*Norbury: The Story of a London Suburb, J. G. Hunter and B. A. Mullen, 1977)
Chapter 3
Want to be a success? Look posh.
Jane had the big room at the back. Kenneth had the box room. June had the small front room. Doreen and George had the large room at the front: bay window, twin beds (much good they’d been) and his-and-hers burr walnut veneer wardrobes. Georgette’s cot had been in her parents’ room at first but she made so much noise – even when fast asleep – that they had moved her out on to the landing. There had been talk of her sharing Jane’s room. There had also been talk of Jane not rotten well putting up with it and finding a nice bedsit somewhere. Nice bedsit? Fifty bob a week for some bug-ridden box in Earl’s Court? Don’t make Doreen laugh.
Jane shivered into her room and switched on the one-bar electric fire. Hardy Amies’s suit hung from the picture rail and there was a bulge under the pink candlewick bedspread where she had stuffed the bag. She used to try hiding things under the bed or under the mattress but, while Doreen had stopped making Jane’s bed when she started at primary school, she still liked to nose about in such places. That was how she found poor Kenneth’s dirty postcard (a black and white Rokeby Venus). That was how she found Jane’s secret library: Lady Be Good, a pronouncing dictionary and Anita Colby’s Beauty Book (Let’s make a star out of you!). Doreen had a field day. Some people didn’t half fancy theirselves. But she never actually looked inside the bed – she had enough to do without waiting on Jane – so everything was now tucked safely away under the eiderdown.
Jane wedged a chair under the door handle, sat down at the frilly dressing table and posted a penny into her flowery china pig: A daily penny put away becomes 30s 5d in a year; buy two savings certificates and in seven years they will be worth £2. She pulled the big mock-tortoiseshell slide from the back of her long brown hair. She brushed it hard then reached for her china pot of hairpins – A present from Whitstable – God knew who from: no one in the family had ever been there. She fumbled her hair on to the top of her head then dabbed on a bit of lipstick. Too much. Outline your smile with a brush then blot with care. Try to give the outer edges a merry, upward flick. Never forget that a man will judge a girl’s disposition by her lips. Better, but it was still a rotten cheap colour. Geranium. She’d be better with Rose Satin or Raspberry Ice. Finally she slipped into the skirt and jacket, shuddering as the cold silk of the lining slid over her skin.
She put on her only high heels, a really smart pair of black suede stilettos that a customer – elegant little South American woman – had left behind in the shop still in their box and bag. They had hung on to them for a few weeks but she never came back. The senior salesladies had wanted them very, very badly but they weren’t a three and a half double A and Jane was. She walked – always leading with the thighs – towards the mirror.
Next she practised sinking down on to the corner of the bed and pretending to tuck her legs into the passenger seat of an imaginary sports car, raising her knees slightly so that the skirt slid up, exposing her lovely young knees, all cobwebbed by her cheap, laddered stockings.
Jane tilted her head into her mirror face – three-quarter profile, sucked-in cheeks – and gave herself a snooty model-girl look. The hair wasn’t right but it was a wonderful suit. Smiling with satisfaction, she perched on the dressing-table stool, crossed her legs – high on the thigh so that they are absolutely parallel from the knees down. Her reflection was deliciously rich and expensive, very ‘Can I help you, madam?’ She answered herself softly in her best elocution voice. A five-year scholarship to a convent school had given Jane lots of voices: dressy, casual and several grades in between.
‘I’m looking for something to match this,’ she said in her posh, world-weary whisper.
She passed the pot of hairpins to her reflection, smiling flirtatiously. As you sit before the glass, pick up various small articles and pretend you are passing them to your reflection.
