Alice Heskett was born in 1915 and attended the Foundling Hospital School at London and Redhill. At fourteen, she left to train at Chislehurst in housework. While working in her first job as a nanny she met her husband Alfred who worked on a farm in Kent. They had two sons and two daughters together, but sadly the daughters died while still infants.
Alice worked on the farm with her husband until her early thirties, when the farm changed hands and her first son died in a motorbike accident. They first moved to a farm in Oxford, then back to Kent where they got a council house. She extended her family by making friends with work colleagues and their families, and remained very active into her late nineties.
Into the World
‘When, when you’re fourteen, they find you a, you had to go to Chislehurst…and you learned to be a cook, or a lady’s maid or a parlour maid, or anything. … before you went out, you know, to service and, that’s at Chislehurst, we used to have to scrub the back yard and black-lead the drain, and the outside toilet, you had to just wash all the floor and then do it with hearthstone so that when it was dry it all looked lovely and white. … And there was, do all our own washing. There was about three big tubs that washed the sheets and then they went into a big tub for rinsing everything, and out in the yard we had to mangle them in a big old mangle and hang them out. When I left Chislehurst they sent me to Harley Street, to learn to be a cook, and that was my job, and I really was upset because I knew nothing about the world and when it come my half-day I didn’t know what to do, I used to stay in my bedroom and cry my eyes out. I was too frightened to go out, ’cause not knowing anybody and I didn’t know about the world, you know and the maids they just used to say to me, “What’s the matter with you, why don’t you,” and I said, “I don’t know where to go.” and I said, “I don’t know nobody.”‘
Reflections
‘I think that the School made me understand that I must never get into debt, I al… if I couldn’t afford anything I had to go without, and it was very hard because I didn’t get much money when I, I got married. I’m not, can’t run it down because I think they clothed us and fed us and we was really looked after wonderful, and gave us a wonderful life, excepting that was the only thing I could say, sending us out in the big wide world with not knowing a thing or, not having anybody with us to talk to. If we went with one another girl, you had somebody to talk to, and we would perhaps, have found out about life, you know, but, not having anybody at all, don’t matter where I went to work or anything, I knew nobody.’
School Life
‘I had a lovely doll and I never knew whoever gave it to me, except in that, they, I used to co… have to play with it but I always had to take it back to the office and, and I used to say, “They told me my fairy godmother gave it to me,” which was really my own mother, but we never knew that. So, like, Christmastime, I had books, and just “Alice” in it and a page was torn out. And I suppose it was what my mother had sent and they’d torn the page out so I shouldn’t know.’
