by Dawson, Jill
Lucky Bunny
A Novel
Jill Dawson
Epigraph
Stolen sweets are always sweeter;
Stolen kisses much completer;
Stolen looks are nice in chapels;
Stolen, stolen be your apples.
James Leigh Hunt, “Fairies’ Song,” 1830
Contents
Epigraph
Part One
1
My Early Years
2
A Trip to the Country
3
Keeping Mum
4
My Education
Part Two
5
My Further Education
6
My Apprenticeship
7
My New Job
8
Becoming a Mother
Part Three
9
One Last Job
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Jill Dawson
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
PART ONE
Queenie’s not my real name, of course. The name I was given at birth is plain enough, well known, and easily looked-up. Queenie’s the name I took, chose for myself. Only the best for me, I remember thinking, at the time: the Queen of Everything. A cracking name. I wanted it, I took it, I made it mine. As there might be some proper consequences attached to my real name, it wouldn’t be right to set my given name down. I shouldn’t even call that one my real name because now I think of it, isn’t that the point? Queenie’s real, to me. For the purposes of this account, then, best you think of me as Queenie throughout: the name I’ve gone by for most of my life.
My best friend Stella knows my given name, but never calls me it. Yesterday she drove me up here, to my new home by the river, and as we picked up the keys from the estate agent’s office and I signed “Queenie Dove” on the contract, she was giggling and shoving me in the ribs and trying to hide her excitement, whispering in my ear: “ . . . Can you believe your luck sometimes? Go on—can you?”
When I’d turned the key to my own front door, Stella went on: “Don’t you ever ask yourself: ‘Blimey, how did I get here in one piece, and get away with it all?’ ”
You might find this strange, but honestly, I never have asked myself that. And it struck me hard, Stella saying it. As if now that she’s mentioned it, I’ll have to pinch myself. My luck might fly off. I don’t think I’ve breathed out yet. Am I safe? This old cottage has a back door and a garden that can’t be seen from the front, and a garden wall with a door in it that leads to the river: an escape route. I noticed it right away. And it’s nothing flash, either, doesn’t draw attention to itself. I’m not swanking, it’s nothing like what I could actually afford. Bricks and mortar and my own garden shed; a wad of money all cozy in the silk lining of my red leather handbag; a child sleeping outside in the car: those things are real, those are things, not ideas, but luck, and getting away with it? How did I get here, after all?
So after Stella’s gone back to London, and it’s late, midnight, and I’m lying for the first time in the brand-new, stiffly squeaking bed, snuggling in the fresh shop-scented linen, and geese are honking outside by the water, and there’s the rest of the money, fat and solid, all piled up high in the otherwise empty white cupboard, I can’t sleep for thinking about it, for wanting to answer Stella’s question.
I’m so wide awake I have to get out of bed and wander into the living room, bumping into a crate. I put the light on and blink hard. My eyes fall on the open door to the kitchen, on the wooden table, to the bag of cherries, bought from a roadside stall, that Stella’s dumped in a blue china bowl—her contribution to the unpacking. I walk over to it. Crumpled newspaper springs around the bowl: the purple-red cherries glistening against the blue. A bowl of cherries: I pop one in my mouth. I spread the newspaper out, glance at the headlines: look at the faces, the wanted list. Even now, years later, there are more arrests, names I know. No one has ever said anything that could lead to me. Stella’s right then, surely? This is luck. I’m here, in one piece, in a life better than anyone might think I deserve. Because don’t we all believe that bad behavior will be punished, that those who stick to the rules will get their reward eventually? If not in heaven, then in a beautiful cottage by the river and a healthy child and a table filled with fresh cherries in a bowl.
Not me, though. I don’t think I ever believed in fairness. Where would I have learned that? And like the song says, I regret nothing. I promised myself that long ago. No moaning and groaning and tearing at my clothes. I’ve read Moll Flanders—it’s one of my favorites, I know the form. But it’s not me: you won’t catch me repenting. Puzzling, yes, but not repenting . . .
