The Staircase Girls

by Catherine Seymour

  When Rose told her that she’d arranged for the housekeeper at her college to talk to Ann about a job as a bedder, Ann was so pleased that she gave her old neighbour three different necklaces from her bin collection. Rose took them saying she’d give them to her granddaughters, ‘If Maurice ever gets around to having any.’

  Ann’s quiet nature and can-do attitude impressed the college housekeeper well enough, and almost forty years after she’d first dreamed of being a part of the university, Ann Adams found herself standing in the sitting room on the third floor of staircase H, with an electric vacuum cleaner in one hand and a bucket filled with dusters and cleaning materials in the other. To her they were just as good as a sceptre and a mitre. The ‘boys’ she met that day were all very well spoken, polite and tried to keep out of her way as she set about giving their rooms the best clean they’d ever had. Ann worked so hard on her first day that she only managed to get half the rooms done in the time allotted. At 12.30 Rose went looking for her in the gyp room on the ground floor, and found it empty. She climbed to the first floor, and called for Ann. She found her on her hands and knees vacuuming under a bed in the furthest bedroom from the staircase. The rest of the room was tidy and the surfaces gleamed.

  ‘Whatever are you doin’, Ann?’ Rose asked in astonishment, pulling the plug to the vacuum cleaner out of the wall. ‘You should of finished this lot ages ago.’ Ann looked up at her, sweat running down her face, which was red with the effort she’d put into her work. ‘But there’s so much to do, Rose!’ she exclaimed. ‘These poor boys, their rooms are filthy, there’s rings round their baths, washing up in the sinks, dirty cups and glasses all over the place, and their desks are a right muddle.’

  ‘Oh no, Ann, you din’t . . .’ Rose looked over at the desk under the window, seeing it neatly arranged with piles of papers stacked alongside each other, pens standing upright in a pot and books closed and stacked with the largest at the bottom of the pile.

  ‘Yes, Rose, you should have seen that desk, it was a right mess, with papers all higgledy-piggledy and books left lying open and all ways up, but it looks lovely now, don’t it?’

  Rose sighed deeply. ‘Ann, you don’t touch their papers, din’t no one tell you that?’

  Ann nodded, ‘Well, the housekeeper did, but I couldn’t leave it like that, could I? You should of seen it.’

  ‘No! Now Ann, you ’ave to leave their work alone, it might look a right muck-up to you, but they all know exactly where everything is, or so they say. Now the chap what has this room will be mad as hell, I reckon. Come on, we’d better go see the Mrs and tell her you made a mistake, before the boy in here does.’

  ‘But what about the rest of the rooms, Rose? I ain’t done the floor below yet.’

  ‘Orright, I’ll ’elp you, but it’ll ’ave to be a surface clean ’cos we ain’t got time and we ’ave to be out of ’ere by one o’clock.’

  Ann got better at finishing on time pretty quickly, but she would still occasionally be found finishing something in a room by the occupants on their return from lectures. Her reputation as an honest, modest and damned hard worker was made in the space of her first eight-week term, and as it came to a close, she received a number of gifts from students and fellows who she cleaned for. ‘I don’t expect gifts, but look at this present,’ she said to Fred when he got home one day in late December. ‘Just look at this one,’ Ann said, getting up from the kitchen table. She wrapped an Indian silk scarf around her neck and did a twirl. ‘What do you think? Where am I going to wear it?’

  Fred looked confused. ‘Where’d you get that?’

  ‘From the wife of one of the professors,’ Ann gazed almost shyly at the scarf as it hung along her arm. The professor was leaving the college and she had only looked after him for a few months. Ann was very touched by the gift and the note that came with it, thanking her for being so kind to him. That wasn’t all, either. ‘And he left me some money in the porter’s lodge in an envelope. It’s more than I earn in a week, Fred. I went straight to put it in the bank.’

