‘Septicaemia,’ he said, ‘she really needs to be looked at.’ Joyce was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance.
‘Thank God for the NHS,’ Celia kept saying to the driver as they weaved their way to Mill Road.
Once inside, Joyce, half-delirious, and a distraught Celia, sat waiting impatiently for a doctor to tell them what they were going to do. When the doctor did appear, almost an hour after she’d arrived, Joyce screamed and tried to climb out of the bed. ‘Not him, I don’t want him nowhere near me, I’d rather die,’ she cried loudly.
The doctor stopped, looking confused and half-turned to Celia. Joyce reached out her hand to her mother and said pleadingly, ‘Mum, it’s ’im, the one who let Trevor die, don’t let him near me, please!’
Celia rose from the chair next to the bed, took Joyce’s hand and shouted, ‘Get out!’ at the doctor, who promptly did as he was told.
Joyce was shivering, shaking and crying. Clasping her mother’s hand ever tighter, she tried to lift a leg out of the bed, and two nurses who’d appeared at the sound of shouting rushed to keep her where she was.
Eventually a different doctor was found, Joyce submitted to his examination and was taken to an operating theatre where the cut on her neck was scraped clean and bandaged. Afterwards she was given penicillin and slept for almost twenty-four hours straight.
Two days after being admitted to the hospital, Joyce was sent home with Celia, who insisted that she spend her days recuperating in the dining room, which had been rearranged in order that her bed could be set up there. Celia took it on herself to arrange for Joyce’s wages be paid up to when she’d left Woolies. ‘You’re not working there again, I can tell you that much,’ she told Joyce, who was too weak to argue.
For three days Joyce lay in the dining room, eating soup and seeing no one, because Celia would turn away everyone who tried to visit. Janet, Vicky and Rita all tried to see her, and Vicky got as far as peering through the window from the side passage, but Celia came in just as Joyce was trying to lift the window in order for them to be able to talk, and chased her friend away.
Late one Thursday afternoon, Joyce heard a knock at their front door, and her mother answered it. Joyce could hear her talking to someone on the doorstep for a few minutes, but couldn’t pick out anything either was saying until Celia barked, ‘I’m going to call you a liar!’
Another, unfamiliar woman’s voice answered loudly, ‘How dare you, I am NOT a liar!’
‘Right then, just you follow me,’ Celia barked again, and Joyce heard footsteps leading to her door. Celia pushed it wide and beckoned for someone to look in. ‘Here then, is this my daughter what you saw out on the town again last night with the black American soldier?’ A large, frowsy-looking woman with a tight black permed hairdo, and wearing a scruffy looking Astrakhan coat, stepped into the doorway and looked at Joyce, who’d never seen her before, she’d swear.
‘Oh, er . . .’ the woman looked uncertainly at Joyce.
‘I’ll ask again,’ Celia said firmly, barely able to control her anger, ‘did you see this girl out last night with a black American soldier? You can’t miss her, ’cos if you did, she had that bloody great bandage on!’
‘Well, er, maybe not then, it weren’t her, I’m really sorry, missus.’
‘You want to say sorry to my daughter an’ all, I should think!’
‘Yes, sorry, love, I do hope you get better soon . . . I’d better be off, sorry, sorry . . .’
Celia pulled the door firmly to before shouting, ‘And don’t come round here again making up wicked stories, you old cow!’ The front door was slammed loudly and Joyce giggled for the first time in over a week.
She was smiling when Celia entered her room again, this time with a letter in her hand. ‘Who’s been writing to you from London, miss?’ she asked, curious but also slightly embarrassed. Joyce knew that her mum would never apologize for the beating she’d given her, but she also knew that because of it, her wound, and now having no job, Celia wouldn’t give her too much of a hard time about the letter for long.
‘Must be my black American soldier, eh?’ Joyce smiled. Celia flushed scarlet and left her alone with her post.
