46. One Pair of Hands by Monica Dickens

I stumbled upon a Monica Dickens book a couple of years ago and brought it out to the family seat to read during the xmas holidays.  My mother and sister immediately glommed on to it, one of them took it to read, then passed it on to the other and it never made its way back to me.  Typical.  They loved it so much that they started looking for her other books and this was one they got that I stole back.

It's a biographical telling of the year and a half that Dickens, born into a genteel family and bored with life, decided to get a job as a domestic in the role of the cook.  She recounts in a light and entertaining way each of the houses where she worked (from bourgeois apartments in London to country family estates).  She is admittedly not great at her job but does really try hard and improves.  It's not laugh out loud funny, but it is, as they say, thoroughly delightful and I would add, quite readable.  She has an excellent way of describing the worst kind of people in a way that is damning and yet excusing at the same time.  A large part of her enjoyment in the experience, which she shares with us, is the eavesdropping of the people for which she works.  Some of them are just awful, whereas others, particularly the last family, are quite loveable.

There isn't really anything deep here beyond perhaps a very nice anthropological exploration of the evolving relations between the classes in the context of domestic service in England at the beginning of the 20th century (it was written in 1939).  Underneath, though, you really do see how hard this work is.  You have to have a significant skill set (cooking is huge but also cleaning those old houses required all kinds of knowledge and techniques) but more importantly be really efficient and organized.  It's one thing to make a meal for your own family (a decent enough amount of work), but with these jobs, everything has to be presented correctly and with the exact right stuff.  It's kind of like running a private restaurant, not to mention that you have to be up before everyone else to get the stove running to make the hot water to prep breakfast.

I really enjoyed this book and will now have another name to look for in the gasp literary section of used book stores!