Rosie (32 page)

It was a good evening. Everyone was in high spirits, and Pat Clack had surpassed herself in cooking a truly memorable meal. They gave each other little presents, pulled crackers and wore the paper hats. Mary made everyone laugh with her exploits in Ireland; she’d been over there for four days and only arrived back on Christmas Eve. Linda gave a hilarious speech, pretending to be Matron giving her last talk before retiring, in which she revealed where she got her training for Carrington Hall: lion-tamer in a circus, governor of Holloway prison, chief torturer in the Gestapo and a missionary in Africa bringing ‘the word’ to a tribe of cannibals.

Rosie was a little tiddly when she went to bed that night. After the sherry, Pat Clack had brought in some home-made gooseberry wine. It tasted so nice she gulped down two large glasses without realizing how potent it was. Mary told her the next day she’d been singing Ruby Murray’s ‘Softly, Softly’ very loudly as they went up the stairs, and they’d had to gag her. But it was just as well she was a bit drunk, it stopped her thinking about Alan in the midst of his new family. Or how Christmas used to be at May Cottage with the table in the parlour all laid nicely and Dad carving the goose, wearing the tiny toy policeman’s helmet he dug out every year.

When the shops opened after Christmas, Rosie had bought the new outfit she was wearing tonight, New Year’s Eve – a black and white houndstooth-checked dress with a fashionable gored shirt and white collar and cuffs. She felt sophisticated wearing lipstick, mascara and her hair tied back at the nape of her neck with a black velvet bow. Linda had said she looked like a London girl now, and Rosie believed if she could achieve the right look so easily, she could just as easily stop herself looking back over her shoulder, and become whatever she wanted to be.

‘Drink that!’ Linda ordered as she saw Rosie staring into space, the glass in her hand still nearly full. ‘Wherever do you pop off to? I never saw anyone drift off into a dream world as often as you do.’

‘She’s away with Donald, to be sure,’ Mary said with a giggle.

Rosie pulled herself together, all at once aware that she had been doing exactly what she’d planned not to – drifting back into the past. ‘I was not dreaming of Donald,’ she said, and laughed because all the staff pulled her leg about the two of them. It was true she had become very fond of him, and Donald missed her terribly on her day off. She just wished they wouldn’t make smutty jokes about him and call him her boyfriend.

‘I was just thinking how gorgeous you both look,’ she went on, hastily gulping down some of the drink. Mary was wearing a pale blue shirtwaister dress her mother had made for her; it matched her eyes perfectly and with her blonde hair set in sleek waves she looked like a plump beauty queen.

Linda, although not naturally pretty, looked very attractive tonight in a slinky red wool dress and her face made up. Mary had set her hair for her. It was a froth of dark curls, swept over to one side and secured with a glittery hair slide.

Linda beamed at Rosemary’s compliment. To her mind one of the best things about this new girl was her knack of making others feel better about themselves. She was even touched by the patience and affection she had for Donald. Heaven knows none of the others could be bothered with him. Normally she wouldn’t want to be bothered with carting someone as young as Rosemary out for the night, but the girl was intriguing. She came across as an innocent country girl, yet there was something very strong and adult about her too. Every now and then Linda got the feeling she had some big secret. There was nothing unusual about that in Carrington Hall – most of the staff had something they wanted to hide, that was exactly why they were there. But she had resisted the urge to try and find out what Rosemary’s was. She had enough secrets of her own to give her the screaming hab-dabs, without discovering anyone else’s.

‘Are you nearly ready now?’ Linda turned her attention to Mary who was now curling her eyelashes with a pair of tongs. Mary couldn’t even go out for a walk without lipstick. A night out in the West End needed a full beauty treatment.

‘Five minutes,’ Mary mumbled, grimacing at herself in the mirror. ‘Have another drink and calm down. There’s no point in going out too early and hanging about in the cold till midnight.’

Maybe it was the reference to hanging around in the cold, or just because she’d been wondering about Rosemary, but Linda was suddenly taken back to those nights in Cable Street.

