The Staircase Girls Page 4

  ‘I can’t breathe,’ Rene complained.

  ‘You’ll be fine. It’s these things what are gonna keep you alive,’ Grace told her.

  Ann looked in one of the biggest boxes that their gas masks had arrived in, and saw a huge hood thing. ‘What’s that for, Mum?’ she asked. Grace glanced at the box Ann was pointing to. ‘That’ll have to go back so’s someone who can use it gets it. It’s for the pram, but we don’t need it, do we?’ Like the big old Victorian pram that stood empty in the yard, it was a reminder of the absence of their baby sister.

  Grace’s tiredness and mood swings, coupled with having to raise her voice to be heard and repeat the same words several times over before Jack understood, was creating a lot of tension between her mum and dad, Ann realized. Grace didn’t care about screaming at Jack in front of the children, who knew better than to ever take his side in an argument with her. As the year wore on in a kind of addictive suspense – everywhere she went it seemed to Ann that people were asking, ‘When’s Jerry gonna bomb, then?’ – Grace seemed to become more and more nervous.

  It was teatime when warning sirens began testing in late 1939, and Ann saw her mother almost faint. She dropped a frying pan into the sink, fell to the floor and crawled under the dining table. The younger children all thought it was funny, but when she began pulling at their legs in a rough way that hurt them, they soon got down with her. After a few minutes Jack came in and laughed at them, shouting, ‘It’s only a blooming test!’

  From the beginning of 1940, though, planes and sirens began to be heard in the town at any time, day and night. It disrupted every waking and sleeping moment. The sound of aeroplane engines – which were felt as a rumble in Ann’s chest before she heard them – was relentless. Both German and British planes droned on and on during the night. Grace’s nerves were constantly on edge and, as was her way, she snapped and snarled at her husband and children over the smallest thing.

  At the end of May 1940 the whole of Folkestone turned out on the seashore to see all sorts of boats off to France. Some of them didn’t look to Ann as if they should be at sea, they were too small, surely. Alongside the trawlers the tiny little river boats looked like toys.

  ‘Why are they all going, Mum?’ asked Ann.

  ‘’Cos our boys need to be brought back ’ome sharpish, and the Germans are giving them a hiding over there, that’s why,’ Grace told her.

  Ann spent the day going to and from the seashore hoping to see the boats return, and just before teatime she saw the first boats arrive back, overflowing with uniformed men. After they drew up on the beach, some of the soldiers jumped out and ran up to the nearest civilian, to push pieces of paper into their hand. One looked at Ann, trying to decide whether to give her his.

  ‘What’s that?’ Ann asked.

  ‘It’s a letter for my wife, to tell her I’m safe. We can’t go back home, we all have to regroup and get back to the fighting as soon as we can. Could you . . . ?’

  Ann shook her head. She didn’t want her mum to get angry with her, as she’d told her plenty of times not to ever talk to soldiers. He ran over to a middle-aged woman in a pair of jodhpurs and riding jacket, who did take his letter.

  For the rest of the day and night, boats kept arriving and soldiers disembarked, some falling to their knees and putting their faces in the sand – the ferrying of troops into Folkestone from France seemed to go on all week. It was followed, just as Grace had feared (‘You watch, them soldiers will get here and the Germans won’t be far behind!’), by the first spate of heavy bombing that the town had seen. All of the bombs landed in a 300-yard-wide stretch of the town, and no one was sure whether that was intentional or if the Germans would bomb more widely at any time.

  Grace became increasingly nervous and scared. One afternoon, she watched as two parachutists landed in the sea, and when a siren went off, Ann saw her begin to shake. ‘We’re leaving Kent. We can’t stay here any longer,’ Grace cried determinedly to the children.

  That night, before going out on duty, Jack told the children that it was best for all of them to go to Cambridge. He didn’t want them to end up working like slaves on a farm in Wales, which is what he’d heard happened to evacuees, and he didn’t want them sent halfway round the world to Australia like some other kids had – especially since some hadn’t made it at all, their ship had been sunk by German submarines. (Plus, Jack had told Ann more than once in the past, Grace had never liked living in Folkestone.)

