The Staircase Girls Read online

  After the Americans entered the war (‘about bloody time’, Aggie had said, who was listening to the radio with them when it was announced in December 1941), everyone had said that it would soon be over, and that the Yanks would help get Jerry on the run. In 1943 lots of American soldiers and flyers started to turn up in the town. Aggie was excited at first because she thought she might be able to get one or two in as lodgers, if Celia and the kids could find somewhere else. But because she was a ‘single’ woman, what with her husband away in the services, she wasn’t allowed to even apply. She was annoyed when she found out that landladies who did get an American also got bigger rations, including tinned fruit and even fresh bananas.

  There were plenty of US soldiers billeted around their area, and Joyce became as brazen as every other kid in the street when they saw an American soldier; she’d shout to them, ‘Got any gum, chum?’ and was more often than not rewarded with a stick or two for her cheek. Joyce thought that they all sounded funny, and it made her laugh when they told her what a funny accent she had. Although not quite five years old, Douglas and Trevor were more brazen with the American soldiers, and would ask for anything that they might want to part with, from marbles to uniform patches. A couple of times they were given American comic books which were all about the war, with American soldiers beating the Germans and Japanese in battles on land, sea and in the air, and they were passed between each other until they fell apart.

  Following the invasion of Italy in September 1943, the family heard that Charles had been a part of the invading force and was somewhere near Pompeii. Not long after Christmas that year, foreigners wearing loose uniforms with badges on them started appearing in Cambridge. ‘They’re prisoners of war,’ Celia told Aggie as they watched from the upstairs window as a line of them walked down their street. ‘They’re going to be working on the farms and that, till the war’s over. Italians, Madge at the grocers reckons.’

  ‘Don’t look Italian, do they?’ said Aggie.

  ‘How’s that, then?’ Celia asked.

  ‘I dunno,’ Aggie thought for a second, ‘maybe smarter or something, like that Frankie Sinatra.’

  ‘He’s not Italian, Ag,’ Celia laughed.

  ‘Close enough though, ain’t he? Italian-American. And gorgeous, eh?’

  ‘Who’s gorgeous, Mum?’ Joyce asked, walking into her mother’s bedroom where the two women stood.

  ‘Your dad, love’, Celia said sweetly. ‘And I hope we’ll see him soon, eh?’

  They didn’t see him for another nine months, but Charles returned for a two-week leave in one piece and sun-tanned in June 1944, just after the Normandy landings had taken place. The boys were delighted to have their own war hero at home, even if he wouldn’t talk to them about what had happened during the invasion. His nightmares, night sweats and dark moods told Celia that something terrible had happened, but he wouldn’t say a word. Instead he’d take her and Aggie to the pub as often as they’d agree to go, leaving Joyce to ‘look after’ the twins.

  Aggie’s husband hadn’t been heard from for some months, but she hadn’t received any telegrams from the war office about him, so she supposed he was ‘having a whale of a time with those Italian girls’, although she said it with more hope than humour.

  When it came time for Charles to report back for duty he told Celia that he didn’t think he was going back to Italy, and that it was more likely to be France, but not to worry. He was still giving dying men medical care and carrying stretchers away from the battlefield. Celia couldn’t read much in his eyes as Charles said goodbye, there was a determined hardness to the set of his features, as if a front had been pulled down on a shop window, she thought. Joyce felt it, too. She knew her dad was inside that uniform and under the little hat, only she didn’t think that she could see him, just the shape of the dad she’d known and loved. As he walked away from the house, Joyce noticed his usual light step turn into a stiff, jerky march as he got further away from the house, and by the time he turned the corner out of sight he’d become just another soldier like the ones she saw marching across Parker’s Piece, or along Newmarket Road.

  When Charles returned from the war for good he was physically in one piece, but it seemed like he’d left a bit of something in France and Germany. The Jones family all survived the conflict, bombings, separations and privations of the war. Joyce’s grandparents picked up their life as if the previous six years hadn’t happened (although they’d pass away within months of each other, from natural causes, before the 1950s began). However, the ensuing peacetime was not as successfully navigated by one of the twins.

