London Belles

by Annie Groves

  The sound of their father’s voice downstairs, demanding to know where his tea was, had them dispersing, her mother hurrying back down, whilst Rick retreated whistling to his own room and Edith went back to brushing her hair, an expression on her face that to Dulcie was unbearably smug and triumphant.

  Sibling quarrels were part and parcel of their shared home life, and normally blew over, but during the evening, the more Dulcie thought about renting a room of her own, the more appeal the idea had. She resented the cramped space she shared with her sister almost as much as she resented the way Edith thought she could help herself to her clothes, and, what was more, her pride was still stinging from the fact that their mother had taken Edith’s side in the quarrel. Didn’t she give her mother a whole two shillings a week for her keep more than Edith did? The trouble with her mother was that she didn’t appreciate her like she should, and the trouble with her sister was that she didn’t respect her like she should.

  Dulcie might not have thought anything of the two of them sharing a bed before she had started to work for Selfridges, but now, from listening to the other girls, she recognised that most of them lived in rather better circumstances than her own, middle-class girls in the main, whose parents had neat houses on the outskirts of the city, instead of growing up at its heart as she had, in what was unpleasantly close to being a slum area. Dulcie could well imagine how Lydia, whose father was a director, would look down on her if she knew how Dulcie’s family lived. She couldn’t imagine David James-Thompson walking her home here after that date she intended to have with him. No, that certainly could not be allowed to happen. She’d have Edith hanging out of the window, gawping at him and then her mother insisting that he come in and listen to Edith’s caterwauling, she was that proud of her. No, finding a room of her own somewhere a bit more respectable would suit the image she decided she needed to project if she was to win her bet with Lizzie.

  First thing tomorrow she’d buy herself a paper and start looking for somewhere. With a room of her own, she could do what she wanted. There’d be no parents wanting to know where she was going and who she was seeing; no brother poking his nose in and warning her about not egging lads on, and knowing her place; no irritating sister. In her mind’s eye Dulcie pictured herself dressed up to the nines, and going off to the Hammersmith Palais dancing with handsome David, the director’s stuck-up daughter’s beau, her clothes immaculately washed and ironed and not salvaged from her sister’s disrespectful treatment of them.

  * * *

  Gratefully Tilly picked up from her desk the ‘Rooms to Let’ notices she had been given permission to type out – and not just to type, but also to place on the notice board in the corridor outside the Lady Almoner’s offices.

  The office Tilly shared with Clara was in reality more of a long narrow corridor than a proper room. Its one small window overlooked an inner yard where waste bins were stored. Panelled in dark wood from floor to ceiling, the room was dark and smelled musty from the contents of the files stored in the ancient filing cabinets that lined both the long walls. To reach Tilly and Clara’s desk, at which they sat on opposite sides to one another with their heavy typewriters, it was necessary to squeeze between the filing cabinets and the desk itself. Tilly’s typewriter was old and very well used, its ‘d’ key inclined to stick unless you knew just how much extra pressure to apply to it to make sure that it didn’t. Each girl had a set of drawers in which she kept her stationery: Official-looking notepaper with the Lady Almoner’s name and title printed on it, as well as Barts’ address for official letters, thin copy paper and plain white paper for typing up patient notes, memos and envelopes. Here too were kept their very precious pieces of carbon paper, which had to be used until one could barely read the copy they made. Fresh supplies had to be pleaded for from Mr Davies, who was in charge of the stationery cupboard, and who, so Clara claimed, counted out every single sheet of paper he gave them.

  The doors at either end of the office were never closed. There was normally a trail of people coming in and out: junior clerks carrying or wanting files for their superiors, senior clerks bringing in handwritten letters and notes that had to be typed immediately, or sometimes requesting that Tilly or Clara took down their dictation in shorthand. Tilly and Clara were certainly kept very busy. Once a week Miss Evans, the Lady Almoner’s personal secretary, would march into their office, her greying hair swept back into its tight bun, the jacket of her tweed suit on over her blouse, no matter how warm it was, her eyes, behind her rimless glasses, seeming to notice immediately a typing mistake or a file that was in the wrong place, as she went through the week’s diary with the two girls.

