Bryce Courtenay: The Potato Factory

Mary even understood that she could learn to keep her big mouth shut. Though in this last endeavour she was never to prove very successful and she would privately, and to the secret delight of the junior maids below stairs, declare the verse by the great Dr Watts to be a load of utter shit.

Before her ultimate undoing she had served in two further households. In the first, the master of the house had left her several gold sovereigns richer, and in the second she had been promoted to the position of abigail, that is, lady's maid, and the youngest son in the family had been inducted by her into the delights of Aphrodite in return for lessons in reading and writing.

When two years later this scion of the family went up to Oxford, Mary was promptly, though discreetly, dismissed, again with an excellent reference and, as a result of her lover's tuition, a small knowledge of Latin and a facility at writing which was contained in a good copperplate hand studiously learned from a copybook he had bought for her. On return from the Michaelmas term her boy lover was said to have wept openly at the discovery that his dearest mumsy was now attended by a flaccid and cheerless personal maid in her late forties.

Mary's next billet was to prove her final undoing. Appointed as upstairs maid she soon found herself at odds with the family nanny, a middle-aged lady of imperious manner known as Nanny Smith. Well established in the family, the old woman exercised considerable power over all the other servants. She soon took a dislike to the new young maid, who seemed much too forward and confident around the male servants in the house and was not in the least afraid to speak before she was spoken to.

For her part Mary accepted Nanny Smith's carping instructions and held her tongue. But one day the old girl accused her of poisoning her cat, an aged tabby named Waterloo Smith who coughed up fur balls on the Persian rugs and stumbled about with a constant wheeze and permanently dripping nose. Mary had made no attempt to conceal her dislike for this creature, who returned the compliment by arching its back and hissing at her whenever they met along a corridor or in one of the many upstairs rooms.

'You ought to be dead and buried, you miserable moggy!' Mary would hiss back. Her abhorrence for Nanny Smith's cat was soon the joke of the below stairs staff and no doubt her dislike was soon communicated to Waterloo Smith's ill-tempered owner.

Then one morning Waterloo Smith went missing. Nanny Smith had placed him as usual on a broad upstairs window ledge to catch the morning sun and upon her return an hour later he was nowhere to be seen.

Mary, together with the second upstairs maid, was made to search every cupboard, nook and cranny and under each bed and, in the unlikely event that the disabled creature had somehow managed to negotiate the stairs, each of the four levels of the downstairs area of the house.

Bishop, the butler, had ordered the footman, the stable boy and Old Jacob the gardener to inspect the lavender bushes which grew forty feet below the window ledge where Waterloo Smith had been sunning himself. When this yielded nothing the speculation that foul play was involved started to grow. While nothing was said, Mary's well-known dislike for the cat made her the prime suspect.

By evening it became apparent that Waterloo Smith had disappeared quite into thin air, and his distraught owner retired to her bedroom, where her unconstrained weeping could be heard by all who worked above stairs.

Mary was given the task of taking a supper tray to the old lady and upon knocking on Nanny Smith's door the weeping from the other side immediately increased in volume.

'Come in,' the old woman's tremulous voice cried.

'Cook 'as made you a nice bit 'o tea and 'opes you feels better,' Mary said, placing the tray down beside Nanny Smith, who lay on the bed with a silk scarf covering her head.

At the sound of Mary's voice Nanny Smith sat bolt upright, the scarf falling to the floor. 'You did it, didn't you! You killed him!' she screamed, pointing a trembling finger at Mary.

Mary's jaw dropped in astonishment at this pronouncement and as she bent to retrieve the scarf the old woman continued, 'You horrid, horrid girl, pushed my pussy! I shall see that you are dismissed at once!'

Mary should have immediately panicked at Nanny Smith's words, for this time she was in no position to negotiate. The old cow's word against her own left her in no doubt as to who would prevail. Then Nanny Smith snatched the scarf from Mary's hands in such a rude manner that Mary lost her temper and a deep flush overtook her face.

'I never laid a finger on your bloody cat! Though I must say it's good riddance to bad rubbish, if you ask me, with 'im hissin' and wheezin' and doin'

'is mess all over the place! I 'ope 'e broke 'is bloody neck!' The offending words were barely out before Mary regretted them.

The following morning, in the manner to which his breed had been trained for countless generations, Samuel the family spaniel politely presented Waterloo Smith, stiff as a board, to Mrs Hodge the cook at the kitchen door.

Waterloo Smith's fur was matted and covered in fresh dirt, suggesting that Samuel, finding the dead cat in the lavender bushes, had contrived a hasty burial in some remoter part of the kitchen garden, but that later his conscience got the better of him and he'd repented by laying the dead cat at the feet of the cook.

Later at the inquest held in the library, Mr Bishop, seeking to console Nanny Smith, opened the proceedings by suggesting that the unfortunate creature might have died from natural causes – a fit, or convulsions or similar which had by natural movement catapulted Waterloo Smith from the window ledge?

However, the dead cat's distraught owner, red-eyed from weeping, wouldn't countenance this suggestion and declared flatly that her darling had been brutally murdered.

Nanny Smith glared meaningfully at Mary, who had been summoned to the library together with the other upstairs servants. 'We all know who the murderer is, don't we?' she sniffed and then buried her head in her hands and wept copiously.

Turning to Mary, Mr Bishop enquired, 'Mary, the room in which Waterloo Smith was last seen is your responsibility to clean. Did you see the cat on the window ledge?'

'I saw 'im, Mr Bishop! But I swear to Gawd I never laid a finger on 'im! I swear it on me dead mother's grave!'

With no further evidence to go on, Mr Bishop terminated the proceedings and Waterloo Smith's murderer, if such a person existed, was never apprehended. In fact, Mr Bishop had been correct in the first place; Waterloo Smith had suffered a violent fit followed by a stroke, the contractions of which had thrown him from the sun-bathed window sill to a merciful death in the lavender bushes four storeys below.

However, Nanny Smith was not to be thwarted and she caused such a disturbance with the master and mistress of the house that the butler was summoned and Mary, despite her protestations of innocence and Mr Bishop himself believing her not guilty, was stripped of her starched pinny and mob cap and banished below stairs to the laundry.

The laundry was the most onerous task among the skilled domestic duties and therefore the most humble and disliked. But Mary, who had never been afraid of work, discovered that if she worked hard she had time for reading and for practising her handwriting. Besides, the laundry was the warmest place in the big cold house and, like most children from the rookeries, she suffered greatly from chilblains.

Mary remained in the laundry for three years, even taking pride in her work, in starching and ironing, removing stains by bleaching with the juice of lemons and in mending, so that she became a useful, though not excellent, seamstress. By this time her reading and writing skills were much enhanced and she had graduated from the penny papers that pandered to the taste of the lower classes for bloodthirsty plots and overblown romances, to serious literature. Mr Bishop, feeling guilty for having politely complied with her demotion to the laundry without positive proof that she had pushed the cat from the window sill, negotiated for Mary to use the master's library. The master had agreed to this, providing the books were always taken from the shelves in his presence and after he had closely inspected the state of her hands.