The Staircase Girls Read online

  Jack shrugged and tried to smile winningly.

  Grace strangled a scream and wrote again, ‘Nearly all our coupons gone.’ Then she turned her back and returned to the bread she had been making.

  She hadn’t smiled at him once, but determined not to show how hurt he was, Jack asked, ‘Are the kids at school? St Luke’s?’ Grace nodded without looking at him, so he left and went to fetch Derek and Rene, knowing the school would let them out early if he asked nicely.

  When they all returned, Jack explained to the children, as much for the benefit of his wife as for them, that he had been asked to leave his job as an air raid warden because, ‘I couldn’t hear a thing, so I was no good to man nor beast. They had to write everything down, and last week the head warden wrote, ‘Go on Jack, join your family.’ So here I am, I’m going to stay with your mum for now, but we’ll all have somewhere to live together soon. Your Uncle Bill’s sorting it.’

  Jack hoped that his brother-in-law could find them somewhere decent to live and get him a job, too. But it was not going to be easy, as Grace pointed out to him more than once – his lack of hearing made him a liability on the kind of labouring jobs he was used to doing.

  With the surprise of Jack arriving and the fuss that the family made of him – Bill and Edie joined them for tea – nothing was said about why Bet and Ann were heading to Nana Wolfe’s house when they should have been in school.

  When, a few weeks later, Ann explained about hitting Mrs Smales’s elbow with the desk, Grace replied sternly, ‘If she hits Bet again, you tell her to keep her hands to herself or else I’ll come up there and show her how to give a smack.’

  A few days after this, just as Mrs Smales was about to deliver her first smack of the day to Bet, Ann stood up and said with a slight wobble in her voice, ‘You don’t ought to do that, miss, or my mum says she’ll come up to school and show you a proper smack.’

  The teacher turned in the aisle between their desks and raised her hand to smack Ann, who, although trembling, kept her gaze levelled at her. Mrs Smales paused before lowering her hand to straighten her blouse, trying to make it appear as if that’s what she was going to do all along. ‘Right, well, we’ll see . . .’ she muttered, returning to her place at the front of the classroom.

  Bet was not smacked that day, nor in the months that followed, before bombing hit Cambridge so hard that classes were suspended.

  Uncle Bill said he’d have to find Jack some paid work before he found them a house – which didn’t take too long, as it happened. Jack had been in Cambridge only a few days when Bill announced that he’d found him a job on a pig farm. ‘You won’t have to do it for long,’ he said, although both men knew that it was unlikely anything else would come up that Jack could do while there was a war on.

  Jack’s pig farm work began when the sun came up, lasted for as long as there was daylight and involved a lot of dirty work. He was caked in mud from pushing barrows of beets and roots around and making sure that the pens were secure. It was hard, physical work, but he did everything asked of him, didn’t complain, and his boss liked him.

  Jack hadn’t been in the job long, cycling the three miles out of the city every morning and back at night, when the family discovered that there were ‘perks’ to it, too. One night he returned home carrying a dead piglet in his front basket. It had been killed by its mother rolling on it, and since Jack was the only man working with the herd, he was given the corpse to take home to do with what he wanted. Which was a lot, as it turned out.

  Jack made black pudding, smoked sides of bacon in the back garden, left trotters and tail in a bucket of brine in the shed and hung the rest on a hook above the buckets. Jack, Grace, Nana Wolfe and Elsie ate pork for five days, which was as unexpected as hearing Grace say that her husband was good in the kitchen. ‘I’ll give him that,’ she told Elsie. ‘He’s a good cook.’

  Over the following week it wasn’t only piglets that Jack sometimes turned up carrying at the end of the day. Sometimes he brought a rabbit home, often there’d be root vegetables, too. While she was glad he was working and bringing home the bacon (as Bill liked to joke), Grace wasn’t overly happy with Jack’s new job because, apart from the smell that he brought back with him every night, as she was always complaining in front of the children, the pay was low.

  Still, it did mean that if Bill found them a house they’d be able to afford the rent.

