The Staircase Girls Read online

  ‘You’re a bit younger than we’re used to seeing here,’ he told her. ‘Quite a bit younger in fact. How old are you anyway?’

  Uh-oh, thought Joyce, so it’s true that you have to be ancient before they let you work as a university servant. No point in lying, she thought, and said firmly, ‘I’m nearly seventeen,’ and stood up straight, jutting out her chin, even though she knew that in doing so her scar could be clearly seen. She was properly grown up, she wanted to tell him. She thought of telling him that she remembered serving him when she was a waitress at Lyons two years ago (she hadn’t, but he wouldn’t remember), or that she thought she knew him from Saturday night dances at the Rex – but then he might think she was one of those girls who went with the Yanks from the air base. Instead, she sniffed, and tried to look haughty. Half a smile disfigured the man’s face.

  ‘I’m Percy,’ he said. ‘Pleased to meet you . . . ?’

  ‘Joyce.’

  ‘Well, pleased to meet you, nearly seventeen Joyce. I’m what the boys here call a bulldog, but don’t worry, I only bite them that deserve it. I bark a lot more, and at everyone and anyone who comes into these here grounds. This is my yard, if you like, and I have to patrol it. It’s up to me and Bill to keep things running smoothly, and on time. Otherwise we’d be in a right state, wouldn’t we?’

  Joyce smiled lightly, and didn’t think she was expected to answer. He’s not as tough as he wants me to think he is, she thought. Percy continued, leaning with both fists on the counter, tipping onto his toes just like she’d seen a police sergeant do at the Regent Street station when she and her mum had gone in to see them about her next-door neighbours’ shouting and fighting last Sunday morning.

  ‘Good to see that you’re nice and early, Joyce, and if you keep that up you’ll be alright with me. As long as you don’t get up to anything untoward concerning the boys or masters – or anyone else here, come to that – you and me will get on just fine. Right?’ Percy’s raised eyebrows made his hat bob up to comical effect. Joyce could only agree, ‘Right,’ and stopped short of indignantly proclaiming, ‘Untoward? How dare you, I’ll just be cleaning and making beds!’

  Percy moved back around to Joyce’s side of the counter and opened the door again, motioning her into the archway. He pointed across the grass to the building opposite, and a doorway that was another arch, although much, much smaller than the one she was stood under now. The quadrangle somehow resisted the fog, which appeared to have stopped at the front gate. It was shut out like the rest of the world, thought Joyce. ‘Take this path past the big oak tree to staircase B,’ he told her. ‘They all have letters on them, keep going left until you reach it, then go in, there’s a door on the left and you should find the old woman, tell her who you are and she’ll get you started.’

  He stood watching Joyce (she knew he would) as she started along the path towards the big tree. Hope his silly hat falls off when he’s talking to the next person to come in, she thought, as she walked with a straight back and stiff arms towards the dark entry to staircase B.

  Inside the cold, dark corridor she saw a dim light coming through a crack in the door on her left, and knocked on it. An old, tired voice half-whispered, ‘’Ave yer clocked in?’

  Joyce craned her neck through the door and tried to see where the voice was coming from. She half-shouted in reply, ‘No, I’ve just been sent over here to you – I’m the new girl.’

  There was a snort and a short, almost square figure shuffled towards Joyce. ‘C’mon, this way ’ere.’

  Joyce stepped away from the door and the brown-coated figure moved slowly past her towards the staircase on the right. The old woman began a halting, panting, climb up well-worn stone steps, half-hauling herself along by a dull metal rail. Joyce stepped slowly behind her, in no need of the rail, listening to the broken wheeze grow louder above the echoing slap of the old woman’s feet as they rose into the dark recesses of the stairwell. At the first proper landing (having gone through one half landing turn), the old woman paused, leaned back slightly and panted, ‘Here y’are.’ A gnarled finger pointed to a plain wooden door about twenty feet away. Joyce looked at the door and back at the woman, who’d set her eyes on the stone floor at her feet, breathing deeply, getting her breath back. Noticing that Joyce hadn’t moved, the old woman impatiently waved at the door again. ‘Thas yer gyp room,’ she said as if talking to a child. ‘Get in there and find a bucket an’ fill it up, pick up yer mop and come back ’ere. Might as well get yer begun, we in’t got all day.’

