In the history of domestic service, workers were often assigned titles that connected them to the specific part of the house to which they were tethered: the upstairs girl, for instance, or the downstairs girl. 

A “between” girl (sometimes called a “tweeny”) was neither. She assisted the cook, but also ran interference for the chambermaid, the parlor maid, even the laundress, filling in, if never actually quite fitting in. 

While Ireland’s reallocation into two self governing Northern and Southern territories didn’t take place until the early 1920s, the idea of fixed classes was both a social and spatial conceit that predated “partition”, as it came to be known. Indoors, below floors, walls were social as well as spatial determinants, fixed fortresses marking intractable boundaries of power and privilege. (And knowing your place.) 

The tweeny had no place. She was a floater, neither here nor there. 

Immigration is always a story of betweenness.