“Bread and jam, my dear?” said Mrs. Hollidaye as though she still had her cloth-ears on. “Lilian dear, what about you? It’s the new marrow and ginger; Dorothy and I chose it this afternoon. Or there’s just a little honey left. But we’ll save the fresh comb for Dorothy to take back tomorrow.”
“What if I go and don’t never get to come back?” said Dot. “You’ll miss me. Then you’ll be sorry.” She sounded like Mrs. Parvis, saying one thing yet meaning another.
“Nonsense. Of course you’ll come back. Everybody always comes back. It’s going to be exciting to see your mother again. You’ll be able to tell her all the news.”
What news would interest Gloria? Would she want to know about the flowering of the pink camellia and its glossy leaves, about the goat running away, about the double-yolked egg? She might pretend to listen, but she wouldn’t hear. The two places were quite separate. News of one didn’t transmit to the other.
Mrs. Hollidaye spooned some chunks of marrow onto a slice of bread, cut it in half, and put it gently into Dot’s hand.
“Eat up, there’s a good girl. I know, leaving is always hard.”
Dot took the bread and sniffed. “It hurts. Like real hurt. Much worse than being ill.”
“My dear, that’s good. You must hold on to the hurt. It’s a sign of growing up.”
“But I don’t want it like this. I want it to be like it was before.”
Lying in bed and being looked after and enveloped in love, by day and by night.
“Like I was your little girl. Like the one what died.”
She flung herself crying onto Mrs. Hollidaye’s lap, knocking Mrs. Hollidaye’s afternoon hat sideways. Mrs. Hollidaye straightened it, but let Dot stay.
“You have to remember, Dorothy, that I am your friend. I am not your mother. Why, I’m old enough to be your grandmother! I cannot keep you here when your mother wants and needs you. However, even when you’re far away, this place will still remain, you’ll still see it. That way, you have the benefit of both.”
“How?”
“Wipe your nose first, and then I’ll tell you something that happened to me. A long time ago. About leaving a place when I felt torn between two people I loved. You see, unlike you who has lived in so many places and seen so much, I had never lived anywhere except at my parents’ home. I knew every corner and I loved that house so much. I loved him so much too. I was so excited to be a young bride going off on tour to Europe. Then to a new home waiting for me. But after the marriage and the party, when it was time, the brougham was already waiting for us at the front door, I couldn’t bear to leave. Like you now, I felt that I might never come back. Or, even if I did, that things would be different.”
“Did you cry?”
“Goodness gracious me, no! That would never have done. Why, it would have made everyone else so sad. I had to keep the hurt to myself. But my nurse knew.”
“Your nurse? If you were ill, why did they make you go away?”
“Not a sick-nurse. My nursemaid, the servant who looked after me. She helped me dress in my new going-away outfit before I went down to say good-bye to my parents. She must have known about the hurt of leaving, for she said, ‘Don’t worry, Miss Charlotte. You’ll be taking this whole place with you. Whenever you miss it, you close your eyes and you’ll find it right there in front of you. You’ll see, Miss Charlotte,’ she told me, ‘how you can walk into every room, check in every cupboard, count the books in your father’s library, just as though you were really there.’”
“So what did you do?”
“I straightened my back, and I walked down the stairs to my parents and I said good-bye to them and to the servants lined up on the front steps. I still didn’t entirely believe my nursie. She was up at the window looking out. But I found out it was all quite true what she’d said.”
Dot found that she had stopped crying and was sitting upright, eating the slice of bread and marrow jam.
That evening, when Mrs. Hollidaye crept into Dot’s bedroom to damp down the fire for the night and check that the guard was securely in place, she had filled a trug basket with garden produce.
“For tomorrow, my dear,” she whispered. “I’ll put it here by the chair so we don’t forget.”
