Lucky Bunny (9780062202512)

by Dawson, Jill

  First I go in the ration shop run by Old Mr. Spinks. He was once a bare-knuckle boxer, and Bobby told me that one day, when Mr. Spinks didn’t like the fish and chips he was served, he threw the cat in the fish shop fryer, so I’m scared of him. The place is too small anyway, so I just glance around and float my hand over some socks to muss up the neat piles and then leave. I consider nicking a pair for Bobby, but the stash under the bed for him is getting bigger and bigger, and today the thought doesn’t comfort me.

  Also the Green Bottles are in Margate for some reason, and I miss having them around to goad and praise me. I choose not to go up towards Bethnal Green Road, like I normally would. I’m tired of the rubble—Stein’s clothiers is just one pointed finger of bricks left standing. I hate seeing all the poor sad dogs nosing around, nobody to claim them anymore. No, I’ll go the other way. Not that Mare Street is different. I’m sick of everywhere being window splinters and dust: the buildings all broken open, showing their ugly insides, everything so exposed and jumbled up and frightening, the way you feel when you come home and find your drawers tipped out, after your house has had a spin by the police. Now it’s like all the houses have had a spin. One big giant one, by God or the Luftwaffe.

  Thinking this, I’m getting deeper and deeper into the doldrums, and I find myself outside James Brooke and Sons, and the only little possible cheery thing I can think of is to get Grace the new shoes. So I leave the pram outside. Red ones. Red leather with little cutout clovers in the front and a red leather button on a fine strap. They’re so sweet they make me drool. They’re on a shelf next to some blue ones but the red look smaller, they look a better size for Gracie. I just pick them up and push the door and walk out into the drizzly rain with them. I’m thinking that if anyone stops me I’ll say I was just trying them for size on Gracie’s feet.

  But no one stops me. No one is interested. I think about going back in for some socks but the rain is now falling a little harder, making a patting sound on the hood of the pram, and I don’t have a coat, or hat. The baby will be fine with her waterproof pram cover. I slip the shoes inside it to keep them nice and dry and maneuver the pram around—the trick is to use all my weight at the back to make the front wheels lift so that I can turn it—and begin hurrying home down Mare Street. I feel flat. The red shoes are mouthwateringly beautiful, but just the same . . . things look as ugly as ever. And I can’t show them to Bobby and there’s no point nicking a bun from Smulevitchs’s bakery for him, either. The dust and the rubble everywhere turns to slick grey sludge in the rain. My stomachache is really kicking in. I need to go home and get some bicarbonate of soda. And when I have, I’m going to write to Bobby again. Annie mentioned there’s a “borstal hour” when they’re allowed to write letters, so maybe this time he’ll reply?

  Did I see a shop walker? There was someone looking at me, and usually I would be so good at spying her. I go over and over this in my mind when I get home (in the end I took a meandering route, sloshing the pram wheels through puddles and forgetting my stomachache; stopping at the sweet shop for some paregorics, then throwing them away because the smell brings back Nan so fiercely; kissing Gracie’s nose and making her laugh), and Dad tells me grimly that the police have already been round and asking for me. His mood has changed entirely since this morning. Anger always seems to leave him as suddenly as a match flame dies. He’s dog-tired now and looks it, with a five o’clock shadow and his ice-blue eyes pale as water. He ruffles my hair with his huge hand and I grab it and hold it there as he says, “Oh, sugar. What am I going to do if they take you off of me as well?”

  I really think he means it. Gracie starts crying in her pram outside but no one goes to pick her up.

  Phew. I’ve got away with it—the police have been and gone again. Yes, they know where I live, but it’s hardly surprising: our family is pretty well known to them.

  I show Dad the gorgeous dolly-sized shoes and he smiles but then sighs and frowns and says I’d better go chuck them in the Regent’s Canal. When I pull a face he says gruffly that he’ll do it for me. So that’s where he is when the cozzers come back.

  Annie lets them in. This time they have the welfare lady with them.

