Trouble In Paradise

by Pip Granger

  On top of all that, Zinnia Makepeace kept my poor old feet in mid-season form, and for that I will love her until the day I die. I’ve always been a martyr to my feet, ever since I was knee-high to something small with knees. She produced a cream every winter that kept the chilblains at bay and some concoction that I swallowed that kept my joints from swelling and aching too badly. According to Zinnia, it wasn’t just old people who got painful feet, and judging by my poor plates, she was right; even my bunions had bunions.

  Number 23 took up the whole of the narrow end of the Gardens: Arcadia Buildings formed the left-hand side, Paradise Buildings were on the right and at the wide part, opposite Zinnia’s place, were Utopia Buildings. In the middle was the garden itself, now filled with vegetables and soft fruit, the smutty laurels and sooty privet having been dug up for victory long before.

  As Zinnia said, ‘The man who had the job of naming this place allowed religious zeal or brainless optimism to cloud his judgement just a wee bit. It’s hard to imagine a spot further from the Promised Land.’ And then she’d added, graciously, ‘I like it fine, though.’

  She was never one to over-egg the pudding. The truth was, it was hard to imagine the Gardens without Zinnia or Zinnia without the Gardens, despite the tiny trace of haggis-noshing accent she still had after all her years in the East End.

  That Monday night, the people in Paradise Gardens went completely off their trolleys. Although there was a proper ‘do’ – a street party – scheduled for the following Saturday, there was no holding us back. We danced, sang and drank the night away. Lenny Hobbs found a fistful of rockets, God knows where, so we even had fireworks. The King’s Head rolled its piano into the street and I took my turn to bash out ‘Roll Out The Barrel’, ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’, ‘Knees Up Mother Brown’, ‘The Lambeth Walk’, and one or two other favourites.

  The Gardens was a sea of heaving bodies as we twirled and danced our joy. Black, brown, green and blue skirts flashed their stripes or flowers among the sombre shades of khaki and navy blue uniforms as they waltzed, tangoed or jitterbugged by. The pigeons roosting in the plane trees almost dropped off their twigs, stunned by the deafening racket of ‘Rule Britannia’ being belted out by so many happy, drunken sets of vocal cords.

  We kept the party going well into the next day, and some folk started all over again once Winnie had made his official broadcast. That famous voice drifted out over the Gardens from a hundred wirelesses. You could have heard a feather drop right up until the last full stop and then a roar went up that shook the sparrows out of the eaves and the knees-up started all over again.

  Well, it was more of a knee-wobble really, everyone being half-cut and knackered already. Some braver souls managed to line up behind their eyes just enough to totter into work, only to be sent home again: it was a holiday. Let’s face it, most of us wouldn’t have been much use, so they might as well make it official.

  * * *

  For me, the best bit of Monday’s celebrations was when the men had repaired to the boozer and the women and children settled down for a good old natter over the teacups and the crumbs of the Victory cake Dilly and I had knocked up. We had made it mostly from this and that scrounged from Terry Rainbird, the grocer with the corner shop next to Hobbs the butcher. Dilly had worked for Terry ever since we’d left school at fifteen. He was a bit sweet on her, I reckon, but she wouldn’t have it.

  ‘Don’t be daft, Zeld, he’s old enough to be my dad. You’re disgusting, you are. Now then, as all your stockings are so full of darns you’ll look like a two-legged Dalmatian, we’ll have to do a paint job. I brought my eyebrow pencil just in case. Stand still and stop your rabbiting or your seams’ll be all over your legs and you don’t want that. Your Vi’ll be on about ’em all night.’

  She licked the precious stub of eyebrow pencil and screwed her forehead up in concentration, desperately trying to get the fake seams to look straight and real. I swear that girl was as blind as a blindfolded bat, but she was too vain to wear specs.

  I wore the rose print frock I’d made up out of half of some old curtains from Zinnia’s front parlour. The other half went to make skirts for my sister Doris’s twins and a blouse for my other sister, Vi. Very fetching we looked, too, even if I do say so myself. Naturally, all of us turned up at the party in the same curtains, not having discussed what we were wearing beforehand, but I think we carried it off. As long as we made sure we didn’t stand too close together when we were indoors, in case some drunk mistook us for the furniture and sat on us, we were all right.

