Nancy Jackman was born in 1907 in a remote Norfolk village. Her father was a ploughman, her mother a former servant who struggled to make ends meet in a cottage so small that access to the single upstairs room was via a ladder. The pace of life in that long-vanished world was dictated by the slow, heavy tread of the farm horse and though Nancy’s earliest memories were of a green, sunny countryside still unspoiled by the motorcar, she also knew at first hand the harshness of a world where the elderly were forced to break stones on the roads and where school children were regularly beaten. Nancy left school at the age of twelve to work for a local farmer who forced her to stand in the rain when she made a mistake, physically abused her and eventually tried to rape her. Nancy continued to work as a cook until the 1950s, sustained by her determination to escape and find a life of her own.
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Reviews
Praise for the Lives of Servants
Reading this fascinating book is likely to unleash anyone's inner Bolshevik...!
...a fascinating portrait of the drudgery and servility of a domestic's life.
...captures the subtelties of the English class system to an extraordinary degree.
If the Brothers Grimm had ended Cinderella where she was being forced to clean the house by her stepsisters, they might have accidentally been writing Rose Plummer's biography. The maid's story makes for harsh, heartbreaking, fascinating reading.