A vivid insight into life below stairs was given by Miss Meriel Hayes with her lecture Dear Polly - Letters of a Lady's Maid on September 26th. Meriel had discovered a batch of letters written by her grandmother, Polly, between the years 1872-80, most of them written to Polly's fiance, Alf, and his replies, detailing the sort of lives they led, the hardships, the distances they had to travel in order to see one another, the various jobs they had, starting in service at Grafton Manor, near Hanbury.

Alf was a gamekeeper but Polly was far from being a Lady Chatterley!

As time went on, they were able to see little of each other as their need to keep in employment took them separately to different parts of England, from Cheadle to Wimbledon to Weston-super-Mare, and travelling by railway and bus was an arduous business, even worse than today, as Meriel explained in graphic detail.

But their story ended happily for, after seven years of courtship, they finally married in 1879.

Polly died in 1930, having been a widow for 17 years, and full details of her life are recorded in Meriel's book entitled Dear Polly, in which more than 150 local characters are mentioned, a work of considerable appeal to anyone interested in the social history of the time.

The next meeting will be on Friday, October 31 at the Baptist Church Hall, Chapel Drive, Wythall, at 7.30pm when Richard Pountney will be showing slides and talking about The Diaries of a Wythall Farmer.