  Two weeks before their seventh birthday in April 1946, Joyce took the boys to Newmarket Road intending to go to see the circus tent being put up on Midsummer Common. As they reached the public toilets in the centre of the busiest part of the road, Douglas said he had to go to the lav, could they wait for him? Joyce sat on the steps and listened for the sound of Douglas singing ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary’, as he always did when he went to the toilet. Trevor made his way around the traffic island because he couldn’t sit still. As he climbed around the railings a bunch of bigger boys crossed the road to where he was and started calling him ginger, pushing him and poking him. In a panic, Trevor jumped off the railings and ran across the road, trying to hide between the pillar box and telephone box, but the boys followed him across and chased him. As he got to the roadside again he stepped backwards, into the road – the driver of a passing lorry had no chance of missing him. Trevor was dragged under his wheels and left in a small, crumpled heap.

  Traffic stopped and people ran to the boy, forming a ring around him. Someone went to the doctor’s office opposite where the accident had happened, and as Joyce fought her way through the crowd to her little brother, Dr Cameron, a middle-aged GP wearing tweed and small, rimless spectacles, reached the boy at the same time. He bent over Trevor, who was still conscious, felt his chest, held his limp wrist for a few seconds and straightened up.

  ‘Sorry, nothing I can do for him, and he’s not my patient anyway. I’ll call an ambulance for him, though.’ He turned and walked stiffly back to his office.

  Joyce sat crying beside Trevor as adults tried to comfort her. One man put his jacket over the boy. Trevor’s eyelids flickered and he looked up at his sister. ‘J-J-Joyce,’ he stammered, and lifted his hand towards her, ‘give this to Mum . . .’

  She took the brand new ha’penny from him and Trevor sank into nothingness. She knew when the ambulance men arrived and set about lifting her brother that it was too late, they wouldn’t be able to do anything for him. He was dead.

  MAUD COOPER

  Cambridge 1945–50

  Maud Cooper was twenty-one and desperate to get away from the house she shared with her grandmother when she met Hugh Ingram in 1945. She vowed to herself that she would never go back to see her after she married and moved out. She had not really known either of her parents, and her last memory of them being together was from when she was about three years old, standing at the garden gate. Her dad was wearing a sailor’s uniform, waving goodbye and promising to write. But he never returned, and according to her nan, Maud’s mother had collapsed when she received a telegram telling her that he had gone missing after the ship he was serving on as a bo’sun had disappeared somewhere in the China seas. She never recovered, according to Nan, who soon had her only daughter committed to the local psychiatric hospital at Fulbourn, and moved her granddaughter into her decrepit house on Mitcham’s Corner.

  They lived a very private and frugal existence. Her nan never mentioned her mum, and Maud was discouraged from asking questions about her. Nan kept Maud busy when not at school by giving her housework to do, and as a result she had few friends and didn’t know how to behave when around boys. By the time she reached her teens, Nan was forever telling her that she wasn’t good enough for marriage. ‘No man wants a miserable sour-looking girl like you,’ she told her. ‘You’ll be a spinster, you will. Good for nothing, to
o.’

  Her nan’s obstructiveness didn’t extend to Maud’s imagination, and as a teenager she spent plenty of time practising ‘smooching’ in the bedroom she shared with the old woman, when sent to bed before her. Maud attempted to master what she imagined would be the perfect kiss, until one evening she was caught in the act by Nan. ‘Bloody mental you are, Maud. Just like your mum,’ Nan said with mild disgust, after finding her with eyes closed, kissing her hand and dancing a waltz; the noise her heels made on the wooden floor had brought the old woman to the bedroom door. ‘I don’t mind you play acting some romantic nonsense,’ she scolded Maud, ‘but keep your lovemaking down. Why are you such a stupid girl? I don’t want old shorty pants from downstairs banging on his ceiling again! I’m fed up fighting with him.’ Maud didn’t fancy their downstairs lodger Mr Golding’s chances in a fight with Nan, so she was careful from then on to take her shoes off when she waltzed to music that only she could hear.

