The Cook's Tale

Told in the first person by a woman who lived the hard life as a cook in a number of England's country houses, this is the true story of what life was really like below the stairs

People talk about feeling as if the modern world is split into "us and them" but they don't know what they're talking about. If you worked as a cook or as any kind of domestic servant when I was young you knew what "us and them" really meant.

In some houses in the English countryside, the cook had a lot more to do than just the cooking—and Nancy Jackman experienced it all. She was expected to kill the chickens, oversee the pig-sticker, deal with the tradesmen, and shout at the kitchen maids. Born in 1907 in a remote Norfolk village, she left school at the age of 14 to work as a cook for a local farmer. He forced her to stand in the rain when she made a mistake, physically abused her, and eventually tried to rape her—and that was only her first such experience in the world below the stairs. In this at times heartbreaking, at times hilarious, tell-all about the life of a cook and a kitchen maid, Nancy goes into detail about what it was like working for people who had no idea how to care for themselves—and how deeply things in the world of upstairs/downstairs changed in the 1950s, following the end of the Second World War.

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