Mum once showed me a picture. Of her as a really young girl, with my dad, standing in Docklands at the edge of the water, men loading in the background and those huge cranes towering over her, like a weird insect, and I remember saying, “Where am I in that photo then?” and her answer: “Oh, you wasn’t even a twinkle in your dad’s eye then.” A shiver ran through me. Like I could see my own ghost there. How could that be? How could I be looking at a picture of a time when I didn’t exist? But we can, can’t we, it’s what schoolteachers praise us for, and then tell us we have too much of: it’s called having an imagination. I’m good at that, I’ve learned. Making things up. Not telling tales though; I’m not a telltale. I don’t want to drop certain people in it, so I might change some names and the odd fact here and there but not the relevant things, not the gist of it. I don’t think I’m a confessional person. Just a compulsive storyteller.
Take what I say with a pinch of salt if you like, luck always beggars belief. The more someone insists something’s true, the more you’ve got to doubt it, wouldn’t you say? It’s important to me that you don’t know the name my mother chose for me. I hope I’ve left that other-named little girl behind; I’ve worked bloody hard at it. But I do want the answer to Stella’s question. How did I get here in one piece, and get away with it all? If I can understand it, believe it, maybe I can keep it. Maybe I can stay here.
This magistrate, a woman, once said to me, “I am rather tired of hearing time and again from those breaking the law, that they had a terribly troubled childhood. Everyone who passes through this court claims to have had an appalling childhood. Surely some people can transcend their childhood, once in a while? Could we at least stop using it as an excuse for everything?”
She had this glossy black hair, like the oiled hair of a Doberman Pinscher, and she flashed a smile round the court as she said it, you know, like a dog baring its teeth. What did I think, listening to her, back then? I thought she had a point. I was all for not making excuses. But she annoyed me, too, I’ll admit. I didn’t examine things too much in those days, but dimly, somewhere, I might have wondered, does anyone “transcend” their childhood? I mean, did she? Did she rise above it, to be someone entirely different from the shape cut out for her? Did her family expect a tearaway, a hoister, a criminal, or a madam, for instance, and instead they got her—a homework-producing Head Girl?
I wasn’t allowed to answer back, of course. I knew she didn’t want an answer. She was bright and hard, skin stretched tight over that gleaming smile. It was probably a throwaway remark; she was just fed up at hearing the same sob stories time and again. It’s funny how that comment from years ago—ten years ago—sailed back just now. I’m standing in my bar
e feet and nightie on the wooden floorboards in my kitchen, my very own kitchen, eating cherries. Not an excuse then, my childhood; no. But how does anyone do it, really? How did I get here, get to be me? Here goes.
1
My Early Years
I was born in Poplar, East London, in 1933. In school we used to sing: “God made the Earth, and God made me.” And all this other stuff that God made. The flowers and the rivers and the bumblebee. And me! I loved that song. Did God make me? Or was it Moll and “Lucky Boy Tommy”—Thomas Dove—one night in Tunnel Gardens, down on East India Dock Wall Road, the tree-lined bit between Blackwall Tunnel and the docks, when he’d plied her with gin and persuaded her to roll up that pink, surgical-looking girdle she wore. A girdle which she would never have needed to wear, Moll, because she was only seventeen and weighed about seven stone, but it was the fashion back then, that kind of underwear. She thought she ought and it would look sophisticated. And sexy. Which to Tommy, it probably did. It turned him on, no doubt: he was Thomas bloody Dove. He would have been insistent, he wouldn’t have taken no for an answer—is it possible to think this, to think about the point when your own father’s juices start flowing, the first moment you are being brought into production, down some tube . . . the first little throb? The idea of me, the dot. Well, yes. Just about possible. But we’ll skip that, because I never did ask them, and I’m only . . . speculating. We’ll go straight to my birth.