  JOYCE

  Redhill to Cambridge, January 1941

  Christmas 1940 had been a jolly one in the Jones house, which was strange, for wartime. Joyce’s dad wasn’t home, but he’d been there for three days a couple of weeks before, and he brought a few things wrapped in brown paper for Joyce and her baby twin brothers, Douglas and Trevor – Joyce was delighted with her little nurse’s outfit. Although rationing was on, it wasn’t too bad, said Gran, totting up what she had in a normal week: four ounces of bacon or ham, six ounces of butter or margarine, two ounces of tea (which was doubled for Christmas week), eight ounces of sugar (made up to twelve for Christmas), two ounces of cooking fats and meat to the value of one shilling and ten pence. Sadly, Mr Perkins didn’t have a chicken for them, but they’d managed to get a bit of brisket instead and Gran had made trifle. Gran bought Granddad a new tin helmet, and he bought her a snazzy-looking gas mask, and they both chipped in for a gas mask thing that could fit over the twins’ pram, although it made it look like a tank or something, said Granddad. Celia got a half-dozen bottling jars from Gran, and promised to make jam for her. The Germans didn’t stop dropping bombs just because it was Christmas, though, and Boxing Day was spent running in and out of the Anderson shelter.

  When Joyce’s dad had been at the house, she heard him tell her mum about a place called Cambridge, where one of his new mates in the army came from. ‘It’s a quiet place he reckons,’ Charles had said, ‘there ain’t been anywhere near as much bombing as round here, and there’s countryside all round it. There’s only the university, a Chivers jam factory and farms there, so no reason for Jerry to bomb the place.’ Which sounded good to Celia. Charles promised to send names and addresses of some people who his mate knew and that might put them up for a while. With the kids being so young, and their house in Caterham having being made uninhabitable by a bomb that landed in their street, and because Celia would make arrangements herself rather than going through the Ministry of Health, she would get free train travel and payment of billeting expenses.

  After a couple of letters to a woman named Aggie, who was the wife of the soldier in their dad’s regiment who lived in Cambridge, it was all arranged. Aggie was used to having people stay, she explained in a letter to Celia, because she used to rent rooms to university students. Since she’d lost them due to the war, she said how handy it would be for her to get the government’s billeting allowance for the family. So in early January 1941, Joyce’s family said goodbye to her grandparents and joined the still growing number of evacuees from London and the south-east.

  Joyce had never been on a train for so long before, let alone been to London. Their funny little electric train rattled along through muddy fields and Joyce didn’t see a single cow or sheep on the way. In places there were patches of snow covering the landscape as it flew past, which gave off more light than the low, grey clouds in the sky above. As they neared London, Joyce began to notice the backs of houses facing the railway line, most of which reminded her of Caterham, but increasingly as they approached the centre of the city, lines of terraced houses would have sudden gaps, and it reminded her of looking at her own crooked smile in the mirror when her teeth fell out.

  ‘Bombs,’ her mum nodded when Joyce turned from the window to ask why some houses were missing. As they drew into London Bridge station it was getting dark, but Joyce could clearly see the destruction and devastation of the area around the station. The sight made her heart beat faster, and she wore an ever-deepening frown as they walked from the station. There were wide-open spaces with huge mounds of rubble between the soo
t-blackened skeleton buildings, their windows gaping like Halloween lanterns. In some places bricks fanned out from the open fronts of buildings as if they were a carpet, welcoming people inside. In others, walls stood lonely and detached from anything, their arched, glassless windows now spaces that reminded you of what was no longer behind them. Spots of grey snow added an oddly softening touch to what were obviously sharp, cold and hard iron rails, metal pipes and blackened, charred beams. Dark human shapes moved quickly, giving the appearance of knowing where they were headed and why, but Joyce couldn’t imagine wanting to move about and live among that mess. She wanted to get away from the chaos and destruction as quickly as she could.

  On 30 December 1940, more than 100,000 incendiaries and 24,000 high explosive bombs had landed around St Paul’s cathedral. The Daily Mail had called it ‘the second great fire of London’, and showed a photo of the cathedral standing defiant against a sky lit by flames, with smoke all around that made it appear as if the clouds had come down to the level of the great dome. Now, as Celia pushed the pram along crowded platforms towards the Tube, Joyce could see that dome from the newspaper picture across the river, shadowed against the darkling sky. They didn’t know it, but a couple of days later, a massive bomb would score a direct hit on the Bank underground station just across the river from where they were walking, killing 111 people who thought that they’d be safe sheltering inside.