  He would have to stay though, Jack said, and held his hand up as the children began crying and shouting ‘No!’, trying to grab his big, calloused hands. He had to carry on in his duties as air raid warden.

  ‘Don’t you fuss,’ Jack told them with half a smile, ‘there won’t be anywhere near as much bombing or dogfights in the sky over Cambridge like there are here, you’ll be safe. Now get to bed . . .’

  Three days later, Ann saw the tears in his eyes as Jack waved them off from Folkestone Central. ‘When will we see Daddy again?’ Rene cried, as the train pulled away from the station.

  ‘I don’t know,’ snapped her mother. ‘When Hitler says so, I reckon.’

  ‘I can just see him coming in from the shelter in the middle of the night and playing some tunes that he can’t really hear on the piano all by himself. He’s going to be really lonely,’ said Bet.

  ‘We have to keep our promise and write to him. Every week. That way he’ll have something to look forward to,’ Ann told her sisters and brother.

  When they reached London, Uncle Bill was at the station to meet his sister-in-law and children, to help them across town to King’s Cross and then back to Cambridge. He recognized Ann straight away, she was almost thirteen years old now, he knew, but was probably just as shy as she had been two years earlier. He had never met his younger nieces and nephew, though. He had been told that Bet was almost eleven. ‘She’s got an artistic temperament and has a bit of a temper sometimes, like her mum,’ Edie his wife had told him. Derek had just turned nine, and was ‘gentle like his father’ while Rene at just seven years old was ‘bright and chirpy’. No one in the family had met the new baby, and Edie had told him not to mention her. ‘Grace won’t want to talk about it. So don’t ask,’ Edie reminded him several times before he left the house. Grace didn’t want Ann going on about Joy all the time, either, she’d warned her oldest daughter as they packed to travel to Cambridge. It was as if Joy had never been born, Ann sometimes thought.

  The family had arranged for the children to stay with various aunts and uncles in Cambridge while Grace and her sisters would be sharing the care of their mum Agnes, Ann’s Nana Wolfe. The old woman had suffered a stroke not long after her husband Samuel passed away six months earlier, and her health had deteriorated to the point where she was now bedridden and frail. Queenie and Elsie, the younger of the six Wolfe sisters in Cambridge, had been taking it in turns to care for their mum.

  Grace assured Ann and her other children that they would only be separated for a few months. ‘It’s to give Elsie a break, really. You know she lives with your nana all the time, and it’s not really fair on the others to be away from their children. Queenie’s little boy Brian is only two. It’s a good job Elsie never married really, and lucky for Mum she’s around.’

  Ann was sad that she’d never again climb into her nana’s bed with her grandparents. One of the last times she’d seen her granddad was a Sunday morning in 1938 when she’d clambered up to ask him all about the university and the people who went there.

  ‘What’s it like? What do they do? Have they got posh voices? I bet they have lovely manners. What do they say to you when you’re there?’

  ‘I don’t know, Nance. I don’t take much notice,’ he told her. ‘I just go in and do what I need to do. I don’t hang around.’

  Samuel Wolfe travelled to each of the colleges to mark their billiard tables, but he really couldn’t recall a time that he had actually spoken to any of the students. Come to think of it, he told Ann, he co
uldn’t for the life of him remember how he had started to work there in the first place. It must have been his brother Jacob who recommended him. ‘He probably told the head porter,’ guessed Samuel, ‘ “My brother has a steady hand, what comes from him being a professional plumber, an’ he knows his way around a table, on account of being the best billiard player in town!” Not that I were, but he told them that, and that’s why I got to be the billiards marker for them.’

  Ann’s Great Uncle Jacob was a porter at ‘one of the bigger ones’, and not long after arriving in the town in 1940, Ann pestered Grace to let her stay with Queenie, who lived near their uncle, so she could hear more tales of university life. She would help out her aunt with housework, Ann told Grace, and look after Brian, ‘so I’ll be useful.’

  Jacob was as much a talker as his departed brother had been, and was flattered that young Ann wanted to know about him and his life. He’d pop round when it was alright with Queenie who’d make Ovaltine for Jacob as he told his stories about the colleges.

