by Dawson, Jill
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.”
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 t
ime 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!”