  ‘What’s a gyp room, missus?’ Joyce had never heard the name before.

  ‘Is where the gentlemen’s breakfast and tea used to git made by their gyps, back in the old days, when they was proper gents and had money to pay for men to run, fetch and carry for ’em. They reckon gyp is on account of a uniform their servants used to wear with all buttons on the front, what had some French word for ’em. Anyways, nowadays is our tea room and they can use it sometimes if they wants, but they don’t seem to know how to do anything for theirselves. We keeps our stuff in there, so in you go.’

  Just as Joyce made to enter the room a smiling, middle-aged lady came towards them. Nodding at the old woman, she turned to Joyce.

  ‘Hello dear, I’m Mrs Atkins the housekeeper here. My, you do look young! Maud said you were, but I wasn’t expecting you to be a child, practically. Well, never mind, you’ll certainly be able to run up and down these stairs, won’t you? Now, are you being looked after?’ Joyce nodded and noticed that the old woman was making her way into the gyp room.

  ‘Lovely,’ continued Mrs Atkins. ‘You’ll be shown where everything is, which is usually all in there,’ she half-turned towards the door through which the old woman had disappeared without another word. ‘If you run low on anything, come and find me and I’ll make sure that you get new supplies. You’ll be cleaning before anything else, and making the beds or stripping them last, when the boys have gone off to lectures for nine o’clock, and when you’ve done, just get yourself off home. It’ll usually take you three hours to do your floors, which are this and the one above – the ground floor will still be done by old Annie.’ Mrs Atkins leaned in closer to Joyce and whispered, ‘She’s slow now, but still a damned good bedder, and she hasn’t got anything else in her life – no husband and no pension – so we’ll keep her here for as long as she wants and is able. Now . . .’ she straightened up and stepped back, folded her arms and appraised Joyce with half-closed eyes. Quickly taking in Joyce’s thick brown stockings, dark blue calf-length gabardine skirt, navy school jumper over a white blouse and those flat shoes, Mrs Atkins assessed her size and said, ‘I’ll find you an overall to wear that you’ll have to take home and wash yourself. Come find me when you’ve finished, and I hope you enjoy it. Ta-ta for now!’ With that the housekeeper stepped around Joyce and made her way down to the ground floor.

  Joyce walked over to the gyp room and peered in. ‘She seems nice,’ she said to old Annie’s back, which presented an impenetrable wall to her.

  ‘Humph,’ the old woman turned with a mop in one hand and a bucket, sloshing soapy water, in the other. ‘You working today or in’t you? Here, get on wiv it.’

  Joyce took them, stepped back and stood quietly, thinking she might not be able to stand much of this job as she was given a quick, brutal run down of what she was expected to do. ‘Wash the stairs, then the washing up, tidy the sitting rooms, but be quiet till they wake up. Scrub the floors when yer’ve swept ’em if they’re asleep. Clean the grate and lay a fire, then make sure the gyp room is clean and tidy so’s the boys can make their breakfast when they get up.’ Boys? Joyce thought, how old are they, then, fifteen, sixteen? ‘An’ if they’re not up in time for their lekchers at nine, you get ’em all up.’

  What have I let myself in for? Joyce wondered, as she took the heavy metal pail into the stairwell, and climbed to the next landing to start cleaning from the top down. And not even a cuppa. The old bag.

  It was still col
d as Joyce began, and she could feel her lungs taking time to warm up. As she moved her mop across each step her breath began to appear in clouds. At the bottom of the stairs the old woman stood, looking up at her through the slowly lifting gloom. No clouds of breath escaped her pursed lips, Joyce noticed as she mopped. The old lady watched in silence for a while, and then called up to her, ‘’Ow old are yer, then?’ Joyce had been warned by Maud that her being so young would make her something of a surprise for not just the students, but especially the masters and staff. Bedders, she was told, were always older women, until recently at least, what with the war and all that.

  ‘Eh? ’Ow old?’ Joyce stopped sloshing her mop, straightened up and spoke into the grey-white air, ‘I’m sixteen-and-a-half, missus.’