I wonder how I knew, one day, that it was my time to arrive. (Doctors still don’t agree on that, do they? A mystery, how labor is triggered. Is it the mother whose pituitary gland secretes oxytocin, or is it actually the baby who sends the signal from its adrenal glands to the mother’s body to signal labor?) This has always interested me. I like to think it was me who decided, that I actually, in some tiny, seedlike part of my consciousness, heard the rag-and-bone man in the street—my granddad!—shouting raaaaagaboooahgh, and decided, yep, sounds good, time’s up, here I come.
He had a horse and cart. Granddad I mean. But he died the year I was born so I only got to ride in it once. There’s a photo of me and whenever I look at it, I’m there: the smell of the horse shit steaming on the street, the bumpiness of that cracked leather seat, the feeling of being Lord of the Manor in my knitted lace baby bonnet and my tie-at-the-neck bouncing pom-poms sodden with dribble, propped up on a bunch of cushions; gazing down from a grand height, jolting round the Isle of Dogs like Lady Muck. You might think this couldn’t possibly be a real memory, I was too young. It must be something made up, something the photograph calls up. What’s the difference? It feels real enough to me.
We lived then in a flat in the tenements built to house dockworkers, and my mum, Molly, was seventeen like I said, and Irish, and a slattern. That’s my word for it. In Poplar the word would have been a bike. She’d arrived in London with her big sister Brodie just a few years before and met my dad, Thomas, at a dance. Dad was twenty-five and all dark and hairy, with the most spectacular temper you ever witnessed. He had—she told me—a good job down the docks when she first met him. Those jobs were well-paid and really sought after, especially since we were in the midst of a depression, and my uncle Charlie was the gang leader so he always assured Dad would get chosen for work, but everyone knew Dad wouldn’t last long, because the job was full of “temptations.”
One thing about Dad that was true his whole life was that he couldn’t work for anybody but himself. He always fell out with a boss, as soon as the poor sod tried to tell him what to do. Dad couldn’t abide being told. And in that moment, when his temper went off, when he yelled all the joined-up obscenities that came to mind or put his face really close to someone’s and pressed his nose against theirs, he loved the freedom of really saying what he felt, of losing it completely. You could feel the joy crackle around him like a sparkler flaring into life when he lost his temper, and nothing at all mattered.
Our tenements were densely packed buildings with external stone steps, about six stories high, set between Blackwall Tunnel and Blackwall Stairs. All the flats were light-starved, as they faced inwards towards a courtyard, heaped with strings of sopping washing where the women would stand, where my nan would be, most days, peg in her mouth, basket at her feet, chatting, laughing, surrounded by bins that were always overflowing.
Moll had wanted to give birth at home, I know, because she was too lazy to get herself to the hospital, but home was a right tip, really filthy, I mean it always stank to high heaven: of urine, my dad’s sweaty baked-bean armpit smell, cigarettes, spilled beer, dirty, unwashed clothes, paraffin for the heater. Those were the smells that would have greeted me after that clean pure smell of blood and adrenaline and the whoosh of arrival. Shit. I should have been warned. But I was nothing but an optimist, from day one, and in that respect maybe I was more like my nan, not my mum. Or more like myself, perhaps. Surely there’s a bit of me that’s inexplicable, that’s just me? It can’t only be genetics and environment can it, otherwise, well, wouldn’t we be repeating everything, walking round like clones? I was never one of those kids who shouted, “I never asked to be born!” because it wasn’t true. I longed to be born, I was even two weeks early. I jumped out, I really did. I couldn’t wait.
