The Staircase Girls Read online

  Ann felt a mixture of hope and fear at the idea of an operation in hospital. Her bad ear had long prevented her from playing out with her sisters and their friends during the cold months, when the wind swept in off the sea and made her head ache something rotten. If having an operation meant that she’d be able to play just like the others, she’d be happy. On the other hand, the hospital smelled funny and she’d be kept away from her family for ages.

  But when, early in 1937, doctors told Grace that they had to remove Ann’s mastoid bone deep inside her ear, she’d readily agreed. As it turned out, the procedure couldn’t be done in one go and Ann had to have a series of operations, and different stays in hospital over the following year. With each visit she got to like the hospital more, though. ‘The nurses are lovely,’ she told her sister Bet after the second stay, ‘they even make me egg sandwiches if I really want one and no one ever tells me off. Not like Mum does, anyway.’ After the final operation in 1938, Grace was told by the surgeons that they’d had to go so deep into her daughter’s ear canal to clear the infection, that following it – as Grace later told Ann – ‘you could get two fingers down the back, in there’. Which made Ann think of all the things that might get into her head. She determined there and then to keep that ear covered whatever it took, especially when it was windy or raining.

  On the Sunday before she was due to be released from the hospital, Ann asked her mother when she’d be able to play outside with her sisters Bet and Rene, and brother Derek. ‘It’s been horrible only being able to see them and Dad through the window,’ she said with feeling. Her siblings used to visit the park across the road from her ward on weekends, while Grace went up to see Ann. The children were lifted onto a bench by her dad who pointed to the window high up in the building, through which Ann would wave madly and they’d wave back at her, smiling madly as they did.

  ‘Now Nance,’ her mother said loudly, ‘you’re going to have to get better at my mum’s for a month or more. I can’t have you home all day, every day. I’ve got to go to work and I’ve got the others to think about, and as you can see I’m getting bigger every day.’

  Ann nodded mutely at her pregnant mother. She didn’t argue, she knew it was best not to, and instead thought about the train journey to Cambridge, where her mother’s family all lived. She liked seeing the countryside fly by out of the train window, and really liked staying at Nana Wolfe’s tiny house in Kettle’s Yard, but she wouldn’t see her sisters and brother at all. Fighting back tears, she tried to smile as her mother fussed about her, tidying her small, metal-framed bed with its two pillows and thick blankets. ‘That’ll be lovely,’ Ann tried to sound brave.

  Grace ignored her and pulled the blankets taut across the bed. ‘Right then, tomorrow I’ll come and collect you and we’ll be off on the train. I’ll go with you as far as London, then you’ll be met at Cambridge by your aunties.’

  After a fretful night, Ann got out of bed as dawn broke and dressed, ready for Grace to collect her. She couldn’t eat any breakfast and cried a little as she said goodbye to the nurses, but Grace’s no-nonsense mood had her daughter ‘bucking up’ and concentrating on catching the train to London in time. The pair sat silently looking away from each other during the journey, and Grace only muttered ‘this way’ and ‘left’ as they found the Tube line to King’s Cross station. Once she’d put Ann on the train to Cambridge, Grace gave her a sandwich wrapped in newspaper and then pinned a piece of paper to her lapel with her name and where she was going to stay written in her broad print.

  ‘Bye love, don’t forget to ask the conductor to let you know when to get off,’ Grace said briskly. Then she simply turned on her heels without kissing her daughter and headed to Waterloo station in order to be back in Folkestone for teatime.

  Ann thought perhaps her mother was going to cry and didn’t want her to see it. Ann cried, briefly and quietly as the train pulled out of the station, puffing smoke and clanking as it went. Then she settled into the corner of the cigarette-smelling carriage, trying not to rest her face against the prickly criss-crossed fabric of the seat by putting a handkerchief on the side of her head that was covered with her elasticated bandage.

  Ann brightened immediately on seeing her Aunty Elsie and Aunt Edie at the tiny Cambridge station. She’d spent summer holidays with one or both of them ever since she could remember (Grace was glad to be free of looking out for her sickly eldest child) and Ann was delighted to be spoiled by her aunts and Nana Wolfe. They wouldn’t let her play out much, but were always happy to bake scones for her.