  Most of the women present had set my old Singer humming at one time or another. I knew for a fact that at least half a dozen of us were wearing silk knickers knocked up from a parachute donated by one of Dilly’s many admirers. She was a stunner, was Dilly, a natural blonde with surprising brown eyes, soft like a cow’s, and a curvaceous figure, topped off with a cheerful and generous disposition when you got past the shyness.

  Once we were dolled up to the nines we made our way, with the cake – which was meant to be a Victoria sponge, but was more municipal manhole cover – round to the Gardens, which were already heaving with merriment. The walk there had been a strange one. At least, it seemed so to me. The deliriously happy people, the women in their very best clothes and full, red-lipped make-up and the men spruce in uniform or their Civvy Street suits, contrasted sharply with the narrow, dark streets around them. These were littered with the twisted, broken remains of houses, shops, factories and warehouses that had been caught up in the fury and shattered, their insides gaping for all the world to see, like open wounds. Which I suppose they were.

  Even among all that joy, I was aware of the people whose lives would never, ever be the same again, in my own family and the families of friends, neighbours, countrymen, allies and foe alike. Each ruin of a familiar house reminded me of who was missing. And despite all the happiness around me, I was immensely sad.

  As soon as we arrived in the Gardens, Dilly disappeared into a group of merchant seamen, who were pouring out of the King’s Head, led by our friend Ronnie. They’d come straight from the docks and were eager to get started. I made my way to 3 Arcadia Buildings to dump the cake in the familiar kitchen. Mum, Gran and Zinnia were there. Dad had disappeared to the pub with Lenny Hobbs and his dad, Leonard.

  ‘Zelda, love, you’re here, and about time too,’ Mum greeted me. ‘Vi’s somewhere around with your cousins and Doris will be back soon.’

  ‘Aye, I saw her chasing Vi’s Tony and that Brian Hole off the bomb site opposite the church,’ said Zinnia. ‘They were collecting for the bonfire but those stairs weren’t a bit safe.’

  She turned to me. ‘How are you, hen? You’re looking a wee bit peely-wally if you ask me. I see my curtains are holding up.’

  I never got to answer, because my sister Doris turned up, breathing like an old traction engine, and sank into a chair, large face creased in concern. ‘You know, I don’t like our Tony hanging around with that Brian Hole. He’s trouble, just like the rest of that family. Where’s Vi? And why ain’t she keeping an eye on her son and heir, that’s what I want to know?’

  Vi and Doris were so different, it was hard to imagine that they came out of the same stable. Doris had taken to marriage and motherhood as if born to it, which I suppose she was, being a woman and all. Most women got married, and those that didn’t were pitied by the rest, which always seemed a bit hard to me. But that’s the way it was – and always had been, as far as I knew.

  Zinnia once told me a story about how a woman saddled with a work-shy, drunken husband and twelve ragged, snotty-nosed children, asked her what it was like being a spinster. Zinnia had told her about her own beloved home, her satisfying job and her annual holiday in Scotland. The mother, looking green with envy, said, ‘Ooh, it sounds lovely; I’d like that – if it wasn’t for the shame.’ Which just about summed it up, really.

  Vi liked being a wife all right, but she was nowhere near as keen on being a mum. She had hated
being pregnant, had referred to her growing lump as ‘the parasite’ almost as soon as she knew it was there. Mind you, she had been horribly sick for most of the pregnancy, which was enough to try the patience of a saint. Even Zinnia’s herbs seemed to be failing, until we found out Vi wasn’t taking them, preferring a Woodbine, weak tea and a biscuit.

