Nicola Smith hasn’t been home for more than eight weeks. A single mum, she hasn’t been able to hug her ten-year-old daughter in all that time or see her own mother.
And when her aunt succumbed to Covid-19 last month, she couldn’t attend the funeral.
Most days, at the end of a shift, the community nurse drives to the third-floor council flat in Slough she shares with her asthmatic mum and child. She stops outside and waves as they look down from the balcony.
She then drives a couple of miles to her new residence — a single room in Cotton House, Eton College, usually home to 50 of its 1,320 pupils.
Nicola Smith, a community nurse from Slough, hasn’t seen her daughter and mother who she usually lives with for more than eight weeks instead she is living in Cotton House at Eton College
Nicola is living in one of the dormitory blocks the £42,500-a-year school has opened up during the coronavirus crisis for key workers who cannot risk exposing their families to the infection.
Instead of the posters of pop bands, sport stars and family pets the schoolboys might put up, there are photos of daughter Adele as a baby, and of a beaming Nicola with her five siblings.
There is her own bright pink bedspread on the single bed and Adele’s drawing of a broken heart, because she’s missing her mum so much.
Next door is district nurse Sarah McKelvie, 50. The mother of two hasn’t been home since March, says it’s been hell getting PPE and couldn’t hug her husband, Steve, who works for a freight company, when his mother died earlier this month.
The funeral order of service is pinned to her noticeboard. ‘That was a very, very bad day,’ she says.
Mother-of-two Sarah McKelvie, a community staff nurse, has not been home since March and could not hug her husband Steve when his mother died earlier this month
Further down the long corridor are Fathima Farook, 52, an ICU nurse and Georgina Russell, 24, a chemotherapy nurse.
There are more than 100 key workers currently living at Eton, 25 of them in Cotton House, including three doctors, first response policewomen, paramedics and a midwife, aged 21 to 58.
Each has their name on the door of their room, a white card stuck below the brass plates of those who would, in normal times, be enjoying summer term.
Viewed as the ultimate in privilege and exclusivity, the 580-year-old school is alma mater of 20 prime ministers (including Boris Johnson and David Cameron), of princes —home grown and foreign — actors and leading religious figures. Over 400 acres, it’s like a small town, with extraordinary facilities and more than 1,000 employees, 155 of them full-time teachers.
While its academic reputation is unchallenged, Eton has received criticism for fostering elitism.
But with coronavirus comes change and, thanks to the leadership of Simon Henderson, at 44 Eton’s youngest-ever head, the school has not only announced a £100 million, five-year investment plan to support disadvantaged children in Britain, but is also investing in the local community.
‘We’re doing it because it’s the right thing to do,’ he says. ‘Organisations and institutions that have resources and expertise should be using them in a positive way.’
He is doing what he drums into pupils — ‘not to sit on the sidelines sniping, but to step up, take responsibility and make things better’.
Now the school laundry is washing for local hospitals, while the Design and Technology Department is using the school’s 3D printer and laser cutters to churn out over a thousand PPE visors.
The catering department provides 190 meals a day to key workers, children and vulnerable locals and not one of Eton’s employees has been furloughed.
From the moment pupils were sent home on March 18 in advance of lockdown, Eton was open to a new clientele.
Primary school pupils of key workers and the vulnerable were invited for lessons, meals and to use the pool, tennis courts and gardens, while its online learning system, EtonX, was made available free to secondary schools across the UK.
On March 30, key workers began arriving — all because they need to shield vulnerable family members from infection.
Nurse Fathima Farook had never been away from her husband and three children in Slough. ‘I’m a very homely person and the only thing I knew about Eton is that it’s for royalty,’ she says. ‘I was nervous but I had to protect my family. I couldn’t walk into the house after working with Covid patients in ICU for 13 hours.’
While many key workers are local, others live hours away and have no idea when they’ll return. For now, then, home is one of Britain’s top public schools.
