Servants in those days were a) necessary because there were no labour-saving devices at all, and b) they were a dime-a-dozen, I mean they were... £20, £30 a year is what a housemaid cost in those days. My parents married on £1100 a year and they had a staff of four, increased to five when I was born. They had a cook, my father had a valet, my mother had a maid and there was a housemaid or perhaps two housemaids. And that was normal. I say, there was no labour-saving devices, no nice easy vacuum cleaners and that sort of thing. It was a major battle in the kitchen, of course, it was far more complicated on a huge, great Aga stove. It wasn't even an Aga, but it was an enormous, great stove that looked like an Aga but it wasn't nearly as good as an Aga.

When I was a small boy living in Gower Street, I don't think we had a refrigerator at all. We had a larder where things were covered with wire netting to keep the flies off, but that was the only cool place we had. We had a very primitive refrigerator at Bognor which worked on gas. It was brown and worked on gas. But we did have ice in our drinks at Bognor, I remember that; I don't know if we ever did much in London in Gower Street.