by Sue Perkins
My regular dealings with the general public meant I got an awful lot better at lateral thinking.
Shop doorbell goes. Customer enters.
Woman:
Excuse me? Do you have Tess of the Duracelles?
Me:
Absolutely, madam. [Heads for Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles]
Shop doorbell goes again. Another customer enters.
Man:
Do you have Rogit the Dinosaur?
Me:
Rogit the dinosaur?
Man:
Yeah. I’d never heard of it. I think it’s a kids’ book.
Me:
[thinks for a second] Here you go. [Hands over Roget’s Thesaurus]
Man:
Cool. [Looks inside] Where’s the pictures?
After nine months there it was time to go on my travels. I’d earned enough cash to get me on a plane to New York and thence on an Amtrak train down the East Coast. I went with my wonderful friend Polly, who had friends in America. This was unbelievably rad. The furthest-flung friend I had was from Caterham.
It was the little things – chewing on a bagel in Grand Central Station, looking out from the top of the Empire State, seeing steam billow from the street vents. When you’re young you don’t care that you’re chasing clichés. You’re unfettered by embarrassment, the need to feel ‘unique’ or ‘independent’. You just pick the lowest hanging fruit, and it tastes bloody great. We spent two days in Manhattan, too overwhelmed and jet-lagged to venture beyond Midtown. Before we knew it, it was time to get to Penn Station for our ongoing train.
We were only a few blocks into our walk when I experienced my first and, thankfully, only mugging. As a woman of the world (and my mother’s daughter), this was one of four dangerous scenarios I’d been preparing myself for while in the States – alongside rodeo riding, gunslinging showdowns at High Noon and being held hostage by a family of inbred rural banjo players.
This turned out to be no ordinary mugging, however – this was America’s Most Benign Mugging.
As we trundled our suitcases along Avenue of the Americas, we were joined by a tall guy with a salt-and-pepper beard and dark, tatty clothes, who ambled alongside us.
Man:
Morning, ladies. Can I carry your suitcases?
Me:
[brusque] No, thanks. We’re fine.
Man:
Come on now …
Polly:
Really, we’re OK.
Man:
Now, ladies, I think you should let me.
Me:
We can manage.
Man:
I said, I think you should let me, you know?
Polly:
Don’t worry.
Man:
[getting exasperated] Girl, are you getting me?
Polly:
Not really.
Man:
I’d like to have your bags, please.
Me:
That’s not necessary; we can carry them.
Man:
[increasingly menacing] Don’t make me ask you again.
Polly:
You don’t need to ask us again. We’ve said no …
Man:
Damn it, girl!
Me:
Really, we’re just fine. They’re on wheels.
Man:
Jesus. I’m gonna have to get old school with you …
And with that, he grabbed my shoulder bag and ran off.
I was left with a confusing set of emotions. On the one hand, I was relieved that we hadn’t been the victims of America’s Most Violent Mugging, on the other, curiously furious that he’d been so polite.
Me:
I mean, he asked for our bags. Asked for them. What’s that about? It’s confusing. He’s being a gentleman and a thief at the same time. Talk about mixed messages.
Polly:
[wisely] Americans are weird.
Me:
I mean, if you’re a criminal, just be a criminal. It’s them and us. Perpetrator and victim. There should be a moral distance between the two.
Polly:
It’s confusing.
Me:
Yes! He asked our permission. Like he was getting us to collude with him. I feel dirty. I feel like I’m an accessory to my own crime …
Polly:
Mmm. Can we get on the train now?
In reality, all the Gentleman Mugger got away with was a handful of traveller’s cheques (good luck cashing them, even in the 1980s) and a selection of hand sanitizers provided by my mother.
‘You’d better take them. I bet there’s threadworm in the Big Apple, and you know how that’s spread – from toilet seats to bums to hands to your hand. YOUR HAND!’
I like to think of him, the Gentleman Mugger, back at his underground lair, tipping out the contents of my shoulder bag and examining the booty before exclaiming wisely, ‘The English are weird.’
Two months before my first term at college, my reading list arrived – on headed notepaper. Suddenly it was official. In celebration, I headed to the shops to buy the next best thing to books – chocolate, fags and whisky miniatures – none of which, I noted sadly, seemed to feature as course requirements. Dad volunteered to come with me, which I remember thinking was odd. Dad never went with me anywhere. We headed there in silence, bar the adhesive tug of our shoes on the hot summer pavement.
‘Well done,’ he finally said. ‘Well done.’
‘Thanks, Dad.’
He stopped and turned to me.
‘One thing.’ I could see that his eyes were brimming. ‘Make sure you don’t become posh, eh?’
New Hall
I didn’t know what he meant until I arrived. You can’t underestimate what a shock it was for a girl born and swaddled in the concrete of south London to see something as truly beautiful as King’s College, Clare Chapel or the Cam River wreathed in mist. How impossible it was to try to accept, even for a moment, that you might belong there. (I didn’t. I don’t. I won’t.)
