Lucky Bunny (9780062202512) (7 page)

O
n the train home, I'm sick in a paper bag that the billeting lady holds out for me. She makes me stand near the open window in the corridor for the rest of the journey, eyes on me like a hawk. She thinks I'm “sickening for something,” but I know better. It's just thinking that's doing it. Of Mum. Where is Mum? Of the hospital, if we have to go there. Of the house with no furniture in it and no Dad there to shout “watcha!” up to us and sweep me off my feet and tickle me with his scratchy beard and put his hand in his pocket and find a sixpence for me. The sick feeling from thinking about Vera again. Vera in a white bonnet, string tied under her chin, and a grey blanket, like a wet bandage, all soaking on her. Vera is a horrible, fearful thing, too ugly to look at or think about, and doing it makes my stomach turn over again and hotness creep up from my belly and rush at me.

They must have had the funeral without us. Nan mentioned it before we left. Vera's with the angels now, learning to play a harp. There must be a mini-sized coffin somewhere with soap-colored satin inside it and a boiled empty baby, like a penny guy. And Dad will never see her again, and maybe we'll never see
him
again. And if we don't watch out we'll all go exactly the same way. Boiled up in a big pot until our heads burst like steamed puddings in a cloth.

I know that's what happened, really. I don't think anyone's ever going to tell me, but I know it was Mum's fault. She didn't want any more blinkin' babies. Children made her go a bit doolally, Nan said. So she did something so wicked, or stupid, no one would believe it. Put Vera in a pot. Cooked her up. Or dropped a kettle of water on her. It's like when Nan used to cry, “Moll, what's got into you?” Has something got into Mum? A devil maybe. And now we're going to see her again, because the billeting lady says she's written to our mothers and they're going to be at the station to meet us.

I feel sick again.

B
ut as the train chugs into that busy London station with the high church roof with all the windows in it like Ely Cathedral and all the pigeons flitting about up there, I'm grabbing my bag from the seat and pulling faces at Bobby, and suddenly I see him. He's grinning through the window of the train and just holding a cigarette at his mouth in that way he has, his silver-blue eyes smiling, smiling. He has a smart black hat on and braces and a tie and a new-looking jacket, and he's chipper, that's what Nan would say, or is it dipper? Or maybe it's dapper? Anyway, he's one of those words, she really would say it, and he's dark and smart and sparkly; he's the loveliest, newest, most shiny thing I've ever seen.

“Daddy!”

He's wheeling me and wheeling me, and kissing my hair and kissing Bobby's head as Bobby ducks away from him, and he takes a hand each and he's nearly crying as he hugs us; I can really tell how much he's really missed us, the way he keeps his mouth buried in my hair for a long time, until the billeting lady comes up and says, all rude and stiff, that she has instructions to hand the children over to a Mrs. Ida Dove and Dad says that's our nan and signs something and he gives the billeting lady a wink, which sends her away all fluttery like the pigeons. And clippie-cloppy on her shoes. When her back is turned, Dad makes this little movement, rubbing his hands behind her, as if her backside is hot. We're so happy that we're squealing, me and Bobby; we sound like the pigs when Bobby pulled their tails.

Dad says he knows a shop where you can get five donuts for just five pence, and let's go and buy them—and eat the lot! Or Sally Lunn's, he says. You choose, kiddo.

“Can we go down Romford Market and see the eels in their buckets, getting the heads cut off of them?” Bobby asks. He's obsessed with eels since Archie Markham got that eel hive. Dad just laughs.

“We'd better go see your nan. Tell her I've been and got you.” He puts his face close to Bobby. “Tell her the old scallywag's out and about again!”

We both know better than to ask. Out from where? For how long? Any case, we're thinking about buns and eels and Sally Lunn's. I'm thinking of the soap in my pocket and Nan's face when she sees it. And Dad with his sweet-smelling hair, glossy with the cream he slaps on it. The prickly feel of his face with all his stubble, like kissing a hedgehog. And a new toy—he says he's got something spanking new that he says we'll love. He promises to show us when we get home.

Where's Mum? I want to ask. Is Mum out, too? Which house are we going to? Is the house all bombed away or do we have another one? Why were you away so long? I fight these questions. Squish them down.