She was fourteen when the war ended and just starting an apprenticeship with Cohen’s Gowns in the Mile End Road, when her mum and dad got offered a council house out in Romford. While her entire family was jubilant about this step up, Linda had her misgivings. All her friends still lived in Bethnal Green, and it would be a long train journey to work. When her Auntie Babs offered her a room of her own in her flat, just five minutes from Cohen’s, she saw it as a chance to gain independence.

Her ambition was to become a court dressmaker and one day make gowns for the nobs in Knightsbridge. Mr Cohen said she was the best apprentice he’d ever had, so her dream didn’t seem too unrealistic and she made pin money on the side by making frocks for neighbours in her spare time.

Everything was fine until she met Sydney Greenslade. She only went out once a week dancing, visited her family each Sunday, and she was always at work on time. But Syd changed all that. He was twenty-three with black hair and merry blue eyes, and his way of life turned hers upside down. Syd was a ‘Spiv’. He made his money in ‘deals’ in pubs and clubs at night and he wanted a girl on his arm while he made them. At first she insisted on being home by eleven, but Syd was very persuasive and he laced her up with gin so she forgot about the time and her job. Auntie Babs would have protested had she known, but she liked a drink too, and mostly she was out cold by eleven, and never guessed that Linda didn’t come home until the early hours.

Soon she was in trouble with Mr Cohen, late most days and falling asleep over her sewing machine. Mr Cohen said if she didn’t pull her socks up he’d sack her.

Linda tried, but she just couldn’t say no to Syd. Almost every day she promised herself an early night, but as soon as she heard him blasting the horn of his car out in the road, off she would go without a second thought. Of course she couldn’t hold back from going the whole way with him either, not once she’d fallen in love with him.

When she told Syd she was pregnant, she really thought he’d marry her; after all, he said he loved her every time they had it away in his car. But he just laughed at the suggestion and gave her some money, telling her to go and get herself fixed up by Ma Purdy who saw to all the girls down Cable Street.

No one warned her how much it would hurt when the baby came away. Or how weak and weepy she’d be afterwards. Mr Cohen sacked her, and on top of that Syd disappeared.

She was just sixteen when she went with a man for money. It seemed the only solution to get a few bob and tide her over until she found another job. She told herself just once wouldn’t hurt, that no one would ever know. Yet it didn’t work out like that.

Once she got over the disgust of the first time and realized she could earn more in five minutes than she could in a week at dressmaking, she just couldn’t stop. Before long Auntie Babs found out, and slung her out. Her parents heard too, and when she turned up at Romford hoping to move back in with them, they called her a trollop, and told her in no uncertain terms to sling her hook.

So she stuck her nose in the air, said she didn’t care and carried on. It was good that first summer; she was young and very much in demand, and for the first time in her life she had money. Not just a bob or two, but pounds and pounds with no one holding out their hand for some of it. She bought nice clothes, got herself a little room in Cable Street where no one cared what she did, and when she had a guilt attack, she went out drinking with the other girls.

Of course she didn’t intend to stay in Cable Street; it was the worse place in the whole of the East End, dirty, smelly and rough. There were illegal gambling dives, opium dens and brothels, all patronized by sailors, dockers and villains. Almost every night she said she was going up West to find some toff who knew how to treat a girl like a lady. She boasted to the other girls she’d end up with a fancy place in Park Lane, and she believed it too. But something seemed to prevent her from getting away. Perhaps deep down she knew that a cockney tart with a plain face was never going to set the world alight.

Her second abortion nearly killed her. She was taken into the London Hospital in Whitechapel with a haemorrhage. When she was discharged nearly three weeks later, her room had been taken by someone else and all her belongings had been stolen. Another girl let her doss down on her floor for a few nights, but then she slung her out too.

Looking back, Linda couldn’t imagine how she survived that winter of 1947. She was trapped in a vicious circle from which there was no way out. To get money for a room for the night she had to take the punters down for a knee trembler under the arches in Cable Street, but her rough appearance got her nothing more than the most squalid of accommodation, shared with other terrifying down-and-outs. As she became more and more unkempt and dirty it was finally only the foreign sailors who’d pay her, and sometimes they used her, then robbed her, often beating her for good measure.