  Riding the bus into town, Ann sat quietly next to Edie and looked out of the window. It was her first time in Cambridge during the spring, when the university was mid-term. Five minutes into the journey, she began to giggle. ‘What are them men doing wearing dresses?’ she asked her aunt, who turned to look at the source of her amusement.

  A look of puzzlement gave way to a smile, and Edie laughed. ‘Oh, Nance, they’re the scholars. That’s gowns they’re wearing, not dresses. They’ve come to Cambridge to get a good education, and they have to wear them.’

  Ann thought it was strange that they had to wear a gown to get a good education, and Edie continued, ‘It’s tradition. They still do a lot of things that they did hundreds of years ago at the university.’ She paused, pinched her niece’s cheek and winked. ‘So do us townies, though!’

  Ann’s gaze returned to the road, just as a scholar on a bicycle passed in the opposite direction. ‘Aunty Edie!’ she shouted, pointing at the cyclist. ‘They’ll do themselves an injury! They’re going to get their gown caught in the wheel!’

  ‘Goodness, you are a worrier!’ Edie teased her. ‘They have to wear them, Nance, otherwise the colleges don’t know who’s a townie and who’s a gownie, and they got to know who’s their boys!’

  Ann noticed more men in gowns walking in and out of the big wooden gates set in castle-like walls that she’d never seen past, although she had daydreamed about them being the home to princes and princesses. Some of the dark grey buildings had statues and carvings on them like churches, and usually they were closed up and silent. Today, she saw that the windows and doors were open, giving tantalizing glimpses of green squares and clean paths as her bus rolled by them. ‘Are there butlers and ladies-in-waiting in there, Aunty Edie?’ she asked. ‘I thought they was castles or churches . . .’

  Edie smiled and looked across at her sister. Elsie answered with a laugh in her voice. ‘No, luvvy, although there’s churches inside them places, but they’re all colleges, where the men in dresses . . .’

  ‘Gowns!’ shouted a delighted Ann.

  ‘. . . sorry, gowns,’ Elsie continued, ‘who are students go to learn about important things the likes of which we don’t understand.’

  Edie snorted a laugh. ‘Yeah, right, ’cept old Maggie who works in one of them places says the boys ain’t got the sense they was born with!’

  ‘Hush,’ Elsie interrupted, ‘the girl’s got her ideas about the place, haven’t you, Nance?’

  She certainly had. With every lovely stone arch and old-looking wooden door that she passed, Ann thought the places looked magical. She barely noticed the shops in between each college.

  Ann was intrigued by what went on in Cambridge colleges, and her curiosity only grew as the days at her aunt’s and nana’s house passed. The more she heard about students the more she wanted to know about them. According to her aunts they were from all over the country, wore fancy clothes, ate strange food and talked like the king. She would sometimes sit in the front garden and hope that her aunts would take her into town so she could look at the colleges where the scholars lived, but Grace had told her sisters that Ann had to have peace and quiet to get better, and town would be far too noisy for her. Afraid of the repercussions that disobeying their bossy big sister would bring, Elsie and Edie respected Grace’s wishes and kept to their word. Ann didn’t even get to see her other aunties and uncles who lived in Cambridge, although she loved talking
to them almost as much as she did with her nana and granddad Samuel.

  Although Ann was rarely taken into town, that didn’t mean that she couldn’t go out into the streets around their house and play during that mild season, although she preferred not to go too far from the passage in front of Nana’s house. Embarrassed about the fabric strap she had to wear around her head to protect her ear from further infections, Ann explained to the local children, when they asked her to play with them, that she’d had a serious brain surgery and any activity could be dangerous. But Ann really liked adult company, anyway. During her spells in hospital she used to help nurses making beds and spent a large part of her day chatting to nurses about other patients’ medical conditions. In Cambridge Ann helped her nana with the cooking or housework, when she wasn’t whiling away the hours daydreaming about the colleges and the boys who studied there.

  She had missed a lot of school in Folkestone over the years because of her mastoiditis, and being in Cambridge meant that she missed even more. Pretty much everything that Ann knew she had learned at the sink or oven, with her mother, nana and aunts. By the age of eleven she was as capable of cooking for her family and cleaning the house as any grown-up, and she was missed in Kent for that, as much as anything else.