It was from Alan. He apologized for leaving Cambridge without saying farewell. Orders, he wrote, had come in that morning sending him to London immediately. Soon he’d be in Europe somewhere, and although he didn’t know where, if he had the chance, he’d write again. He signed off after saying that he hoped to find time to return and say goodbye to her properly. Joyce turned the letter over to see if there was anything further on the back of what was essentially a short note, but it was blank. There was no SWALK on the envelope, either. Somehow she knew that the letter was the last she’d hear from him.
When she was recovered enough to work again, Celia brought their neighbour Maud in to meet Joyce and talk about working at a college with her. Or rather, not with her, but in the same building. ‘It’s bloomin’ hard work, dear,’ Maud told her, looking her up and down a little sceptically.
‘But I’m tougher than I look, missus,’ Joyce assured her.
‘She is, Maudie,’ Celia piped up. ‘She’s back to making fires and beating the carpets for me when I go out cleaning, you know.’
Maud shrugged her shoulders. ‘Alright then, I’ll see the housekeeper tomorra, an’ you can help the old lady who needs an assistant. She must be in her eighties, you know, and really don’t like going up the stairs no more. So the gentlemen’s rooms on the first floor aren’t being done at all, and haven’t been since the old woman chased her last assistant away.’
‘Oh,’ Joyce’s ears pricked up. ‘Why did she chase her off, I mean how did an old woman do that?’
‘Well, I don’t know the truth of it, but some of the other bedders reckon that the old woman thought her assistant, who was Polish and came here during the war, had been taking stuff what she oughtn’t, and I don’t mean bread and cakes. Old Annie Hinkley threatened to report ’er, they reckon, and next day the girl didn’t turn up. She just stopped coming to work.’
‘Well, there’s no such worries with my Joyce.’ Celia stood up straighter as if to impress the point on Maud. ‘She’s as honest as the day is long, and won’t be no trouble to no one, will you, love?’
Joyce made a face of incredulity and said, ‘ ’Course not, I’m a good worker, me.’
A week later, in the freezing fog, Joyce leaned her black Triumph bicycle against the college wall and shivered.
ROSE
Cambridge 1954
Rose Hobbs chain-smoked Weights cigarettes, one after the other all the way down until they almost burned her lips. ‘If the cigs don’t get me, this cold will, that’s for sure,’ she joked to her new neighbours, Mr and Mrs Adams, as she plonked the kettle back on top of a slightly lopsided cooker in her scullery (which used to be the coal shed). Rose shuffled back into the kitchen and the spot she’d barely moved from ever since letting the couple into her house.
It was the winter of 1954 and Rose stood against the fire guard, constantly lifting the back of her skirt. ‘I think I may have got chilblains,’ she lightly complained as the couple sat at the table drinking hot, sweet tea from mismatching mugs.
‘That might be from standing in front of that fire,’ suggested the nice young woman, named Ann. She was clearly unsure of how personal to be with the bony, severe-looking Rose, whose dishwater brown hair showed red tints occasionally, like the sparks in her smoking fireplace. It was difficult to tell how old Rose was. She could have been anything from thirty to fifty, and in some way reminded Ann of her mother. Rose’s clothes were mostly hidden beneath a flowered pinafore wrap-over. Her thick grey socks and brown men’s slippers made Ann think of Mrs Mopp from the radio show It’s That Man Again. Her attitude was much friendlier than her mother usually was though, and for that Ann was glad.
‘Well, whatever they are, my legs have started to look like maps telling a story of where I’ve been . . . or what’s been there, eh?’ R
ose laughed, showing a gold tooth. ‘S’pose it adds a bit of colour!’
The laugh turned into a cough, which Ann waited to subside before saying as gently as she could, ‘You ought to get that looked at.’
Rose caught her breath. ‘Well, I have precious few luxuries left in me life and I love the heat on me, I can’t stand the cold. Love me fags, an’ all and have to catch up on ’em ’cos I can’t smoke at work.’
Rose now worked as a bedder, and what she thought were chilblains would later develop into varicose veins, a not uncommon health problem among bedmakers of Cambridge colleges. So too was arthritis and housemaid’s knee. Bedders, as Rose was always the first to tell everyone, were on their feet or on their knees for long hours. She’d usually then laugh wickedly after saying that and add, ‘Mind you, it’s better than spending all that time on your back or on your knees, believe you me!’
