At the end of the eighties, I spent a couple of months working as a room attendant at the Rougement Hotel on Queen Street, Exeter. I was living in a shared house on Old Tiverton Road at the time, and one of my friends from that house share was doing the same kind of work at the Royal Clarence. My friend was slightly better paid (because it was the Clarence, natch) but I stuck it out at the Rougement because I started and finished earlier, which meant I had a significant part of the day left over for reading and writing. I remember my friend having a right laugh at the way I always insisted on walking to and from work dressed in my chambermaid’s uniform, little white apron and all. She always changed in and out of her normal clothes at the hotel. I insisted I didn’t want to run the risk of having my stuff nicked while I was on site. Those were the days…
That was a difficult summer for me in many ways, with the hotel work – unforgiving and badly paid as it was – providing a weird oasis of humour and stability. The swapped anecdotes, the sometimes outlandish behaviour of some of the guests, the even more outlandish behaviour of some of the other people who worked there – these were things we had in common, my friend and I, and coming back off shift there was always some new and outrageous happening to talk about, which helped take my mind off other stuff that was going on.
Whenever I travel into Exeter these days, I come out of the station directly opposite the hotel that used to be the Rougement, and I usually make a point of walking past the Clarence too, at some point during the day, just to say hello, to reaffirm that tie. I was in Exeter on Thursday, having lunch with another friend, someone I’ve known for twenty years and who shared a large part of my time living and working in the city through the 1990s and early 2000s. We’d arranged to meet at midday, so I spent the hour before that doing some shopping and just walking around, having a look at things. Immediately prior to meeting my friend, I passed through the High Street branch of Waterstone’s and out into Cathedral Yard. I walked past the Clarence, consciously thinking how gorgeous she was looking, glanced in at the window of Caines brasserie, remembering a jazz gig I went to there once, remembering a day last December when I peeped in through that same window at more or less the same time of day. Cathedral Green is a place of such stillness, even when it’s packed. There is an atmosphere there that is only to be found in truly old, continuously inhabited places, usually in cities, a sense of continuity and of all points in time being simultaneously present in a single moment.
In the early hours of Friday morning, the Royal Clarence hotel caught fire. More than twenty-four hours later, she is still blazing, with the fire now having spread to other historic buildings in the near vicinity. The landscape of the city, which seemed only relatively recently to be fully recovered not just from the depredations of the Blitz but from the equally horrendous planning decisions foisted upon it through the fifties and sixties, is now irreparably changed. I feel devastated and heartsick. Exeter did not deserve this. We can only hope that the rebuilding that takes place in the aftermath shows appropriate respect for the city’s heritage and for what has been lost.
Thinking of all those directly affected today, and of the emergency services currently working to contain the damage.