I can well recall the tone of my mother’s voice when she informed the maids that they could have what was left of the pudding, or scolded the cook for some carelessness. It was a forced hardness, made almost harsh by embarrassment. My mother was _gemütlich_ by nature. She would, I believe, have given a lot to be able to dispense with servants altogether. They were a foreign body in the house. I remember what the servants’ bedrooms used to look like. By a convention of the times they were the only rooms in the house that had no carpet or linoleum; they were on the top landing on the dullest side of the house. The gaunt, unfriendly-looking beds, and the hanging-cupboards with faded cotton curtains, instead of wardrobes with glass doors as in the other rooms. All this uncouthness made me think of the servants as somehow not quite human. The type of servant that came was not very good; only those with not particularly good references would apply for a situation where there were ten in the family. And because it was such a large house, and there was hardly a single tidy person in the household, they were constantly giving notice. There was too much work they said. So that the tendency to think of them as only half human was increased; they never had time to get fixed as human beings. The bridge between the servants and ourselves was our nurse. She gave us her own passport on the first day she came: ‘Emily Dykes is my name; England is my nation; Netheravon is my dwelling-place, and Christ is my salvation.’ Though she called us Miss and Master she spoke it in no servant tone. In a practical way she came to be more to us than our mother. I began to despise her at about the age of twelve—she was then nurse to my younger brothers—when I found that my education was now in advance of hers, and that if I struggled with her I was able to trip her up and bruise her quite easily. Besides, she was a Baptist and went to chapel; I realized by that time that the Baptists were, like the Wesleyans and Methodists, the social inferiors of the members of the Church of England. I was brought up with a horror of Catholicism and this remained with me for a very long time. It was not a case of once a Protestant always a Protestant, but rather that when I ceased to be Protestant I was further off than ever from being Catholic. I discarded Protestantism in horror of its Catholic element. My religious training developed in me a great capacity for fear (I was perpetually tortured by the fear of hell), a superstitious conscience and a sexual embarrassment. I was very long indeed in getting rid of all this. Nancy Nicholson and I (later on in this story) were most careful not to give our four children an early religious training. They were not even baptized.