  It was another instalment towards what Ann was determined would be a house of their own one day. Her plan was not to have a mortgage, but to buy it with cash. ‘If you can’t afford to buy something outright, don’t buy it all,’ she told everyone. ‘It’s my motto.’ Her fund had begun with a £100 win on the pools the week before she started work as a bedder. ‘It’s a good sign, eh, Fred?’ she said. They gave £1 each to the children and banked the rest. It proved to be a very good sign, and that first Christmas as a proper employee of the college Ann attended a carol service in the chapel and gave thanks for how her life had turned out.

  Ann was glad that her mother, who’d died peacefully in her sleep a few years earlier, had made the decision to move them all to Cambridge during the war. It seemed like a long time ago now, but the place still looked almost exactly the same as it had when she first saw the turrets, towers, gates and wide, tree-lined avenues that crossed the greens.

  Ann and Fred bought a house at the end of the 1970s, and they brought Kenny home to live with them there. His fits continued until he was well into his forties, when a drug was found that could prevent them. In the early 1990s they all moved to a bungalow in Cherry Hinton, near to Queen’s Meadow. Ann continued to work as a bedder until the mid-1990s, when she had to retire due to heart problems. Aware that she might not have long to live, and having been saving for Kenny’s future since the 1970s, in 1994 she arranged for her son to be looked after at a special care home nearby. He visited his parents every weekend until, sadly, Ann died shortly after undergoing heart surgery in 1996, at the age of sixty-nine. Fred lived on for only another seven years following the death of his beloved wife.

  Once married, Bet became a mother to four children, who she looked after full time. In what spare time she could find, Bet sewed and made dresses for her children and nieces. On retiring from his work as a stoker in the 1980s, Barrel did volunteer work as a driver for the local hospital, until his death in 1987. Bet passed away a decade later.

  Rene married and had three children; she now lives in Milton, just north of Cambridge. Joy lived in Norfolk when a young mother to two children, but returned to Cambridge following her divorce from their father. She worked as a volunteer among old people in Cambridge, where she still lives in happy retirement.

  In the 1970s, Shirley moved to Plymouth to live with her husband. She returned to Cambridge in 1981 following their divorce, and with her mother’s help and encouragement, later became a bedder. It was her failure to arrive for work at college one morning which alerted her family to the sad fact that she had died, in 2008. Her college almost seemed to miss her as much as her family continue to do.

  AUDREY

  Cambridge 1965-70s

  By the time she was seventeen, Audrey had finished her apprenticeship and was now working full-time at Raymond’s, the hairdressers. She was pleased that Edward began to treat her as if she was an adult. She was finally allowed to go out to clubs around Cambridge, and although her father always said she had to be in by midnight, he would always lend her a few bob if she was short. And, often, Audrey would arrive home after the appointed hour. ‘Better late than never,’ she’d say, to which he’d smile and make what became a stock reply, ‘Better never late!’

  In the mid-1960s it seemed as if there was a dance every night. Audrey, her friends from work and a couple of old school pals would regularly go to the Victoria, the Corn Exchange or the Guildhall, where there’d be live bands performing. Some nights they simply walked about the town, watching people go in and out of different pubs. They could tell the students who’d dare to go out without wearing their gowns, and witnessed many a chase through the market place as young men ran from older, bowler-hat-wearing bulldogs who had the authority to march them back to their colleges. One night, she found herself being used as a shield against bulldogs when a student grabbed her arm and pulled her into an alley by the Dorothy, where he started kissing her. After the shoc
k wore off, Audrey thought that he was a terrible kisser, so she shoved him away and told him to get lost. Which he did, without a word.