  ‘They live a good life,’ he told Ann. ‘Ooh, the food is grand, and the silverware is worth a lot of money. When I go waiting there on a Friday night, if any fish is left over I tuck it into the tails of me jacket and bring it home.’ Ann imagined a shoal of fish swimming in the tails of his jacket and laughed.

  ‘Oh, and the May Balls they’re great fun,’ he continued, with a wink. ‘I see all sorts at them. Come in from London some of the ladies, just for the night you know.’

  He winked at Ann, but she didn’t know why.

  ‘They sure can put away a lot of booze those students, and they don’t mind if we help ourselves to a few drinks neither!’ He laughed. ‘But it’s R.A.G. week is what I like the best. Everyone can get involved in that, the students and us locals. It’s ever such fun.’

  Ann sat up and said, ‘What, you can go to the college? You can do stuff with the students? What does “R.A.G.” mean?’

  Uncle Jacob laughed, ‘It means Raise and Give, but really it’s about pestering and badgering people for money. It’s all for a good cause, though, you know, charity. The students come up with some batty ideas for raising money, and they often pick on pretty young girls from town to help them.’

  ‘Like what?’ The thought of being spoken to by a college student thrilled Ann, in a scary way.

  ‘Like running around the town with a pretty girl from a shop like Woolies in a bed, that seems most popular, collecting money in a bucket. You’re far too young for any of that, Nance, and God forbid they pick on you when you’re older.’

  What on earth did he mean, she thought. They were gentlemen, they were educated, why would they pick on her? ‘What do you mean, Uncle Jake, they don’t know me, why’d they pick on me when I don’t know them and would never do nothing wrong?’

  ‘That’s enough now, Jake. She don’t need to hear all that,’ Queenie told him. ‘Don’t want her thinking it’s all debauchery at them colleges. Little mite’s afraid of her own shadow at the best of times, an’ I can’t imagine what she will be like if she came face to face with a gown!’

  Ann thought Uncle Jacob was making the stories up. They seemed a bit far-fetched to her after what Nana and Edie had told her.

  ‘I’ve seen them students. They look like gentlemen to me in their robes and gowns,’ she said, which made both Queenie and Jacob laugh.

  ROSE HOBBS

  1920s–40s

  Rose Hobbs was born in Cambridge in 1923 (‘or 1922, I’m not really sure,’ she’d laugh if asked) to Emily, who was listed as being a seventeen-year-old servant on Rose’s birth record. Her father was ‘unknown’. Emily cared for Rose for the first few months of her life and then handed the baby over to an ‘aunt’ who lived in Clay Street, Soham, about twenty miles from Cambridge. Twenty-nine-year-old Gladys Dunn wasn’t a real aunt to Rose, but she wanted a child and Emily couldn’t look after one at that time, so they agreed that the older woman would bring up the illegitimate Rose.

  Gladys was married to a sailor named Randolph who was hardly ever at home and sent money to her only intermittently. She took in washing for a living and spent most of her days, whatever the weather, in a lean-to in the garden of her tiny cottage where she washed the sheets and curtains, cassocks and surplices from the church, which was her main source of work.

  As soon as Rose was old enough to understand, Gladys let her know that her mother had run off to America (‘or somewhere like it’) and was supposed to come back for her, but that might take a long time. After five years, Emily still hadn’t come back for Rose, and Randolph had written to say that he was coming back ‘for good’ having had his left arm severed in an accident. Gladys, complaining of not having enough food for herself let alone a child and a husband, told Rose that she was going to have to go somewhere else to live. Rose was to go with another ‘aunt’ named Mary, Gladys told her, adding that she lived ‘in the country, off a farm track outside of Burwell’ with her husband Adam Sturgeon.

  Rose didn’t know what to think about that. She didn’t care too much for Gladys, and had learned little from her. She couldn’t read or write (in fact she didn’t know what either were), knew a couple of hymns from repeated singing in church, but she’d spent most of her short life up to this point feeling hungry, cold and tired. Rose thought that ‘Mary and Adam’ sounded as real as Emily did to her. Which was not at all.

