lords and maids

When we saw

, we felt an enormous desire to prepare a

consisting of: sandwiches (not sandwiches), cheese board, glorious cold cuts.

Seeing her in New York was curious, you could perceive the admiration that the American people, longing for an aristocratic history, professes to the British, as a nation with high-class traditions.

We, I am talking about my contemporaries, had seen

as children , and it happened to us like when we read something by Enid Blyton, that we would have wanted to snack on apple pies, hide in sheds and spend our childhood in mysterious boarding schools.

Then we learned, blessed be Roald Dahl, of the mistreatment of creatures and the dream vanished.

he accustomed us to normalize the romantic arrogance of those above, and the sense of duty of those below.

It would be said that God had arranged it this way: some were born to command and others, others, to obey: those above were exquisite;

those below conquered us with their traditionalism.

With

the budget skyrocketed and all that talk, which found its legitimacy in biblical words urging servants to serve as divinely mandated, became grandiloquent.

Once again, it's about the unparalleled ability of the British to embellish their most obnoxious individuals, transforming them into attractive Shakespearean characters.

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What the series 'Downton Abbey' does not tell: the dark life of the servants of the British mansions

The story was another.

I have closed in awe the historic essay by former BBC news director Frank Victor Dawes,

, which was published in 1973 coinciding with the success of

and whose translation now in Spain is given at the same time as a film sequel to

.

Dawes, the son of a maid who began serving when he was just thirteen, tried to counteract the fictional misunderstanding by placing an ad in the

asking former servants to send him letters telling him of their experience.

The result was overwhelming.

Hundreds of invaluable stories arrived in the journalist's mailbox, which encouraged him to investigate the reasons for the radical decrease in domestic service after the First War.

Plagued with testimonies that narrate a regime of masked slavery, in which child labor was accepted, of course, we learn about the resistance of the gentlemen to modernize their facilities so that everything was the result of the slovenliness of the maids;

how the gentlemen freely disposed of the girls, who were later blamed if they got pregnant and expelled, leading them to begging or prostitution;

of the endless days miserably paid.

The march of men to war brought about a radical change in the productive system: women were called to the factories and service girls were cleared of a horizon in which, even though they were underpaid, they were not the object of social contempt.

Because it was customary in the press to make fun of servants, portray them as brutes, foul-mouthed, thieves, ridiculous, lowering them to the status of inferior beings.

A bit in the style of the jokes that were made with blacks in the United States.

The war brought with it a new order, but it also fueled the nostalgia of the privileged for their good old days.

Even the State intervened so that the women returned to serve.

The fact that the houses were left without servants was a colossal drama for those above.

Something was recovered from the world of yesterday, nothing longed for by those who had spent the nights of their youth crying with exhaustion before falling asleep, but the glorious past did not return completely.

The Second War completed the task.

The author writes that the dreams of the cinema, the stories on the radio, the habitual reading of the newspapers and the access to basic education of the poor transformed the expectations of many young women.

The one who could, preferred to be a worker or a secretary.

Perhaps with lower salary, but with more consideration.

I finish this book on the same day that gentleman from Oxford resigns, Boris Johnson, the bizarre prime minister that Simon Kuper, a journalist for the

, defined in his book,

(Colleagues), as a member of an incestuous Oxford university network, which in the absence of other causes, it fueled nostalgia for the old Empire.

Hooligan, cynical, classist, amoral gentlemen, aware of their privileges and staunch defenders of rules from which they consider themselves exempt.

How those above have sneaked it back to those below is the unsolved mystery of these new times.

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