New Hall, as it was then (it now has a new name – Murray Edwards College, named jointly after the inventor of Murray Mints and Huw Edwards*), was rumoured to have been built according to the designs of a Swedish prison. Yes, Dear Reader, you heard correctly – a Swedish prison. Apparently, the specifications were originally intended for a jail outside Stockholm, but the Swedes rejected them. I’m not sure why. Had they hoped for something a little more classical? Doric columns? Pediments? Balustrades? Or maybe something stucco? Mock Tudor? Perhaps I’m just being snotty in assuming that people would have stipulations for penitentiaries that involved anything more ornate than a.) very high walls and b.) A MASSIVE LOCKED DOOR.
Anyway, for whatever reason, the Swedes turned down the plans. Fair enough. It’s the next stage that interests me. What on earth made someone then think, OK, we’re not going to use
this design for a maximum security stronghold, so … let’s use it for a single-sex college in Cambridge! It’s a directly transferable structure, after all. Both sets of needs are exactly the same, aren’t they? Aren’t they? Anyway, the girls won’t mind – they’ve only been allowed to take degrees at the university since 1948. They’re just delighted to be there. Plus, worst-case scenario, if they do kick up a fuss, we can just LOCK THE MASSIVE DOOR on them.
To give you an idea of the look of the place, think brutish St Paul’s. Or concrete Taj Mahal. In modern architectural parlance you might get away with saying it had ‘clean lines’ – but this was the late 1980s, and back then it was simply ‘ugly as all shit’. Long wide concrete boulevards stretched from the entrance. A murky shallow pool ran parallel to the main walkway, decked with algae and pigeon shit – in the days before Pigeon Shit was an aspirational paint colour.
The college’s main claim to fame (other than being the only guaranteed escape-proof structure in East Anglia) was that it had a hydraulic canteen. I am not sure whether this particular feature was part of the original Swedish schematics. Perhaps it was a ploy to distract and entertain the inmates with an ascending buffet. We shall never know. Certainly, Orange is the New Black would be a very different show had the Federal Department of Corrections had an ascending buffet. No one would give a toss about stalky ol’ Suzanne ‘Crazy Eyes’ Warren or the evangelical mutterings of Tiffany ‘Pennsatucky’ Doggett; everyone would just drop their makeshift weapons/dildos and watch in awe as Galina ‘Red’ Reznikov mechanically rose from the bowels of the refectory.
Dinner took the form of classic mass catering, but with a few twists. Firstly, once weekly, there was Formal Hall, which essentially meant same food, different outfits. New Hall prided itself on being a more relaxed and informal college: larger state school intake, less traditional in its outlook. Even so, every Thursday we had to don long black gowns when we ate in a nod to wider university etiquette. It was all a little Harry Potter, but without the fun of the Sorting Hat after dessert.
The catering team were veritable spin doctors. Their primary skill lay in creating a deeply mediocre pile of food and then putting a lady’s name on the end of it – think Chicken Barbara, Lamb Diane and Guinea Fowl Cynthia – as if somehow that addition would work a kind of culinary alchemy. That suddenly the viscous puddle of grey gravy cosseting even greyer meat would become interesting. Romantic, even. In reality, each and every plate that hit the table was a triumph of hope over experience.
I’d specified on my application form that I would prefer to share a room in my first year, thereby acknowledging I considered loneliness a fate far worse than the possibility of being hacked to death by a total stranger while sleeping. Although I had seen the college at my interview, I’d never actually visited the halls of residence. So it was a surprise when I first clapped eyes on my accommodation.
F18 was a split-level room, with steep open concrete treads leading to another room upstairs. At the foot of the treads there was a large glass window. Waiting. Inviting me to get drunk and fall through it. I smashed against it many a time, but with too little force to shatter the glass, although my friend Jamelia went one better and leaped clean through hers during a heated debate at a Black Causus meeting. Her brave political gesture became the stuff of legend – tempered only by the fact she lived on the ground floor and was therefore able to break her fall with a gentle forward roll.
Essentially, our digs were open plan – affording roughly the same level of privacy as a flannel wash in Paul Dacre’s office. I arrived first, no room-mate in evidence, so decided to climb the treacherous stairs and make my nest in the mezzanine. In fact it was pointless worrying about where to put my stuff, because there would have been no boundary strong enough to keep out the woman I ended up sharing with. Enter the irrepressible
Shayla Clare Walmsley.
Shayla was unlike anyone I have ever met before or since. The term ‘whirlwind’ isn’t wild or chaotic enough to describe the mass of raw energy she was fashioned from. Quixotic? Yes. Maverick? For sure. Welsh? Utterly.
