Crier Profile - Pat Cook
"The train about to depart from Platform 1 will be the 7.15 to London King's Cross..." Just retired this January, Pat Cook tells us something about her life as a Swaffham Prior London Commuter.
I WENT TO SCHOOL IN NOTTINGHAM. First of all to St Joseph's preparatory school for girls... convent preparatory school! Then to St Catherine's Grammar school for girls, near the cathedral, on Derby Road, just across the road from the boys' school. A great joy for us and a worry for the nuns who would try to keep us in...I was very good at maths but staying on and going to university wasn't an option for me, so they said ah, you should go to work for a bank. And the one thing you never had to do in a bank was add up numbers!
You had machines to do it for you. But the one thing that came out of it was, they had an opportunity to transfer to the bank in Cambridge, and I thought, well, the ratio of women to men in Nottingham was very high. And I had noted that it was the other way round in Cambridge - so life might be fairer if I moved down. But I didn't like banking. Somebody said, I work in the labs and they're looking for somebody, you should come and see my boss. That was back in the days where you got jobs like that, you know. You didn't have to apply for a hundred and get turned down by ninety-eight of them!
I didn't have to commute, I mean you've always got the choice. I work for the Medical Research Council, though I retire at the end of January. The powers that be decided to build a clinical trials unit to be a centre of excellence and they obviously wanted it to be in London. A bit of a shock, really, and about half the group decided they didn't want to move but I thought, hang on a minute - I'm 57, I really like my job: do I really want to be going off to look for another job now or will I bite the bullet and commute? So I got my shiny new season ticket and car parking ticket and set about it. That was seven years ago and I've been on the 7.15 train ever since. I have to be thinking about going to bed between half-past nine and ten, so social life doesn't really exist. And weekends you're just catching up on things you couldn't do in the week! I haven't missed the train once in seven years. Pathetic, isn't it. When you work in Cambridge, well okay, five minutes either way doesn't make any difference, but now five minutes late, then you miss the train.
Bringing the children up, I didn't start working again till 1988. I kept reading articles about this empty nest syndrome - how the children would leave and I would have a nervous breakdown. I thought I'd better do something about it. I enrolled with the Open University to do a degree - biological subjects, that's what I was good at. I'd worked in laboratories in Cambridge for a number of years. I liked biology but not lab biology - I had a habit of setting fire to things, often myself. I had a spectacular one once, using oxygen from a cylinder - I was in flames and my boss was putting my head in the sink and saying he was pleased he'd had the opportunity to do that because it was something he'd wanted to do for a long time...
I really didn't know what I wanted to do, so I thought I'd meander through a degree. Then this job came up, data manager. I continued doing the degree, and even better, the MRC said they'd pay for it! I did a maths course, and I found I could get up at five in the morning and do two hours maths before I went to work. I could only think in the morning. The chap I worked for used to do research into the structure for yeast. It was back in the days when they'd just got the Nobel prize for the DNA structure, worked out in the Cambridge labs - we had a sherry party for that, that was in my time, you see. There was a lot going on at the cellular level - we used to grow the yeast and put different chemicals on them and look at them under the microscope...and we used to gas ourselves on different things and generally have a good time. When we went to London I suppose we went down in the world because they're smaller than yeast. We looked at how antibiotics affected them. You spend so long getting the experiment set up, you run it for two hours and then you've got it all to clear up again. So it's like cooking, really. A bit more interesting outcomes but it's full of hazards for people like me, burning themselves and things. I got carbon monoxide poisoning once and I had to be taken outside and walked round when someone noticed that my behaviour was even more irrational than usual and thought they'd better do something about it - fortunately my boss was well used to these things. He was the same one who threw water over me.
The unit moved around Cambridge - we were "the Nomads'" at one point we had a lovely spot over Games and Puzzles in Green Street, and our fire exit was through their shop and so we had wonderful notions that one day the fire bell was going to go and we were going to pile out with funny noses and hats on that weĠd pick up on the way as fire engulfed everything...
They were very good: they wanted us to move, not to leave. So we got a building on Euston Road. We made a garden out the back, our little oasis.
