Book Description
We had come by train, carrying our kitbags—two orphans, fourteen and fifteen—evacuated from a war zone in 1944 and sent to the countryside deep in Sussex. We had not thought much about our destination nor the reasons that others must have had to send us en route. We were naïve children to be servants dispatched from an orphanage. So we went where we were sent. We were too young to understand, or for that matter, to have choices.' Following her previous memoir, Matron's Garden, we find Anne—a child raised in a government orphanage and accustomed only to its rigid rules and pecking order—is free from the orphanage's clutches at last. Anne, along with her companion, Aggie, is suddenly transferred into service to a country gentry manor. There she is introduced to the English social strata, a harsh world full of upper class and lower class rules, where forgetting to curtsy can cost her a job. Yet there are advantages; the Martins, a husband and wife who serve as cook and butler, and her employers, Madam and the squire, become her first family. Will Sussex be a welcome refuge from the cruel life of the orphanage? Or will Anne find that the manor house is yet another tough world she has to learn to survive? Read on as Anne recognizes new opportunities, discovers a culture she's never known, and steps out on the pathway to adulthood in Marie Taylor Thomas's second memoir, The Maid Who Forgot to Curtsey.
