss Lettice,” She pauses. “But only just.”

“My poor Mum would be horrified if I came home on my day off wearing makeup.” Edith remarks. “She might even take to scrubbing my face rather than the linens she has to wash.”

Both women chuckle lightly at the thought as they exchange smiles.

“Nah, you don’t need no makeup Edith, love! Youse pretty as a picture, you are, wiv your peaches ’n cream complexion. Youse a right English rose!”

“That’s very kind of you to say so, Mrs. Boothby.” Edith blushes awkwardly at the compliment from the old woman and busies herself even harder with burnishing the lid on the green baize before her.

Mrs. Boothby starts fossicking through her capacious beaded bag before withdrawing her cigarette papers, Swan Vestas and tin of Player’s Navy Cut. Rolling herself a cigarette she reaches over to the deal dresser and grabs a small black ashtray. Lighting her cigarette with a satisfied sigh and one more of her fruity coughs, she wanders over to the open window with her cup of tea in one hand, the ashtray in the other, and her cigarette between her teeth. She deposits the ashtray and her cup and saucer on the wide window ledge.

“You must be the only maid in London, what likes cleanin’ silver, dearie.” she observes as she blows a plume of blueish white smoke out of the window. “How can you get pleasure from cleanin’ somethin’ that’s just gonna get tarnished again?”

“Well, don’t you take pleasure from seeing the drawing room floor beautifully waxed, or the bathroom clean?”

The wry laugh that erupts from Mrs. Boothby’s ends up morphing into more barking, fruity coughs. “Good lawd, no!” She wipes her mouth with a cleanly laundered handkerchief from her pocket. “It’s the same! No sooner are them floors polished, than some la-di-dah toff comes along wiv their dirty boots traipsing muddy prints all over ‘em.” She shakes her head. “Nah! What I take pleasure from, is the thought of the bunse I get skivvying, and what I’m gonna do wiv that bunse.”

“Bunse, Mrs. Boothby?”

“Money, Edith love. Money!”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, it’s the bunse wot get me frough cleanin’, scrubbin’ and skivvying all day, ev’ry day. Do you fink any of the toffs at this party is gonna look at the candlesticks you just polished and fink of the elbow grease you put into makin’ ‘em shine? No!”

“Oh I know, Mrs. Boothby. I don’t expect them to.” Edith replies. “But I’ll know. I want to do my job to the best of my ability. Mum always taught me, and Dad too, that any job doing, is worth doing right. If Miss Lettice or any of her friends notice the nicely polished silver, even if I never hear about it, that is an added bonus.”

Mrs. Boothby shakes her head in mild disbelief. “Youse too good for any of ‘em, dearie.”

“It’s funny you should say that, Mrs. Boothby. It’s what I keep telling Mum about old Widow Hounslow. I told her just the other week that she was too good for her when she told me that she was monogramming the nasty old so-and-so’s pillowcases.”

“Like mum, like daughter, then.” the older Cockney woman observes with a long and noisy slurp of tea.

“I suppose,” Edith smiles shyly.

“’Ere! Thinkin’ of your mum.” Mrs. Boothby points her smoking cigarette end at Edith. “Did she like the teapot you bought ‘er dahwn the Caledonian Markets**** then?”

“Oh yes!” Edith deposits the nicely polished ornamental lid onto the green baize. “Of course, she did exactly what I told you she would do.”

“Keepin’ it for good?”

“She says she’ll use it on Christmas Day when my brother Bert and I are home.”

“Well, Christmas Day is as good a day to use it as any, ‘specially if you and your bruvver is comin’ ‘ome. Better use it once a year, than not at all. Eh?”

“Yes, I suppose you’re right.”

“Course I’m right.” Mrs. Boothby remarks with a satisfied smile, before taking another loud slurp of tea from her cup.

The two women remain in comfortable silence for a little while, each lost in their own thoughts, whilst outside the quiet kitchen, the constant burble of distant London traffic coming Mortimer and Regent Streets and the occasional twitter of a bird carries across the rooftops of Mayfair.

“Well, this ain’t gonna get the barfroom done, nah is it?” the old Cockney char remarks at length with a resigned sigh. She stubs out the butt of her cigarette in the ashtray where it is extinguished with a hiss and a final long curl of blueish white smoke. Downing the last of her tea, she thrusts herself forward forcefully, causing another of her rasping coughs to burst forth from within her diminutive frame.

“Just leave your cup and saucer in the sink, Mrs. Boothby, and I’ll wash it when I’ve finished polishing.” Edith remarks as she picks up a silver spoon to burnish.

“Alight dearie.” she replies. “Ta!”

Depositing the cup and saucer as instructed, the char reaches down below the sink to fetch her box of cleaning agents.

“When you’ve finished the bathroom, let me know, Mrs. Boothby,” Edith adds. “And we’ll borrow the caretaker’s ladder so we can dust and polish the crystal on the chandeliers in the drawing room and dining room.”

“Right-oh, dearie.” she replies.

As Mrs. Boothby is about to walk through the green baize door that leads from the kitchen into the dining room of the flat, Edith pipes up, “I do think of the wages I earn too, Mrs. Boothby.”

