Lucky Bunny (9780062202512) (8 page)

Boring. What a boring thing to find, after all! I creep back towards the house, and using all my weight, shove the dresser back, properly, making a plate on it wobble. It's so disappointing, I don't even think I'll write and tell Bobby about it. He prefers cards with kings and queens of England on them, like the ones you get with Mazawattee Tea and he always asks Nan to buy it even though she says that's not her favorite kind, it's got a “musty” flavor. It's so that he can try and get the one with Queen Victoria on it. Victoria the Great, he calls her, like the film. (He's seen it loads of times. Dad says Bobby has “been and got himself a thing for Anna Neagle.”)

Dad finds lots of things in bombed sites, and one day it was a baby grand piano, and he and the Du Maurier cigarettes man called Buster pushed it into our living room and Dad played it. He'd had another row with Nan by then, and asked her to leave. Still the planes twang the sky and I try not to think of what Nan said, of burning and smoking and what it must be like, scrunching and scrambling, the drumming sound, the smokiness, gulping for air.

Dad is happy though. Dad doesn't worry about London burning. He doesn't worry about the Frampton Park Road junction with Darnley Road being all flat and dust and sticks with just a sort of cliff of wall where houses used to be; with most of it eaten out, all smashed and mashed, red bricks dissolving into white powder. He has parties with ladies over, Green Bottle friends of Annie's. Another year goes by and London seems quieter and it's not about fires but about waiting and parties and
finally
having my ninth birthday and getting a tiny red bottle of perfume with a silver top shaped like a witch's hat that I hide under my pillow. It's from one of Annie's friends—a lady called Gloria.

Gloria is one of the Ten Green Bottles. The others are Annie and Dolly and Beattie and Lily and Ettie and Pearl and Josie and well maybe two more that I don't know. They smell of bluebells and lilac—a sort of squeaky flowery smell—and Gloria has a huge chest like a shelf you could rest a cup of tea on. When she gives me the perfume I pull the stopper out and it has a little black plug that smells so strong that I think I might faint every time I sniff it. Gloria has soft white fur on the collar of her navy-blue jacket and a hat like the lady in the Craven A adverts.

Gloria says she'll take me out shopping with her one day, but I say that Nan says she'll tan the hide off me if she catches me with one of the Green Bottles. This makes the ladies laugh and they all smoke their cigarettes and ruffle Dad's hair and ask him to play them something on the baby grand. He sings, “
Run rabbit run rabbit run run run
,” but that makes me cry thinking of Bunny and Bobby shooting all those rabbits, so he plays some other ones, lovey-dovey ones, and Annie sits on his knee.

After she moved to Uncle Charlie's off the Vallance Road, whenever Nan comes to our house, Dad sends her away. I hear them one time shouting at one another in the hallway again and then I don't see her for months on end. She even missed my ninth birthday and I'm glad again about the Green Bottles who baked me a cake and gave me their sweet coupons, because otherwise, without Bobby, there wouldn't be anyone. I keep going back at Lauriston School but there are signs up saying “
CLOSED
” because so many of the children are still evacuated that there are rows of empty seats and no teachers to teach them. I wander back home again. It's boring and lonely and no one seems to mind if I stay home, so gradually I stop bothering to go in the mornings and instead go out with the pram to look for coal like Dad told me.

Annie tells this story about a friend of hers who lived in a block of flats in Clapton, where a bomb fell and a whole building got demolished and her friend was lying in her bed, which fell through the ceiling to the flat below, and the friend ended up in a crater, in her pajamas and not even injured!

They like these stories. Funny ones are best. Beattie says, “Get this. One night, Roger (Sly Roger) hangs his trousers on the bedpost like he always does and there's a blast in the house opposite, and his trousers get blown off of the bedpost and out the broken window, and he runs downstairs in his underpants to catch them!”

They giggle and smoke their cigarettes and tell some more stories about how funny it is to be bombed. Only Annie tells a bad story about a friend of hers who put an asbestos blanket over her baby's cot to protect her, and how the next day there was a bad raid and in the morning there was this huge piece of glass sticking into the blanket. “If that there blanket weren't there, it wouldn't half of done some damage,” Annie says, and they go a bit quiet, and suddenly I think of Vera, and want to cry. To cheer us all up they start chatting again, because after all it's quiet at the moment, no bombs for a while. They spring open their silver cigarette cases and snap off their mother-of-pearl earrings and let me try them; and Beattie shows me her eyeliner pencil, and how she draws a line on the back of her legs to make it look like she's wearing stockings, and lets me have a go.

