The Staircase Girls Read online

  When Rose was eleven years old she felt the terrible disappointment of not being able to fly any more. Try as she might, she couldn’t leave her body – and that meant that she felt hurt, sickened and shameful whenever Adam came to the caravan with her. One evening, when she felt really angry about not being able to float free, Rose stabbed Adam in the leg with a potato scraper as he tried to get her to play with him in the caravan. He clutched his leg, screamed, and Rose jumped out and ran across the field towards the windmill. That night she slept in a ditch, in sight of the house, but neither Mary nor Adam tried to find her. The next day, hungry, tired and cold, and when it was long enough after dawn to know that they’d be gone, Rose made her way back with a vague plan to get some food, her old doll and a coat and run away. She had no idea where to run away to, just that she had to leave.

  She slid inside the back door but Mary grabbed her by the arm as soon as she got in, then dropped to her knees and hugged her tightly. Rose was astonished to see that Mary was crying, silently, and continued to for five minutes, while Rose stood straight-backed, unflinching. Finally, she got up without letting go of Rose’s arm, took down both their coats from the back of the door, pulled her outside, and they walked quickly away from the house. Rose had no idea what Mary was going to do, she’d never left the house with her alone, and Mary never spoke to Rose as if she was a person, she only ordered her about, usually.

  They made their way to the train station without a word. Mary bought a third class and a child’s ticket to Cambridge and they sat at the very end of the platform, as far away from the entrance as they could, to wait for the train. ‘I’m sorry, Rose, it’s not fair, you need to learn proper, so I’m giving you to my sister and her husband, they’ve got two boys but Sal always wanted a girl, and she’ll look after you real good. Maybe I’ll see you sometime in the future.’

  ‘Not him though?’

  ‘No, not him, he don’t know what I’m doing. You cut him good and proper Rose, he’s right hurt and angry but I don’t want him to hurt you. Not no more, anyway.’

  An hour later, Rose was being shown her room in a new, strange house, albeit one that was smarter, lighter and cleaner than she was used to. Rose was surprised that so many houses could be gathered together in one place. She’d seen a few terraces of half a dozen houses together, but in this place all of the houses seemed to be attached to each other, and there were a lot of them. ‘It’s the smallest room, but it’ll do, won’t it, love?’ asked Aunty Sal, as she asked Rose to call her. The room was properly decorated with wallpaper, unlike the bare plaster and brickwork of the Sturgeons’ house. It had a small fireplace and a window that looked out over the back garden, which was thin and long and slightly overgrown. The bed had a thick-looking candlewick cover on it, not a rough horse blanket that she was used to. Rose thought it was a right luxury.

  ‘It’s lovely, missus,’ she said with a hint of amazement in her voice.

  Sal had an idea that something bad had happened at Rose’s former home, and not just because Mary had been a surprise visitor that day. The women were not sisters, although they’d often been mistaken as that when young girls. They’d become firm childhood friends back then, and spent all their time together. The pair had lost touch a bit after Mary married and moved to Burwell, but Sal would make an effort every year to see her friend at least once a year and she always sent birthday and Christmas cards. She felt sorry for Mary and had felt a deep distrust of Adam from the moment she met him. Her own husband, Paul, wasn’t keen on him, either. ‘Gives me the creeps, he does,’ he’d admitted to Sal after their first double date, in 1918.

  Rose’s arrival meant that Sal’s sons Bobby, sixteen, and Jacky, fourteen, had to share a bedroom although, as Paul said, ‘It won’t be for long. Bobby’ll be off to the army soon enough, won’t you, Bob?’ The prospect clearly didn’t fill the boy with joy, and he muttered something inaudible under his breath.

  ‘Bloody hope he does!’ shouted Jacky, who was a good six inches taller than his ‘big’ brother. Bobby flicked out a hand and clipped Jacky on his ear. ‘Ouch! You . . .’ The boys fell into a loosely brawling mess on the sitting room floor, until their father stepped between them, grabbing each by an ear. ‘Get out of it you two: no fighting ’less you want to fight me.’

