The Staircase Girls Page 6

  Joe would never shout and barely argued with her, or anyone else, which meant that Rose, and increasingly, Sal, had been getting at him because they knew that he wouldn’t respond. They could have a go at him out of spite, frustration, boredom or sheer malice, and he’d never shout back. Arguments with Joe were always over insignificant things, like his leaving dirty boots by the hearth, or forgetting to close a window on leaving the house empty. Rose hadn’t bothered to confront him with the sad fact (as she saw it) that he’d given up on almost everything, because she knew it would make no difference and only upset her. He hadn’t been looking for a house for them because he hadn’t managed to get a better paid job, and they’d never save enough money to move out, as he saw it. He’d accepted whatever fate had in store for his family, it seemed to Rose. But she wasn’t made that way.

  When Rose heard Sal and Paul arguing loudly and almost violently one night, she thought that it was the first time she’d known it be that bad between them. Listening to them, Rose realized that they were fighting about her. She only knew of one way to earn a lot of money in a relatively short space of time, and she’d been going out every other night for two weeks, having told everyone that she was working as a bar maid at a pub in the Kite area, safe in the knowledge that Joe would be home with the babies and that Paul always drank at the Hearts of Oak. In fact, she’d been turning tricks, and earlier that night, she now realized from listening to the argument, Paul had seen her walking to the back of the Grapes with a bloke.

  Rose went downstairs to the kitchen and shouted ‘Stop!’ at Sal and Paul. ‘I know you don’t like me doing it,’ she said, in as even a voice as she could manage to Paul, ‘but it’s the only way I know how to get out of your hair. I can see it’s making everyone here bloody miserable, but I’ve gone and made a bit of money. It’s enough for me to pay some down on a slum place over by the railway, and that’s what I’m going to do. I’m not taking him though,’ she jerked her thumb at the ceiling, meaning Joe. ‘He’s bloody useless and I don’t want him hanging round my neck an’ all. I’ve got enough to do with the kids, so please let him stay here. Paul, make him stay, and I’ll take the boys with me tomorrow.’

  True to her word, Rose and her two boys set up home on their own, while Joe drifted back to his old home in the north and lost touch with Rose and the boys. Rose thought that he was too proud to tell anyone in his family up there that he’d failed in love, and had his kid taken away from him. It was the easiest way for him to go on, she figured. It was natural, wasn’t it – after all, it was probably what she’d do if she had to.

  JOYCE

  Redhill and Caterham, Surrey, September – October 1940

  ‘What’s that noise, Mum?’

  Joyce Jones, four years old and sharp as a pin, as her gran always said, looked out from under the table. Joyce knew what the air raid warning sounded like, and she’d run downstairs from her bed and ducked under the table when it had started ten minutes earlier. Her mum, who grabbed the babies and ran downstairs after Joyce, was feeding them to stop them crying. Since she couldn’t do that properly under the table, she’d settled into the armchair by the fire. She couldn’t easily move with them both on her, but anyway, the Germans didn’t want to bomb them, did they? That was what her parents-in-law, who were under the stairs together, kept saying.

  ‘Shush, Joyce,’ Celia Jones comforted her daughter, ‘it’s only those ’orrible German aeroplanes again, on their way to London.’

  Joyce knew what aeroplanes sounded like, alright. She’d seen with her own eyes a dirty great big German bomber – it had caught Dawn next door’s runner beans in its propeller as it hopped over her hedge, just a few weeks back. But the sound that caught her attention now was different. It kind of sounded like whistling and whooshing at the same time, and it was getting closer. ‘Mum!’ Joyce screamed. Celia lifted both babies from her lap and flung herself forwards, head first under the table, twisting round as she dropped. She landed on her back with the twins atop, as Joyce scooted sideways to get out of the way. The whooshing sound stopped, the air hung still for a second, and then it exploded with a thud. With Celia panting, the boys crying and the windows rattling fair to break, Joyce’s hands covered her ears and she screwed her eyes shut.

