雙語故事:僕人自述 閣樓下的生活

WINSTON CHURCHILL'S valet always said the great man could not dress himself: “He sat there like a dummy and you dressed him.” Whether anyone ironed the wartime prime minister's shoe laces, washed his loose change or made sure the yolks in his boiled eggs were centred, Lucy Lethbridge does not say. But as she shows in this absorbing history, much of it in the words of servants, such things were the rule in some houses.

WINSTON CHURCHILL的男僕總是說，傑出的男人無法自己更衣：“他笨拙地坐在那裏，讓你給他穿衣。” Lucy Lethbridge並沒說戰時是否有僕人爲首相熨鞋帶、洗零錢、確保餐桌上有水煮蛋蛋黃。但她在書裏展現的這段歷史引人入勝，用僕人的話來說，這些都是作爲僕人的義務。

This is the extreme end of Ms Lethbridge's survey—a vivid sweep from ducal palace to suburban villa, from lordly butler to Barnardo's orphan, from decaying gentry and aspiring middles to the foreign nannies and cleaners of today. Her subject is many-branched and full of pressing issues, not least, the status of housework itself. All the same, there is a peculiar fascination about the old order, with its skivvies and tweenies and gentlemen's gentlemen. This is where the class system most resembled a theatre of the absurd, where maids became invisible by turning their faces to the wall as their master walked by. Virginia Woolf captures the ethos brilliantly in “Mrs Dalloway”, where a society lunch is apparently magicked into existence. Tables self-spread with glass and silver, food self-cooks and is served, not by working women, but by handmaidens, “adepts in a mystery”.

Ms Lethbridge向我們展現了截然不同的生活場景——從公爵官邸裏忙碌的大掃除到僻靜的郊區住宅，從貴族男管家到Barnardo（創辦孤兒院的英國慈善家）的孤兒，從衰落的貴族、興起的中產階級到外國保姆，如今的清潔工。所列議題廣而緊迫，尤其是家務勞動本身的情形。但過去關於下等傭人、女僕、貼身男僕的約定俗成也同樣令人好奇。 這就是階級體系與荒誕派戲劇最爲相似的部分，一看到主人，女僕們就要扭頭臉貼牆變成隱形人。Virginia Woolf在《達洛維夫人》一書中絕妙地捕捉了這種社會現象。社交午餐何其充滿了魔力，餐桌自己擺上了杯具和刀叉，食物自己煮好端上桌。其實這些並非職業女性所爲，而是出自“善於隱形”的女僕之手。

Ms Lethbridge is good on the mystifications that enveloped both employers and employed. Most servants were drudges or “slaveys”. It was estimated that a maid carried three tonnes of hot water up and down stairs each week. And they were expected to be grateful for a place in a home rather than a factory (often they were). A home, so the myth went, was a haven of moral purity and order. Even its furniture was sanctified. According to one advice book, a maid should keep a place in her heart for it, next only to family. No amount of digging with chapped fingers into greasy saucepans (dishcloths were frowned on) could shake the employers' sense of conferring a privilege.

Ms Lethbridge擅長刻畫僱主與傭工身上的神祕莫測。大多數僕人過去做過苦力，當過“奴隸”。據估計，一個女僕每週要拎三公噸的熱水樓上樓下地忙碌。對此他們心存感激，因爲他們可以住在稱作家的地方，而不是住在工廠（通常他們都是住那裏）。家如同神話般被視爲純潔的道德和秩序的庇護所。就連傢俱都充滿了神聖感。一本指南里寫道，女僕應當忠於它們僅次於忠於這個家庭。用粗糙的雙手（而不是抹布）清洗深油鍋，會讓僱主覺得榮譽盡失。

Nor could anything modernise them. American innovations, such as rubber gloves, detergents and vacuum cleaners, took decades to arrive in Britain. True cachet lay in the old and customary. There is a wonderful story of footmen having to remove for cleaning all the electric lamps each morning, as if they were oil lamps. As for Lloyd George's 1911 bill to bring in compulsory insurance and unemployment benefits for servants, there was uproar; the delicate balance between employer and servant would be destroyed, it was said.

沒有事物能讓英國傭人與時俱進。美國的發明創造，像是橡膠手套、洗滌劑、吸塵器，過了幾十年纔在英國流行起來。老派的作風習慣體現了真正的貴族威望。有個有趣的故事是說一名男僕每早起來都要卸下燈泡並清潔，搞得它們跟煤油燈似的。就在1911年，Lloyd George專門爲僕人開設法定保險與失業津貼一事引起騷動；輿論說這將打破僱主與傭人間微妙的平衡。

Victorian and early-20th-century domestics were the largest single group of workers in Britain after agricultural labourers. Yet histories of the working class have neglected them. Scorned by their peers as flunkeys, they felt constrained by their position from doing much more than sing rudely over the washing-up. In telling their story so fully and humanely, Ms Lethbridge manages to suggest what the words to that song might have been.

維多利亞及二十世紀初期的英國，傭人是繼勞農羣體後最大的工人羣體。而工人階級的史料中卻遺漏了這一羣體。同階層的工人蔑視他們，認爲他們是奴僕，社會地位讓他們無路可尋，只能邊洗餐盤邊唱悲歌。Ms Lethbridge通過完整人道的故事敘述，成功說明了那些歌聲到底意味着什麼。