One day, it's early spring by then, and closer to my tenth birthday than my ninth, and the war seems to have been going on my whole life. The tree near the church dangles tiny cattails like baby's fingers. Nan comes to the door and starts knocking, and she keeps knocking, so loudly, banging the letter flap up and down and calling, that we all hear her, and I have to let her in. She looks thin. She must have been ill, I realize, from looking at her, ill or sad or something; why did no one tell me?

“But I'm better now, poppet,” she says, as if she can read my mind, when I bury my head in her dress and cuddle her.

Nan takes one look at the goings-on in our front room and puffs up her chest and says we're in more danger here than from bombs and I'm to come with her, right away back to Uncle Charlie's off the Vallance Road. Dad says, “To that old slum, Ma, you think that's better for them than this?” and then she and my dad start arguing, again out in the hall, with Dad slamming the door and all the ladies trying to listen in and we catch bits like “your fault she's bin there that long” (from Nan) and something about “I just about had it up to here . . . my grandchildren . . . and a bleedin' load of whores . . .”

I don't want to go to the stinky house of Aunty Shirley and Uncle Charlie in Bethnal Green and I'm ashamed because though I love Nan, and I've missed her, I also love all the things that the Green Bottles give me. The tiny red bottle of perfume . . . will Nan make me give it back? They'd even given Bobby—home last Christmas on a visit to bring us eggs and chickens like he promised—a new bag of jacks and a whole box of Lotts Bricks. Won't Bobby feel the same?

But when I hear the door close and see Nan's head out of the window and her collar up and see her looking up at our bedroom windows, I can't help it, I run outside after her, and fling my arms around her. She seems to have grown so much smaller, in these years.

“Go fetch your coat, gel, and come with me down Vallance Road,” Nan tells me, and I run inside to get it. Dad is back on the piano plink plinking away and no one sees me leave. “
It's OK to be tight on the seafront in Brighton, but I say by Jove, watch out if it's Hove . . .”

“You done the right thing . . . made a choice. Good gel,” Nan says, taking my hand as we walk down Well Street, right down to the bottom, past the barber's that Dad goes to, all pumping steam from the hot towel sterilizer in the corner; and then cross over and on towards the Cambridge Heath Road. Nan plans to walk the whole way, I know. Long distances are nothing to Nan, and she's no money for the bus.

But we never get there. The evening's drawing in; it's black-dark very quickly with the windows all boarded up and no streetlights on and the cars with black paint over their headlights. Nan gets her white hanky out and ties it around my button so that it will flicker in the dark and show people where I am. We start to feel a bit stumbly, and I know that, really, Nan wants me for some company, though she'll never admit it. I hold her hand and try to guide her safely to the curb, but she's very slow; she has these strange puffed-up ankles as if she's got mushrooms stuffed under the stockings, and the darkness starts to move towards us, like a big black animal, licking up to our ears. We put our hands out, touch things and bump things: a person, a wall, just thin air. Now
our
ears are perked up like dogs. We can hear other people's crepe-soled shoes, all spongey on the wet pavements. Nan's scared she'll be run down or knocked down, or attacked, in the dark—and she'd never let on to my dad, because he's a “useless great lump” and she's had to do “every bleedin' thing meself since my Alf went.”

Cambridge Heath Road is full of puddles, and as we can't see them, we keep accidentally splashing one another on the ankles. Nan's wool stockings are soon soaked. My legs are bare and the splashes are icy and startle me. But it makes Nan laugh. “My Great-Aunt Fanny!” she says, every time I do it, which makes us giggle.

“Pip pip!” Nan says sharply when a dark shape is about to bump into us, and we hear someone say sorry and melt into the darkness. All you can see is black and grey patches where someone is wearing something light: a shirt collar or a handkerchief, like me.