Dad loves me best though for my best skill: keeping mum, he says. Keeping my lips sealed. I can do that. He's so tall and so swingy, he can “show out” as he walks along, with all the ladies looking at him, and he has something new: a limp, and as he limps by, the ladies cock their heads at him like little birds, their hands on their hips and smiling, so, so sweetly, and kindly. He's like something royal, like a prince or a soldier as he limps quickly through the station, touching his hat here and there to people. The dog's bollocks, Mum would say. Or a dream.

3

Keeping Mum

C
hristmas comes and goes with not much kerfuffle: just an orange for Bobby, which he can't open and tries throwing down the stairs, and a golliwog for me, and a Mr. Jollyboy for Bobby that Dad found in a house after it had been abandoned. The Mr. Jollyboy is the best thing in the world. That's the spanking-new thing Dad was talking about. It's all wooden with a black cap of hair (just like Dad's) and a painted red shirt and black boots and jointed shoulders, knees, and arms; and if you wiggle the stick in its back and put him on a flat surface, he can really dance. Dad does this for us and makes Bobby nearly wet himself laughing.

The Mr. Jollyboy comes in a box with a picture of four laughing children on it, and a kind man with grey hair. The box says, “The most amusing toy of all times. Keeps everyone in fits of laughter
.
” I try not to feel cross that Bobby got the most amusing toy of all times and I'm Dad's favorite and I got a golliwog.

We're back now in the house on Lauriston Road, and we visit Mum in the London hospital, and Dad says she's not all her ticket, which means she's not right in the head. She's waiting there for something. Some decision to be made—a court case, or something. I don't understand, but I know she won't be there for long, that's what Dad says, and so of course I imagine that she might come home soon. Whenever I think of this my stomach turns over. I should be glad, I should want her to, but I feel sick and I'm ashamed of it. I keep picturing her in her hospital bed. She's in a pale blue nightie with forget-me-nots on it, all tied up at the neck, and she seems thin, suddenly, and old, and made of paper. She doesn't look at me when I step forward to kiss her—with Dad's hand pushing me in the back—and a thin worm of dribble glitters at the corner of her mouth. The hospital smells and the nurses aren't nice to us, and won't let us look at their little watches pinned to their pockets (although one of them gives Dad a cigarette and they all admire his limp), so we only go the once. Matron says Mum is just a dipso, which means nothing to me. I think I didn't hear her properly.

That nightie.
Forget me not.
I want to, though.

The months go by with me trying not to think about Mum, think about anything at all, but I listen to the grown-ups, and everyone is worried, all the time. Now it's late summer and nearly a new school term and I'm seven and not six years old, and suddenly London is different. Yesterday, Sunday, there's a roar. Right on top of us. I look up and see a plane like a silver fish, like a roaring shark, and I'm a little minnow in a pond. Three flash over. Pop pop pop.

Nan comes to the house and begs Dad to let us go away again, because now there are air-raid sirens every single night and we have to spend so much time under the table. “Weeping Willie,” Nan calls the siren, and afterwards that's how I think of it: like Wee Willie Winkie rushing through the town—are the children safe in bed?

After she's gone on about this, Dad says okey-dokey then, we should go back to Ely, to be billeted with that same family, and he'll talk to our teacher, Miss Clarkson, about it. I shout and put my fingers in my ears every time Dad mentions it to me, while Bobby looks at me in surprise and says, “Bang bang—all those rabbits! Didn't you like the plum pie we got?” In the end Dad says Bobby can go on his own and I can stay with him, as long as I'm a good girl and make him his breakfast every morning, and help him by filling a pram (Vera's old pram) full of coal whenever he tells me to and pushing it up to our house from wherever he finds it.

But a while goes by before it can be arranged. Nearly Christmas again and we've had a new bomb by then, one called Satan, which hit the Post Office Sorting in Mount Pleasant, and now we won't get any Christmas cards from anyone.

When Dad takes Bobby to the station, bits of London are roped off and wardens are not allowing cars to go up this road; there's a bomb in a square near the station that's unexploded. Dad just tuts and takes another direction. Bobby is excited: he's got his shilling knife in its leather case, and his rucksack with some barley sugars again, and his train ticket, that somehow the teacher got for him, and he asks him from the backseat, “Dad, you know your bad leg—can I look at it?” and Dad nearly jerks the car off the road and looks at Bobby in the wing mirror, and taps his fingers on the steering wheel and then says, “You cheeky monkey. You watch that!”

