Lucky Bunny (9780062202512)

by Dawson, Jill

  Nan told me I opened just one newborn baby eye because the other was crusted with gunk and the eyelid wouldn’t budge and my dad laughed, saying to my mum, “That baby is winking at me! The gel’s on my side, Molly, and don’t you forget it,” and he tucked the rabbit in the blanket I was wrapped in and snuggled me back into the cradle. That was it, in fact. He was gone three weeks and didn’t so much as ask after his new daughter—or her mother—in that time, but why would I care about that? I had the bunny. “Came in here like bleeding King Kong . . . upsetting the baby,” Nan said, describing him later, unimpressed. King Kong was showing at the new Troxy cinema on Commercial Road: everyone was talking about it.

  My brother, Bobby, came along barely ten months later and looked like a scrappy black-haired doll. I do remember staring into the drawer they’d pulled out and laid him in, like he was a pet guinea pig or something, and pushing the empty teat of a bottle towards his mouth and watching his tiny eyes stare at me over the top of it, grateful, I supposed, or desperate.

  There was one tap for cold running water and one lavatory shed down in the courtyard at that time, for a whole row of families to use. If it was dark and raining, the corridor and stairs would gleam slick as the skin of a black slug. I wouldn’t dare to venture there, preferring to use the chipped china pot in the corner of the bedroom. It seems to me a little easier to forgive Mum for being so disgusting in her personal habits when I remember that. That was the first five years of my life.

  Nan lived one flight down. She was Dad’s muvver, she’d had a great band of boys, and no girls, and all of them “bad as socks” and sure to be “the death of her.” Like lots of women at that time she’d all her teeth removed for no good reason except that she couldn’t afford dentists’ bills, and if she had any beauty, I think it went that day with the teeth.

  The boys had long since left, all except Charlie and her eldest and wildest, my dad, Lucky Boy Tommy, who she doted on; for all he had been such a “bleedin’ handful,” for all he got the needle so often and with such dramatic results. She was horrified by his choice of wife. Skinny hopeless Irish Moll who had no “good Irish” left in her. Moll’s mum had died when she was a girl so in Nan’s view Moll had “no idea on God’s bleedin’ green earth” how to be a mother. Mum’d been raised by her older sisters and only one of them had come to London with her. Those sisters had been useless, as far as Nan was concerned; “they didn’t half bugger up the raising of Moll” by imparting no practical skills and indulging Moll’s laziness and helplessness. Nan had been teetotal all her life, despite the many times when Dad and his brother Charlie had tried to hoodwink her with a slug of Haig in her tea. Molly, now eighteen, and a mother of two, already drank like a fish.

  My nan used to say to me when I was little, “Who did she get you off of, eh? Where’d she find you?” It worried me, though I think she meant it kindly. I thought that if it wasn’t the moon, it must have been somewhere far away like Canada. Somewhere icy and clean—a blank slate to drive a glacier through the filth of Molly’s life. I worked out years later that all Nan meant was: how did I get to be so clever? And that was before they tested me, before they knew how clever. Nan couldn’t quite believe I was one of the Dove family. But when she said it then, shaking her head and pursing her mouth, I thought she meant to disown me, or suggest I was the milkman’s daughter, like people did with Meryl Davis.

  I didn’t realize it then, but that comment of Dad’s about my winking—if Nan remembered it right, this setting us up together as in cahoots against Mum—was my undoing as far as Mum was concerned. She was depressed, yes, but she was jealous, too. She liked to be the baby herself, the center of attention, and when she clicked first with me and then with Bobby, she loved the fuss. But once the babies came that all changed. It was just crying and pooping and work, work, work. She’d once said to my dad, “Why don’t you do all the bleedin’ nappy-changing and nappy-washing if you love kids so much?” and he’d said (apparently), “You never ought to have had any, you, and all right then I will do the nappies and I’ll do it a hell of a lot better an you do.” So she started this campaign, where she’d never change Bobby until Dad got home so that she could hand him over. I needn’t tell you that in those days men did not change nappies.