  Audrey particularly liked seeing people who went into the Criterion in Market Passage. It was a huge old pub, with a front bar usually populated by an older, local crowd of men who, on Saturday nights, took their wives to show off their new beehive hairdos. Audrey sometimes recognized customers as they passed her on their way in, some would smile at her as she and her friends chatted across the way from the Cri. Every kind of fashion was worn by the younger blokes who drank there. Mods and rockers wouldn’t exactly mix, but they’d tolerate each other’s presence in the back bars. After closing time, though, they’d invariably have a fight outside. Drunken brawls were the late night activity of choice for Cambridge local lads who didn’t have enough money (or had drunk too much beer) to get into the nightclubs which stayed open until after midnight. There were a few beatniks (‘fakeniks’, she’d heard some of the rockers call them) around, most of them post-grad students who liked their duffel coats, pipes and trad jazz records they sipped mild beer and smoked roll-ups, Ron told her. Beatniks would avoid confrontations outside the Cri and make their way to someone’s flat or house in order to smoke away the rest of a Saturday night, or so Ron said. Ron couldn’t decide if he was a mod or a rocker, so mixed with both.

  After people watching, Audrey and her mates would make their way directly to a club for a couple of hours of dancing on a night out, and didn’t go into pubs. Nice girls certainly didn’t go into the Cri alone, and seeing it at closing time once was enough for her not to want to visit the place without someone to protect her. A boyfriend that she was serious about, perhaps, if she had one.

  Some of her friends met boys soon after leaving school, and quickly settled down, even though they’d only just turned eighteen. Audrey wasn’t keen on getting too serious with anyone too soon, and had no plans to start a family until after she had her own salon. She had boyfriends, but none were serious. One of the more regular ones, Dave, played in a band and they dated often enough that she decided to introduce her dad to him, at one of his gigs.

  That night, a Friday, she returned from work with aching feet, sat down on her mum’s favourite old stool and kicked her shoes off. She shouted to Edward, who was in the hallway, combing his hair in front of the mirror. ‘His band are called Joker’s Wild and they’re quite good.’

  ‘Do they play anything I might know?’ Edward called back.

  ‘Yep, they’ll play some old rock-and-roll songs like that “Why Do Fools Fall in Love”, and they also really like the Four Seasons, you know, “Big Girls Don’t Cry”?’

  ‘Right-o, I’ll get me brothel creepers on then, shall I . . .’

  ‘Now Dad, behave yourself, you were never a Ted.’

  She heard him laugh, and seconds later he came into the kitchen looking smarter than she’d seen him in a while. ‘It’ll make a change stepping out with you,’ he told her warmly. Edward’s health had been worrying Audrey. He was out every night at the pub with his mates, and she thought he wasn’t going to get any better if he carried on drinking like he did. At least tonight she would be able to keep an eye on him.

  After Audrey had changed and put her hair into a style that looked something like Brigitte Bardot’s, she walked her dad up to the Racehorse on the corner of Wadloes Road. Having seated Edward at the bar (‘I’ll be happy here, love, go off with your pals,’ he told her), she joined her friends close to the front of the stage and they all danced, never taking their eyes off the band who roared through a thirty-minute performance. When they finished, Audrey, gasping and sweating, made her way back through the crowd to where Edward was sitting. As she got closer to him she noticed he was looking unsteady, and just before she could grab him, her dad slid off the bar stool in a collapse. Dave came over as soon as he realized what was happening, and they sat with Edward until the ambulance arrived, reassuring him that everything was going to be OK. Edward tried to make a joke out of it, telling Dave that his band weren’t that bad, really, but he was clearly in pain and near to unconsciousness.

  Audrey travelled to the hospital with her dad and made sure he was settled before making her way home, alone. Dave and the rest of the band had gone on to a house party, but she really didn’t feel like joining them.

  The next day at the hospital Edward told Audrey that he had stomach ulcers. ‘They said I’ve got to change my “habits”,’ he said as dismissively as he could. Then he snorted. ‘I’m too old to change.’

  ‘Well, if you don’t you’ll be dead, Dad,’ Audrey said as calmly as she could, before giving her voice an edge and adding, ‘So you better stop drinking for a start!’

  They both knew that as much as she might nag him and he’d agree just for a quiet life, that would never happen. All she could hope for was that he’d take heed of the doctor’s advice and at least cut down on drinking, smoking and eating badly. Which he did, for a while.

