‘The Mason Line’: The bell in our pockets
By Independent columnist Paul Nicholas Mason
My paternal grandfather’s first job was in the Royal Navy during the First World War, but shortly afterwards he entered domestic service, starting as a footman and ending as butler and valet.
He died at age 70, a few months after retiring. He spent, then, nearly 50 years as a servant.
Something in me is appalled by that. Yet his relationship with the Earl of Jersey was clearly warm, judging by the gifts he received and the fact that his employer was my dad’s godfather.
When I was one, the Earl’s then wife, the film actress Virginia Cherrill (discovered by Charlie Chaplin, she starred in City Lights) visited my parents and sat on the floor, dripping with diamonds, to play with me.
My egalitarian, “Brotherhood of Man” side says that no man should serve another – but brother Bob Dylan had a different take: “You gotta serve somebody.”
It wasn’t my first job, but I spent 32 years teaching in a private school. I met wonderful people there – students, parents, colleagues – whose friendship is precious to me. But there wasn’t a day, in all those years, that I didn’t at some point think: “You’re in service, Paul.”
Most families strove not to give that impression, but a few made it plain that their fees made me the equivalent of a chauffeur. And in my final years, when the head declared that we were a 24/7 institution, some of us saw the implications clearly: We were constantly on call. Constantly. Not just the heads of house, who worked like trojans. All of us.
It took me a while to see what that phrase had in common with my grandfather’s life. It wasn’t the work; polishing silver and teaching Shakespeare are both honest labour. It was the bell. In the great houses, a board of bells hung below stairs, one for each room above, and when one rang, you went. The defining condition of the servant was never the task. It was being summonable.
Today, most of us carry the bell in our pockets. The email at 10 p.m., the text on Sunday morning, the “quick question” on a holiday – each jangles below stairs. And we answer because everyone else does.
Ontario has noticed. Since 2022, employers with 25 or more staff must have a written policy on “disconnecting from work.” But the province’s own guidance is candid: the law does not create a right to disconnect. It requires a policy, not a promise.
Yes, nearly all of us – shop clerks, farmers, web designers, soldiers, actors, masseurs, clergy, engineers – have to serve someone, and there is dignity in that. But there are degrees of service, and the line between service and servitude is marked by the off-switch.
I believe passionately that we should all have the right to turn off, to check out, to recharge, and to recreate. If that right is denied to us, then whatever our titles, we are all, effectively, domestic servants – waiting for the bell.
Paul Mason is a voice-, film- and television-actor, and the author of six novels, most recently To Our Graves and Sackville House.
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