I think her first name was Denise. It was hard to discern on her small easyjet name badge; but the surname was certainly Williams. So let’s call her Denise Williams. The name matters less than the circumstance. It was Luton Airport departures corridor (gates 1 to 8 to the best of my recollection); the time was Sunday 5 February, from before dawn until at least lunchtime. This (you may remember) was the morning after snow had blanketed most of England; and south-eastern airports including Luton were in the near-ritual state of mayhem we all but demand of our transport infrastructure when there’s snow. It gives us something to talk about.
‘My airport hell’ stories are uninteresting. Airports are not hell. Honestly, try hell, and you’ll prefer Luton. Our generation is as hooked on competitive aviation-based conversation as doubtless a previous epoch anchored its anecdotage in horses, carriages, grooms and the villainy of horse dealerships. My indifference to the relative merits of Iberia and Korean Air is fathomless and I honestly have no preferences between Schiphol and JFK. Anyway, it’s fair to say Luton makes no claim to be one of the world’s premier airports, nor easyjet any claim to be the Rolls Royce of international carriers; and that’s fine. They do the job. What are you expecting for a £50 flight to Madrid?
This was scheduled to depart at 7.25. I’d struggled through London’s snow to be at the airport by 6.30. Not much to my surprise, on arrival I found on the notice board that the flight had just been delayed until 13.25 for reasons too tedious to detain you with. I quickly reconciled myself to the wait.
I like being delayed at airports for much the same reason I should welcome a short stay in prison. There’s absolutely nothing you can do about it, unseen and irresistible forces are in control, you’re warm and dry, your diary is clear and nobody can ask you to do anything. The occasional blank page should enter all our lives, and here now were six hours for wandering around, having bacon baps and cups of tea, reading the Sunday papers to check there was no news, catching up with emails on my swanky new iPhone, and staring at things I wouldn’t dream of buying in Luton’s eccentric array of duty-free shops. (No trousers; only tracksuit bottoms.)
But to spice my morning with a dash of purpose, I decided to persist in a quest to realise easyjet’s promise of £6 worth of refreshment vouchers: an offer that had pinged into my iPhone ‘Your flight with easyjet is regrettably delayed. Our agent will provide you with further information and refreshment vouchers. We apologise for any inconvenience.’
‘Agent’? ‘Vouchers’? Probably mythical, I thought, but let’s have a go.
And that’s how I met Denise. Ms Williams seemed to be easyjet’s vicar on earth, the airline’s only airside incarnation in the form of a person. Hordes of mutinous passengers were swilling around the departure gates, requiring to know what had happened to their various flights to Geneva, Tel Aviv, Madrid, etc, and (until reinforcement arrived) the diminutive Denise seemed all alone. Small, trim, fair-haired, in her forties perhaps, she manned the barricade against the mob. Wherever she tried to walk, knots of passengers converged, poking fingers, raising voices, demanding information and explanation she was plainly not in the position to provide. The moment she positioned herself behind any counter, a crowd of news-seekers gathered, interrupting each other to jostle for her attention.
Ms Williams seemed entirely unsupported. She will have been up in the small hours of Sunday, to face a day of this. I don’t know what a budget airline airport agent is paid, but would be surprised if it much exceeds the £32,000 figure at whose untaxed equivalent the government wants to cap payments to the unemployed. City bankers (and Fleet Street columnists, and many of Ms Williams’s airline passenger customers) should ask ourselves how we’d like doing a job like hers for about £18 an hour, or whatever.
For she was the Florence Nightingale of easyjet agents. She listened sympathetically to each complaint; she kept apologising gracefully for every inconvenience; she engaged professionally with all the complicated enquiries lobbed her way; she smiled; she brushed anger aside; she apologised again; she kept telephoning her superiors for updates, and what scraps of new information she could garner she dispensed; she ignored mockery and sarcastic asides; she even indulged a passenger who thought he had a better plan than easyjet for the disposition of their fleet across the European continent that morning…. And, all the while, as passenger after passenger tugged her sleeve, she kept trying to make contact with someone who could supply refreshment vouchers for her to dispense. Finally she succeeded.
People did notice this. Fury did abate. My fellow passengers and I could see a woman palpably doing her best, and many hearts softened towards her — and even easyjet — as she tried to explain the tangle of problems arising from all the planes being in the wrong place. Throughout, she never looked tired or discouraged, or gave any sign of irritation either with customers or superiors. Only once did I catch her turning temporarily aside to make a Mayday call to management. ‘Please get a message through,’ she whispered, ‘that I’m on my own here, without information.’
As finally I left Ms Williams’s domain to board my flight, I remembered George Eliot’s Dorothea, whose ‘full nature … spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive, for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.’
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