There was a posy of pale spring flowers wrapped in damp newspaper to keep them fresh, a bag of potatoes tied with bristly twine, six eggs in a carton, carrots unearthed from the sand heap in which they had lain stored against invasion of the wireworm, and a selection of dessert apples, no mere windfalls but blemish-free bests, each polished to a rosy sheen by Loopy Lil.
“You know, my dear,” Mrs. Hollidaye said, sitting on the edge of the bed and taking Dot’s hand. “I’ve often thought that each person is rather like a different vessel out at sea. Some are little dinghies, others great ocean liners. Or paddle steamers, or cork rafts.”
“You mean, like we’re all boats?” said Dot, surprised.
“That’s it. Or ships. Once out on the big seas of life, we each have to do the best we can, whether we have sails, or engines, or nothing but a wooden paddle. I daresay your brother was like my daughter, a pretty little flower petal bobbing along. He wasn’t meant to keep afloat forever. While you, Dorothy my dear, started out as a small tub, straight into deep choppy waters, with quite a few holes in the bottom, no rudder, no sails. You were scarcely seaworthy. But somehow you were unsinkable. Then you were towed into harbor. Now you’ve been patched up, your hull’s been scraped, a lick of paint and you’re ready to get back into the great sea of life. Well, good night, my dear.” She bent and kissed Dot on her forehead.
17
Coming Home
The train rattled through the suburbs, then slid between the brick backs of tall tenement blocks where Dot could look right in the windows at women standing by their kitchen sinks.
Then it rumbled along a bridge, so Dot could see into the friendly clutter of people’s backyards, down into bomb sites to view the mystery of chaos.
They said there was a fuel shortage. But Dot saw plenty of coal heaped up beside the tracks in so many different shades of black. Big shiny chunks, thin pale nuggets, dull velvety dust, huge rocks like slippery ice.
At home in the country, Dot thought, we burn wood, chestnut limbs that spit and hiss in the drawing room, neat oak logs in the bedrooms that quietly glow through the night.
The train passed a fire station, a brewery, and over the wide murky river.
Gloria was late. But the station felt safer than it used to, though nothing had changed except Dot herself. She saw the same high empty space between the ground and the broken glass roof, she recognized the air that smelled of soot and coal smoke and was thick as gray soup, and the mottled pigeon droppings and the gray suits of men, the black hats.
She staggered with the laden trug to where the buffers stood up like huge metal pennies on their sides, preventing the train from going any farther. London was not on the way to somewhere else. London was the center to which all tracks, all travelers, all patched-up dinghy boats, were led.
Dot had been away and now she had come back.
Patiently she waited beside the ticket collector till Gloria came running breathlessly across the station toward her. She had her best shoes on, and a new hat. She had her hair in a new way too, short and brushed upward. It made her look different, almost like a stranger.
“Hello, ducky, so here we are, large as life and twice as handsome. That train must have been in ever so early.” She smiled at the ticket collector. “Here pet, better let me take some of your things.” She took Dot’s carriers and Dot carried the trug basket.
Dot said, “Mrs. Hollidaye gave me the money for a cab.”
“Ooh, just hark at you, speaking all la-di-da!” Gloria giggled. “You gone and got yourself a posh accent, just like Mrs. H. herself.”
“No I haven’t,” said Dot, wondering if she had. “Anyway, you’ve gone and changed yourself, too. Your hair’s gone yellow.”
“Had it
bleached. Does it suit? Incendiary blond,” said Gloria. “So how much she give you, then?”
“Five bob.”
“You don’t want to go wasting that on a taxi. We can get a number nine easy enough. Split the difference on a cuppa, shall we? Let’s pop into the Corner House.”
She led the way through swirling traffic.
“All right by you, ducky? You’d like a nice sticky bun and some tea, wouldn’t you?”
In the spacious tearooms, a sparkling light was suspended from the ceiling, a man in a suit played the piano, and most customers wore hats even daintier than Gloria’s new one. But nobody was encumbered with the bounty of the countryside tied up with old newspaper and garden string. Dot shoved the trug out of sight under their table before the waitress saw.
