Lucky Bunny (9780062202512) (13 page)

I
n the end, I wished I'd never gone. I felt so guilty that I had to tell Bobby about it, a week or so later, and he just shouted at me. He said Mum was a dipso and an Alka-Seltzer and he didn't care that no one took him; then he burst into tears. The visit spoiled my ability to picture Mum the way I wanted to as well. I wanted to picture her like the statue of the Immaculate Heart of Mary on the church in Homerton on Kenworthy Road. That statue had eyes like Mum's: eyes that were glancing down, sarcastically, as if she wanted to laugh. Passing it always made me think of her.

You know it never ceases to amaze me how little information that people—adults—see fit to tell children. That really was it. The end of our explanation about her. The end of the subject. She loomed large for us, she was a statue with sarcastic eyes and a stone heart carved on her chest that colonized our dreams, but honestly, she could never be mentioned.

I spent more and more time with the Green Bottles, and Bobby, being a boy, somehow couldn't, and that's when our lives seemed to divide, along strictly boy/girl lines. Bobby spent time with mates he'd made at the Dogs, or trailing Jimmy the boxer, or just watching at the ring of the Repton Boys Club and bunking off school. Dad and Annie had some “news,” they told us, one day, all smiles and secret looks; they were expecting a little baby brother or sister for us.

We thought of Vera, and said nothing.

I was supposed to be at big school by then and Bobby, too, but most of the time we both bunked off. I thought of Nan telling me to look after Bobby, and not get separated from him, and I tried, but the boys Bobby wanted to be with were a bit scary to me, and wouldn't let me hang around them. And he didn't like to be in school.

One day about a month later I heard from Annie that Bobby had been nicked for stealing an air rifle. He had to go to court and of course no one paid the fine for him, so that made matters worse. Dad was away at that point, doing his time for his part in the dog-racing fixing, and money had dried up. I can't now remember the sequence of events—I remember a bright autumn day near Bonfire Night when Dad returned and took me to the brand-new Lesney's factory in Hackney Wick to show me where the matchbox toys were made, and said, wistfully, “Think your brother's too old for a matchbox car these days?” and I agreed that I thought he was. So Dad said he'd get one for the new baby when it came, instead.

Then there was the day—a day when the weather perked up and daffodils appeared at Vicky Park—that Bobby nicked a bike and cycled past the Jewish Boys Club on Fordham Street and got nicked by two coppers who recognized him. He abandoned the bike and tried to run and they chased him easily and caught him, and tumbled him to the ground, where one held him down while the other administered some good old British justice.

Oh, in those days you could do what you wanted to tearaways; you could get them in the car with a kindly “Come on, son, let's be having you,” and once in you could pin their arms behind their backs and say to your mate, “Right, I've got him, let the little bastard have it!”

By the time he got to the police station Bobby had bloodstains all over him, but the arresting officers just shrugged, as if to say, “Well? How'd you expect us to bring him in?”

Bobby was in court the next morning, and fined a pound or two. This fine wasn't paid either—who had a pound to spare, when every penny was needed for the new baby?—and so his old schoolteacher at Lauriston finally got what she predicted: her picture for Bobby came true. Bobby was taken to an Approved School in Hertfordshire. When—a year later—he absconded from there one night with his new friend Robby, he ended up at the police station again, and from there was taken to the Allocation Center at Wormwood Scrubs, where borstal boys awaited their fate.

PART TWO

5

My Further Education

M
e, too. I ended up at a girls' Approved School, eventually. I think Bobby went to his school around the spring of '46, and me a year later. I tried writing to Bobby, piecing together from snippets Annie told me that after he'd run away from the school he ended up in Hollosey Bay, a big farm borstal in Suffolk, but Bobby's letter-writing never improved and I didn't hear back. I waited for that letter, and when it didn't come I threw myself into learning all that I could from the Green Bottles about hoisting.