  Now, grabbing some drawing pins, Tilly headed for the corridor outside the main office where the clerical staff worked, narrowly avoiding bumping into a senior nurse, and dropping her typed notice as she did so.

  Both Tilly and the nurse, a tall slender girl with glorious dark copper-coloured hair drawn back under her cap, lovely cream-toned skin and eyes so intensely blue they were almost violet, came to a halt.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Tilly said.

  ‘It was my fault.’ The other girl smiled, both of them bending down to retrieve Tilly’s notice.

  The nurse reached it first, a small frown creasing her forehead as she read it.

  ‘Is this your notice?’ she asked Tilly. ‘I mean, are you the one who is advertising the rooms to let?’

  ‘Yes. Well, my mother is. My grandfather died recently and since we’ve now got two spare bedrooms and a bathroom standing empty my mother thought we should let them out.’

  ‘Where? I mean, is your house within easy reach of the hospital? Only I’m looking for somewhere myself.’

  Tilly recognised immediately that the other girl was exactly the type of lodger her mother was looking for. Tilly guessed that the nurse was older than she, perhaps in her early twenties, and that she had that air and manner about her that said she was responsible and reliable.

  ‘Yes. We live on Article Row in Holborn, at number thirteen. It isn’t far away at all.’

  Sally had been doing her own assessment. The young girl in front of her was well turned out and spotlessly clean, her manner bright and energetic, the kind of girl who quite obviously came from a good home. A home that would be clean and properly looked after, Sally judged.

  ‘Well, bumping into you looks like being a piece of good luck for me,’ she announced. ‘I’m Sally Johnson, by the way.’ She held out her hand for Tilly to shake.

  ‘I’m Tilly – Tilly Robbins.’

  ‘Look, Tilly, I’m really keen to see your rooms. How about if I came and had a look at three o’clock on Sunday afternoon? I’m off duty then.’

  ‘Yes. I’m sure that will be all right. I’ll tell my mother.’

  Sally gave a brisk nod of her head, and then turned on her heel to hurry away, thinking what a stroke of luck it had been to bump into Tilly like that – fate, almost. Sally considered herself to be a good judge of character and she had liked Tilly straight away. Not that she was going to get her hopes up too high until she had seen the room in question. She’d certainly feel more comfortable if she wasn’t easy accessible to anyone who might take it into their head to come down from Liverpool and enquire for her at Barts’ nurses’ home, and she was conscious of the fact that her room there was only temporary. She’d meant what she’d said before she left when she’d told her father that she didn’t want anything to do with him in future – him or his new wife.

  Chapter Three

  ‘The vicar’s wife has just told me that she thinks she knows someone who’d be exactly right for a lodger,’ Olive told Tilly as they walked home together arm in arm after the Sunday morning service. ‘I mentioned to her that I wanted to let a couple of rooms at our Women’s Voluntary Service meeting on Wednesday night, and now it seems she’s heard of a girl who’s looking for a room.’

  Despite the warm sunshine Tilly shivered as she glanced down a side street to see a convoy
of army lorries loaded with men in uniform rumbling along the Strand. The signs of preparation for a war that Mr Chamberlain had assured them would not happen were all around them, from the sandbags piled up around buildings, to the men in ARP uniforms, and the ongoing work on preparing public bomb shelters. In Hyde Park work was underway to dig trenches for shelters and war defences, and Tilly and her mother were doing their own bit ‘just in case’ it came to war. Tilly had joined her local St John Ambulance brigade, and her mother had joined the local Women’s Voluntary Service group – the WVS for short – run by Mrs Windle, the vicar’s wife.

  There’d been a smattering of young men in uniform in church this morning, with their families, and Tilly had stopped to speak with one of them – a boy who had been ahead of her at school and who was home on leave from his obligatory six months’ military training.