  Over the next few months, as Edward tried to get better and pretended to drink less, Audrey and Dave split up (he had to go to London in order make a living out of playing music) and she met a new bloke called Barry Woolard. A bus conductor, he’d made her laugh and asked her out just as she reached her stop one day after work. Ex-army, he lived at home with his mother – his dad had died in the war – but was more mature than most blokes she met. He could certainly hold his beer, as she discovered after a couple of nights out together. She felt safe, happy and like she could be herself around him, though. If she’d thought hard enough about why she liked Barry so much, she’d probably discover that it was because he was a lot like her dad.

  She liked him enough that within a year they were engaged and Audrey put their name down on the council list for a house. A year after that, they were married.

  It had taken a while but by the time of the wedding Audrey knew that, like her dad, Barry was more than just a drinker, he was a heavy drinker. It hadn’t put her off, even after she’d returned from their honeymoon at Maud’s caravan in Felixstowe with a black eye. Edward wasn’t impressed when he saw that and wanted to give his new son-in-law the same, but Audrey reassured him, ‘Don’t worry, Dad, he came off a lot worse.’

  Audrey had arranged for them to rent a small house on Milford Street, which they moved into after their honeymoon in Felixstowe. ‘I like it here, it’s close to the pub and that’s no bad thing,’ she’d told her Aunty Maud on her first visit.

  While they’d argue sometimes before they were married, it seemed as if having the ring on her finger made Barry bolder about being physical with Audrey. Not that their arguments were strictly one-sided, and they still had a giggle together most of the time. Barry had never learnt to drive and Audrey teased him that it was a ‘good job you don’t drive, ’cos you’d never know where to find the car. You struggle to find your bike, as it is.’ Which wasn’t that funny, since Barry’s bike wasn’t his, but belonged to the GPO and every time he misplaced it they stopped money from his wages for a replacement.

  He’d started working for the Post Office the year before they were married because the pay was better than on the buses, and they were both keen to start a family. That wasn’t to prove easy, though. ‘We could have had a lot more fun before we married if we’d known about your blocked tubes!’ Barry half-joked following a hospital visit a year after they’d married. Audrey said nothing, feeling too disappointed to speak, afraid that she’d cry if she did. As it turned out, she would become pregnant soon enough.

  The first year of their marriage was also complicated because Edward moved into their home with them. Audrey had to look after him because his health had worsened. He developed lung cancer and was unable to care for himself. That very dark cloud had a thin silver lining, though, in that the council gave them a two-bedroomed flat on Wadloes Road, so at least they had more space.

  It was something of a relief for Audrey to get to work these days. She had discovered that she was pretty good at organizing people
and running things. She understood, without being taught, how to plan ahead and make sure everything ran smoothly. She wasn’t afraid of upsetting people if they deserved it (as she saw it), and was promoted to positions of responsibility at the salon despite having had a couple of run-ins with suppliers.

  She was often disappointed when she had to close Raymond’s at the time that the boss told her to. Work allowed her to occupy her mind with something other than worry for Edward, or about Barry’s drinking. So she took on as many extra jobs doing people’s hair at their home in the evenings as she could. Audrey saved the extra money she made, and by 1968 she was able to buy her own hairdressers.

  Despite having had the vague but determined plan to open her own salon, Audrey hadn’t done any real planning for it, but as is often the way in life, she happened on an opportunity that she took eagerly and almost without thinking. She’d gone to the launderette on Newmarket Road one morning and noticed that the shop next door for was for sale. She went home and told Barry and her dad about it, and they pooled their finances, determined that she should become her own boss. Audrey refused the money Aunty Maud offered her, though. She’d only recently left her job as a bedder, and it ‘don’t seem right taking her money now she’s not quite right in the head, and anyway she taught me to stand on me own two feet,’ she told Barry, who wasn’t as keen on refusing the money.

  The next day, she and Barry went back to the shop and asked to speak to the owner of the laundrette, who also owned the place next door, and the deal was done there and then. Just as Maud had predicted, Audrey’s name was soon up above the shop at 125 Newmarket Road, along with ‘Hair Stylist Tel. 54871’.