It was understood by all of them that I was the best. It helped to have me with them: I looked so innocent, in my blue pinafore, with the smattering of freckles across my nose. Sly Roger was always trying to put his hand up my skirt when I climbed out of the car and he liked me to sit in the front with him. (He'd bought another Chrysler off my dad at a knock-down price while Dad was inside again, and that's what we drove around in.) The Green Bottles used to hoot with laughter to see me slap him off, not even slightly tempted by his offers (usually of something he was eating: a chip, or a stick of licorice).

We'd all get done up and go out for the day. It was a time when everything was short, everyone told not to be a squander bug. But that's not how I remember it at all. The Green Bottles were having none of that. Sometimes there were as many as eight of us.

In the West End there were shop walkers, and the Green Bottles taught me to look out for them. Something about their eyes, their expression, the way they fiddled with a jacket or a dress on the hanger but looking all around them, not interested in the clothes—I got this at once. My job was to let Gloria or Annie or Beattie or whoever know. The signal was my bending down to pull up my socks. This meant: “Shop walker in the area.” If I pulled up the left sock the shop walker was to my left, if I pulled up one after the other, the shop walker was directly behind me. But if my socks were folded over at the tops, and equally matched, and I wasn't fiddling with them, the coast was perfectly clear.

I was mostly playing hooky from school. The first time a shop assistant asked me why I wasn't in school I said in such a posh voice that I “hev a music exam this ahfternoon and Miss hes given me the morning orf to practice” that Gloria nearly wet herself trying not to laugh.

“Who learned you to talk like that?” she asked, later, as we were drinking hot chocolate in Debenham's off Wigmore Street.

“Margaret Lockwood” was my answer. I'd been watching old films at the Children's Cinema Club on Mare Street. My favorite was one about a posh lady who becomes a highway woman for the adventure. That was the voice I was mimicking.

So then Gloria took me to this friend of hers, to have elocution lessons. It was a house in Brancaster Mews with green walls and a big piano and a fireplace facing you as soon as you walked in, with flowers in a silver vase. Every time I went, the flowers in the vase were different, I noticed. The woman never let them go brown or droop petals. She was a tiny woman, hardly bigger than me, with these glasses with little diamonds at the corners, and she wore them low down on her nose, and she'd stare at me over the top of them, and tap me sometimes, on my chin, or upper lip, with a pencil.

She'd make me recite things, poems, and say in this funny deep voice that I had to breathe from low in my belly, which she patted with her small, pink-nailed hand as she spoke. Gloria would watch her, waiting for me, sipping tea from a china cup that the teacher—I think she was called Mrs. Sin-gin Sargent or something that sounded like that—would make her whenever we arrived.

“The sense of danger must not disappear,” I'd say. “The way is certainly both short and steep.”

“Stee
p
,” Mrs. Sin-gin Sargent repeated, pursing her mouth over the “p” to make it pop. “Short and stee
p
.
However gradual it looks from here: look if you like, but you will have to leap
.”

And then it would be back to the beginning, to recite the whole poem, carefully, slowly forming each word:

“
A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep sustains the bed on which we lie, my dear; although I love you, you will have to leap; our dream of safety has to disappear
.”

“
Leap Before You Look
, by Mr. W. H. Auden,” Mrs. Sin-gin Sargent would say at the end with satisfaction, and make me repeat it, popping the “p”s and cracking the “k.” A great poem for a girl like me to learn. It was drilled into me, that poem, and in its way became my motto.

“
Much can be said for social savoir-faire. But to rejoice when no one else is there
. . .”

I droned on, wondering what “savoir-faire” could be, but liking the sound of it, just the same.

“ . . .
is even harder than it is to weep
. . .”

No one is watching, but you have to leap.

I
t's Gloria who's the boldest and the best, the one I want to be like.

This day, this one day, we're walking along Bond Street and she says, “How about some cucumber sandwiches and a spot of chocolate cake in The Dorchester? Just you and me.”