  The last time she’d seen Bob had been early in the summer, before he’d started his training, and the difference in him had really struck her. Gone was the soft-featured, faintly shy boy she remembered and in his place was a thinner, fitter, tougher-looking young man who spoke proudly of his determination to do his bit for the country, and his belief that Hitler would not stop merely at invading Czechoslovakia, no matter what the Prime Minister might want to think.

  After church the talk had all been of the prospect of war.

  Now, though, feeling her mother’s slight squeeze on her arm beneath the smart little white boxy jacket trimmed with navy blue she was wearing over her Sunday best frock, Tilly turned to her to listen.

  ‘The girl Mrs Windle has in mind is your own age, Tilly, and an orphan. Apparently she’s spent virtually all her life in an orphanage run by the Church, but now she’s too old to stay there any more. They’ve kept her on to help with the younger children but the Church has decided to evacuate the orphans to the country, they can’t take her with them. They’ve found her a job working on the ticket desk at Chancery Lane underground station and now she needs somewhere to live where she’ll feel comfortable and safe. She’ll be coming round to look at the room at four o’clock this afternoon, after the nurse you were telling me about. They both sound ideal lodgers for us. I’m looking forward to meeting them.’

  ‘Sally, the nurse, is a bit older than me, Mum, but I think you’ll like her.’

  Like Tilly, in her navy-blue, white-spotted dress, Olive was wearing her Sunday best outfit, an oatmeal linen two-piece of neatly waisted jacket and simple straight skirt, made for her by a local dressmaker from the Greek Cypriot community. Both women were wearing hats, a girlish white straw boater with navy-blue ribbons in Tilly’s case, a neat plain oatmeal straw hat for Olive, which she was wearing tilted slightly to one side, in the prevailing fashion.

  ‘I feel sorry for the orphan girl, though. How awful never to have known her parents,’ Tilly sympathised, earning herself another maternal squeeze on her arm.

  ‘Yes, the poor little thing was left on the doorstep of the orphanage as a baby. According to Mrs Windle, she’s very shy and quiet,’ Olive approved. ‘She’ll be good company for you, darling. You’ll be able to go to church social events and dances together, I expect. Young people need to have fun, especially now, when there’s so much to worry about.’

  Because it was such a warm day neither of them felt like a heavy traditional Sunday lunch, and so instead they were going to have a nice salad made from a tin of John West salmon Olive had splashed out on, and some lettuce, cucumber and tomatoes bought from Alan, the barrow boy from Covent Garden, whose pitch was just off the Strand. Eaten with some thin slices of buttered brown bread from the local bakery, it would be a feast fit for a queen, so Olive had pronounced before they had left for church. As an extra treat they were going to have a punnet of strawberries, again bought from Alan, with either some Carnation milk or possibly some ice cream from one of Italian ice-cream sellers who sold their wares from the tricycle-propelled mobile ice-cream ‘vans’ they drove round the streets.

  The houses of Article Row didn’t have large back gardens, but at least there were gardens and not merely back yards, like those of the poorer quality houses in the area.

  Olive and Tilly’s garden had a small narrow strip of lawn surrounded by equally narrow flowerbeds, with an old apple tree down at the bottom of the garden almost right up against the wall.

  The Government had been urging people to think about growing their own salad and vegetables, but Olive wasn’t keen. She was city born and bred and didn’t know anything about gardening. The garden had been her father-in-law’s preserve before he had become too ill to work in it, and although she and Tilly kept the lawn mowed, pushing the small Wilkinson Sword lawn mower over the grass in the summer, and weeded the flowerbeds Olive didn’t fancy her chances of actually being able to grow anything edible.

  ‘We could take a walk over to Hyde Park this evening, if you fancy it,’ Olive suggested to Tilly as she unlocked their front door. ‘We might as well enjoy this good weather whilst we’ve got it.’

  ‘Yes, I’d like that,’ Tilly agreed immediately. ‘Bob was saying after church this morning that some of the men will be parading and drilling there – you know, being put through their paces a bit.’

