September 28

Below Stairs: The Classic Kitchen Maid's Memoir that Inspired "Upstairs, Downstairs" and "Downton Abbey" (2012, originally published 1968)
By Margaret Powell

Margaret Langley is one of seven children born into a poor family in Hove, UK in 1907.  They never seem to have enough to eat or enough fuel to heat their home.  A bright girl, she leaves school at age 13, works briefly at a laundry, then enters service as a kitchen maid at 14, starting her day in the predawn dark and working till evening; she works her way up to cook at a small house at 18.  She witnesses the changes from lowly servanthood to respected and valued employee.  She leaves service in the 1930s to get married and raise a family.  She tells it like it is!  Though she didn't work on large estates like Downton Abbey, her experiences in aristocratic townhouses is a very readable window into the servants' world.