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WINSTON CHURCHILL'S valet always said the great man could not dress himself: “He sat there like a dummy and you dressed him.” Whether anyone ironed the wartime prime minister's shoe laces, washed his loose change or made sure the yolks in his boiled eggs were centred, Lucy Lethbridge does not say. But as she shows in this absorbing history, much of it in the words of servants, such things were the rule in some houses.
WINSTON CHURCHILL的男仆總是說，杰出的男人無法自己更衣：“他笨拙地坐在那里，讓你給他穿衣。” Lucy Lethbridge并沒說戰(zhàn)時(shí)是否有仆人為首相熨鞋帶、洗零錢、確保餐桌上有水煮蛋蛋黃。但她在書里展現(xiàn)的這段歷史引人入勝，用仆人的話來說，這些都是作為仆人的義務(wù)。
This is the extreme end of Ms Lethbridge's survey—a vivid sweep from ducal palace to suburban villa, from lordly butler to Barnardo's orphan, from decaying gentry and aspiring middles to the foreign nannies and cleaners of today. Her subject is many-branched and full of pressing issues, not least, the status of housework itself. All the same, there is a peculiar fascination about the old order, with its skivvies and tweenies and gentlemen's gentlemen. This is where the class system most resembled a theatre of the absurd, where maids became invisible by turning their faces to the wall as their master walked by. Virginia Woolf captures the ethos brilliantly in “Mrs Dalloway”, where a society lunch is apparently magicked into existence. Tables self-spread with glass and silver, food self-cooks and is served, not by working women, but by handmaidens, “adepts in a mystery”.
Ms Lethbridge向我們展現(xiàn)了截然不同的生活場景——從公爵官邸里忙碌的大掃除到僻靜的郊區(qū)住宅，從貴族男管家到Barnardo（創(chuàng)辦孤兒院的英國慈善家）的孤兒，從衰落的貴族、興起的中產(chǎn)階級到外國保姆，如今的清潔工。所列議題廣而緊迫，尤其是家務(wù)勞動(dòng)本身的情形。但過去關(guān)于下等傭人、女仆、貼身男仆的約定俗成也同樣令人好奇。 這就是階級體系與荒誕派戲劇最為相似的部分，一看到主人，女仆們就要扭頭臉貼墻變成隱形人。Virginia Woolf在《達(dá)洛維夫人》一書中絕妙地捕捉了這種社會(huì)現(xiàn)象。社交午餐何其充滿了魔力，餐桌自己擺上了杯具和刀叉，食物自己煮好端上桌。其實(shí)這些并非職業(yè)女性所為，而是出自“善于隱形”的女仆之手。
Ms Lethbridge is good on the mystifications that enveloped both employers and employed. Most servants were drudges or “slaveys”. It was estimated that a maid carried three tonnes of hot water up and down stairs each week. And they were expected to be grateful for a place in a home rather than a factory (often they were). A home, so the myth went, was a haven of moral purity and order. Even its furniture was sanctified. According to one advice book, a maid should keep a place in her heart for it, next only to family. No amount of digging with chapped fingers into greasy saucepans (dishcloths were frowned on) could shake the employers' sense of conferring a privilege.
Ms Lethbridge擅長刻畫雇主與傭工身上的神秘莫測。大多數(shù)仆人過去做過苦力，當(dāng)過“奴隸”。據(jù)估計(jì)，一個(gè)女仆每周要拎三公噸的熱水樓上樓下地忙碌。對此他們心存感激，因?yàn)樗麄兛梢宰≡诜Q作家的地方，而不是住在工廠（通常他們都是住那里）。家如同神話般被視為純潔的道德和秩序的庇護(hù)所。就連家具都充滿了神圣感。一本指南里寫道，女仆應(yīng)當(dāng)忠于它們僅次于忠于這個(gè)家庭。用粗糙的雙手（而不是抹布）清洗深油鍋，會(huì)讓雇主覺得榮譽(yù)盡失。
Nor could anything modernise them. American innovations, such as rubber gloves, detergents and vacuum cleaners, took decades to arrive in Britain. True cachet lay in the old and customary. There is a wonderful story of footmen having to remove for cleaning all the electric lamps each morning, as if they were oil lamps. As for Lloyd George's 1911 bill to bring in compulsory insurance and unemployment benefits for servants, there was uproar; the delicate balance between employer and servant would be destroyed, it was said.
沒有事物能讓英國傭人與時(shí)俱進(jìn)。美國的發(fā)明創(chuàng)造，像是橡膠手套、洗滌劑、吸塵器，過了幾十年才在英國流行起來。老派的作風(fēng)習(xí)慣體現(xiàn)了真正的貴族威望。有個(gè)有趣的故事是說一名男仆每早起來都要卸下燈泡并清潔，搞得它們跟煤油燈似的。就在1911年，Lloyd George專門為仆人開設(shè)法定保險(xiǎn)與失業(yè)津貼一事引起騷動(dòng)；輿論說這將打破雇主與傭人間微妙的平衡。
Victorian and early-20th-century domestics were the largest single group of workers in Britain after agricultural labourers. Yet histories of the working class have neglected them. Scorned by their peers as flunkeys, they felt constrained by their position from doing much more than sing rudely over the washing-up. In telling their story so fully and humanely, Ms Lethbridge manages to suggest what the words to that song might have been.
維多利亞及二十世紀(jì)初期的英國，傭人是繼勞農(nóng)群體后最大的工人群體。而工人階級的史料中卻遺漏了這一群體。同階層的工人蔑視他們，認(rèn)為他們是奴仆，社會(huì)地位讓他們無路可尋，只能邊洗餐盤邊唱悲歌。Ms Lethbridge通過完整人道的故事敘述，成功說明了那些歌聲到底意味著什么。