Shayla was the first person I’d met in my life who was genuinely different, something other than the nice, monochromatic, lower-middle-class girls I knew from Croydon. Her otherness thrilled me to the point that ever since I met her, I’ve been looking for that shock of the new in everyone else I’ve encountered. She stormed in that afternoon, a corona of cigarette smoke over tangled red hair. Then, emerging from the fug, came a pair of Deirdre Barlow glasses and a syrup-thick Caerphilly burr.
‘Who the fuck we go’ ure?’
It turned out that Shayla had never met anyone from the south-east before and therefore had a few preconceptions. It was only when she asked whether I owned my own pony that I felt I needed to disabuse her of one or two of them. What started out as an awkward, self-conscious cultural exchange developed seamlessly into a unique and peculiar friendship. I say peculiar; it must have looked like abuse from the outside, she and I permanently slagging and jostling one other. Robust. Honest. No prisoners. And just bloody, bloody wonderful.
Shayla gave me two key things – firstly, a working knowledge of Spanish. She was a light sleeper and most nights would wake bellowing, ‘¿Donde está, Eduardo?’ in a gruff and thoroughly convincing Andalusian. She had spent her year off riding horses in the Spanish hills. I’d worked in a bookshop in the Whitgift Centre. That sort of sums us both up, really.
Secondly, she loaned me some of her derring-do. Shayla threw herself at everything with an almost suicidal force. ‘DO IT!’ she would shout if I expressed the faintest interest in something – often accompanied by an impromptu grab or slap. ‘DO IT! DO IT! DO IT!’
‘I’m thinking of invading Nantwich.’
‘DO IT!’
‘I’ve always wondered what it might be like to milk a pig.’
‘DO IT!’
‘I’m thinking about forming a funk and soul collective with Eamonn Holmes.’
‘DO IT!’
By the end of the first week of the first term Shayla had spent her entire grant (yes, we had them back then, children – as we basked on the sunny plains of state funding) on a box of contact lenses, a semi-permanent wave and a pair of stonewashed dungarees. This was back in the days when contact lenses needed to be hand-rinsed in a vat of chemicals and hung on a washing line to dry overnight.
Shayla had never had money before, and boy could she burn through it. Within seven days of starting college, all she had left to her name was a tenner.
That night, as we sat eating potatoes out of a can (‘I spect you’re used to caviar, love’), I expressed a mild interest in going to watch some comedy later at the Footlights Club Room.
‘DO IT!’ she said. ‘Do a spot, an open spot!’
‘What? No! Don’t be silly.’
I could feel her fingers digging into my bicep.
‘Ten quid. I’ll give you ten quid. Go on! DO IT!’
By now she’d worked out I couldn’t resist a dare.
‘Go on. DO IT!’
So I did.
I loved her. I loved the bones of her.
Cambridge was also the place I met my brilliant beloveds, Nicola and Sarah. Nicola hailed from Essex and wore a full hunting outfit to her interview ‘so they won’t forget who I am’. (They didn’t.) Sarah spent most of her undergraduate years in a pair of orange tie-dyed trousers bellowing, ‘Who’s got weed?’ They’re family, but without the burden of my genetic material. They’re my rocks, my touchstones, my sounding boards. Together, we’re proof that good things can come in triangles. Together, we’re the unholy trinity of silly. Lucky me.
As for Shayla, we had a spat – over a boy. The three of us got close in our final year. It turned out that the boy liked me. It turned out she liked the boy. I bowed out, and they ended up dating for a while after we graduated, but the damage was done.
Stupid kids.
I saw her sporadically after we graduated. Well, twice. Twice in all those years, and yet not a week went by when I didn’t think of her. There would always be something: a Welsh lilt, a raised, excitable voice, the impetus to do something wild and rash. It all reminded me of her. I’d go online and find hints of what she was up to: community work, teaching in Tower Hamlets, fostering big ‘bad’ Staffies. She could and would love the unlovable with a fire you couldn’t put out. The more I heard about her good heart, following itself so clearly and purely, the more shame I felt about my rather tawdry and venal one.
I got the call last year as I was heading into the garden to hang out some washing. I vaguely recalled the voice at the end of the phone – as faint as all yesterdays. An old acquaintance from college seemed to be telling me that Shayla was dead. How very strange. If my brain didn’t quite register it, then my body did. I lost my legs. I lost my legs and sat slumped on the floor, sobbing, with a wet bra slung over my shoulder and a tea towel hanging somewhere round the back of my head.
Oh Shayla. Oh Shayla, what have you gone and done now?
Shayla can’t be dead. Not Shayla, with her lioness heart and flaming hair and bottle-top glasses. Not her, with that firm grip on my forearm, leading me off to try something daring and life-affirming. Who will push me now? Who will tell me to DO IT if not the Architect of Crazy herself?