  The train that took the family north and east of King’s Cross – which was amazingly still functioning, despite its tracks having been hit at least four times so far – was drawn by a slow, steam-spouting, big old engine, and the small, stuffy compartments were full of men: most of them in uniform. Joyce had to stand by the window, her arm on her mum’s shoulder, the twins as usual taking up Celia’s arms and lap. The men smoked and talked in low voices, occasionally laughing. A couple of them kept looking over at Celia, who had her head turned permanently towards the blackout blind that covered the window, or down at the sleeping faces of her boys. Whenever the train stopped, which was often, sometimes in the middle of a field (or so it seemed), Celia would get nervous and shift in her seat, making as if to get up. A man opposite, wearing a uniform with stripes on his arm, noticed after a couple of stops, and started talking to her. ‘Don’t worry, love, we’re not there, yet, it’ll be a stop to check the wheels or something. Where you going?’

  ‘Cambridge!’ Joyce blurted. ‘Where you going?’

  The man with the stripes laughed. ‘Can’t tell yer that, little ’un, don’t choo know loose talk cost lives, and that walls have ears?’ The men next to him all laughed.

  ‘No they don’t, look!’ Joyce pointed above his head, at the carriage wall below the wire luggage rack. ‘There’s no ears there.’

  ‘Ah, yer right, not that you can see, anyways. It’s alright, we’re going past Cambridge and I’ll let yer know when we get there, OK?’ He reached out a hand to Joyce, as if asking for a shake. She shrank back against her mum’s arm.

  ‘Thank you, if you would, that would be most kind,’ Celia said in a posh voice that Joyce didn’t recognize. The man saluted, nodded and leant back in his seat, continuing to stare at Celia, who’d once more directed her gaze at Douglas and Trevor. ‘He’s a lucky man, your old man,’ the soldier said in a low voice. Celia ignored him. Eventually Joyce saw him close his eyes, his arms crossed over his chest.

  True to his word, whenever the train pulled into a station he’d pull aside the blackout blinds, slip the window down and lean out, searching for someone to ask where they were. The signs had been taken down in every train station in the country, Granddad had warned them before they left, so they had to ask. The soldier would try to joke and get a smile out of Celia – ‘Blimey, that guard looked just like Rob Wilton!’ he exclaimed, and, ‘Oy, that’s Will Hay!’ – but Celia wouldn’t react. After what felt like a hundred stops and forever in time to Joyce, the train stopped and all along the platform they could hear doors opening and people getting out and in. ‘This is it, love, time for our sweet parting . . .’ the soldier pulled up the blind and lowered the window. Celia leant forwards, her head out of the window. She searched along the platform, and shouted to the guard, ‘Hello? Can you help me with my babies, please? There’s a pram in the guard’s van.’ With a half-smile at the soldier who’d been so helpful, she turned the door handle and stepped down onto the platform. The soldier lifted Joyce under her arms, which surprised her, and swung her down onto the pavement in one easy movement. Then he pulled the door shut, saluted them and pulled down the blind. ‘He was nice, Mum. Wasn’t he?’

  Celia sniffed. ‘Come along, Joyce, let’s get the pram and our bags and find Aggie, shall we?’

  She wasn’t hard to find, since she was holding a piece of paper with ‘Celia’ written on it. Aggie looked to be about the same age as Celia, and could have been her sister, almost. The two women got on immediately, and although the walk from the station to Aggie’s house wasn’t short, it flew past in a whirl of conversation for the grown-ups. Joyce half-listened to them as she looked around her. All of the buildings seemed to be low, and the sky looked bigger than she’d ever seen it in Redhill or Caterham. There were no hills, she noticed. Some tall houses stood impressively grand but dark, their front doors all in dark colours too, their windows covered with net curtains and some still had their blackouts closed (in the middle of the day!). Looking up, she saw a couple of thin chimneys poking up above the rows of small houses, and lots of church steeples – or she thought they were. It was quiet, Joyce realized, and somewhere she could hear bells ringing, even though it wasn’t a Sunday. Joyce couldn’t interrupt the adults to ask about the bells, though, because they were chattering on.

