Escape from Domestic Service

This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Sarah Housden of Norfolk Adult Education’s reminiscence team on behalf of Daisy Trzaskowski and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

I was put out to work to domestic service when I was fourteen and it was four years after that when the war started. I remember sitting in the church on Sunday morning at 11 o’clock and hearing them say “We are at war with Germany”. The vicar gave out the news. We were sitting at the back in the servants’ seats, and the Hall people sat at the front with their names on their pews.

All the people in domestic service were told that they would have to do some war work. They told me that if you went into the Forces you would be a ground sheet for the service men, so I decided that I would join the Red Cross and do some voluntary work in the evening. I was quite a junior to the other people, and had a lot of odd jobs. They sent me one day into Norwich during the Blitz, to bath an old lady who was over 90. I was quite inexperienced but they told me what I’d got to do. I’d got to wash her ears out, wash her mouth out, wash her tongue out and bath her. Well, I did this, and when it come to cutting her toe nails they were awful. See they couldn’t get her into hospital and there was no care in those days. Well, she died about a week after I’d been and I was sure I had something to do with it.

We had to study Air Raid Precautions, war gases, invalid cookery and child welfare in the Red Cross. We would work all day and then go fire watching at night. I mean, you never had your clothes off hardly, and if you were at home you didn’t want to take them off in case there was an air raid and you had to go down the shelters. Eventually I left domestic service and went full time in the ARP where I was mostly on Red Cross call but would do anything they wanted really.

One April during the war, Norwich was bombed on the Monday, the Wednesday and the Friday of one week, and we had to come up and help wherever we could. Norwich was terrible, I hardly recognised the place. There was all firemen’s pipes across the road and one part of the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital had all the patients out on the grass. They hadn’t actually had a direct hit, but they had to come outside in case the place collapsed.

One night we were called out to collect a naked service man. We took blankets and took him back to his base. We later found out that the woman’s husband had come back unexpectedly and this man had jumped out of the window.

I lived on the edge of an airfield – at Pulham St Mary, where the R33 was which was known as the Pulham Pig. I used to go to the airfield for dances. I asked mother if I could go and she said that I could but if I got myself into trouble I would have to go to the workhouse, so I was scared out of my life. I met this bloke twice and mother said that he should come over for a coffee because she wanted to know who I was mixing with. When he came round there were two or three other Americans there, as my mother loved the Americans and used to wash for them. When we went in they all stood up and I wondered whatever was going on. Anyway, afterwards, when we went outside, he said: “I think we’d better end this friendship Daisy ‘cos I’m their padre”. When I told my father he said “You always were a clever little devil weren’t you”, and I laughed.

One night four Americans came to my mother’s door with four chickens and asked if she would cook them for them to eat after they came out of the pub. She said that she would pluck them and cook them, but that she hadn’t got any butter, so one of them went back and fetched a box of butter. Later they sat in the kitchen and ate the chicken. Mother didn’t feel like washing up that night so she stacked the plates up and left them. There was no hot water in those days. Next morning a policeman came knocking on mother’s door and said that a neighbour had lost four chickens and had she heard anything? She said that she hadn’t heard anything, and all this time the chicken bones still lay there in the kitchen on the plates.

Mother had a big house because there had been fourteen of us, but by this time, some of my brothers and sisters had left home and we had spare rooms. This meant that we had to take in some evacuees. We thought they were really strange, because they had never seen wild flowers before and they got all the jam jars they could lay their hands on and had them standing on the windowsills crammed with primroses, violets and cowslips.

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