Nov. 2, 1982
It has been four years since I wrote the above and I don’t want to leave it unfinished as my father did. When I think of the early years of my parents marriage in Manila I can’t help but imagine what a glamours life it must have seemed to a girl raised on a farm in Iowa. It was a very cosmopolitan life. Many of her friends were English women (Colonials) who observed the manners of high society. Exchanging calls and calling cards (there were strict rules about how many cards you left, your own and your husband’s even tho’ he didn’t go with you). They entertained at tea parties. There was an abundance of servants because help was very inexpensive. Many of them lived in, so they were furnished with food and housing and a small salary. They were anxious to work for the Americans and English because they could learn a skill.
One time my mother needed a new cook and she was interviewing applicants. She felt she was indebted at entertaining and was planning a series of dinner parties so she was looking for one who could make good deserts. A man named Manuel applied but he couldn’t make deserts and was turned down. About a week later he applied again. In the mean time he had learned to make deserts and he was our cook for many, many years. He made wonderful pies and his lemon pie became famous among my mother’s friends.
At the time I was in high school we had six servants The cook, laundress, two house boys, the nurse maid, and the chauffeur. In a country where the clothes were mostly cotton and silk and you changed often and there were no washing machines yet, a laundress was very necessary. The house boys did the house work. We had two because the younger one was the brother of the actual house boy and he was working for nothing so he could learn. Later he learned to drive the car from the chauffeur because that was a higher paying job of course. The nurse maid was our legendary “Sleepy”. Her name was Felipa. She came to us when I was perhaps about two years old. I couldn’t pronounce her name and she became Sleepy because that was as close as I could come to her name. She stayed with our family until after I was married and came back to the States twice with my mother. In 1920 we came back to Minnesota to spend a year because my other had had a near nervous breakdown after Eleanor’s birth. Sleepy had been so much help and comfort to her that she agreed to come back and spend the year in the States. In 1920 Sleepy was a great curiosity and of much interest to the people of LeRoy, Minnesota and you can imagine her experiences of a winter in Minnesota with lots of snow and coal stoves after her life in the orient!
Then in 1933 after I graduated, my father retired from business and they came back to live in California at Lakeport. They had become Sleepy’s family and she decided to stay with them so she came back and lived with them for several years. She had no children of her own, altho she told my mother that she had had two little boys who had died as infants. Eventually she felt she had to go back to Manila where she lied with a niece who could write English and we kept track of her until the niece wrote us of her death. She could not write but she did read books in Tagalogue. We didn’t know her age. In 1920 when she came back to Minnesota she needed a passport. She didn’t know when she was born, date or year. So we gave her a birthday and my father decided from what she could remember of her childhood that she must have been about 37 in 1920. The year that she lived in Minnesota my father withheld her salary and gave it to her in a lump sum when she got back to Manila. It was enough that she could buy a house of her own and she became a woman of substance in the little community where she lived besides a woman of the world with all her traveling. There are pictures of her among my pictures. She was devoted to Eleanor who was a bond between my mother and Sleepy.
No comments:
Post a Comment