  Aggie didn’t have kids. ‘Yet!’ she laughed, and her husband was also in the army, like Charles, training to be a medical orderly. When Joyce tried to butt in, Aggie thought she wanted to be carried, so she picked her up, grunting as she did so, and carried her for a while as they made their way along closely lined streets of small terraced houses. Aggie smelled of carbolic soap, powder and some kind of food that Joyce couldn’t make out.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ she asked, and Joyce nodded. ‘Good, ’cos I’ve got some soup on the go, some bread I baked and a special treat’ – which turned out to be some Cadbury’s Teatime chocolate biscuits.

  Aggie’s house was in a terrace just like the ones that they’d passed from the station. Joyce wondered if she’d ever be able to find her way back if she got lost, they all looked the same to her. Aggie lived there alone until now, she said, because her husband was away and the young men that they used to put up for the college weren’t coming any more. One of the bedrooms on the second floor, and the front parlour downstairs, used to be for university students before the war, Aggie explained. She’d decided to take in evacuees in order to ‘help out – and not be so lonely, like’.

  ‘Well, we’re very glad you did,’ said Celia, slurping her soup slightly and smiling at Aggie as she rocked the pram to keep the boys sleeping. Feeling full and happy, Joyce put her head on her arms at the smoothly polished dining table, and promptly fell asleep.

  The following day, Aggie told them tales of Cambridge, and of how there had been some bombs dropped by the Germans – bringing down some houses in Vicarage Terrace just up the road, she said, waving vaguely in the direction of where the street was – but there hadn’t been much of anything to speak of since October. According to Aggie, the Germans did more damage to a farmer’s beet fields the previous spring than they had done to the town since then. It wasn’t that there were no air raids in Cambridge, she explained, just that there were not many actual bombings. No one knew why the Germans had gone for Vicarage Terrace, since it wasn’t exactly near the railway lines and as far as anyone knew had no secret buildings around it. ‘But then,’ Aggie said, ‘them bloody Germans don’t need a reason to kill us, do they? Maybe the pilot had been at one of the colleges, and didn’t have a happy time,’ she laughed.

 
Joyce and her mother set about exploring Cambridge for the first few days of their stay, and Celia told her it was like most other places she’d been to in England, only it had more pubs, more even than Brighton, and that was saying something. Joyce couldn’t think of much except how freezing cold it was, and not just because of the snow that hadn’t let up since the New Year. Aggie told them that there was a constant bone chilling wind that blew through Cambridge in winter and it came all the way from Russia. Due to everyone being wrapped up in layers of clothing and hiding half their faces with scarves, Joyce didn’t notice the black capes some of the men around the market square had on weren’t made to keep the wearer warm. She was too busy trying to not get snow and hail in her eyes.

  One morning, a week after being in the town, Joyce spotted a couple of young men in their pyjamas and dressing gowns, carrying towels and walking across Parker’s Piece. Admittedly it was early, not yet 8 a.m., but it was very odd, she thought. ‘What are those funny men doing?’ she asked her mum. Celia shushed her and said they’d ask Aggie when they got back home with the fresh milk they’d gone out for (the milky hadn’t arrived).

  Celia explained what they’d seen, and Aggie laughed. ‘They’re just going for their morning baths, that’s all.’

  ‘Eh?’ Celia replied. ‘I thought you told me the public baths were up off Mill Road, in that funny-sounding street, what was it, G-why-deer?’

  ‘They are, in Gwydir Street. Those blokes you saw were going off to their colleges for a bath. The places they stay, like mine here, don’t have any bathing, just a tin tub in front of the fire. None of the gentlemen I had staying ever wanted the tin tub, though, they’d always go and have a bath at college. Then they’ll go back to their digs and have a cooked breakfast. You see ’em in their ’jamas all weather, some of ’em. Funny bunch. None of my gents ever went out of the house in their night-clothes, though, I can tell you.’