I remember Nan telling me that the midwife was just a slip of twenty-two, her name was something like Jennifer, or perhaps Rosie—let’s call her Rosie—and she was still in training with the nuns who delivered babies in our part of London; she would have had a uniform on, and worn a handkerchief over her nose and chin. This girl had managed, with Nan’s help, to get the flat into some sort of state to greet me. Of course I can’t remember this, but you know I can imagine it or make it up and that’s nearly the same thing: the midwife’s young high voice squeaking while I was starting my descent, saying things to my mum like, “The heartbeat’s 126, that’s very good,” and, “Oh—oh, Mrs. Dove, you never said the baby was breech . . . ?”—a question that Mum wouldn’t have known how to answer. There’d be Nan, too, her slightly raspy tone, always clacking her dentures somehow because they were a bad fit; saying things like, “Well for God’s sake, she didn’t know!” And then to herself: “I’ll find someone to tell that good-for-nothing son of mine that he’s been and got a little one on the way,” and her knees snapping and creaking like twigs on a fire, as she knelt by the bed. She’d never be sure where Lucky Boy Tommy was, although even at the cell-dividing stage I could have told her: the betting shop was always worth a try.
I was pushed about, then, or whatever it is that a baby feels, pulled and pummeled in a corkscrew fashion, and all around me the seething walls sort of pumping me and squeezing me. Nan says I ventured one little foot out and it was dramatic: it caused such a shriek—“What’s that? My God, what’s that?”—that I tried again.
I was still in the sac, all nicely sealed up and wet, and you know mine had to be an original entrance—not a slimy red head like the cliché, no not for me—but a foot inside a bulging transparent sac, like the eye of some fantastical insect or a sea monster, something like that. Nan said they couldn’t believe it when they first saw me: they thought I’d come from the moon! She said the midwife, the young Rosie, actually screamed with astonishment: “Oh my word, a footling breech!”
In a rush of liquid, all at once, here I am, then, one foot after the other, and no time really for Moll to push, that’s what Nan said; when a baby’s in this position there’s no stopping her. They’re shouting and fussing, the midwife, Nan, Mum . . . and I’m making my first great escape—feet first, leaping, heading for the open, for the light!
That then was the fanfare and kerfuffle when I arrived in such an unusual way, and a few hours later, when he was found (yes, at the betting shop, and in a grand mood, Nan remembers, because he’d won two a pound and brought home a crate of beer), would have been the first time I met my gorgeous dad.
It must have been late by then. The midwife would be long gone, and Nan would have been snoozing by the fir
e, her knitting pattern sliding off her knee, a giant gobstopper clacking against her dentures; one foot in her pink slipper on the cradle she’d popped me into to rock me now and then. Mum lying with her face to the wall on a bed in the same room, her long auburn hair spread out on the pillow like a mess of hay. I guess Mum was sometimes a looker—I think I learned that over the years, the reactions she got when she pranced down the park with us in the pram, all bound up in her tightest skirt and her clickiest heels, her hair washed and piled on top of her head in curls. But this was rare. She mostly lay in bed in those early years, with her face to the wall, and allowed Nan to do any taking care of us that happened. If she did get herself tarted up, she did it with a giddy, brittle kind of feeling and we knew it was all going to end badly.
So now Dad came in, and he had his wild black hair slicked down, and such a big, big grin on his face and such pale icy blue eyes. He scooped me up from the cradle and if I close my eyes now I can imagine the massive beating of his heart beside me and the metal buttons on his jacket digging into me and the tickly hair rising up from inside his collar and the powerful smell of him—beer, tobacco, the leather strap from his watch, which was too big for him and he’d been piercing with a knife; a strong, animal smell, sort of bitter and warm all at once. “Look what I’ve been and got for my little rosebud,” he’s saying, producing from inside his jacket a bunny rabbit, white and sprawling legged, and dangling it in front of me.
Did he really? Did he bring me that bunny the first night I was born? I have a vivid memory of it. It traveled through my childhood with me, turning grey eventually like all of us, and one ear flopping hopelessly over its eye, but then it would have been new, made of felted wool, with soft white ears carrying little flecks of crumbled leather from Dad’s watch strap, and smelling of him. It had a glamorous pink bow around the neck, so I knew the bunny was a girl. Why do I think he must have given me it then and there, the first time we met? Because the shape of my life had begun and I feel certain it was Dad who began it. Things. That was what he gave me from the start in place of anything else and it’s what I ended up craving. Gifts and glamour and novelty, and if it came with a whiff of contraband so much the better.