This is Sarah Wells's story, one of the five stories that make up The Housekeeper's Tale.

Mrs Wells was bad at accounts, bad at managing her girls, ill experienced in buying stores and economising – and this was only the opinion of her son, the writer H. G. Wells. Despite this accepted view of her housekeeping abilities, Sarah Wells managed to maintain her tenure at Uppark, West Sussex, for 13 years, having arrived in 1880. It was during this half of the nineteenth century that was the era of wealth creation for the Victorians: the railway age.

Presiding over a home where the master of the house had married the estate dairymaid, this transition from downstairs to upstairs was most unusual and risked sending the household into chaos. What followed was positively stranger than fiction, as her own son expressed in some of his published works.