After the trip to see Mum last summer I know she looks out for me, somehow. She says it's her job to teach me, as I don't have another woman to do it. (Annie is big as a house and not coming out with us so much now the baby's nearly due.)

I haven't heard of The Dorchester but she takes my silence as a yes and hails us a cab. I watch closely how she does this. She doesn't wave her arm or shout like Annie or Beattie. She just steps a little closer to the curb and tilts her chin. It's a nippy little movement. She stares down the first cab driver who approaches and then it's just a flicker of her white glove, and the cab stops and we're climbing inside. She pats the seat beside her and sort of purrs at the driver:

“Park Lane, please. The Dorchester.”

We all like it best up the West End. We're sick of roped-off streets with signs about “Unexploded Bombs,” and pubs like the Nags Head on Whitechapel Road saying “Business as Usual,” but where the building is flapping open and hanging on by a thread. In the West End there are tiny purple flowers spilling out of window boxes, and post boxes and telephone boxes gleaming with new paint. As the taxi slides past I squint my eyes a little, making the streets blur into soft putty colors with bright splashes of tomato red.

But as we get out and the doorman in his big hat sweeps us in, my mouth feels dry. The height of the ceiling threatens me, dangling the most dangerous looking chandeliers over us. Gloria smoothes a hand over my hair and smiles at a fixed spot over my head, heading for the cloakroom.

She hands over her coat, a dark velvet, not her best, and as we wait there a fat, powdered lady arrives. Gloria steps back and says, “Oh, after you my dear,” and the lady hands over her coat to the girl behind the desk, who gives her a button for it, with the number 26 on it in black letters. It's a floor-sweeping, silky sable fur, and I see Gloria glance at it. I register her look. I wonder just how out of the blue this little trip was, really.

Bending a little, Gloria whispers, “Fat slug.”

She then straightens up and allows one of the waiters to show us to a table.

We walk past the marble columns—the Promenade Bar, Gloria says—safest place in London during the war, she says, Churchill had his own suite here. Everywhere is green and gold, full of fronds and gigantic sprays of flowers. Instead of fountains and streams there's bubbling chatter, and the sound of cutlery chinking, and crockery. It's just so big—high ceilings loom over us like those huge Fen skies back near Ely, and I nearly stumble into a statue of a black boy holding some golden fruit, next to a golden lamp.

As we sit down, Gloria notices that I'm trembling. The waiter is hovering, staring right through me.

“Relax, Queenie,” Gloria whispers. She picks up the menu and flaps herself with it.

“My niece and I would like afternoon tea, please,” she says.

He dips in a sort of bow, picks up our menus, and leaves us.

Gloria leans in close towards me and mutters, “Just speak in your Margaret Lockwood voice.” When I say nothing, she gets out her compact and uses the mirror to see who is sitting behind her. Then she takes the green velvet cushion I'm holding like a shield and puts it firmly on the seat beside me.

“You know,” she says, “I used to work here.”

“Did you?” I can hardly believe it. Here, amongst the tinkling silver and the sparkling mirrors and the golden fruit and . . .

“Yeah. I was a chambermaid. Look, Queenie, we've earned this. When you've wiped round the bath of one of those fat slugs for the umpteenth time, you get to enjoy sipping from the best bone china, OK?”

The waiter reappears with a silver tray. He places a cup close to me, and a little silver tea strainer, in its own silver pot. Seeing my hand shake as I go to pick up the spoon, Gloria waits for him to leave and then whispers, “He's just a bleeding waiter. A waiter! His mum works as a cleaner down the Troxy on Commercial Road.”

And yet to me, he seems like the poshest, scariest representative of another world I've ever come across. I glance again at Gloria, grateful, and take a bite of the triangle of crustless cucumber sandwich she offers me.

“Is there any vinegar?” I ask, which makes her laugh for some reason.