  Paul was as tall as Jacky but twice the width, his hands looked as if they were made of leather, his fingers the size of the sausages that Sal had served for tea. Rose hoped that she wouldn’t have to ‘play’ with Paul; she wasn’t sure if stabbing him in the leg would hurt enough to make him stop.

  After a few sleepless nights in her new home, during which she smuggled a knife into her room and tried to stay awake in case anyone came in, Rose decided that Paul didn’t want to play games with her. After a week she began to get a clear idea of how safe it was in their house, and how she could behave. School was another matter, though. Within days of moving in, and persuaded that she wasn’t going to be too much trouble to look after, Sal organized for Rose to attend a church school sited just a few streets away. She told the headmaster that Rose was a ‘charity case’ that they’d taken in after her parents had died, and she was allocated a desk among other eleven- and twelve-year-olds.

  Having never attended school and quite unused to being around so many children of her own age, Rose became a virtual mute on her first day. When her teacher realized that she was severely behind in her learning, Rose was taken out of class and put in with six ‘slow’ children, as they were known by the rest of the pupils. It didn’t help that, although only just twelve years old, Rose had physically developed and looked at least three years older. Seated among her peers Rose looked like a teacher who’d taken the wrong desk. It didn’t take long for the humiliation to become too much for her, and she simply stopped going to school.

  She’d set off for school at the usual time, but instead of turning right at the end of her street to go to school, Rose would turn left and make her way to the bus station if it was raining, where she’d sit in a shelter and talk to anyone who talked to her. If it was a warm, sunny day, she’d sit on Parker’s Piece or Christ’s Piece, big green areas in the centre of town with flower beds, benches and lots of trees. If a grown-up asked why she wasn’t at school, Rose would usually tell them that she was off to the doctor’s and waiting for her mum, or some such story. Most people believed her – which was when she discovered the power of lies. Everyone, she realized, expected a nice-looking girl like her to tell the truth, and didn’t want to hear a truth if it was not to their liking. More than once when Sal asked Rose what she’d done at school, Rose replied truthfully, saying things like, ‘Oh I went to the park instead and cadged some cigarettes off a boy who’s got a motorbike,’ and Sal just laughed, or said, ‘You’d better not, my girl!’ and go on to something else.

  When a truant officer called at the house one day, though, Sal had to confront Rose, who stood in front of her shaking her head, not speaking. I told you, thought Rose, but you didn’t believe me! Sal had an uncomfortable look on her face, she thought, as if she doesn’t want to do this. But when Sal said she’d take Rose to school, she shrugged and said, ‘Fine.’ All the next week Sal took Rose to school and made sure that she entered the building.

  Rose never caught up with her peers academically, but she persisted with her attendance for the most part in order not to alarm or agitate Sal and Paul, who she only had to see dish out punishment to Jacky for playing truant to know that she didn’t want any of that.

  Rose grew in confidence as the months passed, though, and she discovered that she could easily persuade older boys at the school, including Jacky, to protect her from the jibes, digs and physical threats of girls jealous of her looks and her growing popularity. She stole cigarettes from Sal’s purse in ones and twos, and held smoking parties behind the boiler room with the fourth and fifth form boys. Despite consistently getting bad reports from the teachers, Rose did enough housework at home to help Sal that she wasn’t blamed for not p
erforming well at school. ‘Them teachers don’t give you enough time, do they, girl?’ Sal said sympathetically after getting Rose’s first end of year report card. ‘Or maybe you just can’t learn. I had a brother who were like that, he can’t hardly read nor write, but he makes his way over at Lowestoft on the trawlers. It’ll be alright in the end, eh?’

  During her first summer in Cambridge, Rose worked at keeping the house clean in the mornings, and roamed the city during the afternoons and early evenings. She was growing out of her clothes almost as fast as Sal could adjust them for length and width, and began attracting the wrong kind of attention from men on Parker’s Piece where she’d sit under trees with Jacky and his friends, smoking and laughing.