  Reluctantly, after a few weeks (which felt like only days to her), Ann returned to the south coast in order to have a check-up at the hospital, and to resume her life with the family.

  During the few weeks of not seeing her mum, it seemed to Ann that she’d grown much bigger. She hadn’t grown jolly though, like big people were supposed to (like Oliver Hardy, thought Ann, or that Two-Ton Tessie she heard on the radio). Grace was quite the opposite, Ann thought one evening, while the children chattered and laughed as they finished the last of their bread pudding.

  ‘Gawd help me, stop making such a racket!’ Grace cried, leaning heavily against the table, her left hand on the small of her back. ‘What’ll I do when there’s five of you? Bloody run away and leave yer, that’s what I’ll do!’

  Stunned and frightened, Ann’s sisters turned to her as their mother limped out of the kitchen. ‘It’s alright,’ Ann soothed Bet’s hair, ‘she don’t mean it, you know that, when has she ever left us? And I think the nurse is going to bring us another brother or sister in her black bag real soon.’

  Not long after, Ann and Bet were on their Dad’s smallholding, just up the hill behind the house, playing with the ducks and chickens – they especially loved going ‘up top’ to watch chicks hatching in the incubator – when Ann told Bet, ‘I can’t wait to get married and be a mum. My husband is going to be smart, he’s going to have studied at Cambridge. He would ’ave been a scholar. I’ll iron his gown for him so he can wear it at formal hall where they have them there grand dinners with lots of fish. All our children will go to university, Bet.’

  Bet looked at her sister with surprise. ‘Where are you going to meet a gentleman, Nance?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Ann asked Bet.

  ‘Nothing, Nance, nothing. Of course you will.’

  Barely two months later, Grace went into labour at home. Luckily Jack was there and he set about rousing a couple of female neighbours, who fetched a midwife and began boiling water on the stove and carrying clean old sheets into the bedroom where Grace lay, moaning. When her moans turned to screams, Ann crept up the stairs towards the closed door and stood impatiently for what seemed like hours and hours, waiting to hear the cries of the baby. When Grace’s screams stopped, all Ann could hear were grown-ups’ voices, not a baby crying.

  The midwife opened the door, looked at Ann and said, ‘There’s something wrong with your new sister. Go outside and tell your sisters and brother it’s a girl, but best not to mention anything else.’

  Ann shook her head and asked what was wrong. The midwife sighed and said, ‘She’s got something wrong with her eyes, I’m afraid. The doctor will need to examine her but it looks like she could be blind in one of them, it’s just not opening.’

  Confused, Ann thought that her black bag must have had some sort of disease or infection in it, there was no other explanation. With a sinking feeling she turned and walked down the stairs, trying to think of what to tell the others. Maybe she’ll only be a little ill, like me with my ears, she thought. Yes, she convinced herself, little Joy (her dad’s idea for a name if the baby was a girl) will be alright, she must be.

  For the next few months, life at the Pilcher house continued as usual, and baby Joy behaved just like Rene had done when she was so small. Ann took turns with her mother, pushing Joy in the old pram during the day, and rocking her to sleep in her arms at night. Maybe the nurse was wrong, thought Ann, who kept the knowledge of what she’d been told the night Joy was born to herself.

  Over the autumn and winter, Ann made a few more trips to Cambridge in order for her ear to ‘heal’, and whenever she was there, she would miss Joy more than she did even Bet, Rene and Derek. She loved being a kind of mother to Joy, taking care of her when Grace was working or otherwise too busy.

  When Joy was a year old, she began seeing doctors more often, and Grace’s mood became darker after every visit. In the summer of 1939, Jack began talking about Hitler, Germans and a war coming, but Ann and her siblings didn’t really pay any attention to any of that; they were more concerned with how and when to keep out of their mother’s way. When Grace was in a mood, or when her nerves were playing up, they’d all five go down to the beach and play (Ann was in charge of Joy, of course), coming home only when they were hungry, or if a wind got up and the clouds rolled in off the sea.