Rose lived in Queen’s Meadow with her two sons, who looked as different to one another as two boys of a similar age could. The Adams had just moved into the other half of the semi-detached council house that Rose had lived in since it had been built. Ann and Fred explained to Rose how happy they were to be there, and how glad they were to have left the damp, cold and unsanitary Nissen hut they’d come from. The hut was always a ‘temporary’ accommodation, but their move was brought forward after reporting to the council that they’d seen a rat sitting on the end of their baby’s cot. ‘Oh yes, those Nissen huts are due for demolition soon, I’ve heard,’ said Rose when they told her about it. ‘About bloody time, too,’ Fred Adams replied with feeling.
Ann had introduced herself to Rose as soon as they’d moved in, and on discovering that Rose worked as a bedder at the university, she knew that she wanted to be her friend. Rose was friendly to anyone who treated her well enough, and as soon as the nice young woman started asking about her job, she’d told her how much she loved it. ‘I’m never gonna leave there,’ she said. ‘I don’t care if I can’t walk, they’ll ’ave to carry me out, to make me leave.’
Rose had begun work at the college in 1951, having been hired as an assistant to a veteran bedmaker named Vesta (‘named after the little match seller, so me mum told me’), who was to retire the following year. Because the colleges were once more taking the same number of students that they had before the war, the number of staff required to service them had to increase. Rose had been recommended to Vesta by a neighbour in Barnwell, so the three women had met at Vesta’s house and she’d approved of Rose, and suggested her to the college housekeeper. The ‘interview’ for the job consisted of the housekeeper asking if Rose had ever been in trouble with the police (‘No,’ she’d lied, knowing that a couple of court fines for soliciting would mean she’d never get the job), and that was it. She was told that she’d be on half wages while learning the ropes and started the following week.
Many of the students that Rose did for had been officers in the armed forces. Some of them had been invalided out and were picking up where they’d left off before going into the services. They were older than new students usually were, and many were married. Wives were not allowed in college rooms, though, and so they either had to remain at the family home and only see their husbands at the end of Cambridge’s eight week terms, or live separately in digs in Cambridge – with those landladies that would take them, that is, because not all did. The majority of Cambridge’s landladies had a prejudice against taking in young women, believing them to be too much trouble and possibly wary of having another, younger woman in their house who might give their husbands funny ideas.
Rose would admit many years after the fact that she had been tempted at times to offer ‘comfort’ to some students during her first term as a bedder. And not just for the money, either. She had been a slim, attractive brunette in her youth, and always wore make-up to work, was always aware of looking her best when out and about. She knew that men were attracted to her, as much for her flirtatious nature as for her high cheekbones, thin ankles and easy laugh. But she hadn’t ever acted ‘improperly’ as a bedder, knowing that it would mean an immediate sacking if anyone ever found out – and they would, she was sure. She quickly realized that no one could ever keep their trap shut in a place like her college. After only a few weeks as Vesta’s assistant, Rose knew well enough that for women like her, being a bedder was a cushy number, and if she kept her head down and did the job then she could be there for years to come. The perks of the job alone made her happy.
Students who knew that she smoked and did so too would offer her their cigarettes. She’d take one for now and one, she’d laugh as she plucked it from their gold and silver cases, ‘for Ron’, slotting it behind her ear where it was kept in place by the headscarf she wore like a small turban. One day a student misunderstood her quip, and after she had taken a cigarette for ‘Ron’ he asked what her ‘husband did’.
‘Eh?’ she looked quizzically at the thin young man. ‘What ’usband? What ’ave you ’eard?’
‘Oh, er . . .’ he stepped back defensively as Rose thrust her chin out and leaned on her mop. ‘Why, er, er . . .’ he stammered. ‘Ronald. I mean, of course . . . isn’t he your husband?’
At that Rose laughed loudly and said, ‘Oh, him. Yeah, he’s alright. Was gasping for a fag this morning, though.’ At which the packet was produced again and Rose took two. She wasn’t going to tell him that ‘Ron’ was her verbal play on ‘later on’, and that there was no husband at home.
