Ch. 12: David Smith's sudden and surprising summons.
It was the start of another new week in the Sock Room.
I'd had no reason to suppose today was going to be any different from any other day. Just another lousy load of same old, same old.
The only thing that changed was the size of my gruesome workload: the daunting and demoralising backlog of the females of Canford's dirty socks. Which, continuously being added to, grew bigger and more insurmountable with every passing day - even though for more than three months now I'd been working relentlessly in the Sock Room for seven days a week.
I suppose it was inevitable that eventually I would get jaded, that my strength and stamina would become depleted.
And that's not to mention the mental strain ...
It was a struggle to stay motivated.
And I could feel myself becoming more and more run down; could sense that both my physical energies and mental fortitude were close to being spent and extinguished. That I was on my last reserves.
In fact, I believed that I was now beginning to succumb to the same debilitating and demoralising condition that was reportedly afflicting Sock Room community servants nationwide, termed by the doctors who treated the new widespread phenomenon as 'Community Servant Burnout Syndrome'.
In about equal measure I was being defeated and ground down by the casual cruelties of the sock-changing, Sock Room attending females, and by the stresses and strains of the soul-crushing futility and utter pointlessness of not only trying to cope with the unmanageable overrun but also actually endeavouring to reduce it.
Extra holding capacity was again urgently needed; the number of previously added wheelie bin containers had proved woefully insufficient to cope with the unremittingly escalating demands upon my sock-washing remit.
Some further additional colour-coded wheelie bin receptacles had been brought in, that brought the total up to twenty, and took up all of the remaining holding room.
But it was to little avail.
Such was the relentlessness of the sock-changing females' dirty sock deposits that these other new wheelie bins too had soon become full to overflowing from the incessant build-up; their hinged lids too left hanging down in an admission of overwhelming defeat to the irreducible cascades of dirty socks.
And that's not to mention the also spilling over industrial-sized hopper, marked: 'White Socks Only!'
The turning inside out, hand-washing, rinsing, hanging out on clotheslines to dry, and steam-ironing of hundreds and hundreds of pairs of mostly white but also countless pairs of Girls' Highschool black, navy blue, and other types of coloured and multicoloured dirty socks was too much for one person.
Of course, it didn't help my productivity output that the sock-changing, Sock Room attending females of Canford were constantly interrupting my work.
Ordering me to drop whatever I might be doing, and demanding my immediate attendance at the foot of their recliners so as to avail themselves of some of their constrained and compelled Sock Room community servant's other, extra-laundry, services.
*
I was up past my elbows in the temperature-controlled three-feet-deep stainless steel hot-and-soapy-water sink, hand-washing yet another gruesome batch of the females of Canford's dirty white socks when, behind me, in the upper level of the Sock Room, I heard the familiar warbling sound of the wall-mounted black bakelite phone.
I risked pausing a moment, just to straighten my grievously protesting back ... ah, what a relief.
I'd been bent over that damned hellish steamy sink now for two hours solid. Bent on rubbing and agitating all of the yellow-tinged foot sweat and ground-in dirt and snagging flaky dead skin from countless pairs of turned inside out dirty white socks.
Still, I daren't overindulge in this rare opportune moment of most welcome respite.
The ringing telephone would distract, but only momentarily, the attentive vigil of the reclining but ever watchful and performance monitoring Sock Room attending females. Who, taking it upon themselves to act as enforcers, at the first sign of slacking would harangue and rebuke me and, sometimes, even trouble themselves to alight from their recliners and come down the six wooden steps to yell unladylike reproachful words right in my face.
When the Sock Room phone rang it meant one of two things, and neither augered well: One of my two young supervisors CSOs Karen and Linda were calling from their office, or someone was calling from an outside line.
Mrs Norma Newlove - my neighbour from hell, one of the Sock Room regulars, and who had long considered herself Acting Superintendent in the absence of my two supervisors - got up from her padded black leather recliner behind the two-barred safety rail of the 'Spectators' Gallery' overlook to answer the phone.
Norma's voluptuous body moved with a fluid, eye-arresting grace. And it was with reluctant admiration that I watched her sedate progress as, padding barefoot the nine or ten strides to the ringing phone, her naturally olive-skinned soles and the pads of her customarily cherry-red painted toes picked up bits and pieces of dust and new sock lint from the dark-grey linoleum Sock Room floor.