  Jacky became obsessively protective of Rose, and was made uneasy by the way that strangers looked at her. One night in late August, he and Rose were escorted home by the police who explained to Paul that Jacky had started a fight with a drunk who wouldn’t leave Rose alone, and kept offering her a drink from his bottle. Paul brought in an 8 p.m. curfew for them both for the rest of that summer.

  The following school year, Rose showed a small improvement academically, but clearly wasn’t going to be staying on past the age of fourteen if she could help it. Sal had agreed with her that there’d be little point in enduring another year of schooling, and even though the leaving age was to be raised to fifteen in 1936, because Rose was born before 1925 she could leave earlier.

  Paul told Sal that he’d be happy to see Rose in work and earning money so that she could think about moving out; he was aware of his youngest son’s feelings for the girl and didn’t like it. Jacky had refused to even consider following Bobby into the army and had remained at home, working with his father at the wood yard in order to do so. Paul was sure that he only wanted to be close to Rose and Sal also suspected her son had more than brotherly feelings for her.

  Neither parent was really surprised to discover the pair asleep in Jacky’s bed early one morning in the summer of 1936. That didn’t mean that they were going to accept it, of course. Paul wanted to frogmarch Jacky straight down to the army recruiting offices and put Rose on a train to Burwell, but Sal calmed him down, and he had to accept that Jacky didn’t want to join the army and Rose couldn’t go to Burwell, because Mary and Adam had moved and she didn’t know where to, so what was the point?

  ‘The point,’ said Paul, ‘is that I don’t want that little hussy in my house no more!’

  By the evening, Sal had arranged for Rose to move in with the grandmother of a friend who lived across the city in Chesterton, and needed someone around the house to cook, clean and help out. Rose’s all-too-brief and chaotic childhood ended that day.

  For two years Rose acted as nurse, cook and carer for the old woman, who was mostly quiet and complacent, accepting of how she had become reliant on a stranger, a girl who didn’t talk much, but wasn’t cruel, at least.

  Rose spent her days doing housework and making sure the old woman was comfortable. She’d put her to bed by 8 p.m. and then she’d either stay home and save enough money from the old lady’s pension, which she had to make to last all week, or sometimes go and buy herself a drink in one of the many pubs that littered the area.

  Rose never had to buy herself more than one drink, though. She was a good-looking girl, as many a man told her, and she was friendly enough, too. A few boyfriends came and went during the time Rose lived with the old woman – none of them were taken back there, Rose knew better than that; she’d be kicked out instantly.

  Rose was evicted after the old woman died and, in desperate need of a roof over her head, she searched out one of the men she’d met in The Grapes on the Histon Road. He had asked her recently if she wanted to work for him. Rose knew he was a pimp and that his last girlfriend was serving time for soliciting, which was why he had what he called a ‘vacancy’. Charlie dressed well, wore a big signet ring on his little finger and promised to give Rose a life of fun and money that she could only dream about. He was good-looking, and sometimes when they kissed Rose could almost feel something for him.

  Rose didn’t think her new life was difficult and the work didn’t bother her – she simply switched off while on the job. A few times she thought that she could almost fly again, and felt detached from what she was doing, but often the ‘job’ was brief and easily forgotten about. She worked Parker’s Piece, the market place and, on busy Saturday nights in June, Rose walked among people wearing fur stoles and top hats, looking for a light of her cigarette which, naturally, led to an offer to escort her home. In the winter months, Charlie brought clients to their three-room flat on the Histon Road where they kept the other bedroom for ‘entertaining’.

  It didn’t take long for a kind of normality to settle over Rose’s life, and she enjoyed the drinks and trinkets that Charlie bought for her (London Gin was a particular favourite). They had fun when not working, and took trips to London and stayed a couple of nights in West End hotels while he sorted business deals with men who looked like him, all thin moustaches, big shoulders and dropped aitches. They made Rose laugh, and she liked that.