  Bobby would be sore and red and his little bum kind of scalded looking, but if Dad didn’t turn up for days on end Mum wouldn’t change him. She’d just leave his nappy off and let him piddle and poop anywhere in the flat, like a little rabbit. She was on a protest. I don’t know how she dared to do this, because she must have known it would make Dad mad, mad in a way that always meant fireworks. When he finally did show up, she’d be ready for him. She’d stand in her dressing gown, the house stinking, drawing on her cigarette as she propped up the French dresser, smoking and pretending to be calm. Her heartbeat, the sense that she was ticking, like a bomb ready to go off . . . I could feel it, the moment I heard his key in the door. I’d tug on Bobby’s hand and take him and hide somewhere, under the beds in our bedroom, where we could put our hands over our ears so we couldn’t hear it.

  Once I crept out, saw them in the hall. Watched from behind a door crack as he took off his shoe, and threw it at her. It hit her on the shoulder and thudded off the wall, leaving a black smudge, but she just brushed at her shoulder, carried on walking into the kitchen.

  “Huh! You think that fucking hurt?” she couldn’t resist saying, over her shoulder.

  So he took off the other one . . . I ran into bed then, back under the pillow, Bunny next to me and only the sound of my own sputtering heart for company. That phrase of Dad’s, the allying of me to him, struck deep. I’m not like her, I thought. I had no sympathy at all for her. No one’s ever going to throw a shoe at me.

  But it was a confused thought, because Moll was stubborn, and defiant in her way, and perhaps my stubbornness was as much from her as Dad? When Nan visited over the next few years she was horrified by the state of our place and would spend her whole time on her hands and knees with a dustpan and brush, while Bobby would stand playing by the mouse hole next to the fire, poking a pencil into it to see if he could make the mouse come out. Nan would be scooping up dry filth and crying. “What’s got into you, Moll? What on earth are you thinking? I’m telling you, these kids will get sick if you carry on like this . . . it’s the worst pen . . .”

  Pen and ink. Stink.

  Nan decided, finally, that she was the only one who could improve things in her daughter-in-law’s home, so she took it on herself to bathe us, hauling buckets of water from the tap down in the courtyard up the stairs, and setting up a chipped china basin in front of the fire. Bobby would always scream and get a mere dunk: he’d soon be rolled in a thin blanket—there were never any towels—and left in front of the fire, where he’d wriggle out in an instant. He could never be still for long. Moll and Bobby hated water, but I loved it. I loved that trickling feeling as Nan splashed it over me. I loved sitting up in my cramped bowl, once I could, and gazing at Nan—how she always seemed to me, right from the very beginning, just like a tortoise, with her neck stretching out, all folded and crisscrossed, so many hundreds of times. I loved the tinkle of the drips between her fingers, as she lifted up the old grey flannel and squeezed it; and the way the droplets looked like gold beads when a little flame from the kitchen fire was reflected in them. I loved water—baths, pools, the sea. That was another way that I was different from my mum, who had a suspicion of anyplace green or wet, or not made of bricks.

  We didn’t get to go to anyplace green, though, until six years after that, when war broke out and Bobby and I were evacuated. We’d moved from Canada Buildings by then, to a house on the Well Street end of Lauriston Road in South Hackney, near the church, and I’d started at Lauriston School and Bobby was in the nursery class. That was the most extraordinary change. I mean, Lucky Boy Tommy really seemed to have struck lucky: he bought us that house for £250, a massive sum, and he bought a c
ar, too, a Chrysler, which was like a Mercedes in those days—we were the only family in the neighborhood who had one. Remembering this now, I realize that I did have some dim understanding of how unusual it was, but on the other hand, like any child, I just accepted it as an enchanting change in my life, like the Tizer and coconut ices he suddenly bought us, and the little shilling knife he bought Bobby, with the bone handle and the leather sheath. The car was a buttery yellow color, with a top that peeled back and these little canvas flaps in the windows that you could coil up around the window rails when the roof was off and big sweeping curves over the wheels and it was so delicious I used to think it was like one giant ice-cream cone when Dad rolled up outside our house.

