Copyright © Peter Kendell, 2004

Now that Hilary Term has ended and the undergrads have all gone down, the shop has become a little quieter. Weekends are still quite busy, but we're practically dead during the week. Miss Hulme, our supervisor, has decreed that this is a splendid opportunity to rotate the stock so that's what I do most mornings. Afternoons, I bang away at my thesis.

Have you ever donated anything to Oxfam? I do hope so. Most people bring in their bags of old clothes or cassette tapes from the nineteen-eighties and dump them on the counter upstairs with a slightly embarrassed air. We say thank you, and they leave. Nobody seems to want us to make a big production out of our gratitude. I think they are slightly ashamed - ashamed of the things they give to us, because they're old and out of style. Or perhaps they have bad associations, or sad ones. You can spot them with a little practice. The donor is often in his seventies or eighties and he's been clearing out his wife's wardrobe after her funeral. He brings in a supermarket carrier bag full of tweed skirts from Marks, or acrylic jumpers from the British Home Stores. We always promise him that we'll make sure that the clothes go to another branch, so there will no risk of his accidentally meeting somebody who's wearing his dead wife's old things.

I work in the Broad Street branch, here in the centre of Oxford. It's crammed into a tall, narrow building so we're on three floors. The books and tapes live on the top floor, along with the photocopier. Maureen Charleson takes care of it, making sure that nobody makes any illegal copies. Naturally, this being Oxford, the books tend towards the academic, together with the usual mixture of best-sellers and thrillers. Local authors go down well, of course. There are plenty of them, after all.

Miss Hulme is in charge of the ground floor, with its Fairtraid chocolate and new items for sale. She has an eagle eye for shoplifters - two eyes, actually. One on the stock, and one on the closed-circuit TV screen.

Lastly there's the basement, my domain, where I, Janet Moore, look after the clothes. It's my job during these quiet vacation weeks to sort through the clothes, deciding which ones to keep and which to send on to another branch. You see, Oxfam realised long ago that some kinds of goods sell better in some branches than others, depending where they are, so they rotate them through the shops. Tweed skirts and Courtelle jumpers go to provincial towns, art-silk and fake fur to metropolitan locations. You should see the stuff they keep in Regent Street!

Oxford counts as metropolitan, so we get a better class of clothes here. Trinity Term is coming up, with its May Balls, so I'm looking forward to an influx of poor or bohemian undergrads in search of something old-fashioned and glamorous. For a start, anything with sequins is going to the front of the rails.

Music helps to pass the time. It lends its rhythm to the work. Each floor has its own music player. Maureen upstairs plays baroque-twiddly things, or Classic FM, to get her customers into a cultural mood. Miss Hulme likes musicals, like Show Boat and West Side Story.

And me? I go disco!

It's Saturday morning, and we're moderately busy. I've been tidying up a bin of scarves in front of the cash desk. "Silk", they're labelled, so there can be no argument about what they're made of. Anything but silk, of course. Polyester, mostly. There are just three customers in my area; a Japanese tourist - I have to keep a special eye on them - and a couple. The man is tall, with a distracted air. He might be an academic, but again he might not. His wife is fingering through the clothes, pointing out the waistcoats (for him) and the sparkly tops (for her). He is carrying a green rucksack slung over his right shoulder and she is wearing a rather nice embroidered suede coat with fur trim down the front. I offer to take the money for the bottle of scent she is holding and which she must have picked up on the ground floor - Miss Hulme's department. It'll make my till roll look better if I can up my takings a bit. She smiles and gives me the bottle. I ask her if she'd like to buy a scarf, but she says no; she's got far too many scarves already. I refrain from asking her if she would like to give the shop one or two of them.

She pays me for the perfume. It's L'Aimant, by Coty, in a seventy-fifth anniversary edition and I hope she realises how horrible it smells. She hands the bottle to her husband and he puts it in the front pocket of the rucksack. They say goodbye to me and go to the stairs, and as they leave the man leans over to his wife and says, 'Pets.'

'Yes,' she replies, and I can tell that she already knew. They've got it; it's the Pet Shop Boys, and the song that's playing is It's Alright. Do you know it? It starts with street sounds - cars and lorries - then there's a wash of synth chords and Neil Tennant's lovely jolie-laide voice sings:

And then there's a great crescendo of brass and this amazing bass line starts up: Dumdum-dumdada-dumdum, dumdum-dumdada-dumdum. It pushes the song like a steamroller, unstoppable, taking me with it. I'm back in Shawnee's, and it's Ladies Night, and Sophie is with me once again.

Sophie - up from Manchester with four starred A levels. Sophie with her wicked grin, and her jet-black hair cropped close to her scalp. Sophie, whom I could not resist; Sophie who approached my Milton Society stall on the first day of Michaelmas Term and who came back to my rooms the same night. Sophie, with her collection of comic books and Smiths records.

So much, indeed. She loved the Smiths, and she loved New Order and the Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays and the Charlatans. And because of her I loved them too, although my musical tastes had frozen in the early eighties. In return, I introduced her to Sylvester and Yazoo and Kool and the Gang. 'They're our kind of music,' I told her, but she only half-agreed with me. We both adored the Pets, though.

Memories of Sophie. Long summer nights in Trinity Term. Being told what a stunning couple we made. Mingling our sweat on the dance floor and later, at her place or mine.

The year three thousand may still come to pass,
But the music shall last.
I can hear it on a timeless wavelength,
Never dissipating but giving us strength.

And Sophie. Sophie who left one cruel April morning, taking my heart with her. Sophie, whom I still see on the High and the Broad, or outside the gates of Balliol College, alone or with a friend. Sophie who might, one day, look into the Broad Street branch of Oxfam and hear our song sashaying its way up the stairs, and remember me and come down to say hello. I would hate her to miss me, so I've made a tape of It's Alright and I've set the machine up to play it over and over again. On rotation.

I smile as I sort through the piles of clothes. I know it's going to be all right.

Suffer Little Children (Morrissey/Marr) and It's Alright (Sterling Void) are quoted without permission.