I have to be out of the house by twenty to seven. The interesting thing is how much it's changed. When I first started seven years ago I could drive from here right down to Newmarket Road without seeing another car. Now there's a queue just to get onto the main road here. And the train's got busier. It's often full when it leaves Cambridge. The car park's fuller - sad souls with glazed looks on their faces. You see the same faces on the platform, sometimes for years, but you don't ever speak. Colleagues I travel with, we have a rule we don't speak on the train, because we don't want to start our working day in Cambridge. And that's my precious reading time! That's the upside - you have two solid hours when people don't interrupt you.
In the morning there are a goodly number who sleep, but there's a lot of people who'll be at their laptops, working - or doing something! If there's one in front you can look through the gap in the seat and see just what they are doing. Then there's what I call the ugly ducklings. They get on the train in their raw state - ladies, this is - and they'll open up their Pandora's box, with mirror, and between Cambridge and King's Cross they transform themselves - starting with the cleansing cream, and the foundation ...everything. Now, I can't even write a card on the train, but they even do the mascara, without a blot. They're obviously very skilled. But it doesn't stop there - they'll have gas-heated brushes, and do their hair - don't forget you're all packed in here, people sitting next to you and opposite, but they're completely oblivious to it. Then the nail polish, and everyone's glaring because it smells, but with the headphones in they don't hear the tutting. By the time they get to Kings Cross, they look immaculate! Then of course, the mobile phone users. Not so much in the morning but in the evening people have conducted their entire business on the train, in a loud voice, and by the end you know a lot about them. One girl who was applying for jobs on the phone, arranging dates. She kept getting cut off in the tunnels but this didn't deter her - the whole spiel about what her attributes were and why she should be given the job - she had a couple of interviews lined up by the end but I'd had enough of hearing about her. The thing that really annoys people is if they get on the train with their supper - Burger King or whatever. Apart from anything else you're hungry and you want to steal it from them. But mostly it's the phones. People are just dozing off, then suddenly these extraordinary ring-tones! And they can't find it - they go through every pocket, and get their things down off the rack...
The thing people don't like is the fare dodgers. You always get them. They don't always come round stamping tickets but whenever they do, there's always at least one person who hasn't got a ticket. People really resent that, because the ones that are paying, in the end they pay more. Either that or they're thinking, I could have got away with that...
There've been a number of bad things in recent years. There's been the
train crash - for a whole year after that, a lot of disruption. Still is,
sometimes. Worse than that, everybody was very nervous - every glitch as
you're going along, people think "what was that?" And even worse
was the bombings. It was just round the corner from our building. The whole of
the Euston Road was closed and all that went up and down it was ambulances and
Police cars, and we had no idea what was happening. Something dreadful, but you
didn't know what. The second time the Police made us lock our doors because
the people had run up from Warren Street tube station and they were trying to
catch them and they thought they might run into the office. I think people
haven't got over the bombings. There's a great nervousness now on the
underground - not on the buses, strangely enough - People look to see who's
standing near them. There's not as many people on the tube either. I think
a lot more people walk. Not me, it's my age you see, and my gammy knee
stops me walking sometimes...!
There's great vying for position on the platform, for the seasoned traveller. You know where the door is going to be, to the inch. And you have to be there, your shoulder in the right place.
There's always an argument about windows. Somebody will open it, somebody will close it. Especially if they've cycled to the station, all hot, they open all the vents, but they don't feel it - it's the people two seats along who get blown to death! And I don't think I'd ever been in big crowds before. When you get to Kings Cross and the doors open, it's just a sea of people and you don't have to think where you're going - it's just like a river of people moving down the platform. It takes some getting used to - you don't see the steps, you just find your way.
The MRC sent me on a retirement course - they tell you useful things like how to save for your retirement, which you needed to know about twenty years before you retire. And they say you must think about all the things you've got to do...but having had this seven years of clock-watching, I don't want to have to think about time. I just want to be.
Will I miss it? It'll be different. I've never been so aware of the seasons. You stand at the same place on the platform, you're almost like a sundial, a pointer, and you can see where the sun's coming up over the other side of the platform. You don't usually notice the subtle changes otherwise. In the fields between Quy and Bulbeck, in summer, there are poppies all the way along the edge. You come from Euston Road where it's all dog ends and discarded litter in doorways. And you get on the train and go to sleep, and you wake up - it's like a couple of minutes, like you've blinked your eyes - you get in the car, and it's just like living in a different world, like you've been picked up and dropped. That's why it's worth commuting, because an hour ago you were in that and now look at it! I love poppies, and when I see them all along the road it makes me know why I want to be here.