Evening Star Newspaper, October 18, 1936, Page 15

Author of Prize Novel Tells Of Years of Toil in Kitchens Immigrant Girl Paid $50 | a Month on First JobinU. S. Her erperiences and impressions *“backstairs” during her rise from serrant to novelist are descrived here by a shy, prim, paint-and- powderless young womanr who has just won a Swedish prize novel competition with a book she wrote while employed as a maid in New York. BY SALLY SALMIM NEW YOREK, October 17. at the beginning, I came to New York | because I wanted to see the v\orld and how it lived. T had left my island home of narc.n .one of the Aaland Islands, to go to! Stockholm, had worked there a short while as a maid, had worked behind the counter of a sort of delicatessen store in Linkoping for a short while Jonger, and then I started out for a land which was not so much the land of my dreams, but the land in which my sister and her friends worked nnd 2 land whose major city is a cross- roads of the earth. I arrived in 1930, 24 years old, my purse thin, my mmd teeming. A week later I had my first job at $50 a month in the home of & high public official in a New York suburb. | That was an extraordinary home.| The husband drank steadily, his wife erratically, but in the grand man-!| ner. When they had a party, she entered into both the spirit and spirits of all occasions. At the end of the party, she would go off to bed. Her husband would stay up and finish whatever liquor was left over. He had a passion against putting away half-empty bottles. Then he would pass out exactly where he had found the last one. He was a gentleman| and his wife and he seemed to be on friendly terms. Witnessed “Wild Party.” I saw there my first American wild | party. They all drank so much before | dinner that the lady of the house for- got her manners and served cran- berry sauce with her hands. Wild-| ness beyond that I did not see. | After five and one-half months, I left. The incessant raids by the guests on the Kitct made my work too difficult. I found another situation nearby for $65 a month in the home of a lawyer, and here I learned to respect the American household. They were magnificently kind people. In this house, the man was the head, but he was no boss. The woman and | her children did what he wished be- | cause they loved him However, there was one drawback. The lady belonged to a bridge club whose members seemed to pride them- | selves on how many people they could entertain with one servant. A com- petition started and my mistress won first prize with 16 at lunch. After 10 | months, I decided that the competition was somewhat too great a strain on | me. I was sorry to go. The lady had been good to me. She had lent me books to read—"Giants in the Earth,” *“Daddy Longlegs” and “The Trail of the Lonesome Pine.” I liked “Giants in the Earth” best, but “Dady Longlegs” was the book that changed my life. In this book, the heroine is an orphan who wants to write. I wanted to write. She want- ed to write about the grand things of hife, but she could not. I, too, want- ed to write about the grand things, but what grand things can there be in a mind whose sole training has been in an elementary school? So the heroine of the book wrote .about what she knew—an orphan asylum—and was successful. And I, too, decided to write | about what I-knew—a woman's life on a farm at the edge of the sea that claims her men. Theatrical Home Tempestuous. But I did not start to write them. | That was something yet to ripen in | my mind. I went to work in New York | for a theatrical family. At least, the man was a theatrical producer. His wife was an unstable creature who | blew now hot and now cold, but al- | ways a gale. Vhen she stormed into the kitchen, you did not know whether it was to say you had ruined her life with too much salt in the soup or that she “adored” you. The tempestuous nature of my mis- | tress made life a little difficult at last and I moved on to my next job in the home of a wealthy lawyer. It was like moving from a hurricane into a typhoon and we all in that house’ #tood in the exact dead, soundless cen- | ter of a typhoon each time the master | became angry. The master became | angry often. I stayed there two and one-half years, longer than I have stayed any- | where else, and at the end I left #adly and only because I wanted to see new faces and taste new life. The | day I arrived, the child's nurse warned | me that meals must be ready exactly on time and that, if they were as much as a minute late, the master would put on his hat and coat and g0 out to a restaurant. And warned me, too, that I was to make no un- necessary sound when he became angry. We all knew when he was angry. The house instantly became dark as a thundercloud. He would g0, sometimes for days, without utter- ing a single word, and we walked about on tiptoe while his wife perched silently on the edge of her chair, huddled within herself like a fright- ened bird. She was afraid to death! ©of him. | Becomes Angry at Delay. Once, in the country, breakfast was late. He had no set time for breakfas: | on Sunday. Sometimes he would come| down at 7, someiimes at noon. To| insure that everything would be awail- | ing him on the instant of his arrival, | his wife would go upstairs frequently | to see what stage of dressing he had | reached and report to me. This morn- | ing she forgot. I heard his step on! the stairs and flew to place the butter, | fruit and toast on the table. He saw! me in the act of doing it, zlowered at me and stalked out into the gar den\ without a word. When I had finished setting the; table, 1 followed him and told him his breaktast was ready. “I don't wam: any,” he said. I turned on my heel | without a word and removed the dishes . from the table. That mad him even angrier and he stamped up- stairs and locked himself in his room. ! But in the end, he had to mel. Guests were coming for lunch and he knew ice cream would be served. Ice cream was his, as they say, devour- ing passion. He arrived at the table just in time to eat two helpings of dessert. 