  ‘Humph,’ the old woman grunted. ‘Don’t know what they’re thinking lettin’ you in ’ere.’ She clucked, and went on, her face indistinct to Joyce. ‘When I was your age they’d never let me in ’ere, they’d as soon arrest me for standin’ around in Petty Cury as they would wave me into one of these places.’

  Joyce said nothing, but continued mopping her way down the stairs. Like most people born and raised in Cambridge, she knew very little about the university except that it was powerful and only a very few townspeople ever got through the gates of a college. It was generally believed that there were different rules and even laws for the university, and that normal people like her had to be respectful of university folk or they might end up in trouble without knowing what they’d done wrong. She’d read in a book Maud had lent to her that university men had the right to go into town and arrest people, even as recently as her grandmother’s day. Which made her wonder . . . Joyce stopped mopping.

  ‘How old are you then?’ she asked.

  ‘Never yer mind, yer cheeky beggar. Let’s just say I’m old enough to remember when that Daisy ’opkins gave ’em what for.’

  ‘Daisy who?’ Joyce thought the old woman might be a bit mad.

  ‘’Opkins!’ barked the old girl. She moved away from the foot of the stairs, and said, ‘Come and ’ave a cup a tea, yer doing alright.’ Joyce picked up her pail and carried it with the mop sticking out up to the gyp room. She stood in the doorway while the old woman put a blackened kettle onto the single gas ring on the side of the stone sink. There was only one chair, so Joyce waited in the doorway.

  The old woman was grumbling and mumbling, almost to herself. ‘It was a crime the way them bulldogs would run after young girls in them days, chasin’ ’em and callin’ ’em whores and all. In the day as well as night-times, it got so yer couldn’t go out in yer own town back then – they even ’rested the vice chancellor’s own daughter! It were when I were a girl, about Daisy’s age – yer, I was your age once. There was another one before ’er an all. ’Ow many sugars you want?’ The old woman pulled a spoon out of the drawer in the small, well-scrubbed wooden table on which she stood the teapot, and reached to a shelf above the sink to a Kilner jar half-filled with granules of sugar.

  ‘Another what?’ Joyce felt herself getting lost. ‘Er, two sugars please.’ The old woman rustled towards the window, opened it slightly and pulled in a half-empty bottle of milk. ‘Another girl put in the Spinning House after being caught by bulldogs in Petty Cury,’ she continued. ‘Just before Daisy it were. This one – Jane I think her name were – she escaped and ran away back ’ome to Suffolk, but do you know, the silly old bugger sent ’is men after ’er at home and they brought ’er back and put ’er in court for breaking out of jail.’

  ‘What happened to her then?’ Joyce was becoming intrigued.

  ‘Well, she dint get off, but ’er lawyer gave the vice chancellor hell, and ’cused ’im of being no better than Russian secret police, so ’e did. I think she got a pardon off the ’ome sec’try an’ all. An’ she were only seventeen, as well.’

  ‘But why were they being arrested?’ asked Joyce.

  ‘’Cos they was young and out in Petty Cury – all the old tarts and the young ’uns did used to get blokes there, an’ the students was always walking up an’ down looking, or doing things with the girls. So them bulldogs in their silly ’ats used to run up and down, ’coosin’ any woman of this an’ that and sending young gentlemen ’ome with a clip round the ear.’

  ‘Really? In Petty Cury?’ Joyce couldn’t imagine the narrow street which ran from the entrance of one of the oldest colleges, Christ’s, to the market place, with its crumbling old buildings and busy shops, being such a place.

  ‘Yer, and it weren’t just the poor girls eiver what got arrested. I ’eard one year the students tried to ’ave a ball in Shelford and asked lots of ’spectable girls – dressmakers, maids and the like – to go to it, an’ they sent a bus round to pick ’em up. But the proctor stopped the bus when it were full, got the boys off and drove it to the police station, where they kept all those nice girls in overnight. Well, they was wrong there, and one of the girls who was kept for days in the Spinning House tried to sue ’em for false arrest. After that, if the bulldogs was trying to ’rest a girl in town loads of people would go an’ help her – lots of them got away. My own mum said she saw some blokes ’avin’ a go at bulldogs in broad daylight once. Well, the proctors stopped looking for ’em for a few years ’cos they was getting beat up, bones broke an’ everything by blokes looking to fight ’em in town.’