Nan says just to stick to going straight, so we won't get lost. We've been walking for a while like this and we know we've passed York Hall to our left, because we can smell the steam from the baths there, and we know where we are now because of the smell of lavender in the museum gardens. Suddenly Weeping Willie starts up his lonely howl, making our insides turn over in fear. I hear the lavatory flush in the house we're passing, and then another one and another one. People always do that before they go to their shelters. Two buses are just pulling up and they stop at once; people pour out, heading towards the tube shelter.

“Dad says don't bother,” I tell Nan. I know if he's caught in Bethnal Green he'd rather shelter under the Salmon and Ball railway arches, or round Vallance Road, under the soot-stained viaducts, in a warren of small houses called Deserters' Corner and “do a little business” while everyone else is in the stinky smelly tube shelter, which smells so bad because everyone is frightened and there aren't any lavatories.

“It's mostly over now . . . there ain't no real danger,” I say.

“My arse!” Nan says, reaching for my hand, crossing the road, and pushing me towards the entrance to the tube. “I'm telling you, we hit Berlin two nights ago—they'll be wanting to get their own back!” and she says this breathlessly, making me join up with the other people hurrying towards the entrance. Nan, her face shiny with sweat, and then there's this strange sound, one we haven't heard before, really loud explosions, and Nan grabs me and screams. And breaks into a kind of lumpy run, like a cow, or a big animal.

I don't understand what started her off, but other people are running, too, and there's panic. We're all hemmed into the steps, a feeling of being pushed, of slippery wet steps beneath you. It's so inky dark—we can't see them but we know the steps are like blocks of black ice, with just this one tiny bulb down the bottom, a finger of light pointing in a wobbly way towards us, and people tumbling over one another to get down there, jostling me and hurting my shoulders and stepping on my toes and a lady crying, her hand on her huge stomach, all squeezed into a giant plum by her purple wool coat, shouting wildly to anyone who came near her: “Mind me baby! Mind out!”

And then a horrible sound, a frightening roar and about sixty blasts, one after another goes off, somewhere over the way of Vicky Park, and people start screaming and pushing behind us. We are deep inside the steps; we must be quite near the bottom now and Nan is still clutching my hand beside me but the person behind her is pushing her forward and she is being wrenched away from me, nearly twisting my fingers and I open them and as the screams go up I feel her hand snatch free—Nan! Nan!—her fingers clutching for mine but yanked away from me and then suddenly we're all falling, a pack of cards, one on top of the other, it's concrete and bones and soft chins all mashing up together, my nose slamming into something hard—I put my hand up and it feels wet—but I can't think, there's just an almighty feeling of being crushed, squashed, all the breath pumped out of me, and my knees buckling beneath me and the pain of people toppling onto me and smashing me against the steps and I can't see a thing but I know I'm going to die and then someone is pulling my hair and I feel as if the top of my head is being opened up, like the top of a boiled egg—I'm being lugged by the hair and told to “hold on, hold on,” and I'm pulled free somehow of the people on top of me, and a lady's voice says “gotcha!” and makes me holler with the pain of having my hair yanked so hard. The lady isn't Nan; I can't see Nan anywhere in that mass of smelly wool and mothballs and rain and galoshes and wet black sticky stuff that might be blood or sick or I don't know what.

“They're kicking me!” another woman cries. I can't see her in the treacly dark; I don't think anyone else can hear her.

I'm so shocked I'm not even crying anymore, I stop the hollering sound I made a second ago, and the same lady puts her hands under my armpits and drags me somewhere, and I have a feeling that maybe she's a police-lady or an air-raid warden or something, so I do as I'm told, but my heart feels sick because I know that what we're climbing over is bodies, is people, I can feel their elbows and their squashy soft bits and sometimes they breathe on me and I smell them and it's like the smell in the pigpen at Salmon Farm only worse because it's people. I hear them mutter things but it's all happening so quickly that I have to just do what the lady says, and get to the shadowy place where she tells me to wait, next to other people. We're all squished in a flat dark space, and I'm trembling so much that I feel as if the place itself is shaking, this must be what hell is like. A hell full of animals, sheep in a pen, stinking animal smells, and sounds of crying and wailing and not even knowing if any of that sound is coming from me, but the lady says, “Be quiet, be quiet, wait here,” and so I do, but I'm thinking, Nan! Nan! Where is Nan? And I look around and try to see her amongst the shapes, and I strain to hear her voice.