1 watched his wife carefully. She seemed to be & person like me—timid, slow to act, invincibly firm in all her decisions. It took more than a year for a decision to be forced on her and then it came about ludicrously. They had had a quarrel, about what I don’t | sent for a trunk. know, because, as-soon as & cause for quarreling arose, the master became A N MISS SALLY SALMINEN, Kitchen maid, whose novel, “Katrina,” won a prize of $2,000 | as the best novel of the year written in the Swedish lan- guage, says good-by to her pots and pans. —Wtde World Photo. soundless. But one Sunday morning. | after days of thunderous silence, he Remains in Foyer. | The trunk arrived and then he du-\ covered that his wife had the key for | i High _ | B | Des Moines. THE SUNDAY STAR, ITHEWEATHERI. District of Columbia—Fair and cool today; tomorrow fair and somewhat warmer; fresh northwest winds. Maryland and Virginia—Fair, cooler in east portions today; tomorrow fair and slightly warmer. West Virginia—Partly cloudy today; tomorrow generally fair and warmer. River Report. Potomac River little cloudy and Shenandoah muddy yesterday after- noon. Report Until 10 P.M. Saturday. Record Until 10 P.M. Saturday, p.m, yesterday. Year At 10 p.m. yesterday. Year est, ago. 9. ‘ Record Temperatures This Year, Highest, 105, on July 10 Lowest, 0. on January 23. Tide Tables. (Furnished by United States Coast and Geodelic Survey. Tomorrow. m. Sun. today Sun. tomorrow Moon. today __ Automobile lights must be turned on one-half hour aiter sunset. Precipitation, Monthly precipitation in_inches in the Capital (current month to date): SLPE iz SR “ellllzr in Vnrlom Chlel Precipl- ,Temuenturh tation Min, 8pm. night. S Asheville. N. DY R Tt 3 Atlanta. Ga 56 G0 60 86 Detroit. Mich. Duluth. Minn... El Paso. Tex Galveston_ Tex. Helena. Mont, Coon Ak ANITNR B D3 h ChOROMRTR it. That was an impasse. You see, ‘;_ he refused to speak to her. For days the trunk remained in the foyer lnd‘ we all tip-toed around it because we did not dare to move it. At last| he broke his silence long enough to | M| ask me to ask the handyman to opem the trunk. In that house, whenever N necessary, it was the lady who called for the handyman amd I relayed his | request to her. Promptly she marched into her bed room, got tfie key and placed it on top of the trunk. { The key stayed there for days and at last they talked things over to- gether and decided amicably to part. She helped him to pack, and, on their last evening together, they most tranquilly joined in working cut a | jig-saw puzzle. He used to come once a week to see his child, whom ne adored, and I believe he tried to get his wife to allow him to return to her. But she had made her deci- sion and would not budge. However, she was afraid of him, and where.\ in the beginning she used to wait| and greet him on his visits, she soon took to going out when she knew he was coming. 1 began to write my novel here. 1 was taking a oorrespondence school | course in English and I noticed that, time I wrote of something back | home, I would get high marks. I| knew that was not because of my style“ —which was awkward and weak—but | | because of the subject matter. And I decided that perhaps my home and | the people I knew there would make a story. . Words Fail to Go Down. After two and one-half years of work and with $200 in the bank, I took two weeks' vacation and wrote| rapturously through it, all day -ndl sometimes until 3 o’clock in the morn- | ing. But while the words tumbled | out, they did not march on paper, and I put the novel away discouraged and went looking for a job. That was 1934, and there seemed to be no good jobs left. For three days 1 was cook in a luxurious private| home on the East Side, but I could | stand it no longer than that, The| woman had four servants and refused | to buy food for them, making #hem | eat whatever scraps were left over on the plate from her meals. Fer one day I worked in a house where there were two bosses, a woman and her sister. For two days I worked ! in the Riverside Drive apartment of | a woman who was 5o neurotic that she was a lunatic. i She had always lived in a hotel | and this was her first apartment. | When I arrived the icebox and the | stove were scrubbed spotless. All day | long and part of the night she stood | over me while I scrubbed and | scrubbed that icebox and stove. She | had a fear they were not clean and | refused to use them until they were. In a month, and with maybe 15 serv- | ants, she had not been able to get either clean enough to cook a single Jacks Ans: Li s Angeles Louisville. Ky Marquette. Mich. Ten anuunn 5 obil rleang, Nort | Plnue Neu O fateionia, Pa. - ; Phoenix. Ariz. ~__ Pittsburgh. _Pa. Portland, Me Seattle Was ‘Drlnlfl!ld A ViR Rours, " Miss. WASH.. D. C. Reckless Driving Fines. New York State fines for reckless driving are $100 for the first offense and $250 for the second. meal. I was not allowed even to cook one for myself. And I worked two weeks in the home of society people— a widow and her daughter—who had fallen on thin days. Once they had had six serv- ants. Now they had only one, but| they expected the same service—fin- ger bowls and their beds turned down at night. The service bell rank endlessly for the most trivial things and I never could get any work done. But finally I landed where the work was reasonable and I took up my novel again, working from 3 until 5 in the afternoon and from 9 in the evening until sleep struck me down— midnight and three or four times dawn. On Friday, March 13, T mailed it. with a kiss and tears of hope. I did | mot expect much from it until I read | in an astrology magazine that accord- ing to my horoscope the concluding months of 1936 would bring me fame. Fame is here. The room is full of reporters and photographers and my lap is full of movie and radio offers. Everybody is so funny. They have not seen my book, yet they beat a path to my door. When they see my book, they will run away. It is not very i good. I know it is not very good. 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