“On the Floor” and the Mystery of Joan Jukes

“But when I open the door I find someone has moved my chair.” Some hold that a proper short story should start midstream. Joan Jukes’ 1935 story, “On the Floor,” takes this advice to the extreme. Where are we? What was happening before he/she opened the door? Who is this narrator? The reader can only continue and hope the clues will be forthcoming.

Where are we? Within the first few sentences, we find out. As the title says, on the floor. Collapsed on the floor: “I am sitting on my right foot and it hurts. I must ease it, push it away, push hard! So! Now I am comfortable.”

How did we get here? Answered in the second paragraph: “Five minutes ago I set out from the study to fetch a letter from the dining-room….”

And the parenthetical comment that ends this sentence reveals not only who’s speaking but what is exceptional about her: “… (not in a spirit of pride or arrogance, for I never walk like that, but none the less hoping for the best. A letter is so easy to carry I can slip it in my shoulder straps or down my neck).” She is on the floor because “someone had moved the chair I steady up on three feet to the right, so it all came to nothing.”

That is pretty much all the action there is in “On the Floor”: a young woman who has severe difficulties in walking goes into the dining-room, slips when she reaches for a chair to steady herself on, falls to the floor, and lies there, helpless, until someone will come along and find her. Time now “will crawl past while I am sitting uncomfortably and impatiently on the floor.”

“On the Floor” is the earliest example of a disabled person as narrator I know of in English fiction, although I won’t claim to have any authority on this point. Her disability appears to have developed slowly but progressively. She remembers taking part in a dance performance as a child — although her mother stopped her just before going on stage: “‘You would keep the others back, dear,’ she said gently.” Until she was about twenty, though, “I was more or less like anybody else. I lived an ordinary life Nothing much happened to me. I was insignificant and commonplace, and just such another as the duller among my neighbours.”

Now, however, things are altogether different. “Everyone notices me. I am a sensation. In any assembly or any house I am the most important person, just as Dr Johnson was, and no one grudges me my pride of place.” Which also means that any mishap involving her is not a mishap but a catastrophe: “On an occasion like this I have sometimes tried to sing out for help in an unmistakably jaunty tone of voice to let everyone know at once that I am happy and carefree, I haven’t lost an eye or broken a leg, but this attempt has never been successful, because through closed doors my gay halloo seems to pierce like a shriek of agony. The long-dreaded has happened, they think, their worst fears are realized, and the helter-skelter is wilder than ever.”

“I am an invalid. I can’t walk. I have no other characteristics.” This label affixed, she loses all other aspects of identity: “That little invalid, you must have noticed her going past in her chair” “‘Oh, yes, I’ve often wondered who she was.” Even people who hated or disliked her in the past are free to ignore her now: “My enemies, base deserters, have left me in the lurch.”

“On the Floor” is such an honest, funny, and wise account of life with a disability that I have to wonder why it’s not better known, not widely anthologized. It was first published in New Stories, a short-lived magazine edited by Edward J. O’Brien, who founded the “Best Short Stories” annual anthologies of British and American stories, and O’Brien republished it in the 1935 edition (available on the Internet Archive: Link). It appeared again in 1938 in Penguin’s second volume of Selected Modern Short Stories.

That was the end of the story of this story until now. If Joan Jukes was the author’s real name, she appears never to have published again. From a cursory search of British genealogical sources, there doesn’t appear to have been a Joan Jukes who would have been within a realistic age range to be the author. And if “Joan Jukes” was a pseudonym, no one has come forward to match it with its rightful owner. Neither O’Brien nor Alan Steele, the editor of the Penguin collection, provided any biographical details.

So there the trail ends, and until someone can shed more light on it, the mystery of Joan Jukes remains unsolved. In the meantime, however, I enthusiastically invite you to enjoy this superb piece of writing. I have extracted the story from the 500+ pages of O’Brien’s anthology to make it easy:

“On the Floor” (in PDF format)