16 MAY 1941
Five days later, Peggy stepped sleepily blinking into the morning light and felt a rush of relief when she spotted Lucky casually leaning against the railings by the park next to the Tube, his cap perched at a jaunty angle.
In his hands, he clutched a paper bag and a rolled-up newspaper, and on his face, he wore a broad smile.
‘Morning, beautiful,’ he called, holding up the bag. ‘I’ve brought you breakfast. Fresh rolls made with ham straight off the bone.’
‘Oh, thanks. I’m famished! The Tube was so packed last night the cafe ran out of food,’ she grinned, thinking how much she was going to love being greeted by Lucky every morning for the rest of her life.
‘I can’t wait to bring you breakfast in bed when we’re married,’ he grinned. ‘Not outside a Tube station. Come on, let’s get going.’
‘You’re full of the joys this morning,’ Peggy said, sinking her teeth gratefully into her crusty ham roll.
‘Well, that’s because we had another quiet night last night,’ he revealed. ‘That’s the fifth night now with no bombs. I spent most of the night in my cot down the ARP post. Still didn’t get no sleep, mind. I think I’ve forgotten how to lay me head in peace anymore.’
‘Really? You don’t think . . . ?’
‘Too soon to say, and I wouldn’t want to jinx things,’ he replied, ‘but let’s try and be cautiously optimistic, shall we? Perhaps that was his final great raid.’
Since that last catastrophic night when the City of London had taken a battering, the night skies had been curiously quiet of planes. In fact, save for one night in November when the weather had been foul, this had been their first break from the nightly bombardment for eight months. The relief of having a fifth raid-free night certainly showed on Lucky’s face.
‘God willing, that’s it,’ Peggy replied. ‘We’ve certainly had our share.’
At Trout’s, the workers, buoyed by yet another quiet night, fed off each other’s optimism. Peggy knew no one dared suggest that might be it, but a weary and cautious hope prevailed as everyone got ready to do a day’s work behind their machines. After a week’s bed rest, Dolly was due back to work today. Maybe, just maybe, some normality could return at long last.
Lucky nipped to the toilets to change out of his ARP outfit and into his overalls, and when he returned, he held the newspaper aloft. ‘I nearly forgot, girls – you’re in the paper!’
Peggy giggled as Lucky’s words caused a near stampede, with everyone clustering round him to look at the newspaper.
‘Ooh, would you look at that?’ babbled Daisy excitedly, spreading the East London Advertiser out across a workbench. ‘We’re only on the front page, and oh look – is Doll back in yet? Someone fetch her. They’ve made it all about her.’
Peggy glanced over Daisy’s shoulder and sure enough, there, under the headline – ‘The Daring of Miss Dolly Do-Good’ – was a photograph of a very young Dolly.
‘Look at Dolly,’ said Peggy admiringly. ‘Isn’t she the spit of Ginger Rogers in this picture? How old is she here?’
‘She must be, what – eighteen, nineteen? Same as you two, Flossy and Peggy,’ said Pat. ‘It was taken about three years after she started at Trout’s. That must be near on nineteen years ago.’
‘That’s right. She was quite the head-turner back then,’ said Archie, who along with the rest of Trout’s had come to take a look. ‘I hope she won’t mind but I gave the journalist that photo. He wanted one of Doll on her own, but she had to leave suddenly after that funny turn, so I gave him one of her on Trout’s first ever beano down to Southend. I took it on my old Box Brownie.’
Archie smiled wistfully at the memory. ‘We stopped halfway down to the coast for a loo break and I took this photo of Dolly in a field while we were waiting for the girls.’
Dolly wore a gingham dress cinched in at the waist, with white gloves, white hat and white sandals, which showed off her slender ankles. The works’ charabanc was parked on the edge of a cornfield, and Dolly was leaning back casually against an old wooden gate as if she didn’t have a care in the world, her smiling eyes bright and warm as the drowsy late-summer sun.
Peggy looked fondly at all the factory old-timers and suddenly realized the photo had opened a window onto a golden past. Funny how a single photograph could do that.
‘Cor, life was so straightforward back then – no ducking bombs and sleeping down the Tube,’ murmured Ivy. ‘We had no idea.’
‘Not much,’ agreed Archie, with a wan smile as he picked up the paper and started to read. ‘“The East London Advertiser calls for Dolly Doolaney, or, as she is affectionately known by her work colleagues at Trout’s garment factory in Bethnal Green, Dolly Do-Good, to be awarded a medal for setting up and running the finest sewing bee in the East End of London.”’
‘Too right,’ interrupted Pat.
‘“A boatload of our sailors and bombed-out locals have been supplied with warm clothing, not to mention the endless mugs of hot tea she made for bomb survivors. If the war could be won on tea and smiles alone, then Dolly Doolaney could claim a victory.”’
Chuckling, Archie put the paper down and looked about. ‘Well, what about that? So come on there, where is the lady herself? She’ll get a real kick out of this.’
‘She hasn’t clocked on yet,’ said the forelady, frowning.
Peggy suddenly noticed Flossy, standing on the edge of the group, staring at the photo of Dolly with a curious look on her face. She seemed oblivious to everyone, until suddenly she looked up with the queerest expression.