Jane placed the magic handbag on her smooth, dogtoothed lap and began emptying its contents on to the glass top of the dressing table: handkerchief, envelope, compact, photograph, a tiny pair of nail scissors, a wallet full of hairpins, a pair of really good-quality stockings in a little cellophane bag (spares: very organised), a pair of gloves (always carry extra gloves in your bag in case the ones you have on become impossibly soiled), three keys (one Yale, two Banham) and a red leather purse – a very Norbury purse for such a beautiful Bond Street bag – with a ten-bob note and some silver. There was a tiny jeweller’s brooch box and Jane was half expecting diamonds but there was only a pair of fluffy black false eyelashes and a tiny tube of glue inside. Two expensive twist-up lipsticks – one for day, one for evening – and a brown eye pencil. There was the mirror in its little pocket and – bit funny – the price ticket. One hundred and ninety guineas. Export Only. Blimey. A good saleslady usually took the price off in case it was a present.
There was nothing with the girl’s name on it. No letters. No cheque book – you’d expect someone with a crocodile bag to have a cheque book. There was an expensive-looking diary covered in ginger pigskin that told you when to stop and start shooting things. The personal details page was blank but there were twenty, maybe thirty birthdays in written in the same colour ink – as if whoever she was had sat down in January and copied them over. Some of the other dates were circled (for fairly obvious reasons) and the next few weeks were peppered with mysterious meetings: ‘Bergman’s (day for evening) 10.30 5gns’; ‘Earl’s Court. West Door. 9am. Short sleeves.’ There were some gin rummy scores on the inside cover – S, P and M – and a few phone numbers in the back – all men’s names, all West End exchanges. But Jane could hardly ring some strange Dick or Harry (Regent 4121) and ask about a mysterious brunette and a crocodile handbag.
There weren’t any cigarettes but there were two books of matches: one was from Carpenter’s oyster bar, the other was the photographic kind they made at dances and had ready by the time you went home. The girl was sat on the lap of a middle-aged man in a dinner jacket. They were both wearing party hats. The man just looked old and a bit drunk in his but the girl, in her strapless satin gown, made the funny little fez seem larky and exotic. She was having a very good time – or knew how to photograph that way. The more dress rehearsals you have with your make-believe audience, the better the real performance will be. Jane threw her head back and laughed lightly at the mirror, dislodging some of the pins in her hair so that the whole lot fell down.
She brushed it all out again and hung the suit back on its hanger ready for the morning. It was far too good for work really but where else was she going to wear it? Shopping in Croydon? The shop closed at one on Saturdays. If the worst came to the worst she could always go back to that dreadful pub but she’d try the oyster bar first – in her suit. See if anyone could remember seeing the girl. She looked at the photograph again, unconsciously tilting her head to the same angle, smiling the same smile. They were bound to remember.
Chapter 4
Just remember that your personality
isn’t printed on you like a birthmark.
It can alter for better or worse –
and you’re the girl who alters it.
Jane’s alarm went at half six, a strange soft sound from inside a sandwich of cushions – whoever woke Georgette had to change her and poke Ready Brek into her with a special pink spoon. Jane was most at risk (she got up a good hour before anyone else) but it was usually June who was unlucky. She was rather heavy on her feet but Jane suspected she did it on purpose. She liked taking the pram out as well. Creep.
Jane’s stockings, underwear and quilted nylon dressing gown were already hanging over the back of the chair in front of the fire. She leaped out of bed, switched it on, drew the curtains then jumped back under the covers. A fancy lace of frost had grown on the window panes overnight. It was even colder today. A few more minutes in the warm and Jane was up, huddling into her dressing gown and slippers and tiptoeing a
long the corridor to the bathroom. Georgette had taken her time getting off to sleep the night before but was dead to the world now, grunting and snoring through some dreamland tantrum.
Jane met Kenneth just coming out of the bathroom, spots glowing after a good wash. Kenneth usually spent his Saturdays loitering at bus stops. But today he was off to Streatham bloody Garage – a lot of really important routes didn’t come as far as Norbury apparently.
Kenneth had left the heater on but it hadn’t even started to take the chill off the room and only ever really heated the ceiling. The bathroom was very bare (Doreen couldn’t abide clutter). There was a bottle of medicated shampoo, a pale blue nailbrush shaped like a swan, a rack of curling toothbrushes and a yellow bar of soap with a label glued into the middle of it. Uncle George liked to keep the Steradent in the bathroom cabinet with the Elastoplast and the iodine bottle but his wife was forever taking it out and putting it in the middle of the glass shelf – in case anyone forgot. On the ledge behind the lavatory sat three wrapped bath cubes. June had once given Doreen a Mothering Sunday present but it wasn’t a mistake you made twice (‘I’m not your mother, thank Gawd’ was the thanks she got). The bath cubes (Goya, Black Rose) had sat there unused and dusty ever since: ‘they dry the skin’.