Drinking gin was a temporary release from the nightmare she was living, but at four in the morning when she awoke with the cold to find herself huddled up in some derelict building or an alley, death seemed preferable to struggling through another day of humiliation and utter misery.

It was a church army woman who saved her. A funny skinny little woman in a grey coat and hat who found her early one morning lying vomiting in the gutter. She took her arm and hauled her up and said she was taking her somewhere warm to get her cleaned up.

It took six months to get her healthy again. She had lice, the clap, and a chronic chest infection. She had to hand it to those church army women – they might have looked like little grey ghosts, but they were tough. They put her in their hostel, nursed her, fed her, prayed for her and talked to her until finally she broke down and admitted she really wanted their help to change her life.

It was through them she finally came to work at Carrington Hall.

Matron knew what she was. And Linda knew what Matron was too. They reached a compromise. Matron didn’t ask her to grass anyone up, and kept off her back. Linda, in return, didn’t tell tales out of school about the second floor, and kept any other potential troublemakers amongst the staff in line.

Working in a loony-bin wasn’t satisfying or creative like dressmaking, but it had its compensations. She was away from the East End and sordid reminders of how low she’d sunk. The pay was good, she had a decent place to live and her family managed to forgive her once they’d seen she’d turned over a new leaf.

Mostly she felt secure now, five years on. Yet every now and then, particularly when she was confronted with a little lamb like Rosemary, she was reminded of how she’d been at sixteen. Rosemary would be easy prey for anyone unscrupulous, be that Matron or some fast-talking man in a sharp suit. She had every intention of warning Rosemary about men, but she didn’t quite know what she should do about Matron.

‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ Rosie gasped as they stood in Piccadilly a couple of hours later. She could barely see Eros because of the people climbing on to it. The pavements were packed with a vast noisy, jostling, but good-natured crowd, and above and all around her were the famous neon lights she’d heard so much about but never seen before. Her neck was already aching from looking up at the ever-changing messages and advertisements flashing green, red, yellow and blue. She could stand here all night and never grow tired of it.

‘It won’t look so bleedin’ wonderful to you if you get lost,’ Linda shouted back. ‘Keep a tight ’old on my belt, and if we do get separated, come back ’ere to Swan and Edgar’s so we can find you.’

They managed to squeeze into a pub later. Mary was complaining she was cold and her feet hurt. Linda was thinking to herself that she’d rather be down in the East End having a jaw with people who spoke her language, than being pushed and shoved by upper-class berks with braying voices and college scarves.

Rosie thought it was the best night of her life.

There was something in the air here in the West End that thrilled her right to the end of her frozen toes. The wisps of fog floating across the brightly lit buildings, the lights, smells and the wafts of music coming from every direction. So many people, all with cheerful faces despite having to move along at a snail’s pace. The red buses, the big black taxis. It was all so marvellous.

A smell of chestnuts roasting on a brazier took her right back to market days at Midsomer Norton, but there was so much more here than she’d ever seen in Somerset. A barrel organ on one street corner, with a pet monkey in a little red coat jumping up and down on it, an old gypsy lady selling sprigs of white heather and a one-man-band marching along as proud as a louse with a drum on his back, thumping out a steady beat.

As they tried to elbow their way towards the bar, a big dark-haired man with a long white evening scarf tied rakishly round his neck turned to watch them. Rosie thought he looked a bit like Errol Flynn, the same kind of wicked grin and sparkly eyes. He saw their predicament at once. Linda was jumping up and down trying to catch the barman’s eye, but she was too small to be seen behind the burly shoulders of the men who were drinking there.

‘Let me buy you a drink, girls,’ he called out. ‘What’ll it be? I’m just getting one in.’

Mary lit up like a Christmas tree to see such a good looking man. She giggled and batted her curled eyelashes at him. ‘To be sure that’s very kind of you, sir. We’ll have three gin and oranges, please,’ she said.

Because of the density of the crowd, Rosie was edged away from Mary and Linda. She heard the man tell Mary his name was Mitch, and the way he was looking down at her and smiling attentively as she spoke back suggested he was instantly taken with her.