  It was money which had made this magic, I knew that much. Dad would produce a silver sixpence from behind my ear and pop it on my tongue, or fold a ten-bob note up and poke it in the top pocket of my pinafore dress, patting it and telling me to “go buy myself something nice.” Silver coins tasted bitter and pennies tasted like blood, but the inky tang of folded notes when I slipped out my tongue and tried it was the best taste on earth. Rule Britannia, two tanners make a bob, Dad used to sing. He’d throw me up in the air when I was still small enough and there would be breath-holding seconds before he caught me again, where my heart would sail through the air with me, but he always did, and then he’d laugh, and snuggle my face with his, brushing me with his prickly chin.

  Those early days in Lauriston Road I’d stand at the corner shop with Bobby, mouth watering over the coconut ice and licorice sticks and know that we could choose them and take them home, where there’d be coal in the fire and Sally Lunn’s from Smulevitch’s bakery in Well Street and our lives would be different, full of calm. I knew that money did this: made our lives into those of children in books—safe and good, with kind parents. I even saw myself differently during this time: I was a girl with auburn ringlets, reading a book in a broderie anglaise dress, under a cherry tree, in a garden full of light.

  But being magic, it went up in a puff soon enough. After the thrill of the move and Mum’s joy in riding round the streets in the Chrysler, with her conker-colored hair pinned tightly into a pale pink scarf patterned with rosebuds and wearing a white dress with thin straps and a sweetheart neckline—well after that there was a dreadful ugly night, when we had a spin. The police, the cozzers, came round, opening drawers and cupboards and pulling out things, until our spanking-new place looked just like a hamster’s hutch with all its stuffing pulled out.

  Dad sat all through it, glowering on his brand-new red sofa, wearing a vest where hair snaked out from under his armpits, and around the neck, smoking and refusing to say anything. Mum was crying, Bobby was crouching behind the sofa, and I was right next to him. Bobby and me stared right into each other’s eyes, but said nothing. Bobby had the sweetest little face, with cropped black hair and round, sticking-out ears: his nickname was Monkey. Also, because he was cheeky and a scamp and always dangling from some tree or rung of a ladder or something. His favorite game was to go over to Vicky Park with his shilling knife with the bone handle—all the boys had knives in those days—and practice throwing it at trees, while the crows tottered on the grass like fat vicars and the Jewish boys chased each other around Vicky Fountain, throwing their black caps in the air.

  Bobby sat now, with his knees up and long arms dangling. I could smell him: a sweaty-socks-and-shoes smell and the smell of these hard sweets he loved—black hard licorice pips, which Nan would give him from a tin and sometimes stuck to his teeth so that he could pretend to be a toothless pirate. I had the strongest feeling that to say anything, I mean a word, not just the wrong word, could make the worst thing ever happen. Could make my dad disappear. So when this policeman’s face looms over the sofa and says, “Hello there, and who have we got here?” I wouldn’t answer him, and I squinted at Bobby who squinted right back, snapping his mouth tight shut. There was another baby by then: Vera, a big fat jowly kind of baby who looked just like a Baby Grumpy doll, and who was lying in her fancy white crib, a little distance from the sofa, staring up at the colored balls of string which on one of her rare visits here Nan had pegged above her head.

  The policeman soon gave up, straightening up and taking his notebook out of his top pocket, and we watched as he and another man tried to manhandle our dad and get him out of the room. They told him to get a shirt. We held our breath, wondering what Dad would do. No one spoke to him like that! Even Mum stopped sobbing for a minute, to peep from behind her hands, and watch.

