DOMESTIC SERVICE MEMOIR

Untitled Domestic Servant Memoir

Mollie Moran

UK & Commonwealth rights ex Canada: Penguin

UK publication Spring 2013

All other rights available

Who didn’t watch the most recent series of Downton Abbey and find themselves wondering if they’d been born into that era, where would they have been - 'upstairs' or 'downstairs'? Well, one woman who has been in the unique position of being on both ends of the social scale is 95-year-old Mollie Moran and she is in no doubt which was the more fun place to be.

‘I’d rather be downstairs any day,’ laughs the irrepressible nonagenarian. ‘My life was far richer than those of the fancy ladies upstairs. Who wanted to be stuck in a stuffy drawing room with a life of endless presentations at court and being forced to marry some old rich man? The bosses didn’t know it of course but we had a right giggle below stairs.’

Born in 1916 in Norfolk, Mollie (nee Browne) must be one of the few people left alive today who can recall working in domestic service in the golden years of the early 1930s before the outbreak of the Second World War. She provides a rare and fascinating insight into a world that has long since disappeared. This was a time when the gentry still thought nothing of hiring up to 15 staff to look after one person.  Mollie speaks with no trace of resentment of how the lowly position of servants such as herself helped support the privileged lifestyles of her employers ‘upstairs’. Indeed it was Mollie who rather pitied them, revealing that she had ‘a freedom that they could never enjoy’.