  And that’s how I ended up in the Approved School in Kent. The very same day I became a “young lady,” as Gloria had helpfully warned me in advance that I would. That is, I finally understood what the stomachache was, as I sat squirming self-consciously on the nasty green seat next to the young policewoman in the Black Maria. The first time I was nicked was the day I got my first period. The Curse.

  But before I got to the Approved School, I got my first glimpse of Holloway. Another day, another journey in a Black Maria. They took me to the juvenile wing first, for assessment and to await my next showing in the juvenile court. I’ll never forget it—the drive towards that awful gatehouse: the building just exactly like something Dracula would live in, I thought, glimpsed from the window of the police car. I craned my head to look up at the waving Union Jack, knowing this would be my last sight of anything gaily moving, anything free in a long, long time. Two stone griffins with keys clenched in their jaws glared down at me. There was a pause while the policewoman sitting next to me leaned forward to say something to the driver, and a prison guard by the door. The car rolled towards the gate with horrible slowness, to allow me to fully take in every word carved above it.

  Let this place be a terror to evil doers.

  I’m sure I cried then, but if I did, I wiped my nose and cheeks with my sleeve and made sure the policewoman didn’t see it and licked at the salty taste and told myself that would be the last time. If I cried, it would have been because I allowed myself the luxury of thinking of Mum, or that I couldn’t stop thoughts of her from clamoring. Remembering that one visit to her, that haunting, castle-like place. Holloway was bigger and scarier than the secure hospital had been; with no countryside around it, just gargoyles and griffins and ugly stone things. That would be me, now, my life, I thought. Stuck in stone. Mum would never know I was here, in the borstal wing, with the borstal brats, waiting for people to assess me and write about me and decide, as they had with her, what to do with me.

  When Approved School was first mentioned in court I pictured it like I’d seen in Picture Post with sexy girls in pointy sweaters fighting and pulling each other’s hair. But Holloway was nothing like that. I asked if I could go to the toilet and as I reached the cubicles in the remand wing, flanked by two officers, something skidded out across the floor from under the large gap at the bottom of the lavatory door. My new status as a “young lady” allowed me to understand what this paper item was, but did nothing to reduce the shock of seeing such a thing—soiled, too, as it bounced off my ankle.

  But Approved School was better. A house in the country with locked doors, but no bars on the windows. Thirty girls, mostly tearaways and hoisters and “good time girls”—it filled the papers, the problem of “good time girls”; there was even a film with that title, about this real case, the “cleft-chin murder,” done by a girl with her GI boyfriend, and the policewoman who came with me to prison was full of it, kept talking about it excitedly and wanting the prison guards to tell her more.

  Approved School had five dormitories with six beds in each, and a big recreation room, where we were taught to make pineapple upside-down cake.

  What I remember about that school now was the smell in it—a smell of old food, puddings and gravy, and of mothballs and damp, dirty coats hanging in the hall. We had to have daily walks, in all weathers, but laundry and baths were only once a week. A faintly unclean, unloved smell. Also I remember this: there were no mirrors. You brushed your teeth staring at wallpaper or bathroom tiles. You brushed your hair by asking the girl next to you if it looked all right. The nuns who ran the school must have thought that mirrors would make us vain, or tempt us to smash them, perhaps—make weapons of them. But fourteen-year-old girls need mirrors; it’s the time in your life
when you’re most puzzled by what you look like, the time you are most anxious to see yourself reflected, to know who you are, whether you’re pretty and desirable, or even that you exist. And so I think that the other girls, and particularly Stella, became my mirror. We spent so much time together, seeing only other girls, like us—seeing ourselves. We somehow knew without asking things about each other’s lives that others would never guess at. And we learned how others saw us, too, our reflection in the world. That phrase of Elsie’s: “East End slum kids.” That came back to me sometimes, when a certain nun looked at me, usually Sister Grey, who shrugged her shoulders with a great flourish and told me I was the wickedest girl she’d ever come across in her long long life. “You’re wicked through and through, Queenie Dove.” (I’d found a field mouse, and put it in her desk. Which wasn’t wicked—it was funny.)