Poor Bobby looks startled. He didn't mean anything, he just wanted to look. We neither of us ever know which things are going to make Dad cross.

Now we pass a road where a house has been burning and it's black and you can still see smoke coming off it and Bobby stares, says “wow” at the big pile of bricks, the scraps of cloth hanging to the bare walls at the side of the building and a man standing all bleary-eyed, just standing and staring at us, holding his cap and flapping at himself as we drive past. We pass piles of blue-green glass, watch men stand there shaking frames from windows, sweeping the glass into little heaps. We fall quiet, as we pass the open doors of a church, glimpse piles of sleeping bags, people with bundles of clothes, but Dad is staring straight ahead, whistling under his breath.

It's the first time Bobby and me are going to be separated. I'm sad, and I keep thinking that Nan said we should never be, that it's my job to take care of Bobby, but Bobby doesn't seem to be bothered—he's too little to care I suppose, and the only bit he minds about is not ever meeting the Luftwaffe, or managing to gather up any good shrapnel or, better still, any bayonets. He can't wait to lie on his stomach on a boat, on the River Lark, holding a punt gun and waiting for the ducks to appear so he can shoot one. He says he'll make sure and bring us a chicken when he comes to visit and all the eggs we want. (I try to remind him of how mean Elsie was with our dinner, but Bobby has a short memory. When I carry on he says it's because I didn't help out enough with the beets and the Campaign; Bobby on the other hand is Not Afraid of Hard Work.)

“Save me some shrapnel, a whopping piece, if you find any!” Bobby says.

Best of all would be if I could find a gun—then I could hold off the whole of the Waffen-SS in the back garden.

His little face at the window of the train is more monkey-like than ever, with his hair recently shaved because of lice and his ears waggling as he mouths goodbye and waves to us.

Dad's got a motor again, not so nice as the old one, but a lovely plummy red color, and a lady friend called Annie who's as skinny as a whippet and who he leaves with me during the days or nights when he's out and he says she's just a brass and will move out when Mum comes back.

The months go by and Christmas without him and Bobby doesn't come home, and I miss him. I try to care about the things that Nan talks about—that posh people are coming from the West End after a night at a dinner to gawp at the poor bombed families, can you credit that?—but really I'm just wondering who is this Annie and what's a brass and does Dad post the letters I write to Bobby in envelopes saying “Salmon Farm near Ely” with all my sorriness for not finding any shrapnel? If Dad does, then why doesn't Bobby write back?

I try asking Annie about Bobby, as she's sitting on the sofa, buffing her nails with this little thing she holds in her hand, rubbing back and forth with the suede part and then showing me how pink and soft and polished her nails look. Annie just laughs and says, “Little boys never write letters!” and shows me her powder in a silver compact with a brush so fluffy it's like a rabbit's tail and her best gloves made out of cream leather, with tiny little holes in them in the pattern of a four-leafed clover. They're her lucky gloves, she says, putting them on a shelf above the mantelpiece. I'm not to play with them, mind.

She chats a lot, all the time, and she has hair like a bird's nest, and you feel as if even when she's not talking she'd like to be, which is tiring. No one mentions Vera, or Mum, or whether I'll have to go back to the country, too, if the air-raid keeps going off and the bombs don't stop.

Then one night sometime in the spring Nan comes to stay with us because there's been a big fire at the docks and everything, she says, is ablaze from end to end—warehouses, sugar, wood, food, spices. She says there's black smoke from one end of Poplar to the other, and that you can't breathe for the choking feeling, and can't stir for an AFS man with a black face sleeping on his trailer, too tired to clean up before going back to the fire. She doesn't say anything about her own home but she sits in a corner with her own blackened face crying into her sleeve. I make her a cup of tea but Dad doesn't say a word.

Dad lets her stay with us, and makes a bed up for her in what used to be Bobby and the baby's room, because she is his muvver, after all, but you can tell he can't wait for her to go back home, because Annie and her friends—the Green Bottles—can't come over when Nan's there and Nan listens to “Sincerely Yours” on the radio and it makes her cry and Dad thinks Vera Lynn's rubbish. He calls it “Insincerely Yours.”