  The silence that followed was like being underwater, Joyce thought, as she lay with her back against her mum’s legs. A light kick made Joyce jump, and as she sat up, the sound of her baby brothers’ crying reached her as if through a seashell she’d picked up on Brighton beach that sunny day last month, when Gran and Mum had taken them on the train. It really was as if she could hear the sea. Looking around her, Joyce was amazed to see that everything was just the same as it had been before the big bang. The big mirror that hung from a chain on the wall over the little fireplace was slightly crooked, but nothing was smashed or broken. ‘Mum?’ she asked, as Celia began crawling out from under the table.

  ‘Yes, love?’

  ‘I want an ice cream.’

  ‘Ha!’ Celia laughed and with a smile on her face looked at her daughter. ‘You and your ice cream!’

  Joyce’s earliest memory would always be of her dad trying to get her to wave to Mum as she went off to the hospital with her big belly, in order to collect the twins. But all Joyce could see, looking in the other direction, was the ice cream man. ‘I wan’ ice cream,’ she’d kept saying, refusing to wave at her mum. Celia now helped her up from under the table, saying, ‘Out from under there, go get your gran and granddad. Then, when it gets lighter we’ll pop next door to Mr Perkins, and ask if we might have an egg or two for breakfast.’

  Joyce didn’t get any eggs for breakfast that morning, though, because all that could be found of Mr Perkins’ fifty hens were a lot of feathers and a head or two that sat in the churned mud of his garden, their beaks pointing at the sky, looking as if they were watching their bodies fly away. Mr Perkins suspected ‘that rotten lot’ who went out risking their lives during air raids in order to thieve bombed houses, had taken the opportunity of the raid to grab his birds. Mum said that, whether it was them or the bombing, it was really all the fault of the bloody Germans.

  Mum, Joyce and the twins, Douglas and Trevor, were staying with Gran and Granddad in Caterham in Surrey because the Luftwaffe had been dropping bombs on Redhill, where they usually lived, early in August 1940. But now the barracks of the Guards nearby them in Caterham was probably the Germans’ target, and bombs and a whole plane had landed among the fields and houses nearby. Celia was beginning to think they’d be better off living somewhere else altogether, leaving Caterham and Redhill behind, as she kept saying when the air raid sirens sounded. Especially after what some were saying was the landing of German spies in the woods near their back garden. It was mid-August when word got round that parachutes had been spotted in the night, landing in the trees over Coulsdon Road way, and that next morning a couple of men came marching down the Coulsdon Road from that direction, dressed in army gear, and got to the front gates of the barracks. The dogs there wouldn’t stop barking at them, so they were taken in at gun point. No one knows what happened to them after that, but Celia had heard it from the landlady of the Arms that they were spies. Celia was beginning to seriously worry about being so close to the barracks, even though they were with her in-laws.

  The Germans were bombing Redhill, near their own house, with some force, though. To begin with it seemed that they were aiming at the railway tracks – they hit the railway bridge at the top of Cronks Hill – and didn’t seem to know about the aerodrome where Polish airmen had been training until earlier that summer. But not long after that a bomb landed in the grounds of the Hawthorns school at Gatton Point, blowing out windows and part of the roof. At least that was sort of closer to the aerodrome, said Celia to her father-in-law – the Germans were still not after them. But then there was the time, one morning, when a Stuka bomber had flown really low over the treetops at Petridge Wood Common and fired his machine guns at a poor milkman and his horse i
n Prince Albert Square; the milkman had run off to a house, but then turned back to cut his horse free of the wagon, all while the German plane was firing into the street. Luckily there was no one else around, and neither milkman nor his horse were hit. The following week, though, some houses in Clarence Walk and Hardwick Road close to the golf course had to be evacuated after bombs landed nearby, and the houses had to be demolished.

  So no one knew what the bombs were meant to destroy in Joyce’s old home town. It was a hot topic in the queues for the butcher and grocers. As soon as women were finished cooing at the babies in the pram, Joyce noticed, they’d all start damning ‘Jerry’ and wondering ‘what they thought they were doing’.

  When Celia had asked the same question at lunch one Sunday in September, Joyce’s granddad had said, ‘Hitler thinks we’re done for.’ Then he’d switched off the radio and said, ‘At Dunkirk his planes shot at our boys who were in the water and on the beaches, and now he’s sending bombers to hurt the women and kids over here. Bloody Hun!’

