A vegetarian of some quarter-century standing, I am taking aim at the head of an eel while clutching gamely at the other end. An almighty crack of my rolling pin, a splatter of brain gloop, and the job is done.

I reverse my hold, cut around its squished features, grip on to its skin and endeavour to peel it backwards in the manner of a slimy banana. It is excruciatingly, infuriatingly, finger-numbingly difficult. And then, suddenly, I am there, in the slimy-banana groove, easing the little blighter away from itself in one deft motion until skin and flesh rest triumphantly in different hands. “Owzat!” I cry. “Good work, girl, but no speaking unless spoken to,” admonishes my taskmaster.

Through the magic of journalism, I have been transported back to the Victorian era and am that most apparently anachronistic thing: a servant. I am the “guest” of English Heritage. The organisation has opened the service wing of Audley End, near Saffron Walden in Essex, using actors and video installations to put the focus on the workforce that powered it, rather than the patrician owners who were the guest stars of the “big house”.

Powered is the word. By the time of my run-in with the eel it is barely noon, and I have been toiling for seven hours at the lower reaches of the servanting scale: chopping wood, lighting fires, prising open shutters, ironing newspapers, sweeping, scrubbing, scouring, dung-shovelling, cobweb-dislodging, fetching coal, dusting, weeding, polishing, mangling, churning, degriming vegetables, cooking and washing. For a woman who has not deigned to clean her own home for several years, it proves a curiously satisfying experience.

The Upstairs, Downstairs notion of servant life is all too familiar: cap-doffing, curtsy-bobbing, avoiding the advances of a frisky young master. When Margaret Thatcher suggested “the dignity of service” as a solution to Eighties unemployment, there was uproar. But one in four British households today is estimated to have or be considering “staff”. Yet they come disguised under a glut of euphemisms – nanny, cleaner, gardener – and, moreover, tend not to be British but Eastern European or South American. Meanwhile, recent newspaper reports suggest that Brits may be too chippy even to wait tables.

Yet new research into Audley End by historian Dr Andrew Hann suggests that Victorian service could be a socially and economically empowering career, especially for women. More than 50 per cent of working women in the late 19th century worked in service. Alternatives were scant: straw-plaiting, say, or matchbox-making, the latter so dire that it inspired the first trade unions.

“Women went into service with their eyes open,” says Hann. “It was a career with a structure – an astute move.” Male servants were decorative luxuries; women provided the graft. En masse, they constituted a skilled mobile workforce. With the average length of service being a year and a half, many travelled the length and breadth of the country, moving ever onwards and upwards.

“People were proud to be in service,” argues Hann. “They certainly didn’t see it as in the least servile.” With paternalism came perks: free food (which otherwise could take up three quarters of a typical working-class income), accommodation, fuel, clothing, plus high jinks such as the servants’ ball or theatre trips for the lady’s maid. All this considered, in today’s money, a female servant at the upper end of the 27-strong staff at Audley End – a cook or housekeeper – would have been earning the equivalent of £50,000 (and a male cook perhaps twice as much).

Had I been born in 1881, the year Audley End was at its zenith, then I would almost certainly have found myself in similar circumstances. My parents’ families boast the requisite fancy relatives who gambled away fortunes, and also the odd industrial accident. But somewhere in the middle there is evidence of serving women going steadily about their business, not least Harriet Price, my great-great-grandmother, a widow who worked her way up to become assistant cook at Joseph Chamberlain’s Highbury Hall.

A crack team of English Heritage experts is on hand for my first day in service: Hann; Mark “Griff” Griffin, with his command of everything from pinny-knotting to the correct way of buttering bread; and Jeff Baker, in charge of the day’s more brutal elements, such as coal dispersal and handling animals. We meet the night before for them to shake their heads over the softness of my hands and issue regulation hairpins. I retreat to bed, to be up a head-swimming four hours later at 4.30am, ready for my 5.30am start.

My initial tasks, those of the teenage scullery maids, are robustly outdoor. It is freezing and I am shivering in seconds, my nose running like a child’s, and my cosmetic-free features flush with cold. I am not allowed breakfast until 8.30am, not even the sweet tea that saw the service wing through its labours. I feel glassy, hypoglycaemic, permanently on the brink of an accident, which, Hann says, reflects how my forebears would have felt while the family was in residence (Lord Braybrooke summered away, returning for the shooting season). I am advised on how to avoid housemaid’s knee, having already succumbed to scrubber’s backside.

The junior servants’ lives were unremittingly physical. For the four baskets of wood that leave me bruised and blistered, a 19th-century adolescent would have ferried 30. I am not sporting the authentic corset, yet my dress is so restrictive that it draws blood, rendering arm movements agonising. My besmeared cuffs are forever slipping, my pinafore slinking off my shoulder. It is clear that I would have been a slattern. It is also clear that I would have been a Marxist. Unused to being told what to do, I am truculent and surly.

Times recommends

• Are eldest children really a cut above?
• Peaches Geldof: censored
• Top 10 style-setting films of all time