  It turned into a competition, then. Between me and Stella, I mean. We both had pride and wanted to be the best, and we started to goad each other. Who could be the wickedest? Who could make the nuns despair the most?

  Stella arrives the same day as me, along with another girl who’s skinny and buck-toothed with bad-smelling feet, called Valerie Tomlinson.

  Stella is a tall girl with close-together eyes and straight hair that she swishes over her shoulder with a gesture Nan would have said was showing off. I look at this girl keenly, taking in her big bosoms and her shoulders-back posture, and the way she is making tiny chewing movements every so often with her mouth, moving something around in there, as though she is trying to chew gum, although there are signs everywhere saying it’s forbidden.

  “So many of them . . . that’s three new ones this week!” says the wobbly old nun we’re to call Sister Grey, sitting at the table and looking hopelessly at our forms. “We shall have to build another wing if this carries on.”

  “I blame war fever,” the other nun says. This nun has her back to us and is built like a gas cooker, straight up and down. She has a voice full of opinions: “These girls are boy mad, they go for anyone in a uniform, and the American influence didn’t help, either.”

  This makes no sense to me since I’m in for hoisting and nothing whatsoever to do with boys or “war fever”; what’s more, the war’s been over now for two years, so what on earth are they talking about? The tall girl next to me titters and shifts impatiently from foot to foot. She seems a lot older than me, so I’m surprised to read (upside down on the notes on the table in front of me) that her birth date is only the year before mine. That makes her fifteen. Impressive then that she’s already got Sister Grey snapping her ruler on her desk in irritation.

  “You think that’s funny do you, Miss Stella S—”

  Better still, I recognize Stella’s name as being from a big Jewish/Irish family in Bethnal Green and I beam my recognition of this at her, so far from home in this country house in darkest Kent. She seems to take a minute to decide whether to beam back, running her dark-green eyes over my crumpled pinafore dress and my straggling brown hair before finally moving the gum to one side of her mouth, and half-smiling.

  “And is that chewing gum, young lady? A disgusting habit—give that to me!” screams Sister Grey. This funny old nun is slightly shaky, all the time, I realize: her head, her hands tremble, like she’s a cup of milk on a train journey, ready to wobble over at any moment.

  Sister Grey pushes the wooden ruler towards Stella’s mouth and indicates with a shove that she’s to put her gum on the end of it, so that Sister Grey can walk with it to the wastepaper basket without having to touch it. Stella slowly sticks out her tongue and with finger and thumb deposits the rolled up belly-button-sized piece of grey gum on the end of the ruler. Of course, it sticks a little, and Sister Grey gets to the bin but just shudders and can’t flick it off. She gets agitated then, obviously regretting that she asked Stella to do such a stupid thing—why didn’t she just make Stella put it in the bin herself?—and the other nun turns around and stares at her, clearly thinking the same thing, and shaking her head a little, which makes me want to snigger, and almost feel sorry for Sister Grey. I can see at once how it is between those two nuns. A bit like me and Stella. Sister Grey, now really flustered, shakes and stammers and squeaks a little, and in the end throws the ruler in the bin, and wheels back towards us. Her upper lip is sweating.

  “Disgusting! You’re thoroughly repulsive, you girls. Now get to your rooms.”

  Stella grins and glances at me. The girl with the smelly feet looks worried and tries to hurry out of the door. First point to Stella, I think to myself. Battle lines are drawn.

  “What are you in for?” I whisper to Stella, clutching the three belongings I’ve got with me in my dolly-bag: Annie’s nail-buffer, Annie’s lucky gloves, and Annie’s empty cigarette case. They were the only things I managed to grab that day—which feels like an age ago now—when I was first taken for a ride in the Black Maria. Not exactly practical, but since I can’t harm myself with them, I’ve been allowed to keep them in my room.

  “Too much war fever with too many boys,” Stella whispers back, and I giggle, excited by her willingness to spill the beans. Maybe Approved School might teach me something useful, some of those things to do with men and boys that the Green Bottles were always hinting at and laughing over, but never quite spelling out?