  ‘So what about Daisy, then?’ asked Joyce.

  ‘Ah well, she was a smart girl, dressed all nice they reckon, an’ at only seventeen she must have worked ’ard to get her smart dresses. She were well known to the bulldogs, and this one time they give ’er two weeks in the Spinning House, but she got out ’cos they dint write her charge prop’ly or something, and then she only went and sued ’em for wrong arrest! Well, it were all over the papers and everyone knew what the bulldogs were doing was wrong, so they stopped it. By the time I started ’ere after the first war, they couldn’t arrest no one no more.’

  Well, thought Joyce, plenty of people said that all young girls round town were only after the students for one thing or another. She’d felt the stare of the porters and bulldogs as she walked about town, whatever the time of the day, but especially at night. And she knew that there were some colleges that only let a woman who was a bedder get past the porter – they wouldn’t have no girl students, no girls in the rooms, no girls in their colleges.

  ‘So how come young ’uns like me get jobs like this?’

  ‘It were the first war what did it,’ Annie sniffed. ‘All the married and old women left these jobs to do the men’s work on farms, in hospitals an’ factories. The colleges ’ad to get young ’uns in as bedders’ assistants. That were the start of it, but not many as young as you ’ave been in ’ere, I’d say.’

  Joyce felt slightly proud of herself. She was the only one of her friends who’d got a job at college, she thought. Maybe it was true what people were telling her, that Britain was changing at last, and getting better for young people. She knew that not everyone was happy about the likes of her being allowed into the bedrooms of smart and posh young gentlemen, and never would be she reckoned.

  ‘Are yer done with that tea, then?’ the old woman moved past her into the hallway, forcing Joyce out of the doorway. ‘Yes,’ she put the cup in the sink. ‘What’s next, then?’

  ‘’Ass nearly eight in’t it? Go and see what them boys doin’ and if they ain’t out of bed yet. But you watch ’em, don’t let ’em get up to anything with yer.’

  Yes, thought Joyce, I know the likes of you – if any of the boys did get up to something with me then everyone round town would soon know about it, wouldn’t they? As she walked along the corridor from the gyp room to the first door into a sitting room with two bedrooms off it, Joyce thought to herself, I’m not going in their bedrooms while they’re in bed, or even if they’re in there at all if I can help it. She opened the door, stood in the doorway and raised her voice, ‘Hello? Hello – I’m Joyce, your new bedder!’ The bedroom doors were open, and voices
called out from each in reply, ‘Hello!’, ‘Who?’ Almost at the same time two men – not boys at all – appeared, one wearing striped pyjamas and scratching his head, his hair all over the place, the other in a shirt that hung out over his neatly pressed trousers, his hair flat if not neatly combed. ‘Oh . . .’ said the half-dressed man, ‘Hmmm!’ said the other.

  Joyce felt a small shock and said, ‘I’ll come back when you’re done dressing,’ and she turned sharply to quick-step her way back to the gyp room, outside of which the old woman stood, watching to see how Joyce handled her first meeting with the ‘boys’.

  Lord, thought a rapidly blushing Joyce, why didn’t Maud warn me that they might not be dressed when I got to work! She’d have to ask her when she got the chance, she decided, what was best to do when speaking to the ‘boys’ and they were in their PJs.

  ANN PILCHER

  Folkestone to Cambridge, 1937–40

  Ann Pilcher, known as Nance to her family, was ten years old in 1937 when her mother told her that she was going to have to spend a long time at the hospital. For the previous two years Ann had made many visits to hospital, but she’d never had to stay in. This time though, her mum Grace said, she’d need to be kept in because, ‘They have to do an operation on you, so’s you can hear properly and it won’t hurt no more.’ Since a small child Ann had suffered almost constantly from earaches and fought infections in her ear, and she’d missed lots of school days due to pain and dizziness. Grace didn’t know exactly what the problem was, but she just knew it could get to be as bad as her husband’s hearing unless the doctors did something drastic for their eldest daughter. Jack Pilcher had been almost completely deafened by the field guns he operated during WWI. One eardrum had burst, and the other was severely lacking in effectiveness. It was just a matter of time before he’d lose his hearing altogether, Grace was always telling him.