Suzy Says

Before moving on to Job Two, I will just say that my stay in Nice was probably as memorable for two anonymous Leisure Suit Larrys as it was for me. These two guys were verging on old and bald, wearing pastel blue suits with white belts and shoes, and were commenting on the assets of various, mostly topless, women on the beach in a manner in which the absurd courted the vulgar. They didn’t have a hope in hell of getting any of these girls to look at them once, let alone twice, and in view of their own extreme lack of attractiveness, their temerity in judging the beach girls was both breath-taking and insulting.

Since I was only speaking French to the kids, and was reading a biography of Charlie Chaplin (beloved in France as Charlot) in French, the Larrys thought that no-one understood the depths of their remarks. Finally, one asked the other what time it was. I looked straight at them and said, “About one o’clock.” They fled before they could even finish blushing.

But on to Job Two, where there was no blushing, but there was, on at least one occasion, fleeing.

I moved out on my own when I was 18. My apartment was adorable, the top floor of a Victorian house on a tree-lined street, with pressed-tin ceilings and a (non-working but still charming) fireplace. To support this little pied &agrave terre, I had to get a job, which I did at the local youth hostel. I was still in high school, so I worked late afternoons and evenings, as well as weekends. In retrospect, it was odd that they let a smallish teenage girl lock up alone at night, but nothing untoward ever occurred. From the living, at least.

The hostel used to be a jail, built in 1861. The cells were something like 7 feet deep and 4 feet wide, and had no windows. The light came from high, barred windows lining the room which contained the cells, as it is in Alcatraz. So we used the cells to store the hostellers’ luggage, and there were bunk beds lining the rooms under the windows. One floor for men, one for women.

I did lots of different things: admitting guests, cooking for them (including making pancakes for breakfast for 100 people at a time. Amazingly, I was completely unintimidated by this and had no problems, other than the scale of the kitchen. Though obviously built on an industrial scale, it was built at a time when people were much shorter, so although everything was really big, it was also really short, and you had to stoop over the stove and sink), and giving tours.

School kids, people staying at the hostel, and the curious came for the tours. The jail had the distinction of being the site of the last public hanging in Canada. The school kids in particular were fascinated by the darker side of the jail’s history, and could never wait to see Death Row and the gallows.

We didn’t use Death Row for guests. I never questioned this, whether it was superstition or because the rooms were tiny and isolated at the top of the jail. But one night, we were completely full and I was about to close up for the night when a young couple from Texas turned up, desperate for a room. I told them that all we had left was Death Row, and they said OK. So I showed them up there and returned to my closing up duties. I was just leaving when they came running downstairs. The wife was as white as a sheet and jabbering about seeing a ghost. Her husband apparently had not seen the ghost and was somewhat annoyed, but there was no doubt that Mrs. Texas had seen something, or thought she had. Whatever had happened, she was probably as scared as she had ever been in her life. It was scary just to look at how scared she was.

I found them a room at the Holiday Inn and went home.