“I should ‘ope so, dearie!” she replies with a smile. “I’s glad to ‘ear it though.”

“And why is that?” Edith deposits the spoon and picks up another to apply Silvo paste to.

“Cos, for a minute there I fought I was workin’ wiv a bloomin’ saint!” Her smile changes, betraying her cheeky nature as her eyes light up. “Gawn!”

After the old woman has disappeared through the door with her cleaning box, Edith smiles and starts humming ‘Look for the Silver Lining’ again as she picks up another goblet to polish.

*A charwoman, chargirl, or char, jokingly charlady, is an old-fashioned occupational term, referring to a paid part-time worker who comes into a house or other building to clean it for a few hours of a day or week, as opposed to a maid, who usually lives as part of the household within the structure of domestic service. In the 1920s, chars usually did all the hard graft work that paid live-in domestics would no longer do as they looked for excuses to leave domestic service for better paying work in offices and factories.

**’Look for the Silver Lining’ was a popular 1919 song written by Jerome Kern, popularised by singer Marion Harris in 1921.

***Rosie-Lee is Cockney slang for tea, and it is one of the most well-known of all Cockney rhyming slang.

****Glynes is the grand Georgian family seat of the Chetwynds in Wiltshire, the childhood home of Lettice and the current home of Lettice’s parents, the presiding Viscount and Countess of Wrexham and the heir, their eldest son Leslie.

***** The original Caledonian Market, renown for antiques, buried treasure and junk, was situated in in a wide cobblestoned area just off the Caledonian Road in Islington in 1921 when this story is set. Opened in 1855 by Prince Albert, and originally called the Metropolitan Meat Markets, it was supplementary to the Smithfield Meat Market. Arranged in a rectangle, the market was dominated by a forty six metre central clock tower. By the early Twentieth Century, with the diminishing trade in live animals, a bric-a-brac market developed and flourished there until after the Second World War when it moved to Bermondsey, south of the Thames, where it flourishes today. The Islington site was developed in 1967 into the Market Estate and an open green space called Caledonian Park. All that remains of the original Caledonian Markets is the wonderful Victorian clock tower.

This selection of silver for Edith to polish is a little different to what you might think, for it is made up entirely of 1:12 size dollhouse miniatures from my miniatures collection.

Fun things to look for in this tableau include:

All of Edith’s silver to clean are 1:12 artisan miniatures. The pair of candelabra at the end of Edith’s deal table are sterling silver artisan miniatures from Karen Ladybug Miniatures in England. The silver drinks set and tray is made by artisan Clare Bell at the Clare Bell Brass Works in Maine, in the United States. Each goblet is only one centimetre in height and the decanter at the far end is two- and three-quarter centimetres with the stopper inserted. The sugar castor of sterling silver is one and a half centimetres in height and half a centimetre in diameter. It has holes in its finial actually and actually comes apart like its life size equivalent. The finial unscrews from the body so it can be filled. I am told that icing sugar can pass through the holes in the finial, but I have chosen not to try this party trick myself. A sugar castor was used in Edwardian times to shake sugar onto fruits and desserts. Georgian water jug, the salt and pepper in the foreground and the two Georgian lidded serving dishes were made by Warwick Miniatures in Ireland, who are well known for the quality and detail applied to their pieces.

The green baize cloth on the table is actually part of a green baize cleaning cloth from my linen cupboard, and Edith’s sliver cleaning rag is cut from one of my own old Goddard silver cleaning cloths. The Silvo Silver Polish tub was made by me, and the label is an Edwardian design. Silvo was a British silver cleaning product introduced to market in 1905 by Reckitt and Sons, who also produced Brasso. Silvo has a Royal Warrant.

Edith’s Windsor chair is a hand-turned 1:12 artisan miniature which came from America. Unfortunately, the artist did not carve their name under the seat, but it is definitely an unmarked artisan piece.

On the left hand draining board of the sink in the background stands a box of Sunlight soap. Produced at Port Sunlight in Wirrel, Merseyside, a model village built by Lever Brothers for the workers of their factories, Sunlight was one of the most popular brands of soap created by Lever Brothers in England. Port Sunlight also produced the popular soap brands Lux, and Lifebuoy. Sunlight Soap was first introduced in 1884.

To the left of the sink is the food safe with a mop leaning against it. In the days before refrigeration, or when refrigeration was expensive, perishable foods such as meat, butter, milk and eggs were kept in a food safe. Winter was easier than summer to keep food fresh and butter coolers and shallow bowls of cold water were early ways to keep things like milk and butter cool. A food safe was a wooden cupboard with doors and sides open to the air apart from a covering of fine galvinised wire mesh. This allowed the air to circulate while keeping insects out. There was usually an upper and a lower compartment, normally lined with what was known as American cloth, a fabric with a glazed or varnished wipe-clean surface. Refrigerators, like washing machines were American inventions and were not commonplace in even wealthy upper-class households until well after the Second World War.

Posted by raaen99 on 2021-08-22 06:40:27

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