The Roads to Eaton Place

By Gina Mallet

MR. HUDSON'S DIARIES by MICHAEL HARDWICK

ROSE'S STORY by TERENCE BRADY and CHARLOTTE BINGHAM

SARAH'S STORY by MOLLY HARDWICK

All published by Pocket Books. All $1.50.

As followers of Public Television's most popular import know, the relationship between Richard Bellamy and his servants in the Edwardian saga Upstairs, Downstairs is complex, profound --and totally unilateral.

They know everything about him: his bank balance, his sex life, his loneliness after Lady Marjorie's death, the snubs he receives from his aristocratic Southwold in-laws, his distress at Son James' behavior, the state of his career. And in a hundred ways they mutely demonstrate their sympathy for him. But Richard, unlike the TV audience, knows very little about them. Consequently, his sensitive efforts at sympathy often seem gauche, even patronizing.

It may, therefore, have been in a spirit of democracy as well as commerce that Producer John Hawkesworth authorized a series of pop paperback "autobiographies," which purport to reveal "the never-before-told secrets" of Hudson, the butler, Head Houseparlormaid Rose and the renegade Sarah. But good grief! As coopered up into print by a quartet of British writers, the earlier lives of the fascinating Bellamy servants have been drowned in tears and treacle.

Hudson, it seems, nobly renounced his ambition to be a lawyer and took a job as a gamekeeper to support his parents and educate a gifted younger brother. He falls in love with a highland lass, only to watch her die from measles.

Rose's story is just as stark. Left motherless at twelve, she found herself successively at the mercy of a drunken father, the Southwold servants' hall, and a lecherous young master. Orphan Sarah's beginnings were livelier -- and even more unpleasant. As a girl she is saved from impending rape in Whitechapel, but the man who saved her turned out to be a perverted missionary. By contrast, the weekly blend of world crisis and teapot tragedy at Eaton Place -- where all the books end -- seems calm indeed.

In the Soup. Such books are known in the trade as "show tie-ins," and by the debased standards of the genre these are well done. But what would happen if the show went in for "book tie-ins" and the Bellamys had to cope with a passel of bestselling authors belowstairs?

The furor would make an episode in it self. Undoubtedly, Southwold Solicitor Sir Geoffrey would summon a conclave to cope with the scandal. Richard might well consider putting the screws on the outraged Dowager Lady Southwold to increase his allowance in exchange for suppressing his earlier diaries. Richard's middle-class daughter-in-law Hazel would surely stick up for the servants' right to publish, and James would profit from the occasion by borrowing ten ners from a suddenly flush Hudson. As for Mrs. Bridges, it is obvious that the good woman's recipe book would be come an alltime seller, she would retire to the Cotswolds -- and Upstairs, Down stairs would be in the soup.

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