“I got the afternoon off,” said Gloria. “So there’s no hurry on us to get back quick. Since we’re in town, we might as well enjoy ourselves while we got the chance. What d’you say to taking in a picture after?”
A waitress scuttled past carrying a cake stand stacked with glistening and brightly colored cakes and pastries.
“Haven’t seen the like of that for a while then, have we?” said Gloria. “Ooh and listen, he’s playing the melody from that new film. Ooh, did I cry at the end!”
Mrs. Hollidaye was right. Dot did still have the garden with her. The dark shape of the yew silhouetted against the corner of the window was quite clear. She could even see a thrush pecking out a scarlet yew berry, swallowing the scarlet flesh and spitting out the poisonous pip. And she could hear the rooks cawing, too. She didn’t tell Gloria about it. Gloria was busy tapping her feet in time to the music.
“Just like old times, ain’t it, before you was took so poorly,” said Gloria. “Hey, what’s pecking at you, pet, giving that long face? You ain’t gone and got yourself worked up into a glum mood, have you now?”
Dot thought how she belonged in the country. Now she had to belong here, too.
“No, course not,” said Dot. “I’m glad to be back.”
“Well, that’s something anyhow. Though you look as though you could do with something to perk you up. Bit of frolic, that’s what you been missing.”
The waitress came to take their order.
“Go on then, ducky,” said Gloria. “Which one d’you fancy? Don’t hold back.”
“Ta,” said Dot. “I’ll have one of them with the pink on top.”
18
The Fathers
Dot was pleased when the Children’s Officer called at the basement and said she was strong enough to start school. She remembered things from when she’d been to school before.
But she found it was a different school with different faces. Many of these children had been attending for a long time, so they already knew many things, specially the important things, like how to stand in line and what to do when your pen nib broke.
There were good things at school too, cooked dinners every day and milk if you took your own mug.
Dot didn’t have a milk mug, but the teacher lent her one. The dinners came by van in metal tins. The milk came in a can and the teacher shared it out with a ladle. Certain children, whose names were on a list, were called up once a day to be given yellow capsules, which had to be swallowed in front of the teacher. Dot was among them. She chewed hers and found it contained cod-liver oil.
At first, Gloria took Dot along the road to school, but it was often difficult for Gloria to get out of bed in time, so they arrived late.
“Miss don’t like me being late,” said Dot. “She says I got a lot of catching up to do. I think I’ll go on me own.”
Gloria, under the blanket, agreed. “Watch your p’s and q’s, then,” she mumbled.
A plumber came and installed a row of six washbasins in the cloakroom with running water, hot and cold at each, though they still had to run across the playground in all weathers to reach the outside lavatories. The bars of new yellow soap and the new white linen roller towels placed beside the washbasins were marked LCC. Dot found she could read the letters and was surprised. The desks had these same letters stamped into the metal brackets. So did each sheet of lavatory paper the teacher gave them if they asked, and the box of wax tapers for lighting the gas mantle.
Dot asked the teacher what LCC meant, since it was written on so many things.
“London County Council, dear,” said the teacher. “That’s good. So you have been taught to read?”
Dot said no, she didn’t think so. But then she found that she must have been without noticing, for she discovered that there was writing everywhere she could read without even trying. The coal-hole covers along the pavements had words on them. So did the milk float. A whole sentence was painted on its side. Express Dairies, the oldest dairy in London, it said.
There was a lot to look at, so she took a long time coming back after school, stopping to watch the men mending holes in the roads, to watch the demolition team, with their mighty metal ball swinging on its chain from the crane, clearing the bomb site, to watch carpenters erecting wooden hoardings around the cleared sites to keep the people out, to see bill stickers on ladders pasting huge colored pictures onto the hoardings. She could read them all, Oxo, Rinso, O-Cedar, and Aero, even if she didn’t always understand what they meant. Then she dawdled through the mews where the milk horses were shod, and the blacksmith made new railings to put in front of the houses.