Within days of its well advertised and much-trumpeted opening, responding to popular demand the Community Service Liaison Officer and MP for Canford, Harriet Harmman, had called in South London Telecoms engineers to make the Sock Room's phone contactable from external lines.
One of the brainchild Work Motivation Scheme projects of Prime Minister Caroline Flynt, lauded by her Authoritarian Female Party Cabinet colleagues as ingeniously conceived and radically innovative, the town centre situated establishment was far from being just merely an AFP inspired 'functional', decidedly drab community-servant-operated 'female-friendly' facility.
In common with Sock Rooms all over the UK, Canford Sock Room's success had far exceeded even the insightful hopes and expectations of Caroline Flynt. Turning out to be not only a highly popular girls-only meeting place and a convenient and most congenial rendezvous point for ladies going about town, but an increasingly used, well-attended, and much-valued attraction in itself.
Caroline Flynt's Sock Room initiative had in fact created much more than a Getting-the-career-claimants-to-work, sock-changing institution.
To Canford's Sock Room 'regulars', of whom by now I estimated their 'membership' to be into triple figures, the Sock Room was their free membership Social Club.
After six months of Sock Room service, it was not unusual for frequent-user sock-changing females, grown accustomed by now to a little occasional or even regular foot pampering - particularly of the sort they were unable to get from their less amenable or indulgent or malleable husbands or boyfriends - to ring in on the off-chance. Asking if any of the Sock Room's comfortable padded black leather recliners were free at present, or perhaps were soon to be vacated.
I especially remember one time, well into the afternoon of yet another consecutive diabolically demanding day of slaving over the temperature-controlled hot-and-soapy water sink and working my fingers to the bone, I heard Gina Stainham reply in response to such a caller: "Yes - come on in! He's doing nothing at the moment."
'Doing nothing'!
Such spur-of-the-moment calls were quite run-of-the-mill, made by hopeful half-an-hour-to-spare Sock Room attendees, desirous of treating themselves to a little special attention from the Sock Room community servant.
Or, in the cases of the more mean-minded and sour-spirited - and sometimes, malicious and outright cruel - sock-changing females of Canford, to come and give me a hard time, humiliating me at their dirty, stinky feet just for the sheer, passing-the-time hell of it.
But as the self-appointed 'Chief-Overseer-In-Absentia' Norma Newlove officiously went to pick up the phone, I knew by the distinctive warbling ring tone that the call was internal.
The call was coming from one of the two desk phones (reachable on different numbers) in my two supervisors' lower-level office, situated on the other side of my ironing station.
As she customarily did on these phone answering occasions, initially Norma stood with her right ankle crossed over her left. And as she was at the moment barefoot, the sole of her right foot arched and wrinkled a little as now with bended knee, in her relaxed habitual phone answering attitude she rested the tops of her toes on the dirty, lint-specked linoleum floor.
During phone calls lasting any length of time, I'd noticed that every twenty seconds or so Norma would switch her standing foot, resting one ankle over the other in her usual characteristic manner.
Sometimes, depending on what was being said to her on the other end of the line, responsively Norma would alter her stance and absentmindedly scrunch and wiggle her bare or white-socked toes and in doing so, give some outward 'readable' expression to her private thoughts and emotions as might be occasioned by the caller.
It was surprising how much 'language' I could intuit, or decipher, by the close observance of such absentminded responsive actions by Norma - and, for that matter, also by any other such similarly distracted Sock Room attending phone call respondents.
But this time, the call was over in just a few seconds.
And 'Acting Superintendent' Norma Newlove - Norma's tacitly self-awarded supervisory appointment, that my two supervisors also tacitly acknowledged and approved of and so did absolutely nothing to dissuade or discourage the Sock Room doyenne's assumption of authority in their absence - replaced the phone receiver and glared down at me.
"Community servant David double-oh-seven!" yelled Norma authoritatively. "Report to CSOs Karen and Linda's office - now!"
There's no need to shout - like some parade-ground regimental sergeant-major at some cadet with his beret tilted at the wrong angle! I thought - but didn't dare say.
It was well instilled into me by now that, whatever the provocation, by neither look, word, or deed must I in the slightest disrespect Norma - or, come to that, any of the sock-changing, Sock Room attending females.
They might well insist upon my being administered the Standard Six: the summarily sanctioned six-stroke, bare bottom caning punishment, often prescribed as a first resort, on the spot chastisement.