  Throughout her late teens, during the Second World War, Maud admired scores of men from a distance, never daring to talk to any of them. It was inevitable that when a relatively good-looking young man did speak to her, she would fall finally and fatally in love with him. So it was when Hugh Ingram started to tease her one fine day by the River Cam in 1945. They had both come to watch the annual college boat races known as the Bumps. This year Maud decided to support the St John’s Lady Margaret crew, simply because it was their ‘turn’ – she chose a different one every year. She and neighbour Gladys Burnett were visiting the river in Chesterton, enjoying watching the crowds of people, soaking up the atmosphere and excited to be close to college people, who were rarely seen in such numbers away from the university.

  The girls sat watching the races, and when the Lady Margaret crew came into sight they jumped up and ran alongside the river shouting encouragement. It was when they were running along the river bank that she first saw her future husband. He was there with another young man, helping old Dewsbury the lock keeper at Baits Bite to turn the boats round using punting poles. The Lady Margaret crew had just lost to a Jesus College boat, which was declared the winner and it was being set alight as Maud and Gladys reached the Bite.

  ‘That’s a damned waste!’ the nice-looking young man shouted.

  Slightly annoyed that he should question a college tradition, Maud forgot her shyness and addressed the young man directly. ‘Does seem like it, don’t it?’ she said as snootily as she could manage. ‘But it’s their tradition.’

  Looking wryly amused, he asked, ‘And who are you, Miss . . . ?’

  Blushing she stammered a response. ‘Maud, Maud Cooper.’

  ‘Well, I’m Hugh Ingram,’ he lifted his straw boater to reveal a fine head of auburn hair, swept back over his crown. ‘Pleased to be of acquaintance, Miss Cooper. What are you doing here?’

  Deciding to be what her nan would call ‘brazen’, Maud proceeded to carry on a conversation with an older male stranger (he’s a good four or five years older than me, she thought). ‘Me and Gladys started coming down here a couple of years ago. It’s become our tradition, like.’ Maud could hear Gladys giggling next to her, and she hushed her with a backwards wave.

  Hugh looked directly into Maud’s eyes. ‘Well, we’ve been helping Dewsbury since we were boys, so for years,’ he pointed to the other young man, who had moved away, along the top of the lock gate. Hugh continued, ‘I’m on leave at the moment, and thought I’d help him out for old time’s sake. I suppose it’s a tradition for me, too.’

  Maud thought she had never met anyone so well spoken and polite. She didn’t want him to go, and desperately tried to think of something to say. ‘Is rowing your thing then, is that what you did at school?’ she blurted. What am I thinking? she asked herself silently, I sound proper daft.

  Hugh laughed. ‘Goodness no. Didn’t do rowing at school, just cadets. But I love boats. I’m in the navy, although not a sailor. I’m based up in the Orkneys. I get terrible sea sickness,’ he laughed, ‘so I’m a dry land sailor.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ Maud laughed.

  Hugh pointed at Maud’s dress and asked, ‘And you? Did you like needlework at school?’

  ‘Oh very funny,’ she replied, with as much sarcasm as she’d allow herself. Her dress was home-made from an old patchwork blanket she had found in the bin outside her house. ‘But yes, I did, and I still do. I make dresses out of sheets and all sorts, but you can’t always make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, can you? At least, that’s what my nan says.’ She looked around at Gladys for some support, but she had wandered off.

  ‘I didn’t mean to offend you, I’m awfully sorry.’ Hugh seemed genuinely contrite. ‘Can I make it up to you?’ he asked. ‘Do you want to meet me at the Beaconsfield tomorrow night? There’s always a good band on.’

  Maud smiled, and feeling brave replied, ‘OK, yes.’

  It would be Maud’s first date – and she already had butterflies in her tummy thinking about the prospect of being held in his arms when he said, ‘I’ll see you there. Seven o’clock.’

  Those butterflies almost died of boredom by the time Hugh arrived the following night. He was slightly dishevelled, clearly flustered and full of apologies. ‘It was very embarrassing waiting under this lamp post,’ Maud said pointedly. ‘Not sure what I looked like.’

  ‘You look very nice and I’m so sorry,’ Hugh replied, regaining some composure. ‘I got caught up with something and there was no way of letting you know.’