  ‘Shush,’ Gran had said sharply. ‘We won’t let ’im get us, will we, Joyce?’ Her granddaughter looked over the bowl recently licked clean of blancmange pudding, and nodded emphatically. Whatever Gran said, Joyce always agreed, especially when food was involved.

  ‘Hadn’t you better get over to see that boiler’s still stoked proper?’ Gran almost barked at her husband. He harrumphed, got up from the table, put on his work jacket and took his bicycle out from the backyard. He’d recently added the work of caretaker to his usual job of orderly at the Earlswood Asylum, at least for as long as the war was on. His son Charles – Joyce’s dad – had joined the army almost as soon as the news about Dunkirk had begun coming in over the radio. Initially, he’d wanted to go to the coast and try to help, but they didn’t know anyone with a boat and he wasn’t a great sailor, so he thought better of it and enlisted in the end.

  As a trained medical orderly, Charles would be an army medic and possibly a stretcher bearer. ‘At least you won’t be firing guns,’ Joyce’s mum had said, ‘so you’re less likely to be shot at.’ Her husband smiled at that and said nothing, before heading off for basic training somewhere up north. He’d only been gone a few weeks when the bombs started landing in Redhill.

  In early October 1940, in broad daylight on a Sunday as the churches were holding harvest festival services, air raid sirens went off and, as a neighbour later told them, a bomb was dropped in Ridgeway Road, not far from Joyce’s old house in Redhill. It was a time bomb and luckily it had been spotted landing, so the street was evacuated and the army managed to defuse it. The following week air raids began coming thick and fast after dark, and the Germans dropped incendiary bombs that were designed to spread fires everywhere. Joyce’s grandmother had heard that even if it seemed to them that the Germans were dropping bombs wherever they wanted and for no good reason except to scare, maim and kill ordinary folk, they were better off than her old chums who lived near the docks in London. They were being bombed and set afire every night, all night.

  ‘Why,’ she’d proclaimed one Sunday morning, as she read her Sunday Express, ‘they’re only trying to get the King at Buck House blown up!’ Bombing normal folk was one thing to Joyce’s gran, but trying to get the royal family was a bomb too far. ‘Is nothing sacred?’ she asked, and got a soft raspberry from her husband, which made Joyce laugh.

  ‘It’s been every night since September seventh,’ Gran said, reading, ‘and now people are not only hiding in the Tube stations at night to escape the bombs, but they’re living there too! Imagine,’ she looked over the top of the big grey paper at Joyce, ‘sleeping on the dirty, mucky tube platforms with a lot of smelly people, and no loos to use.’

  Joyce wrinkled her nose and shook her head.

  ‘Well, we’re not doing that,’ Gran continued, ‘but we shouldn’t be hiding under the stairs nor tables neither, it says here, not if we’ve got an Anderson shelter.’ Gran turned to stare over the top of her spectacles at her husband. The sun reflected off them into Joyce’s eyes. ‘Hear that, Les? Are you ever going to finish the damned thing?’

  Granddad worked hard over the following week to complete their shelter. He’d already tied the corrugated iron sheets together and bowed them over the patch of the garden that he’d cleared of grass. Old doors for flooring were delivered on a horse and cart by the rag and bone man on Sunday morning, and Les set to work sawing them to size. After settling them on the earthen floor he called Joyce inside the shelter to walk and jump all over them, getting them to lie flat. Then she helped him drag carpets and rugs from the house to put over the doors. Grandpa’s old army cot was set up along one side, and a double mattress along the other (also from the rag and bone man, who promised that he’d just got it from a woman whose house had the front wall blown off and it was ‘like new’). Using old beer crates as tables and shelves, Les set up a small store along the back wall, and put candles, a kerosene lamp and tin cups on it. The little ones each had a special toy inside, a doll for Joyce and teddy bears for the twins, all of which lay on the mattress, on top of the ex-army blankets, old cushions with stuffing coming out and one of Gran’s old, threadbare shawls. Once Les had put a layer of earth on the corrugated tin roof it was finished and ready for use. It wasn’t exactly cosy, but it wasn’t too dark and scary, thought Ann.