But there’s no time to enjoy the facilities. As pupils wrestle with online learning at home, the new occupants of their rooms are working up to 16-hour shifts. Nicola worked two weeks straight before she got a day off.
Infection control is a priority and they have to strip off the minute they get to their rooms, ‘boil wash’ their uniforms and keep two metres apart from each other.
All would have struggled without this scheme. ‘It would have been too hard in a hotel,’ says Sarah, who lives in three-bed semi in Bracknell. ‘But if someone had said to me, “you’ll be living in Eton College” . . . I’ve seen the boys walking around Windsor — they look like they’re from another world but it couldn’t have been a nicer place and they’ve been ridiculously, amazingly generous.’
When the school discounted the summer term fees by a third, Simon Henderson invited parents to donate the money saved to support Eton’s community initiatives, including this one. ‘About a quarter did, and some have given much, much more,’ he says.
Which means the room is free, along with meals, snacks, Netflix, laundry service and, thanks to Hazel Nash, the warm and capable house dame (the Eton version of matron), so much more.
It is she who welcomes the key workers back each evening. ‘They don’t all come in smiling at the end of the day, though they do sometimes if they’ve managed to resuscitate someone,’ she says. ‘I can tell immediately whether they need a tea, a G&T and a chat, or a hot bath.’
She goes (socially distanced) jogging in the school grounds with some, leaves welcome notes and fresh flowers in rooms and holds ‘Dame Suppers’ several times a week, just like in term time.
For the boys, it’s fish finger sandwiches, crepes, iced chocolate milk and arm wrestles on her kitchen table. The key workers generally prefer gin and crisps.
The longer they stay, the more grateful and connected they feel to the pupils, though Nicola jokes she’ll never get used to opening the shared bathroom door to a row of urinals.
In some rooms, a scrawl of graffiti, the odd sticker or poster gives a hint of the personality that occupied it.
In Fathima’s room, there’s a picture of Indian cricket legend Virat Kohli with the words: ‘Never give up. Today is hard, tomorrow will be worse, but the day after tomorrow will be sunshine.’
Words that made all the difference, she says. ‘I was feeling very low, very homesick and they were so helpful. Every day they give me strength.’
Hazel has also set up a private email service between the pupils and key workers, to exchange messages, pass on thanks and learn a bit about each others’ lives. ‘They’re very touching and very private,’ she says firmly.
If she is proud of her boys and misses their energy and wit, Hazel is in awe of the key workers.
One nurse from a psychiatric hospital in Woking has lost two colleagues to coronavirus, been spat at by agitated patients and looks shattered, but wouldn’t dream of giving up.
Okezie Ogbulafor, 32, an ambulance crew member from Dagenham, moved to Eton because he has a flatmate with type 2 diabetes and a mother with cancer.
Ambulance crew member Okezie Ogbulafor, 32, from Dagenham, moved into Eton because he has a flatmate with type 2 diabetes and a mother with cancer
He’s in the all-male Hopgarden House, along with firemen, frontline police and doctors.
He works 12-hour shifts, coping with desperately ill Covid-19 patients, road traffic accidents and heart attacks, then spends the evenings studying for a Masters in Paramedic Science. ‘I love it here because it’s a very calm academic place to study,’ he says. ‘Calm and kind.’
Nicola, meanwhile, just feels lucky. ‘I wake up every day and feel blessed — that I’m working, that I’m helping people and that I’m able to keep my family safe.’
Yesterday, Eton confirmed the key workers can stay on until at least the end of June. Meanwhile, every Thursday evening, the crowds clapping for them outside their dormitory houses — which include the headmaster, his wife and their four children — get bigger.
Some weeks, though, the key workers cheer and bang pots and pans in appreciation of Simon, Hazel and everyone at Eton who has so welcomed them.
Because somehow, the staff have made this extraordinary school feel like home to people who would never have dreamed they might cross its threshold.
As nurse Sarah McKelvie puts it: ‘As soon as I see the buildings after a 13-hour shift, I think, “Fabulous, I’m home!”’