  When he wouldn’t move, the policeman made a noise with his tongue and went wandering round our house. We listened in hot silence as he thudded up the stairs and came down with a white shirt, from the airing cupboard. The room crackled with the smell of Dad’s anger, with the feeling I always had when I knew Dad was angry. But to my surprise—to everyone’s surprise—Dad just put the shirt on, grinning all the while, taking the longest time to do up every button, fiddling at his cuffs to do them up really, really carefully, right up to the top collar, and then gave a short laugh. He had this weird laugh. It wasn’t when he found things funny. That laugh frightened me, in fact, because he’d put his face too close to you when he did it, and sort of bark at you, right at you until you could feel the spray. He did this now, and the room felt very silent and small, like being in a cupboard.

  Dad had turned rigid, stood with his legs apart, pretending not to notice what they were doing as the two men got his arms behind him, put cuffs on him, and attached him to one of them.

  I covered my face with my hands.

  But I had to look, I had to glance, as I saw the two policemen move behind him, give him a poke in the back. The one he was locked to had to sort of stumble behind him, like this toy I had once, a little walking toy with a rod between the two wooden characters. Dad looked proud, then, with his ice-blue eyes staring straight ahead, his sweet-scented hair, his strange smile not wobbling at all. They kept on pushing him, shoving him in the back, and they got him to move in the end.

  Just as he was leaving he wheeled around, and ducked his head over the top of the sofa to say to me (and only me), “That’s right, my gel. Don’t you ever go and be a grass. Worst thing in the world. Rather die than be a grass, eh?” I thought he might be about to smack me, he looked so furious, but instead he gave me this whoppa of a kiss, a big hard kiss landing like a fist on my head, and that was it: in a whirl of smoke and the sound of Vera wailing, he was gone.

  That night I took Bunny to bed with me and sniffed it, trying to breathe some enchantment, something of Dad—the feelings he always brought, the sense that something good might happen to us at last. That rabbit was magic. Dad had produced it, a magician conjuring it from a hat. Dad could snatch at your nose and pretend to pinch it, and then—puff!—it would reappear between his fingers. So maybe Dad would reappear, if I longed for him enough? I slept with Bunny’s pink silky ribbon under my cheek, and in the morning there was a red strip there. I ran my finger along it, the strange ridge on my skin, thinking: if only it would never fade.

  I knew we were going to be hungry then. Where would the money for food come from, if Dad wasn’t around? Moll could survive on cigarettes, on “air-pie and a walk around,” as Nan used to say. We often felt hungry, we were used to it, but it started up that night, a more desperate, clawing feeling than I’d had before, and I knew it was here to stay, for a long, long time.

  Dad got nine months. The prison was in the country and we never went to visit him. We didn’t know what he’d done; no one mentioned it to us. I somehow got the impression that the house would be taken from us, that what he’d done connected to that, but it never was. Mum told us we should look sad if anyone asked in Hackney and say Daddy was a soldier in Burma—this was before the war had started—and how much we missed him.

  “Let me see you say it,” she said to me, and I put my head on one side and slumped my shoulders and said, “My poor daddy is a soldie
r over—overcease—and we’re all on our own.” “No!” she says. “Don’t ham it up, gel,” and I had to try again, especially with the “overseas” word, until I got it just right and she sat back on her heels and laughed and said, “Well, would you look at that, the gel’s a proper bleeding actress, ain’t she good at lying?”

  I beamed at that: the first—maybe only—compliment she ever paid me.

  So then the leafleting started, it must have been summer of ’39, and Mum picked one up one day standing waiting in the butcher’s on Well Street market—where she couldn’t afford anything and was just chatting to Sly Roger, the butcher, who was a friend of my dad’s. In fact he was a friend of quite a few men who were inside at that time, and Sly Roger made it his business to look out for them, women whose husbands were “away”; to help their wives out occasionally. He wasn’t actually called Sly, of course; that was Nan’s name for him. She would say, “Roger the Dodger the Dirty old Lodger” and some other rhymes, so that’s how I thought of him. Mum picked a leaflet up from the dusty window ledge of Sly Roger’s shop with flakes of sawdust on it and that blood and sawdust butchers’ smell—and read it out to me and Bobby as we were leaving, pushing Vera with her bouncing pom-poms on her hat in her pram up Well Street.

  “MOTHERS SEND THEM OUT OF LONDON,” she read.