When the older boys of a family began to grow up, the second bedroom became the boys’ room. Boys, big and little, were packed into it, and the girls still at home had to sleep in the parents’ room. They had their own standard of decency; a screen was placed or a curtain was drawn to form a partition between the parents’ and children’s beds; but it was, at best, a poor makeshift arrangement, irritating, cramped, and inconvenient. If there happened to be one big boy, with several girls following him in age, he would sleep downstairs on a bed made up every night and the second bedroom would be the girls’ room. When the girls came home from service for their summer holiday, it was the custom for the father to sleep downstairs that the girl might share her mother’s bed. It is common now to hear people say, when looking at some little old cottage, “And they brought up ten children there. Where on earth did they sleep?” And the answer is, or should be, that they did not all sleep there at the same time. Obviously they could not. By the time the youngest of such a family was born, the eldest would probably be twenty and have been out in the world for years, as would those who came immediately after in age. The overcrowding was bad enough; but not quite as bad as people imagine.

Then, again, as the children grew up, they required more and more food, and the mother was often at her wits’ end to provide it. It was no wonder her thoughts and hopes sprang ahead to the time when one, at least, of her brood would be self-supporting. She should not have spoken her thoughts aloud, for many a poor, sensitive, little girl must have suffered. But the same mother would often at mealtimes slip the morsel of meat from her own to her child’s plate, with a “I don’t seem to feel peckish to-night. You have it. You’re growing.”

After the girls left school at ten or eleven, they were usually kept at home for a year to help with the younger children, then places were found for them locally in the households of tradesmen, schoolmasters, stud grooms, or farm bailiffs. Employment in a public house was looked upon with horror by the hamlet mothers, and farm-house servants were a class apart. “Once a farm-house servant, always a farm-house servant” they used to say, and they were more ambitious for their daughters.