  Not long after they’d finished the shelter, Joyce was asleep with her mum one night, the boys in their bassinets at the end of the bed, and the air raid siren went off. They all jumped out of bed, left the house by the back door and ran into the garden in their pyjamas and nighties, even Gran, which Joyce thought was very funny. But after an hour or so the shelter had turned cold and wet, and she didn’t like the damp, dark place that smelled of paraffin from the lamp, which didn’t do much to keep the place light. Granddad’s cigarettes were smellier than they usually were, and one of the carpets on the floor was old and musty, which they hadn’t noticed before. Joyce understood that it was better than having the house fall on top of her, even if she was under the table, but it was still not nice. After that first night, whenever the family was in the shelter after dark she’d cuddle up close to Mum, who always had the twins on her, and try to keep warm and not cry as the world outside rumbled and banged and whizzed and whooshed. During daytime raids she could at least play cards with Gran or do some colouring in.

  On the night of 27 October, Joyce was asleep on the floor in the parlour next to the fire when the siren went off and they all traipsed to the Anderson shelter. After about twenty minutes they began to hear a low drone from the sky. They were used to it; usually the flyover lasted a few minutes at most, the drone of the German bombers punctuated by the ack-ack of the big anti-aircraft gun that was on a train nearby and moved along the rails as best it could when under attack. The attacks had been growing longer over the past month, and were more frequent too, sometimes three or four nights in a row. London was being given a right pasting, Gran had said more than once recently, and even though our boys in the RAF were giving as good as they got (according to the radio), there were simply too many of the bombers to stop them all. The Germans had started bombing other cities, too, with the radio reporting that Birmingham, Coventry, Liverpool, Manchester, Hull and Glasgow had been hit with as many bombs as London in the previous week. By the length of time that the planes were flying over it sounded as if London was in for a bad night.

  When the all-clear sounded, it was nearly 11 p.m., but knowing that there might well be another attack, Granddad said they’d best stay in the shelter for the rest of the night. It was about 2 a.m. when the biggest bang Joyce had ever heard woke her up, and she thought that the roof was going to fall in. Douglas and Trevor started screaming and Mum said ‘Christ!’ at the same time as Gran. Granddad shot bolt upright from his camp bed. Again, Joyce could hear the sea, and the voices of everyone seemed to come from a long way away. ‘Oh Les,’ Gran sounded shaky, ‘is the house . . . ?’

  Her husband pulled the heavy pie
ce of blackout material away from the door, opened it a crack, and peered out. ‘It all looks alright, love,’ Granddad seemed to be whispering, ‘let’s wait till sun up, eh? Try to rest until then.’ He closed the door, pulled the curtain back across, and shifted back onto his bed, reaching for his tobacco pouch. Gran slowly sank back onto her mattress next to Mum. ‘It’s enough to make me take up smoking an’ all.’

  Joyce didn’t really sleep after that, or at least didn’t feel as if she did. Neither did anyone else except the twins, after being fed by her mum, who hadn’t said anything since the big bang and looked very white. Even after the sun had come up they couldn’t make it to the house for breakfast, because another siren sounded just before 8 a.m. But she was too tired to feel hungry. Despite there being no bombs, and it sounding like only a few planes, the all-clear didn’t come until two hours later. ‘It’s sounded nearly twenty minutes after the London all-clear had gone off, as usual,’ said Granddad, who kept poking his head out of the door to reassure everyone that their house, and Mr Perkins’ and Dawn’s were all OK. The all-clear had sounded pretty much straight after the one in London in the early days of the bombing, but after a couple of returning German bombers who hadn’t emptied their bays over the capital city’s docks and railway lines dropped bombs over Redhill and Caterham, that changed. Now the wardens in the surrounding area waited for all German planes to get to the coast before sounding their all-clears.

  Now, Granddad climbed out of the shelter and said he was going to go and see where the big bomb had gone off, and if he could be of any help. Inside their home, Joyce went straight to her and her mum’s room, and found everything as they had left it, except for the mirror which was hanging askew.