Uncle Charlie turns up one day with a new girlfriend called Shirley Edwards and Dad says there'd be more room if Nan stopped round Shirley's just off the Vallance Road for a while, and after he's said this, I remember my question and ask Nan, “What's a brass?” and Nan turns around sharply to say, “Is that what he says about Annie then?” and then that's the end of that, she won't say another word, so I know a brass is something bad.

Not long after, we hear that a friend of Annie's has lost both her legs in a bomb and a block of flats in Stoke Newington was burning and burning and the shops near St. Thomas's Square on Mare Street and a billiard hall have all been mashed to fire sticks. We hear airplanes and they seem to me like wild duck fights in the air; they don't frighten me anymore, instead they make me miss Bobby. If he were here he'd love to watch them: the silver shapes with the trails behind them. He'd love to watch until the little specs of shrapnel pinged off the rooftops, or to cheer when one of them goes into a dive with a swishing noise and smoke pouring from it. Bobby would be able to tell me if I shouldn't cheer, but groan; he can tell which planes are ours. I know he wants the shrapnel so he can swap pieces with his mates, but somehow I don't like rooting around in bombsites—I think I'm the only child in our street who feels this way. I like new things and clean things, not dirty ones.

Nan goes to stop with Uncle Charlie and I know she's sad, and she'll never live in Canada Buildings again, but it's hard for me to be sad about that. I hear Dad saying that she'll get a prefab now. All old people or people like Nan from Poplar are going to live in prefabs, they say, and I don't know why Nan isn't more pleased, because they will at least be new and have their own lavatories.

There is something new, too, about our house at Lauriston Road, and that's the thing Dad doesn't want Nan to see. Dad has opened up the cellar and started doing his photography in there. It's supposed to be our shelter, but we've been told we're not to go down there, and there's a key that only Annie has, and she keeps it up her stocking where she says Dad's not to be a naughty boy but has to “beg for it.” Annie is usually one skinny coil of wide-awake energy like a whippet that wants to race, with these big dark eyes looking out from under her stack of hair, and wanting to say something to you, wanting to talk, but one morning I come downstairs in my pajamas to find her flat out on our sofa, sleeping because she was out late in Bethnal Green and got caught in an air-raid and had to spend it down the tube, where she couldn't sleep at all. We'd just been at home under the tables.

I see the key next to her garters on the table beside the bed. I know it will only take me five minutes to see what Dad has down in the cellar and to put the key back so that no one will know.

The cellar door is hidden behind a wooden dresser which doesn't move at first, until I shove it quite hard, and then it budges a little bit, enough for me, being skinny, to slip behind the crack, without fully moving it.

I tiptoe carefully as I can, and when the cellar door creaks as I open it, I'm scared for a second, thinking Annie'll hear me. There's no sound of her though, so I carry on down the stairs carrying Dad's torch and bouncing a little circle of light everywhere as I go. It's freezing under my feet, and dusty, with a smoky black smell. I can't understand why we haven't got an Anderson shelter like other families and just have to go under the kitchen table and not down the cellar, but Dad says no one's to know the cellar is here, and he'll take his belt to me if I tell a soul.

“Keep mum, she's not so dumb
,
” I think
.
It's a sign I read somewhere with a pretty lady on it, like one of Annie's Green Bottle friends.

It's not that exciting though, down there. It's not what I thought. It's very small: not really a cellar at all, just a sort of space, as big as a cupboard, that you can stand up in. It smells nasty with lots of cigarette butts on the floor. I'm sure I can hear skittering, like mice. All I can see in the trickle of light from the torch is a John Bull printer set, and a pile of photographs—they all seem to be of men, and one of them is Dad's friend, Buster, and another is Dad's brother, our Uncle Charlie. Buster smokes these really posh cigarettes, Du Maurier
,
and that's what the smell is. Everywhere there are these cards. Grade Four cards. These stamps and black ink, which must be what Dad is hiding, probably just because Bobby and me would
love
to play with them. Bobby loves cards of all kinds. I have a little go with the stamp, putting the torch down to do it, pressing the stamp down on a scrap of paper in front of me, then picking up the torch again to shine the light over the words: “Wounded in action.”