But she had given up telling Gloria about what went on each day. Gloria wasn’t interested.
“I got things on me mind just now, ducks,” she said. “Can’t you see?”
She was always rushing off to the Housing Applicant Office, and the interviews took a long time.
“There’s a lot of other people after the same thing,” Gloria explained.
Then one afternoon she came in smiling.
“They’re giving us the extra points! Because of your health, pet, they’re putting us on the priority list, say we didn’t ought to be below ground, nor too high. Ground floor, they say, on account of your chest. They’re going to start building lots of new flats. Over the river, near the stray dogs’ home. They say we might get to have one. Two bedrooms, indoor toilets, hot and cold running to the kitchen so you’ll be able to wash your hands whenever you want.”
Dot didn’t tell her that at school they already had hot and cold water and she could wash her hands and face at any time.
“Sixteen and sixpence a week. Mind you, I don’t know where we’ll find that.” The rent to Mrs. Parvis was only ten shillings. “But once your father comes home, things’ll start perking up, won’t they?”
But being on a priority list didn’t, after all, seem to make any difference. They went on waiting.
“Fat lot of use that office is. All hot air and not much more,” said Gloria. “There’s hundreds of us on priority. They ain’t got nothing for us. D’you know, me and your dad, we had a lovely home out at the start. A beautiful room, all our own. Pink curtains we had there and ever such a nice tea service. Then there I was come back from antenatal and it was blown clean away. Funny how you forget things when you ain’t got them no more.”
Dot thought, I’ve forgotten his face. But I haven’t forgotten he’s coming back.
At the school, there were two other girls whose fathers had not yet returned. Then, in the playground, one of them whispered, “Mine ain’t coming back. Ever. My nan told me last night.”
Dot envied her. Viv didn’t seem upset about it either. She just shrugged. “He died or something, I don’t know.”
Then a few days later, the other girl, Sally, came dancing across the playground and said she’d just got hers back.
“He was in a camp. He’s a bit thin, though.”
“Where he been?” Dot asked. She had seen pictures in the newspaper that Mrs. Parvis had delivered every day of men and women who’d been kept locked up in a camp till the Americans came and found them. They were thin. Had Sally’s father been in one of those places, too, in striped p
ajamas with shaven head?
“No, not him. Them’s the Jews you’re thinking of. Mine was in Burma,” said Sally.
“That’s ever such a long way off,” said Dot. “I expect.”
“Yeah, it was hot over there and he didn’t have nothing to eat except rats. That’s what he says. I dunno if he’s making it up. You can’t eat rats. D’you want to come and have a look at him?”
She was so proud of this father. She talked about him all day. Then she invited Dot and three others to walk home with her after school. She lived in a big old tenement block. They climbed up to the top floor and stood around in the corridor while Sally went in to fetch him out.
“Here he is!” she said at last. “My daddy!”
A thing appeared in the doorway beside her. It looked to Dot more like a skeleton in clothes than a father. He had heavy army trousers held up with a huge leather belt and a thick army shirt. Inside the clothes there was nothing. Brown sticks stuck out of the sleeves where there should have been wrists, and his head was like a hard dry acorn, sunburned and bald, no hair. The children backed away. They didn’t know what to do. Then the mouth opened, and the father’s skull smiled. That was the worst bit.
The other three turned and bolted off down the stairs. Dot stayed just long enough to smile back. He was so thin, he looked like even the birds wouldn’t want to peck at him. He looked as though he’d crack if you touched him.
“See you tomorrow,” she called to Sally, but couldn’t think of anything to say to the man, so she ran off after the others.
Next morning, Dot was surprised when Gloria got up early and left for the Housing Applicant Office the same time as she went to school.
“They’re running a draw for the houses,” Gloria explained.
“A draw?” said Dot.
“A lucky dip like. They ain’t got enough homes. They want to make it fair. We’re each going to get a ticket. I just know it’s me lucky day.”
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