The Staircase Girls

Book excerpt: BIOGRAPHY: GENERAL. As she stood outside the enormous carved wooden gates Joyce shivered in the cold pre-dawn air. She knew the people inside here had all the rights and the likes of her had none. Some of the students had taken advantage of girls from the town and got away with it because their parents were rich or influential. And now she was about to make their beds, clean their rooms and lug coal up flights of stairs to make their fires ... ' In the 1950s women like Joyce, Nance and Shirley lived in some of the poorest streets in Cambridge and suffered great hardships but every day their work as servants in the colleges took them into an extraordinarily privileged world. Known as 'bedders' (short for 'bedmakers'), they often became close to their charges, mothering them, covering up for them, sometimes falling in love with 'their boys', some of whom would go on to become household names.