  But just as the summer was coming to a close, and Ann, Bet, Rene and Derek were dreading their return to school, war with Germany was declared. They all sat around the radio one Sunday evening, listening to the prime minister, Mr Chamberlain, as he told them that because Hitler hadn’t retreated from Poland, then Britain had to fight them. Jack, who’d had his left ear, the only one with any semblance of hearing left in it, stuck up against the radio’s Bakelite casing, slowly sat up straight in his armchair and stared at Grace. She continued to look down at her hands as they furiously knitted. ‘Bed, kids!’ barked Jack, and they all went quietly.

  They couldn’t hear what their parents talked about that night, but one evening a few days later, just before bedtime when it was still light outside, Grace told Ann to sit down at the kitchen table. Rene and Bet were taking turns to push their baby sister up and down the street outside, and Ann watched them as they fussed over the pram. ‘Nance,’ her mother rapped the table to get her attention, ‘we’re making arrangements to have Joy sent away.’

  Ann’s eyes instantly filled with tears. ‘But why, Mum? We can look after her. There’s enough of us at home to help. It’s only one eye that’s not right.’

  ‘No,’ Grace insisted, ‘the doctor said she’s got a condition called coloboma and they’re going to take her right eye out. When she’s older they can put a glass one in. They can leave the other one, even though it’s funny and egg shaped, they said. But her pupil’s really small and she’s going to struggle to see out of it. We don’t know how long this war is going to go on for this time, and it’s going to be hard for us to cope with the four of you. Anyway, I haven’t got the first idea of how to look after a handicapped kid.’

  Ann knew why she had been told; her mum didn’t want to have to explain it to the others. So now she had to think of the best way to break the news to her sisters and brother. They all adored Joy and loved looking after her. She was such an easy baby that Bet had renamed her Sleeping Beauty.

  Ann decided to hold off telling them for a while, until she knew more about the home, at least. The following day her dad answered questions about the place that Joy was being sent to as best as he could, but it was clear that he didn’t really know. He handed her a pamphlet that had small photos of the place in it.

  At breakfast two days after finding out, Ann told Bet, Rene and Derek, ‘Joy’s going to go to the Sunshine Home for Blind Ba
bies in East Grinstead. Mum and Dad will take her there and she’ll learn how to cope with being blind. It’s like a boarding school, there’s more than twenty other babies there – look, I’ve read about it. It looks nice. I’m sure we can visit.’ She pulled the pamphlet out of her pocket. ‘Here, you can read about it.’

  The children sat stunned into silence. Joy was their sister and should stay with them, Bet argued. She was only a year old and that was too young to be sent away. ‘It’s just not right, Nance,’ Bet told her.

  Joy was taken by Grace and Jack to East Grinstead one rainy Saturday in late September 1939. Grace refused to say anything about their trip when they returned home hours later except that, ‘It’s a lovely big house and the nurses seem very nice. Now we’ll see her once a year, don’t you worry.’ Jack looked pale and said nothing. He went upstairs, changed out of his Sunday suit into his work clothes, and headed up top to get what vegetables he could before it became too dark to see anything.

  It wasn’t long before the Pilchers heard about families who were evacuating from Folkestone and moving to places far away. Lots of children were being sent to a place called Merthyr Tydfil without their mums or dads, which sounded horrible to Ann, Bet and Rene. Plenty of new people began arriving at Folkestone’s port too, on boats that braved the Channel from France. The army moved into the town, which became a garrison – this was difficult for Jack because when he was challenged by soldiers for being out after dark, he couldn’t hear what they were saying. More than once he was marched off to the police station by suspicious sentries who thought he couldn’t speak English. He never complained, though.

  When Jack became an air raid warden, he only went out at night wearing his armband and helmet, which meant he was no longer stopped by the army. He didn’t complain when the smallholding up top of the hill was commandeered by the Ministry of War for army use. He thought it his patriotic duty to do what he could on the home front, he explained proudly to his children, when he told them they couldn’t go up and see the chicks any more. The people of Folkestone who chose to stay in the town prepared for war as they were instructed to by the government. Jack and Grace made blackout curtains for the house. When the children all had to be fitted with gas masks Grace told them, ‘I know they’re horrible smelly things,’ as she tied the straps tightly over their faces to secure the masks to their heads, ‘but you got to have them.’