  ‘We’ll go then. We have to support our young men in uniform.’

  It was dead on three o’clock when Sally knocked on the well-maintained dark green front door of number 13. She had liked the look of Article Row the minute she had walked down it, after exploring a little of the area. Article Row might be different from the neat semi in Liverpool’s Wavertree area where she had grown up and lived with the parents, but she could see that here the householders were every bit as proud of their homes as her parents and their neighbours in Lilac Avenue had been of theirs.

  Her keen nurse’s eye saw and immediately approved of Olive’s sparkling windows, immaculate front path and tidy little front garden. Sally liked too the way that the door was answered within seconds of her knocking on it.

  She would have known that the woman stepping to one side to invite her into the clean fresh-smelling hallway was Tilly’s mother because of their shared looks, even if Olive hadn’t introduced herself with a warm but businesslike smile and a firm handshake.

  The hall floor was covered in well-polished linoleum in a parquet flooring design, with a red and blue patterned carpet runner over it, the same carpet continuing up the stairs and held in place by shining brass stair rods.

  ‘I’ll show you the room first and then you can see the rest of the house afterwards,’ Olive suggested. ‘It’s this way.’

  As she followed Olive up the two flights of stairs to the upper storey, Sally took note of the clean plain off-white-painted walls and the well-polished banister rail. On the first landing the doors to the bedrooms were closed, as were the doors on the upper floor, but she liked the fact that Olive opened both bedroom doors, telling her, ‘Both these rooms are more or less the same size. The front room was my late father-in-law’s until he died. It was his idea to install a bathroom up here. I must say, at the time I thought it was a lot of work for nothing, but now I’m glad that he did. Whoever takes the rooms will share the bathroom between them.’

  ‘Your notice said that you wanted respectable female lodgers,’ Sally checked as she stepped inside the front-facing bedroom. It was simply furnished with the unexpected luxury of a double bed, a shiny polished mahogany wardrobe and a matching dressing table, and a square of patterned beige carpet over brown patterned lino, the walls papered with a plain cream paper with a brown trellis design. A dark gold satin-covered bedspread and eiderdown covered the bed, and when Sally lifted them back she could see that the bed linen underneath was immaculately white and starched.

  In addition to the bed, wardrobe and dressing table there was a comfortable-looking chair and a small bookcase.

  ‘That’s right,’ Olive confirmed. ‘We’ve got another girl coming to look at the rooms at four this afternoon, an orphan, recommended by the vicar’s wife. She’s just start
ed working at Chancery Lane underground station.

  Sally nodded.

  ‘And this is the back bedroom,’ Olive told her, stepping across the narrow landing, its floorboards stained dark oak.

  This bedroom overlooked the garden and was rather more feminine in décor, with its pale lemon wallpaper decorated with white green-stemmed daisies. Its furniture was very similar to the furniture in the front room, though its coverlet and eiderdown were more of a lemon yellow than gold.

  This time Sally paid her would-be landlady the compliment of not checking the bed linen.

  The bathroom was as immaculately clean and fresh-looking as the bedrooms, half tiled in white, blue curtains hanging at the windows and a blue-patterned lino on the floor.

  She liked it. She liked it very much, Sally acknowledged.

  ‘If you were to take the room you’d be expected to keep it neat and tidy, although of course I’d given it a good clean once a week,’ Olive told her.

  ‘And the rent?

  ‘Ten shillings a week. That includes an evening meal as well as breakfast, although I dare say, you being a nurse, you’ll be working shifts.’

  ‘Yes,’ Sally agreed as she followed Olive downstairs and into the kitchen, which she wasn’t surprised to see was as clean and tidy as the rest of the house.

  ‘There are no gentleman visitors to be taken up to your room, but I do not rule out the possibility of you inviting a male friend into the front room to wait for you,’ Olive continued.

  Sally didn’t have any problem with that.

  ‘And the kitchen?’ she asked. ‘As I work shifts I’d want to be able to make myself a hot drink and have something to eat when I get back from my shift.’