The Ascot water heater had a big red sign hung round it from the Gas Board pointing out that it had been condemned as unsafe to use. Doreen couldn’t see anything wrong with it. All them water heaters made a noise. The notice was all curled up with age and damp. Either Doreen was right, or they were all living on borrowed time. A smart female will earn enough (or marry enough) to live in a world where constant hot water is never a matter for comment or concern. Jane was prepared to be hissed and banged at for her twice-weekly bath but managed the rest in cold. There was also the danger that the boiler would wake Georgette. She washed quickly with her own soap (Bronnley, English Fern) that she kept in a sponge bag with her shampoo, her face cream, her depilatory cream and a secret supply of tampons: Smart young moderns choose Tampax. Nothing could be daintier. Doreen called these ‘pessaries’ and said only married women could use them but that wasn’t what ‘Sister’ said on the leaflet inside the box.
Jane reckoned it would be all right to wear the Hardy Amies if she wore her half-sleeve black twinset sweater under it. That way she could take off the jacket for work and still pass for Junior Sales. She decided to risk her best pair of stockings (the only unladdered pair she had). She would wear the high heels on her way in but change into her everyday pumps once she got there. She wouldn’t carry the bag (in case someone saw it) but she could put it in the same carrier – a really nice pale green Fortnum’s one that a customer had left behind. Whatever happened, she wanted the thrill of walking along Piccadilly in the full rig-out. Pity about the awful grey bouclé coat but she couldn’t not wear it in this weather. Pity about the hair as well. She wasted a good ten minutes fiddling about with it but she couldn’t find a style that was smart enough for the suit but dowdy enough for work so she just wore it held back with the big brown slide as usual.
Even so, she caused quite a stir at breakfast. Doreen, thank God, had her Lie-in on Saturdays. She also had her Lie-in on Sundays and quite a lot of the school holidays. Uncle George got up extra early on Saturdays and was sat by the radio, soft black book of racing form on the table, drinking his third cup of tea when Jane sashayed into the kitchen.
Uncle George was all right. He thought of kind things to do and he found nice things to say. How he came to get humped up with a nasty, small-minded cat like Doreen Crick was enough to last the huge and very chatty Deeks family an entire wedding breakfast. She hadn’t even been good-looking. Very much the ugly sister – like poor little June really.
‘Don’t you look smashing! Is it new? Turn round.’
Jane smiled and twirled.
‘Nice fit. But then you’ve got a nice figure.’
He was the only person on earth who could say something like that without meaning something else. June might say such a thing but would really be saying ‘a nicer figure than mine’. One of the senior salesladies might say something like it but only in a ‘much good may it do you’ sort of way. And Alan and Bill and Keith (was it Keith or Kevin?) and Tony wouldn’t say anything about her figure without rolling their eyes over it. Compliments were like coupons that they saved up and stuck down until they’d got enough for what they really wanted.
The only person apart from Uncle George who could make a compliment a statement of fact had been the woman at the Trudi Morton modelling academy. Yes, Jane did have a perfect figure. Possibly a shade too short for photographic work but just right otherwise. But it would take work. The walk. The make-up. The wigs – models used a lot of wigs apparently. And that meant money. Twenty-five guineas for a two-week course and diploma. No point asking George and Doreen.
The Trudi Morton woman seemed really, really nice at first. Jane had gone to the academy in her lunch hour just after she’d started working in the arcade. The reception area had been quite crowded with two completely different sorts: girls who were models and girls who wanted to be models. The most obvious difference was that the models all had a dirty great canvas suitcase which Jane knew to be full of stockings, shoes, wigs, petticoats, scarves, gloves – all sorts of stuff you might need on a job. It seemed that the people you worked for only supplied whatever it was you were modelling: frocks, Hoovers, cat food and whatnot and anything else was supposed to be in your bag. Must weigh a ton.