  To Rose’s surprise, they did turn up. The couple were significantly older than Gladys, just as poor, and had no children despite Mary desperately wanting them. They arrived to collect her in an old, dilapidated gypsy wagon, pulled by a horse that had been borrowed from the farm where Adam worked. He and another man unloaded a large, new-looking iron tub from the back of the wagon and carried it through to Gladys’s lean-to. Rose was dressed in the only coat and bonnet she owned, with her two dresses, vests and an ancient, naked doll, all wrapped up in half a sheet tied into a bundle with a big bow, by her feet. As the men passed them on their way through the house, Gladys put the bundle in Rose’s arms and pushed her out the door towards the tall, gaunt woman who stood nervously waiting. Rose was transfixed by the large, scuffed and unlaced men’s boots the woman was wearing.

  ‘Here she is then, missus,’ Gladys said. ‘Thank-ee for the washtub and I’ll say the girl here won’t be no trouble and she don’t eat much.’ Rose looked up at Gladys who glanced at her, said, ‘Bye Rose, be nice to your aunt,’ and turned back into her cottage as the men emerged.

  The slow, meandering journey to Burwell was the only one that Rose ever took in the caravan. As soon as they reached Mary and Adam’s one-up, two-down cottage, the horse was unhitched after backing it onto a bare patch of scrubby grass that served as a garden. Adam removed the wheels, which he’d borrowed for the trip to Soham, and the fading, slightly warped vehicle sat on bricks, merging into the scenery for the next few years. Rose was shown the corner under the stairs where her bed lay, fed some stew that sat in a big black pan on a rack in the enormous fireplace, and settled down to sleep. That trip from Soham was the last time that she’d be so far from the Sturgeon house for the next few years.

  Rose’s happiest times with the Sturgeons were when she played in the caravan and made up stories about the windmill she could see across the field. But after a few months, one early evening, Adam followed her to the caravan and introduced her to a new ‘game’ that she was uncertain about to begin with. But he insisted, so she gave in. That game, which he made her play different variations of over the next few years, became more and more repulsive to Rose, and she grew to hate the slowly rotting caravan with its smell of soft, mulchy decay, and yellow light filtered through the ragged curtains that had to be drawn when Adam was there with her.

  Sometime around the age of seven Rose discovered that she could fly. It first happened one muggy early evening when Adam was touching her in his rough, smelly way. From feeling as if she was suffocating, Rose suddenly found herself floating up to the top of the caravan, where she flew around, examin
ing the top of the window and curtain rails. If she turned her head slightly she could see horrible Adam playing with a doll – or rather, the body that Rose was now floating free from – out of the corner of her eye. But that wasn’t a nice sight, so she flew around and looked out of the window.

  Learning to fly was the best thing that had happened to Rose, and after discovering that she could, she’d lie in her ‘bed’ under the stairs and screw her eyes up tight, willing herself to float away, around the house, watching Mary and Adam, seeing her empty shell of a body curled up on the floor. She didn’t tell Mary or Adam about her flying, because she knew they wouldn’t understand. So, she got better at it, and before long – but only when Adam was in the caravan with her – Rose began to fly out of the caravan window, even though it was closed, and explore the fields and woods. She really liked that.

  Rose was not sent to school because they needed her, they said, to help them out at home where she learned how to clean house, do the washing and cook basic dishes. She’d be locked in every morning just after dawn when Mary and Adam left to go to work – him on a beet farm just outside the village, her at the houses she cleaned from dawn to midday in the town, after which she’d return and, when able to, spend the afternoons cooking, cleaning up and occasionally teaching Rose the basics of writing and reading from a small, ancient book of common prayer. Many afternoons, though, Mary’s headaches were so bad that she had to lie in the dark and Rose wasn’t allowed to make any noise or disturb her. Rose had no friends of her own age. Or of any age, in fact. There were few visitors to the house, and on the rare occasion that anyone called, Rose was made to lay on the floor of the caravan and pretend to be ‘dead’, as Adam ordered her, ‘Otherwise I bloody will kill you, missy.’