I risk a little glimpse around. The restaurant area is full of women, all of them drinking tea and talking. I'm struck by how much they use their hands when they talk, these posh women. That's all I can see. Hands: flapping, gesturing, waving, wagging, clutching, grasping in amongst the hothouse fronds. Their hands look like birds to me: dipping, now spreading, soaring . . . a restaurant full of birds, pecking over their crumbs, sipping at their tea.

And the chink of china sounding like coins in a pocket, jangling.

Gloria sees me looking and leans in to whisper, “Most of this lot were brasses. What you so impressed for? They married their client, that's all. Me, I cut out the middleman and made money my husband, which if you ask me is
much
nicer.”

At the cloakroom Gloria is all charm and innocence, as she seems to have lost the button with the number on it that allows her to collect her coat. I say nothing and the room swarms and contracts. I'm small and then big. My face on the outside of a kettle. A silver spoon.

“Oh dear, what was my number again, darling?” Gloria tinkles.

“Twenty-six,” I reply, without missing a beat.

The fur is brought. The sable fur. The fat slug's coat: long, a gorgeous color.

Gloria looks a knockout in it. She slides her arms into the sleeves, strokes the collar up to her neck as if she's petting a big sleepy cat, and gives the girl behind the desk a cheeky smile.

“Thank you so much, darling.”

She gives a little twirl in the coat, almost giving the game away, she's so delighted.

And Gloria turns and stalks through the doors as if she's a big cat herself. I'm two paces away: I'm right behind her.

As we step outside I see the car. Sly Roger is waiting. Beattie is there in the back and we roll smoothly away, no great hurry, car magically appearing, knowing always what Gloria was planning. This part of London is patterned with neat, distinct shadows. The pointy black spikes have disappeared—for scrap, Sly Roger says—and instead there are little wooden fences, almost like being in the country. Pointing up to a sky that looks like a clean blue handkerchief.

Beattie is admiring the sable, sniffing it, rubbing it against her cheek, stroking it. Annie isn't with them; the baby is due any day soon, and she's home with her feet up.

“Gawd, it's a beauty,” she says. “Bleedin' hell. Must be worth about three thousand.”

They carry on like this for a while and I learn that a really lovely mink coat would cost about three thousand pounds in Harrods but Gloria could only get about £250 for this sable if she sells it to someone they know, who'll buy “crooked.” She doesn't want to part with it and there's a bit of arguing for a while and then they start laughing about a friend of theirs who did a job in Bond Street towards the end of the war.

“So he's smashed the window of the shop and bad luck for him—bleedin' Special Police comes along. So this Special says, ‘What's going on here, sir?' And he's loading up the car, and quick as a flash he says, ‘Unexploded bomb in the shop, sir, stand well back,' and blow me if the Special don't help him load up!”

They giggle then. Put their heads together, snuffling like little pigs. “Best war we ever had . . .”

I know how shocked Nan would have been at that comment, but I push that thought aside. Gloria, Beattie, Annie: they're my family now.

I stare out of the window. Roger is taking us to a restaurant. The streets here are smaller, and so pretty, with trees looming out of pavements and scattering pink blossoms everywhere; and a frill of lilac-colored pansies at the bottom of every window. I close my eyes for a moment, hearing only the purr of the black cabs and the ting ting of bicycle bells through the opened car window. A lady's heels tap down the street like typewriter keys.

Even with my eyes closed, this could never be Bethnal Green. Everything is being repaired. The lampposts are newly painted: black gloss. Each has a fat clump of yellow and blue flowers in a hanging basket at the bottom. The scent of petrol mixing with new paint drifts in through the car window, along with a rich smell of coffee beans from one of the cafés on the corner. This, I'm sure, must be how Paris or Rome or Venice or somewhere like that smells. Of blossoms only faintly littered with cigarette butts. The spring light is so sharp that the pavement is full of shadow puppets. I say to myself, remembering the taste of the cucumber sandwich, the crunch of green on white, that I'm probably a proper posh West End girl at heart. I'm going to have a flat one day with a window box full of pansies and a tree with blossoms that litter the pavement with a thousand pale pink fingerprints.