  The early years of the Second World War were difficult for Rose and Charlie, and they had to move from the north of Cambridge to the east, into two rooms on the first floor of a terraced house in Barnwell. Rose worked outside or at a few select clients’ homes when she could through 1940 and ’41. After the Americans arrived in numbers, her services were more in demand, and while she still plied her trade on Parker’s Piece and Christ’s Piece, she also began to attend parties at hotels in rooms booked by GIs out on a furlough. Soon she and Charlie had enough money that they could buy an old car which they used to travel outside Cambridge, to barracks and makeshift airfields within an hour or so drive of the city.

  One of her regular GI customers, an officer, became so involved with Rose that he would book her for up to a week at a time when he was on leave. He told her that he wanted to take her away from England, back to Iowa with him when the war ended. Rose never believed him, but she played along with his fantasy, all the while feeling sure as she’d ever been about anyone who professed to ‘care’ for her that he’d disappear just like they had. Which, of course, he did, in June 1944 and she never heard from him again. Still, there were plenty of other men who’d pay to spend time with her.

  Rose’s life might have continued on that path indefinitely, but she became pregnant just before Christmas 1945, and didn’t tell Charlie until March 1946, when it was too late to do anything about it. She didn’t want a back-street abortion, at least two girls she knew had suffered terribly after having one. The pregnancy was, if she was honest with herself, a deliberate attempt by Rose to try something different. She knew that Charlie wouldn’t want to marry her and that he knew no other way to make a living anyway, and she was curious (‘Yes,’ she thought, ‘curious, that’s right’) to see if she might actually get to care for or even ‘love’ a baby if she had one.

  Rose had stayed in touch with Sal over the past few years, and although Sal kind of knew what Rose was doing, she had preferred not to know for certain. She felt guilty that she and Paul hadn’t been able to help Rose more when she was in their charge. When they bumped into each other one Saturday morning in the market place, Sal was shocked to see that Rose was pregnant. ‘You . . . you’re . . .’ Sal couldn’t find the words and Rose laughed.

  ‘Yes, Sal, I’m with child! I feel a bit fat to be honest but I ’aven’t bin too sick. How are you?’

  ‘I, I . . . never mind me, what does Charlie think, is he alright with it?’

  ‘’Course not! I ’ave to get somewhere else to live sharpish. He’s got another girl on the go and needs the room. You don’t know anywhere do you, Sal?

  ‘Too right I do! You can have Jacky’s old room. Come back and live with us again, Rose. Please?’

  Sal loved babies and Paul was easily persuaded, even though he had to grumble that it was ‘against my better judgement’. Rose moved back in and gave birth
to her first son in the house. She wanted to call the baby boy Parker in memory of all the good times she’d had on the Piece, but Sal told her that was cruel to the child, so he was called Clark, instead, in memory of the American lieutenant from Iowa.

  The baby was only three months old when Paul brought a new workmate named Joseph home for tea. Quiet, dark and kind of shy, Joe spent that night gazing in awe at Rose as she nursed little Clark. He had moved to Cambridge from Grimsby, and came from a family of fishermen. He’d hated the sea, though, and had taken an apprenticeship as a carpenter at the age of fourteen. Ten years later he’d followed another pal down south in search of employment, eventually ending up at the wood yard where Paul worked. Paul took a liking to Joe, and Joe fell in love with Rose and Clark.

  Rose and Joe’s courtship was brief and uneventful. Neither of them could afford to go out much, and any money Joe had after paying his rent went on the baby. Rose didn’t exactly tell Joe about her past life, but she guessed that he knew. Kind of. Occasionally if they were out at a pub (Sal would always babysit), men recognized Rose and would offer to buy her a drink. She’d always refuse politely and say, ‘Meet my fiancé, Mr . . . er?’ and they’d always fade back into the crowd at the bar. Joe didn’t ask directly who any of the men were, so Rose didn’t tell him. ‘Ignorance is bliss, ain’t it?’ she replied when Sal enquired what Joe knew.

  Within nine months of their meeting Rose and Joe married at the registry office, and the party was at Sal’s house. After which, Joe moved in with Rose at Sal and Paul’s until they could afford a place of their own. Within a year Rose had a second son, named Maurice after Joe’s father, and suddenly the small house seemed too small and people started getting on each other’s nerves.