"The Cleaning Ladies"
Nottingham, England
August 25, 1983
Dear Folks,
I spent the early morning at the offices of the Nottingham Evening Post. After being interviewed, I was treated to a large breakfast in a guard house by the back lot entrance. Very friendly guards. Much tea and chat. They let me store my pack in their room.
At the breakfast of eggs, sausage, tomato, and tea and toast, I started talking to two middle-aged women sitting nearby smoking Marlboro cigarettes. The women were talking and laughing loudly, but at the sound of my voice they looked at me, then at each other, with surprise.
"My goodness, Pratty, the purty young thing said sumptin' t'us, I do believe," the older said to the other.
"Well, he can't be from 'ere then!" the other burst out.
Both cackled delightfully and took quick drags on their cigarettes. With a breath of smoke the first one--tall and skinny, heavily wrinkled, dressed in a black blouse and red stretch slacks, and with her head topped by blond-gray permed hair--said to me, "Where ya from, honey? Lordy, you're too nice to be an Englishman. America?"
When I said I was, she cackled and gave the other woman--shorter and heavy with gray, curly hair and dressed in a polka-dotted blouse, gray dress, and tennis shoes--a little shove.
"Oh I just knew it!" the other woman exclaimed. "Them Yankee boys are such dolls! Ohhh, they aren't so high and mighty to talk to us low 'uns." She looked at me. "Are ya?"
It turned out they were the morning cleaning ladies. They brought their tea cups and cigarettes over, and they sat beside me. Both spoke with a very pronounced cockney that at times made it difficult for me to understand their words. They were as raw as any two women anywhere, and we had an excellent time with all their animated gestures and high, mocking voices. Foremost in our discussion was the stratified English social system.
"I was in America once, you know, where all's the bad men were always gettin' blasted away--"
"Chicago?"
"Yes, that's it. I was there to visit me neice and we went to a funeral and--ohhh my!--I couldn't believe 'ow much the dead woman looked so beautiful. Why the wonders the funeral people in America do. She looked better dead than she'd ever looked alive!"
They snorted themselves silly with laughter.
"Well, go on ya. Tell 'im the rest," prodded the tall one, Whissy.
Pratty made herself sort of stiff, like the corpse, and ran her rough, red-nailed fingers down over her dress as she spoke. "And the clothes they 'ad on that woman. Soooo pretty and cute kinda! Polky dots and frills and silky material. I wanted so much to reach out and feel 'er, to see if what I was lookin' at was real.
"But that wasn't the half of what I'd seen at the funeral, Stevie. No sir!"
She was really getting into her story now, and she grew ever more animated. "'ere, if ya aren't one of them that sits behind a desk all day with a suit and tie and--" She made a face. "--a 'oity-toity look on ya face, ya aren't to count fer nothin'. Ya think in all the morns I've been 'ere to clean the place one of them reporters ever said 'ello! to me?"
"Hah!" Whissy burst out, "I's be cleanin', right beside 'em, and they act like I never existed."
But at the funeral reception in Chicago afterwards, Pratty went on to say, there'd been the bosses with the employees, and the rich with the poor. And the cogeniality between everyone there had been such that she'd not been able to discern who belonged to what social niche. Not only did everyone dress and talk and act similarly, but they all mingled as if from the same family.
"Everyone has their place 'ere," sighed Whissy. "It's okay to smile and say 'Hello, Mista.' But if he's got one of them fancy stuck-up noses, 'bout all you'll ever get from 'em is a quick view of their backside, as they rush past."
Steven