Putting in the work
“We do a lot of lifting – we get muscles on our muscles!”
Robert Petch is a Gyp, a College handyman and part of the backbone of the workforce at St John’s, who help to keep life functioning behind the scenes. Here he tells us of his experiences during the first lockdown, as part of our pandemic series of stories from St John’s.
I’ve been at St John’s 15 years now, working as a Gyp. We basically move furniture and other bits and pieces around the College, cleaning and covering bedmakers when they’re off, moving Fellows into their rooms, carpet cleaning, absolutely everything. We have our own set of areas where we do our jobs: my area is Forecourt, so I cover 18 staircases, making sure they’re clean; we get jobs from the supervisors and from Housekeeping. I like the variety, the work is nice and every day is different, everyone’s friendly and everyone gets on. We do a lot of lifting – we get muscles on our muscles!
There are five Gyps employed on site and one person who works outside College, and three of us worked through the first lockdown. It was quite bizarre back in March, just before lockdown. We went to The Baron of Beef pub after work and that’s when Boris came on TV and said we were going into lockdown and everyone’s faces just dropped and we thought, ‘here we go’.
We were off the first full week of lockdown. I live on my own but I kept in touch with my workmates and we played computer games together over Zoom. Then Anna, the Deputy Linen Room Supervisor in Forecourt, asked if I’d fancy being part of the team to come into College to clean. There were still Fellows here, and Porters and students, so I said yes straight away – it kept me busy and gave me something to look forward to. I started back one day a week originally for four hours and then as the weeks went on, the hours were extended and we started working in pairs. We were cleaning the Porters’ Lodges and communal toilets, things like that, to make sure all the public areas were clean and safe.
It was a very surreal time. It was nice to come in and see familiar faces, and have a conversation with someone. You walked down Bridge Street and there was no-one about, it was very strange, it took a lot of getting used to. The Housekeeping staff all pulled together, we are a good team. There were only eight of us in work over the four months during the first lockdown, so we nicknamed ourselves ‘The Hateful Eight’, like the Quentin Tarantino film! There was real camaraderie.
When people started coming back to work at College around July and August, there was apprehension at first, with everything that was going on in the pandemic, but we had our instructions what to do every day, it was nice and straightforward; we had our gloves and masks, everyone stayed alert, and we just got on with the job. We were counted as key workers. The worst thing about this period was going to shop after work – I’m Cambridge born and bred but I live in Cambourne now and the queue to get into the supermarket there went on for miles, then you got in and there wasn’t much left. The best thing was driving into work, it cut my journey from 20 to 10 minutes because there wasn’t any traffic. I wish it would stay like that when all this is over.
It wasn’t too bad living on my own because nowadays we’ve got the internet, we can go on Zoom and chat to people, we’ve got WhatsApp and messaging, so it’s easy to keep in contact. One hundred years ago we wouldn’t have had all that, so we are lucky really.
For me, the whole four-month lockdown period went so quickly. I think this will be an interesting tale to tell in about 20 years or so, ‘The Story of summer 2020’: where were you and what were you doing? I’ll remember it as a very surreal time but I’m glad I was able to come in and help the College get through it.
Published: 27/11/20
