[Chapter Seven]
Saint Hill Episodes: The Bed-Making Situation
Part One of Two
A local woman acted as the Hubbard’s housekeeper. She had been with them for years, since long before I joined them, well established in her position in the household and in her close relationship with Mary Sue. I believe she was in considerable awe of “Dr. Hubbard”, as he was then formally known. Anybody might be in awe of such a formidable mountain of a personality around whom the winds could roar and the storms would blow.
I’ll call her “Mrs. Smith”, which is not her real name, because I don’t want to feel that I’m invading her privacy. She is long gone and although anyone is free to write about another, I don’t have a good reason to glue the memory of her to the notoriety assigned by many to her employers. She deserves to be left in peace. At the same time, she is part of a story showing how her employer dealt with an episode that reveals more about him than about her.
The duties of this housekeeper, Mrs. Smith, consisted mostly of doing the daily maid-work in the house; she also did the shopping for the kitchen and for anything Mary Sue might need her to get locally. She handled her accounts directly with Mary Sue. Another local woman came to the Manor a couple of days a week to see to the laundry; this woman reported to Mrs. Smith, and together they managed the Hubbards’ laundry needs.
Mrs. Smith was definitely a local person. She looked to me to have been a farmer’s daughter, brought up in the farmhouse. She might have been a farm labourer’s daughter, for all I know, but she carried herself with an assertiveness and alertness that showed she had no reservations about where she had come from and felt unquestionably entitled to her fair share of respect within her circle. I had no idea of her history and didn’t ask her about it, but I never questioned my assumption that she was altogether a countrywoman, quite distinct from a townswoman.
Mrs. Smith was small of stature, not thin, but solid and tending to wiriness. She strode purposefully, always. On duty, she wore a dark-blue polyester or nylon house coat, sensible shoes, stockings, and a remarkably—even aggressively—plain white blouse buttoned to the neck. Her hair was of an ordinary, dull-grey colour, clean and tidy, combed but never seen attentively dressed. One didn’t come across her with a hat except for the practical needs of rain or cold. For rain she wore a plain plastic pleated hood tied under her chin, and for the cold, a woollen cap.
Her face was round. Its striking feature, to my eyes, was the jutting lower jaw with its masterful chin and decidedly firm set of mouth. So straight was the mouth that it’s hard to recall her lips. They tightly and tautly shut out any sign of softness or tenderness, although, aside from her fond friendship with Mary Sue and her cheery relations with the children (and with most people around her), I was never in a position to see her in intimate moments.
I think most people, knowing her and her quiet, gentle old husband, a slow, stooping, elderly fellow, a labourer in the Saint Hill estate department, would take it that in their domesticity the wife wore the trousers with iron fists, and that any tenderness he might get he would have to earn and would win only after hard work. Neither of them looked as though he did that work too often. One could believe, though, that once she had established her tyranny and was allowed to maintain it, she would generally exercise it in kindly fashion.
She did not give the impression of being a bully, just of being a naturally dominating woman wise enough to pick boundaries according to her resources and her aims. Her aims seem to prefer a minimum of avoidable friction. At work in the Manor and, I would certainly suppose, in association with the other women in her life, she would cooperate cheerfully enough; once she had grasped what was needed from her she would set about producing it, needing no prodding. She would assuredly have definite opinions about what might be going on amongst her outside women associates, but Mrs. Smith would keep her considerations to herself whilst in their friendly company, perhaps having plenty to say to a confidante, later. I always assumed she had plenty to say away from the Manor about me and about my performance as her immediate superior but didn’t bother myself too much about it. She was not a gossip.
The other striking feature in her face was its look of constant alertness. She was seemingly very careful to evaluate her position in the interchange of the moment. It was important to her to see what was coming and to know whether what was coming was to be good or bad for her. This in itself can be important to all of us from time to time; constant alertness to possibilities and consequences are part of life. For Mrs. Smith, it was as though a large and heavy hand was permanently raised in front of her, a hand that had been hitting her too hard until she’d learned how to put on the act that pacified its owner. And in the script I’m writing for her (with no basis but my own subjective impressions), that act consisted of adopting some suitable immediate cheeriness for the purpose of transforming the gathering storm into something sunnier—so the hand would relax. But Mrs. Smith lived forever in the shadow of that hand.
