A good joke never grows old. I soon got used to the sight of skeletal arms waved in my line of sight by giggling students crouched below the level of my window.
On her second visit the bedmaker must have been looking about her in a more relaxed fashion than before, because she got an eyeful of something even more outlandish than me. There was a tropical millipede, a nice brownish colour and about a foot long, on the windowsill. In a plastic box, mind you, not roaming free. It had cost me £1 in Maidenhead. What with the millipede and the stereo, Maidenhead had yielded quite a trove of bargains.
Actually the reason she hadn’t seen it the first time was that I had stowed it in a drawer beforehand. Just being tactful, like Bluebeard not wanting to mention the wives on a first date, knowing there would likely be complications later, and wanting to get off on a good foot. Or two feet. But no more than that.
When my millipede curled up it looked very much like a Catherine wheel, though I didn’t like to see it in that position too often, curling up in such creatures being an indicator of stress. This particular morning, though, it was feeding very happily. Millipedes do very well on rotten fruit.
My bedmaker stared at it. ‘What on earth is that Nasty Thing?’ I tried to explain the beauties of the creature, but I could make no headway. There’s something about segmented arthropod bodies, legs that dance in squadrons, that seems to upset people. Coördination which would produce wild applause in a chorus line and enthusiastic cheering at a sports ground — there’s something called a Mexican wave, where people raise their arms in raucous sequence — just gives people the horrors in an inoffensive giant insect.
There was only one thing my bedmaker wanted to know about this beautiful creature: whether she was expected to clean out its box. I reassured her. I myself was the millipede’s bedder. She could relax.
There were no signs of relaxation as yet, but it was early days. At least she was dividing her alarm between two objects, now that she had seen the millipede, so logically she must be feeling more at ease with me. We were on our way.
I knew my millipede was bisexual and hoped it would breed, not realising that you need two of them for that — any two, but you do need two. So my knowledge was curled up round a core of ignorance. Any passing biologist (and there must have been a few such at Downing) could have put me right.
The millipede had a name, but somehow I’ve forgotten it, and The Nasty Thing is all that remains.
Over the railings outside the back entrance of my staircase was a building on the Downing Site labelled Department of Parapsychology, which I thought was a wonderful omen and a testimony to the open-mindedness of the university — until I realised I had been misreading Parasitology. Also an honourable discipline, of course.
When I arrived with Mum and Dad on that first day I had been issued with a key to the door of A6, something that presented practical problems from the start. Where was I to keep it, for one thing? Pockets and I don’t get on, never have and never will. Something in a pocket is as far out of my reach as a jar on a high shelf.
I asked my bedmaker for help. By now she had a name. She hadn’t volunteered it, but I had extracted it like an expert dentist while her attention was elsewhere.
I had it all planned. I let her surprise me at my typewriter, tapping cheerfully away. I called out, ‘I love typing, don’t you? Ten tiny tendrils tapping in tempo! I’m just writing to my mother about you, only — so embarrassing! — your name has slipped my mind. I swear, I’d forget my hips if they weren’t screwed on!’
She gave a little gasp and then it came out. She was Mrs Beddoes. The reluctant stump was held safe in my pliers. And it hadn’t hurt a bit. ‘Beddoes by name and bedder by nature,’ she said. Mrs Beddoes the bedder, next card along from Mr Carve the Butcher in the Happy Families pack.
Her fear of me was still great and it was important to be delicate in my approaches. If I could I would tempt her into making the first move, as if I was coaxing a squirrel down from its branch.
I spoke soothingly, knowing that tone of voice was more important than my choice of words. ‘I wish,’ I said, ‘I could find some way of keeping track of my room key. Perhaps a piece of string would do the trick.’ This was the equivalent of the peanut on the back of my hand, tempting the flighty creature to come close.
Mrs Beddoes frowned and produced a length of string from the pocket of her pinny. Then she came up to me of her own accord, close enough to attach it to my trousers. Her hand held the string, but in another way it was me who reeled her in.
Town full of scrappy facial hair
First we tied one end to the key and the other to a belt-loop. I could retrieve the key reasonably easily by pulling on the string, but I couldn’t always tuck it away again, so the whole arrangement was a bit of a business. Eventually I realised that it was simpler to have the key on its string round my neck, even if it sometimes got tangled up with my clothes. By then Mrs Beddoes was almost tame, though still a long way from eating out of my hand. Progress enough for one day.
She had gone on bringing me cups of tea, and I had gone on not drinking them. Finally she broached the subject. ‘Aren’t you going to have your tea, Mr Cromer?’ she asked. ‘I should have asked how you take it — perhaps you need sugar? If it’s cold I can make you another. It’s no trouble.’
Here we were at the heart of the matter, the charity case refusing to be patronised. ‘Now see here, Mrs Beddoes, why do you bring me tea?’
‘I thought you could do with a cuppa.’
‘But you don’t bring tea to anyone else, do you?’
‘Well, no.’
‘Perhaps you feel sorry for me.’
‘Not really, Mr Cromer. It’s the others I feel sorry for.’
That stopped me in my tracks. ‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, you’re the only one who is ever awake. The only one who doesn’t groan when I knock on the door. And after all, they’re missing the best part of the day, aren’t they?’
After that the scales fell from my eyes, and I started taking Mrs Beddoes’ cups of tea at face value, as a real privilege and quite a contribution to what was (as she said), or became, the best part of the day.
A door to close behind me and a key to lock it with. These were things I had never had until I was an undergraduate. They seemed fairytale privileges. Space and privacy were not things that had gone together in my history. My most intense previous experience of control over my surroundings was possession of the ornamental Chinese box given me by Ben Nevin at Vulcan. A precious enclosure, but not large enough to accommodate so much as a pack of playing cards or, more importantly, a full tube of depilatory cream.
Now I had room for whole vats of Immac, if I had wanted, and could have kept them safe from pilferers. The Immac, incidentally, had done its work, and more than its work. I was making no efforts to suppress the sprouting of my beard, but it was chemically damaged and never grew quite right. There were irregular patches where nothing much happened. Unfortunately they were more on one side than the other, perhaps because I laid the stuff on thick where I could reach most easily. I didn’t try to shave what I had, all the same. I had enough on my plate without razor chores. My growth, however substandard, didn’t draw attention to itself in a whole university town full of scrappy facial hair.
Possession of a key transformed my status. It conferred so many privileges: the knowledge that no one could enter the room in my absence (except, theoretically, the Head Porter, who had a master key). Control of any admission while I was in. Privacy and security, necessary elements of the much-touted ‘peace of mind’.