resigned myself to work for, someone would soon show up from somewhere who was willing to work for less.
But I thought I’d struck lucky with my handyman job at Magdalen College. The pay wasn’t great, but I’d known worse and I made friends with one of the Fellows there, a physicist called Thach Pham, a guy about my own age (I’m thirty-three), whose parents had been immigrants from Vietnam. He was researching the replication of matter using resonance fields (the up and coming field according to Suzanne, my new girlfriend at the time, who’d trained as a physicist, though now worked in the college refectory). Pham said he’d try and get me a job as a technician if he could. He said that sometimes it was possible to get a work permit if the university pulled the right strings, even though the Old Brits normally kept work like that for their own. He would see what he could do.
“My mum and dad were migrants like you,” he confided, “I know what you guys have to go through.”
He also promised me that he would use his influence in Senior Common Room to make sure they didn’t replace me with cheaper labour. Both these promises turned out to be worthless.
Suzanne was nine years younger than me and recently arrived from France with a score of others in a little motorboat built for family holidays on the French canals. She was pretty, graceful, funny and clever (much cleverer than me), but she hadn’t yet adapted to her new circumstances, and was all but immobilised by the challenges that faced her. She latched onto me as if I were the answer to everything. She told me I was the man she’d been looking for all her life, and for a short time I believed her, felt myself to actually be the strong, resourceful figure that she’d decided to see in me. We got ourselves a bedsit room on Walton Street, close to the edge of the great Thames Marsh. We made love every morning and every night and shared our meagre little meals as if they were royal feasts. We decided we were going to work and work until we’d somehow saved enough for tickets and visas for Greenland. There we’d rent a little farm on a hillside and grow vegetables and raise sheep and smell the sweet fresh air of a land that wasn’t slowly sinking into the mud.
But we were using cheap black market contraceptives. Suzanne fell pregnant with Maria and that was the end of our chances of saving up for anything. Suddenly we had no aim in life other than keeping ourselves going from day to day.
“I’m sorry Mr Fernandez,” said Mr Das, the bursar at Magdalen College, “but I’m afraid we have no choice. We can no longer afford to pay above the market rate and we’re going to have to let you go unless you are willing to take a fifty dollar reduction in your weekly pay.”
“Fifty dollars? But how can I? I have a baby, Mr Das, a little baby to feed. We don’t ask a lot – the three of us live in just one little room – but still we have rent to pay. And my daughter has asthma. Please, Mr Das. Please let me carry on without a cut in pay. I already work very hard. I’ll work harder. You will get more for your money I promise you. But you must have mercy on me please.”
Mr Das was a tiny little Old Brit. I am not very tall myself, but the top of his balding yellowish head didn’t reach the bottom of my chin. Incongruously he wore a huge grey handlebar moustache. He cleared his throat.
“As I say, that isn’t an option I’m afraid.”
“But Dr Pham promised me that….”
“Dr Pham had no business to promise you anything.”
“He promised me that I’d be able to keep my job here. He said if there was any problem it would be sorted out in Senior Common Room.”
“All the Fellows are aware of the need to reduce labour costs in these difficult times, Dr Pham included. He made no objection when I suggested this policy.”
I honestly did not know how we could continue to eat and pay the rent. The new arrivals managed it by squatting in those
But I thought I’d struck lucky with my handyman job at Magdalen College. The pay wasn’t great, but I’d known worse and I made friends with one of the Fellows there, a physicist called Thach Pham, a guy about my own age (I’m thirty-three), whose parents had been immigrants from Vietnam. He was researching the replication of matter using resonance fields (the up and coming field according to Suzanne, my new girlfriend at the time, who’d trained as a physicist, though now worked in the college refectory). Pham said he’d try and get me a job as a technician if he could. He said that sometimes it was possible to get a work permit if the university pulled the right strings, even though the Old Brits normally kept work like that for their own. He would see what he could do.
“My mum and dad were migrants like you,” he confided, “I know what you guys have to go through.”
He also promised me that he would use his influence in Senior Common Room to make sure they didn’t replace me with cheaper labour. Both these promises turned out to be worthless.
Suzanne was nine years younger than me and recently arrived from France with a score of others in a little motorboat built for family holidays on the French canals. She was pretty, graceful, funny and clever (much cleverer than me), but she hadn’t yet adapted to her new circumstances, and was all but immobilised by the challenges that faced her. She latched onto me as if I were the answer to everything. She told me I was the man she’d been looking for all her life, and for a short time I believed her, felt myself to actually be the strong, resourceful figure that she’d decided to see in me. We got ourselves a bedsit room on Walton Street, close to the edge of the great Thames Marsh. We made love every morning and every night and shared our meagre little meals as if they were royal feasts. We decided we were going to work and work until we’d somehow saved enough for tickets and visas for Greenland. There we’d rent a little farm on a hillside and grow vegetables and raise sheep and smell the sweet fresh air of a land that wasn’t slowly sinking into the mud.
But we were using cheap black market contraceptives. Suzanne fell pregnant with Maria and that was the end of our chances of saving up for anything. Suddenly we had no aim in life other than keeping ourselves going from day to day.
“I’m sorry Mr Fernandez,” said Mr Das, the bursar at Magdalen College, “but I’m afraid we have no choice. We can no longer afford to pay above the market rate and we’re going to have to let you go unless you are willing to take a fifty dollar reduction in your weekly pay.”
“Fifty dollars? But how can I? I have a baby, Mr Das, a little baby to feed. We don’t ask a lot – the three of us live in just one little room – but still we have rent to pay. And my daughter has asthma. Please, Mr Das. Please let me carry on without a cut in pay. I already work very hard. I’ll work harder. You will get more for your money I promise you. But you must have mercy on me please.”
Mr Das was a tiny little Old Brit. I am not very tall myself, but the top of his balding yellowish head didn’t reach the bottom of my chin. Incongruously he wore a huge grey handlebar moustache. He cleared his throat.
“As I say, that isn’t an option I’m afraid.”
“But Dr Pham promised me that….”
“Dr Pham had no business to promise you anything.”
“He promised me that I’d be able to keep my job here. He said if there was any problem it would be sorted out in Senior Common Room.”
“All the Fellows are aware of the need to reduce labour costs in these difficult times, Dr Pham included. He made no objection when I suggested this policy.”
I honestly did not know how we could continue to eat and pay the rent. The new arrivals managed it by squatting in those
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