  When baby Tony finally struggled out a month premature, we all heaved a sigh of relief, thinking things would improve – but they didn’t. Vi wouldn’t put him to the breast. She refused point blank, despite the pleadings of Mum and Zinnia, to part with a single drop of mother’s milk. I know they were very worried about her then, but all she’d do was stare out of her parlour window, hour after hour, looking for God knows what or who. Every time I walked past in the street, there’d be the glimmer of her round, plain, pale face, behind the nets, staring. I’d wave, but she wouldn’t wave back. I’d knock on the door, but she wouldn’t answer. In the end, Fred gave us a key to let ourselves in while he was at work to make sure poor little Tony was still alive at least. Luckily, Doris was still feeding her Reggie at the time, so she had plenty left for Tony and he began to thrive, but it was touch and go there for a bit.

  Zinnia said she’d seen it before: it was a kind of melancholia brought on by childbirth and that it would eventually go away. And it did, but Vi never really took to her Tony, or him to her. He preferred going to Doris or our mum for comfort when he was little, and he hung about with his dad a lot as he got older. But then Fred went off to war, and Tony, well, he had to shift for himself, poor little mite. When he came back from being evacuated to Wales, he began to go about with Brian Hole, or ‘Bung’ole’ as we called him.

  Even moving in with our Gran, a year or so after his return, when it was obvious things weren’t too clever between mother and son, hadn’t improved things that much. Vi was less lonely, perhaps, but Tony was still far too friendly with Bung’ole for anybody’s comfort. Then, just to make things a million times worse, another telegram had come, saying that Fred had gone missing. And later, a letter from his commanding officer saying he’d been brave and had disappeared in the thick of the fighting.

  ‘Aye, well.’ Zinnia sighed and stood up. ‘I’m away home. Zelda, why don’t you keep me company?’ Zinnia had a way of putting things that made it quite clear this was more than a suggestion.

  ‘You’ll be back later, for the real party?’ It was still early in the evening and Mum was amazed that anyone would leave a party before the very last knockings. ‘The men’ll be back from the pub later and the kids’ll be tucked up in bed and we can let our hair down. What do you say, Zin, Zelda?’

  ‘Aye. We’ll be back. Keep a wee dram for me. I’m just going to find some food. That Victory cake barely touched the sides before it crashed to the pit of my poor stomach. I can take a look at Zelda’s feet while I’m at it.’ And Zinnia swept out, with me in tow and wondering why she was so keen to get me on my own.

  It took quite a while to find out, because we were stopped every few yards by our happy neighbours, singing and dancing, staggering and falling, depending on how far gone they were. It seemed like hours before we fell through Zinnia’s front door and the thick walls reduced the singing to a distant hum.

  3

  I don’t know how long we were holed up in Zinnia’s kitchen, but it felt like ages. I loved that kitchen. In fact, I loved the whole house. It was different from anybody else’s place that I’d ever been to.

  The basic house wasn’t very big: two up, two down, with a scullery tacked on the back. But over the years – centuries, Zinnia said – various Makepeaces had added bits, so that it was a jumble of rooms, one of them made almost entirely of glass that the bombs failed to shatter. Maybe Dad was right: perhaps Zinnia had cast a spell to save her windows.

  Out the back was a wooden workshop and storage sheds. There was even an old railway carriage, complete with window-boxes and curtains, at the end of the garden, nestled under some of the few apple and plum trees to be found in Hackney. As kids, we played for hours in that walled garden. It was always a magical place.

  The kitchen was low and dark, with a small pine table, scrubbed almost white over the years, in the centre. A pine dresser took up the whole of one wall and china twinkled from its shelves in the lamplight. The gleaming butler’s sink, with its brass tap jutting above it like a big, hooked nose, was under the window that faced on to the garden. There was a large, black range along the third wall, while the fourth held a door into the parlour and the stairs to the rooms above.

  Nothing on this earth would get Zinnia to trade in her range for a proper cooker. She said she’d been brought up with one that burned peat, and although coal and coke weren’t the same, they’d do. Every now and then, out would come the Zebra black leading and the monster would get a good seeing-to, brush and cloth seeking out every little cranny – and there were hundreds of them. I should know; I had helped with the ritual more than once.