  Maud looked closely at him and saw a trace of blood on his shirt. His nose looked red. ‘Have you had a nose bleed?’ she said with concern.

  He touched his nose to check for blood and looked down at the area of his shirt to which Maud was pointing. ‘Oh yes,’ he said quickly, ‘yes, I had a nose bleed. That’s why I’m late. I’ve had them since I was a young boy. I’m so pleased you waited. I didn’t expect that you would.’

  But Maud did wait, and she would continue to do so, for months. She waited for Hugh to call round when on leave from the navy, and then, on his return, for him to visit after his shifts at the Post Office. Because she had been brought up to wait for everything, and never do anything without permission, she waited for him to kiss her. She waited for a proposal, and had to defend him against her nan’s sneering questions about their future when he didn’t. ‘We’ve been courting for a year,’ she told her when asked what Hugh’s intentions were, or if he even had any, ‘and he’s never done nothing he shouldn’t with me.’

  ‘Huh. Well, if you ask me he don’t seem very keen,’ came the snorted response.

  Maud angrily snapped back, ‘Oh but he is. He told me he likes me. He’s just not very good with words. Bit like me. That’s why we’re suited.’

  ‘Well, just tell him you can’t afford to hang around for him,’ Nan replied dismissively. ‘You’re not getting any younger and you’re sure not getting any prettier.’

  As usual Nan’s barb hurt, and almost in tears Maud replied, ‘OK, OK, I just don’t want to pressure him. You know, be too keen. I’m surprised he even looks at me, he’s so very handsome and so dapper.’

  Nan folded her arms and sniffed. ‘They’re the ones you should stay away from. Don’t trust them. They’ll always be sniffing around for something else. Think a lot of themselves, that sort.’

  While waiting for Hugh to get out of the navy, Maud continued to work at the Pye radio factory, which she hated. ‘Don’t know why I couldn’t ’ave been a land girl so I could be out all day. But no, I’m stuck working here,’ she’d moan to Gladys regularly. ‘All day I count and pack valves, springs and all sorts.’ Finally though, Hugh did propose to Maud, on his last visit home before being demobbed, although it wasn’t anything like the way she’d seen it done in the movies. They were sitting on the wall outside the Beaconsfield and he mumbled under his breath something about a wedding and Maud said, ‘Are you asking me to marry you, Hugh? If you are, it’s yes.’ Looking back, she would often ask herself if it had been intended as a pro
posal.

  The wedding was a modest do at the local registry office. Maud’s nan and Hugh’s mum were the only guests. ‘I’m an atheist,’ Hugh had told her after she had accepted the ‘proposal’. At the time Maud wasn’t sure what he meant by that, but she explained that she had only ever been to the church for Sunday school and ‘I’m not bothered where we get married.’ Although, really she was more than bothered. She longed for a church wedding and lots of fuss made about her. But instead she accepted what was to be a quiet and cheap affair. ‘As long as I’m married to you, Hugh,’ she told him, ‘I’m the happiest bride you’ll ever have.’

  Hugh’s smile seemed to be tinged with something, Maud thought. Was it regret?

  After the marriage, Maud moved in with Hugh and his mother in their house in Ditton Fields, on the east side of Cambridge. Maud tried very hard to get and keep Hugh’s attention. She bought a couple of new dresses and some fancy underwear from Joshua Taylor, but he didn’t notice. She made him his favourite meal, beef and ale suet pudding, but he asked if his mother had made it. He was rarely home. His mum told her that he had always been like that. ‘Never in, comes home all hours. I’m afraid you’ll just have to be patient, dear. Takes men a little longer to adjust to married life.’

  It wasn’t long before Maud felt very hard done by. She had imagined married life to be very different and thought that her mum must have loved her dad very much. She often wondered if she would ever ‘fall madly in love’, and so far reckoned that she hadn’t. Before the wedding Maud thought that Hugh was a gentleman because he’d barely kissed her and never tried to touch her anywhere he shouldn’t. But she had expected him to seduce her on their wedding night, and while they had managed to do something, it was over quickly and there had been no intimacy.