Nostalgia: 'We got up at 6:30 in the morning and kept going all day'

Published on Saturday 20 June 2009 11:25

JEAN O'Donnell, 80, lives in Easter Haugh, Oxgangs. She grew up in Douglas Water, Lanarkshire, and moved to Edinburgh when she was about 18 to go into service.

"At the beginning, I was a house table maid at a doctor's house in Eglinton Crescent in the West End. It was a big house and, of course, coming from the west, I got a book on how to speak and talk correctly. I had to answer the phone and I don't think I was very good at it!

"I got one pound, eight shillings and six pence. I used to stay in the servants' quarters – we got up in the morning about 6:30 and you put on your uniform. You used to wear a wrap-around in the morning, and a cap and apron in the afternoon.

"You'd to call her 'Madam' and him 'Sir'. You went down and cleaned their fireplace and you lit the fire and then you kept going all the time.

"For the two hours in the afternoon you were allowed off, you were that tired you were glad to sleep."

After that, and before leaving work to get married, she worked at another house in Whitehouse Loan, where she recalls that some of her domestic skills left something to be desired. She says: "I was supposed to be kitchen/housekeeper but I used to go through the hedge to this other house and the old lady in there was a great cook – I used to buy her chocolate gingers so she'd bake the mince pies at Christmas. I was hopeless!

"When I look back you just wonder how you did it. I was just off one day a week, on Wednesdays, and every month I got a long weekend when I went back home.

"When I had the Wednesday off, we had the tram cars and I used to go on the tram cars, up and down, because I'd never seen anything like that in the country. But I think we were more contented than they are now. You just had to get on with things and make the best of it."