Thus, behind her cheery alertness was a vulnerability to which, for some reason, I found myself sensitive. I wanted not to invade it. I respected the courage with which this human being had found her way to keep a threat at bay, a process that fulfilled and affirmed her self-respect. Further, it succeeded in limiting the damage threatened by the older person to herself and to himself (it felt like a heavy male hand) and to the family. She had learned to face a demon and had borne the cost to her peace of mind.
One of the saddest aspects of human existence can be the ignorance of the abusive adult as to the depth and range of disturbance brought to the totality of the life of the abused child. And one of the most serious aspects, too:
But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.
[The New Testament, Matthew 18:2-6 King James Version]
All of this detail about Mrs. Smith is partly a tribute to her and partly to introduce the episode of the Situation involving her good self and the bed and the e-meter (the last wielded by me). Before proceeding with this episode I need to add to the detail some particulars of how she and I related personally.
I had come to the Manor already a committed Scientologist to whom L. Ron Hubbard was Supreme Leader in every way. As a Scientologist I was extremely privileged by my closeness to Ron (as he was universally known in those days within the group), and conscious of my privilege. Mrs. Smith was in the Manor entirely as a non-Scientologist; her presence and her work in the Manor had nothing to do with Scientology at all. As far as she was concerned, her employers’ involvement with that group was incidental. She was in awe of Dr. Hubbard and devoted to Mrs. Hubbard as people, not as Scientologists, let alone as the two seniormost Scientologists of all.
The work for herself and for her husband must have been a boon to her at their ages. It provided good money, perhaps to supplement their state pensions (she looked quite old enough to be getting one, and he certainly was) and to add to whatever nest-egg Mrs. Smith was sitting on. She was not about to throw away such a great blessing.
The difference between us, I have to confess, encouraged me to put myself on one level in the household, relative to the Hubbards, and Mrs Smith on quite a lower level. To tell the awful truth, I allowed myself to tolerate Mrs. Smith. I tolerated her because she did her best to do a good job and in doing so she satisfied our employers. There was no need for me to intervene in any aspect of her performance. Could I have been more grateful and acknowledging of her than I was? Most certainly. Could I have gone out of my way to be constantly socially pleasant, as Mary Sue could do? Yes, but I didn’t, although I was never unpleasant to her that I can recall. All the same, I did stoutly maintain a distance that could not have been pleasing to her. She must have seen that I did not relish personal closeness, even though I felt I was as supportive to her in her job as she herself called on me to be.
I held a distance from Mrs. Smith partly because she was so far away from me in terms of Scientology. She was a non-believer, deliberately ignoring the subject and purpose of her employers’ existence. I didn’t look down on her for this but she put herself on the other side of the room, so to speak. It wasn’t my place to persuade her over to our side of the room; if she made no move, neither would I.
There were other dissonances between us. Mrs. Smith had a rather shrill voice which she could throw at one with a fair bit of energy, as though enforcing the cheerfulness she considered a necessary part of living. Unfortunately, the shrillness, the volume, and the “cheerful” energy hit over-sensitive nerves in my ears that were uncomfortable with the impact. I could usually manage a polite face but I could not encourage conversation past a certain point. I just didn’t have it in me.
There was a certain aesthetic about the Hubbards themselves and about their lovely home. It appealed to me greatly. Had Mrs. Smith gone about her duties without talking to me, and talking quietly to others in my hearing, she would not have interfered with what I valued about the aesthetics. Alas, she pointed up that the Hubbards’ giving her an important place in their home had encouraged her in her belief in noisy and insistent good cheer. She made herself look and sound a bit vulgar. Well, quite vulgar. I was snobbish enough to notice it, and to notice it much too often. After a while, I began to blanket out Mrs. Smith’s cheerful but grating noise.
And so, to some degree, I blanketed out my responsibility to offer Mrs. Smith help with any difficulty she might have in serving our master to the best of her ability, and for her own peace of mind and satisfaction as well as for his. I’ll show in the next post, in which Mrs. Smith gets on the wrong side of The Boss, how in the end he got me involved with her—not with any good sense I might have, but with my e-meter.
© Kenneth G. Urquhart, 2018