Because she was chatty, Rose developed relationships with students who responded well to her ‘cheek’, as she put it. As time passed, she realized that being on good terms – or even simply being on civil, speaking terms – with students held other benefits, too. As well as the cigarettes, Rose often took home bread or cakes that had been left over from breakfast or an evening ‘sworee’ as she called them. At the end of her first Michaelmas term she was amazed to receive gifts from boys and men whose rooms she’d cleaned and whose beds she’d changed – those whose secrets she kept, the ones for who she disposed of contraceptives and other incriminating evidence of their immoral behaviour, were particularly generous.
Emptying students’ bins and tidying their rooms gave Rose clues to the true character of each room’s occupant that no amount of talking to them would ever elicit. While there were plenty of students who would always vacate their rooms before she called in the mornings, she knew what subject they were studying, where their families lived and the names of their mothers and occasionally their fathers too, from letters left lying around on their desks and bedside tables. She knew who took what medicine, who hid bottles of booze (and where, of course). Rose knew if they were happy, sad, anxious, over-confident, snobs, proper posh, or jumped-up grammar school boys – and just recently there were increasing numbers of those, it seemed.
Early on during her time at the college, she became very fond of a young man named Stephen, who seemed at ease with Rose from the start, and who not only gave her an extra cigarette for ‘Ron’, but suggested that she might want one to share with him later, so should take two extra. Within a couple of weeks Rose figured out that Stephen liked a drink. And he didn’t mind what time of the day he enjoyed it, either, as she discovered when he offered her a glass of sherry one morning at 9 a.m. She laughed at that, and said maybe later, but she had work to do.
Stephen extended the hand of friendship not only towards Rose, but to everyone at the college, it seemed. His rooms were often the venue of choice for late night student debates fuelled by bottles of red wine, brown ale and clear spirits, so he told her, after Rose complained to him about the extra work gathering bottles. After the first couple of times though Stephen made sure everyone left with an empty, and he’d give the occasional unopened bottle of ale to Rose to take home. Rose had been invited to a couple of Stephen’s after-pub ‘dos’, but had always declined, even after learning that a gardener and a couple of waitresses at halls had made their way to his rooms for a drink or three on different occasions.
Inevitably stories about the parties and invitations found their way to the porter, and one Friday towards the end of the term, he stopped Rose on her way home and spoke to her about Stephen. The porter was friendly enough, and asked if she thought that Stephen might have a drinking problem. Rose made a joke out of it (‘Is it ’cos you ain’t bin invited, Mr S.?’ she laughed), and told him that she was sure Stephen could handle his drink, but she’d keep an eye on him.
The following Monday, Rose warned Stephen that his partying hadn’t gone unnoticed and people were ‘asking questions about the suitability of his being in rooms’. Stephen subsequently cut down on his daytime drinking – for the rest of that term, at least.
A variety of people at the college – the chaplain and certain directors of study among them – thought that bedders often knew more about their ‘boys’, as they all called the students, than they ever could. It was commonly held that some homesick students saw the older women as mother figures – and as long as they were only mother figures, that was alright. A couple of porters had noticed that Rose was liked and trusted (mostly) by her boys, and if they had any worries about any of them they’d pull her aside as she was leaving and have a word about them. Rose was no grass, and she’d never tell about some of the things her boys got up to – such as the two who liked to share a bed at night on Staircase H, for instance.
‘It’s none of my business, is it?’ as she’d tell friends in the Red Cow pub on Exchange Street. ‘I turn a blind eye, and the boys are always grateful if you know what I mean.’ If, however, a boy was a bit too quiet, not sleeping (she could tell), or wouldn’t talk to her at all nor look her in the eye, then she’d let the porter know that maybe that boy was having some problems and someone might want to talk to him about them. Stephen’s trouble wasn’t something that she’d ever talk to anyone in college about, though, as much because if he was silly enough to get drunk in college then they would know anyway, as because she liked him.
The Staircase Girls Page 16