The other big difference was that the girls who wanted to be models looked like they’d done each other’s hair and make-up in the dark for a bet. Jane had her hair in its usual slide (she’d come straight from a morning’s work) and wore no make-up at all. She hadn’t time and besides she’d actually talked to Vanda about this. Vanda was no fool and Vanda reckoned that it was all about Potential and that they’d get a better idea from a bare face. Funnily enough, she was absolutely right. The Trudi Morton woman had said how refreshing it was to see a girl with her own natural complexion and was her bra padded? That was when she spent five minutes carefully taking Jane’s measurements and that was when Jane went off the whole thing.
Jane had a cup of tea and an apple for her breakfast. It was all she usually had but at least on Saturdays there was no fat Doreen sat there telling her she ought to eat more. Today’s smart girl cannot possibly be too thin. Pay no heed to anyone who pretends otherwise. A slim figure is your most priceless asset. She ran her cup under the tap, kissed Uncle George goodbye and put on her coat and gloves. She’d have to get a new coat from somewhere. She still had £15 in the Post Office. All that was left of her Vanda Modes money.
The walk to the bus stop was good practice with the high heels. They made her two inches taller and made the model walk much easier. She’d only worn them once before, to go dancing at the Locarno with a bunch of girls she’d been at school with. She wore them with a floral stripe California cotton frock: big blue poppies with sooty black centres. She had two net petticoats under it – one black, one white – and her black twinset cardigan over it.
She’d got the dress for half price in a funny little shop halfway in to Croydon. She’d only gone in there for dress shields. Vanda didn’t sell these. Dress shields weren’t Lingerie, they were Haberdashery, and Haberdashery was where Vanda drew the line. The shop’s window had been full of creepy little woollen vests, tenderly laid out on brass T-shapes and draped with yellow cellophane to keep the sun off – as if it mattered what bloody colour the things were – but once inside, she was surprised to see a rail of gaudy fat sun dresses. The woman who ran the shop looked quite surprised herself. A salesman had been round and she couldn’t resist the lovely flowers – like seed packets – but when she’d tried putting one in the window it looked all wrong somehow so they were left on the rail inside. Her regular customers just tutted at them or said they’d make nice loose covers.
Jane told her she worked at Vanda Modes and offered to re-do the window f
or her. Only took ten minutes. She put all the vests and elastic stockings in the side window and left just two frocks in the main one, one on each side, with a hand-written ticket: ‘Perfect for dancing. Only sizes eight and ten remaining.’ They were actually the only sizes the woman had got.
‘He had bigger,’ she confessed, giggling, ‘but I can’t see big girls wearing all those flowers, can you?’
She could if she went to the Locarno. The dance floor last summer had been heaving with size fourteens in yards and yards of waxed cotton begonias and peonies and sunflowers. Like a great big, sweaty municipal flowerbed.
Jane had taken the bus into Streatham and met her old schoolfriends outside as arranged. Two of them were engaged already – tiny little diamonds to prove it. The other two were working on it, slyly eyeing up the Brylcreem boys and spotty Herberts who stood round the edges of the room ready to make a move when the music slowed down. Couples were showing off their practised steps, plain girls were dancing with each other. It was yet another filthy hot night and the room stank of body odour and Evening in Paris.
Jane had pushed her way to the bar for an orange squash, and a man – quite old, thirty at least – had started chatting her up. He used the usual rubbish lines but differently somehow. As if he were taking the mick out of the whole thing.
‘Now what, to coin a phrase, is a nice’ – he put a lot of work into the ‘nice’ – ‘a very nice girl like you doing in a place like this?’
He had a nice deep voice. Not Streatham at all. More Rex Harrison.
Jane selected one of her own smarter voices.
‘I’m here with some old schoolfriends.’
‘To dance? Or are you just on a man hunt?’
He had spotted the four of them, giggling and stealing glances at Jane’s new friend in the blue suit. Hand-stitched lapels. Four proper working cuff buttons.
A Vision of Loveliness Page 3