  Luckily, the coalie, Mr Whitelock, had a brood of thirteen kids that Zinnia had birthed and treated for measles, chickenpox, whooping cough and mumps as those childhood lurgies had run through the lot of them like the dreaded cascara. She’d saved young Ivy from diphtheria and nursed her in her own home to stop the other twelve from getting it, so she had plenty of goodwill stored up round at the Whitelocks’. This meant that when there was coal to be had, Mr Whitelock made absolutely certain that Zinnia got some, and the range rarely went out, war or no war.

  When there was no coal, the Whitelock tribe collected wood from the bomb sites and delivered that on their old cart drawn by Dobbin the Third, a huge dappled grey with shaggy hooves. While they were at it, they supplied manure for Zinnia’s garden and allotments, too. It was what Zinnia called ‘a happy arrangement’; she had loads of those with the people round and about.

  ‘So, hen, the war’s over. Have you given any thought to your future at all?’ That was typical of Zinnia, dismissing six years of world war as if it was just a bit of a squabble. There she was, ready to move on to the next thing the second that particular unpleasantness was over.

  ‘Give me a chance, Auntie Zin, I haven’t taken it all in yet. Nobody has.’ Truth to tell, I had been avoiding thinking about the future, it being a bit bleak, as far as I could figure it.

  ‘Aye, well, to my mind it’s time you did give it some thought. That Charlie of yours is no good. You don’t need me to tell you that. I didn’t believe you when you said that you fell when you lost the baby, and I don’t believe it now. You were pushed down those stairs when Charlie was in drink. You know it and so do I.’

  Zinnia held up her hand to shut me up when she saw my mouth open to protest. I snapped it shut. There was no point; I could see it in her shrewd, grey, far-seeing eyes. Zinnia always looked as if she was scanning some distant horizon, even when she was staring right into your face from not five feet away. It made you feel as if you were there, but not there, as far as she was concerned. It was very odd, until you got used to it. I knew I could argue till I was blue in the face; nothing would change her mind, because she was right. I had been pushed.

  ‘We’ll not waste time examining the point,’ she told me, ‘we’ll just concentrate on what comes next. Unlike your revered father, I don’t take the view that, having made your bed, you should be made to lie on it. We all make mistakes, especially the young. Some folk forget that.’

  My eyes filled with tears. Zinnia always seemed to be able to see right into my mind to the things that worried or frightened me the most. Sometimes she caught on before I realized I was upset at all. But then, I had trailed around after her almost since I could walk, fascinated by her knowledge of herbs, gardening, birds, bugs and bees, and her brisk common sense with her patients, so I suppose she knew me well.

  ‘Hold your water, young Zelda. We don’t have time for your tears,’ she said firmly. ‘We’ve a party to attend and you’ll ruin your mascara. All I’m saying is this: should you ever need to run away from it all, you have a san
ctuary here with me. Your mother and I have talked it over and we’re agreed. Your dad won’t abide the shame if you walk out on your wedding vows, but that’s no reason for you to stay where you’re not safe. He wouldn’t have you home; you know it and so do we. So, if ever you need to run, run here. Charlie’ll not interfere with me. And if he does, he’ll regret it.’

  Sympathy always undoes me. All that time I’d thought that terrifying night when Charlie had gone berserk and bounced me off the walls before slinging me down the stairs had been my secret. Bearing my mascara in mind, I made a big effort not to cry, but the expression on Zinnia’s face finished me off. Every inch of its hard, angular lines was softened by tenderness and understanding, and her eyes told me there wasn’t a lot she hadn’t seen and there was even less she couldn’t imagine. I cried for what seemed like hours, but felt better at the end of it. I hadn’t realized, until that moment, just how afraid I had been of my future with Charlie. It was a relief to know that Zinnia and my mum knew, even if I hadn’t had the nerve to tell them.

  The whole thing was such an awful mess. I’d thrown my life away at seventeen on one stupid act of defiance that had wound up in a tipsy and sweaty struggle on a grave behind St Mary’s. Next thing I knew, I was dragging myself up the aisle of the selfsame church, three months gone and desperate to get away. That was just after Charlie had joined up, early on in the war, and I’d barely seen him since. Chucking me down the stairs had been the last thing he’d done before he rejoined his regiment at Catterick after his first leave. All those years I’d kept the secret, and it turned out to be hardly any secret at all.