  It takes a long while to fall asleep, that first night. Stella is in the bed next to mine, and we’ve been whispering for hours after lights out, and finally I slip into a twitchy sleep, and start dreaming at once. I’m standing above a huge staircase. The staircase is long and steep so that I can’t see the bottom; it shelves suddenly like a cliff, and you can drop off the end, I know that. Someone is beside me holding my hand, and I think at first it’s Nan, but then I see her about halfway down the staircase, waving at me and smiling, showing her pink denture-gums. So I try to turn my head to see who’s beside me, thinking it must be Bobby then, but my head won’t turn, and I somehow know without being told or without seeing for myself that it’s not Bobby, either, it’s someone else. I want to see that person, and I start to panic a little, not knowing if it’s someone or something I should be scared of—is it a nice person or not?—but my head won’t budge and whoever it is is just out of range. And the panic goes and instead I’m sad because Nan’s a ghost, and there’s nobody else on the staircase and I feel awfully lonely. I glance over the edge, wondering whether to take a step. Stella’s snoring breaks in then, startling me awake for a moment. When I sink back again, I can’t find the dream, no matter how hard I look for it.

  Dear Bobby,” I write. “I’ve made a friend here and her name is Stella. She’s teaching me lots of things like how to smoke. We’ve found these butts the gardener leaves in the garden where we do work in the allotment, and even though they are only Capstan and very squashed up and taste a bit soily, we can stretch them out and light them with matches nicked from the kitchen and it’s great. Hope you are finding some nice cigarettes in borstal and have found a good friend like I have. I hope that they are letting you do your Important Touching of things twenty times before you put them on. Love your Loving Sister, Queenie.”

  I push the letter under my pillow, where it sits on top of a small pile of others, tied together with an elastic band. I’ve finally stopped trying to post them, or expecting a reply. I’m not sure that my other letters even reached Bobby—I always gave them to Annie or Dad to post, relying on them to buy me a stamp, and I realize now that they probably didn’t bother.

  Sister Catherine—the Head Teacher—sends a note to call me into the office and makes me sit there waiting while she sharpens a load of pencils. I don’t mind being there because most of the school day is so boring, just full of rules rules rules, like stand up to talk to the teacher and wait until you’re spoken to before saying something and don’t ask questions unless you’re asked to and then don’t sit there in silence like a big lemon when I ask you something, young miss. Anyway I have been sent to
Sister Catherine’s office partly because today I wouldn’t stand up when Sister Grey asked me to and partly because there is going to be a visiting Ed Psych (Educational Psychologist) and I’m to be tested on things like my memory, which any nincompoop could tell you is brilliant, and then this other thing to do with my verbal reasoning or something and then this thing called the Stanford Binet for my IQ. Intelligence Quotient.

  Sister Catherine has a thick brow that sort of joins in the middle and shadows her eyes. She suddenly looks up from her sharpening of pencils, sighing really loudly and says:

  “You’ve been here some time now, Queenie. Nine months, I think. And so little improvement. Don’t you want to be a good girl?”

  I say nothing.

  “What would it take, I wonder, for you to be obedient for once?”

  “Miss?”

  “It’s Sister Catherine, Queenie, as well you know. If we can change with the times and call our pupils by the first names, the least you can do—”

  “Sister Catherine—people in Nazi Germany was obedient.”

  “Were obedient, Queenie. People in Hitler’s Germany were obedient.”

  “Yes, Sister Catherine. They did what they . . . were told and that’s why they did all those terrible things to Jewish people. I don’t want to be obedient, miss. I want to be an Old Scallywag—like my dad.”

  She sighs even more loudly, and sips at a mug of tea on the table.

  “Indeed. Well you’re obviously a clever girl—as well as a downright cheeky one. It’s such a waste, that’s all I’m saying. You could put your cleverness to a better use, Queenie, eh? You’re making life hard for yourself, with this resistance to rules, and your time here is ticking by and you’ve been sent here to improve you, do you understand, to—”