‘Please, Mrs Shadwell, permission to go and check that Dolly is all right,’ she blurted.
‘Really, Flossy, must you be so melodramatic?’ chastised the forelady. ‘I’m sure she is perfectly well. She’s probably just running late, though I’ll admit it is out of character.’
But Flossy wasn’t listening; she was hastily gathering her bag and coat, and heading to the door of the factory with a stricken look on her face.
‘Flossy Brown,’ the forelady called after her, ‘where on earth might you be going? I take a very dim view of this.’
*
Flossy scarcely registered Vera calling after her, or the stunned expressions plastered on the faces of her fellow workers. There was no time to stop. She had to get to Dolly’s house.
As she ran in the direction of Tavern Street, her legs pumping over the cobbles, she felt as if her brain was spinning out of control. The realization had struck her like a thunderbolt as she had gazed on the image of the young Dolly dressed in her Sunday best, almost as if an invisible hand had come and gently lifted a piece of gauze from the shrouded memories of her past.
The image of Dolly in her best white hat and gloves had jogged something from her subconscious, and now she realized, it was so glaringly obvious. Why had she not registered it before?
Dolly was the fair-haired, smartly dressed young woman who had visited her in the children’s home when she was a child. The kind young lady who had taken time to read books and play with her was no governess or official from the child migration programme. It was Dolly! She had known her before she started at Trout’s. Their past lives were entwined together in ways only Dolly knew.
A thousand questions buzzed through her mind like a hive of clashing bees. In her haste, Flossy collided with a telegram boy on a bike and fell crashing to her knees on the cobbles. ‘Watch yourself!’ he called, but Flossy didn’t even pause to dust herself down. She picked herself up and started to run again, the blood from a gash in her knee soaking into her work pinafore.
Breathless, Flossy skidded to a halt outside Dolly’s front door and through her ragged breath realized that despite the bright spring sunshine, the blackout blinds were still drawn. Horror drummed in her chest as she frantically scanned up and down the street . . . Most of the houses in the road had their blinds half lowered. She had lived in the East End long enough to know that was a sign of respect. An awful, wrenching fear rolled over her as she pounded on the door.
One look at Dolly’s mother as she opened the door confirmed her worst fears. Mrs Doolaney’s round face was raw and etched with grief. It was like looking at a stranger. The last time Flossy had seen her plump, flour-dusted cheeks, they were creased into a permanent smile. This woman here had the light of madness shining in her eyes.
‘Dolly . . .’ Flossy ventured, her words breaking off.
The older lady simply nodded, and held the door open.
‘Oh, my dear, I was just about to send word to Vera . . . She’s with the angels.’
Inside in the gloom, Flossy cradled her cup of tea and stared in disbelief at the cooling brown liquid. Seated round the kitchen table of the tiny terrace, dressed head to toe in black, were the faces of women she had seen in photos. Dolly’s aunties, Jean, Polly and Sylvie, along with what felt like half the neighbourhood, had all come to pay their respects. Older women were quietly moving around the kitchen, cleaning and providing a never-ending stream of tea for the visitors. Dolly’s mother sat stock-still in the middle of it all, quietly dignified, but in a state of profound shock.
‘I don’t know why I feel like this,’ she said at last. ‘It’s not as if I didn’t know it was coming. The “dread disease”, they call it.’ She snorted and angrily brushed away a tear. ‘Well, I’ve been dreading it since she first got it, aged seven. Thirty years I’ve been waiting for this moment, so can someone please tell me why I feel so surprised?’
Her sister Polly patted her on the hand. ‘It’s the shock.’
With that, Dolly’s mother started to cry, great heaving sobs that seemed to consume her body, and Flossy watched in horror.
‘It just ain’t fair. It ain’t bleedin’ fair,’ she wept bitterly. ‘It was the bombs. They were the final straw. Her heart was just too weak to stand up to much more. I came down this morning to find her asleep in the easy chair. Well, I thought she was asleep . . .’
She stared at Flossy, her eyes wild with grief. ‘Do you wanna hear the funniest thing?’
Flossy nodded, dumbstruck.
‘It looks like the bombs have stopped. She lasted through the worst of it, and now they’ve stopped and she’s dead. Where’s the justice in that? Mind you, where’s the justice in any of it? My poor darling girl never had a bad bone in the whole of her body. Why did God choose her?’ She gazed round the table, a broken woman. ‘Why?’
‘Come on, Mum,’ soothed a lady Flossy took to be Dolly’s older sister. ‘I think you need to get upstairs and rest.’
Dolly’s mother was led up the stairs and Flossy gulped slowly.
‘Please, ma’am,’ she said at last to Dolly’s auntie Polly. ‘What . . . what did Dolly die from?’
‘Didn’cha know?’ she gasped. ‘She had rheumatic heart disease. She caught rheumatic heart fever as a girl and it never left her.’
‘No, ma’am, I’m afraid I didn’t know,’ Flossy replied.
‘Time and again the poor mite was struck down with an episode of it. By the time she was ten, she’d been hospitalized with it that many times. They hoped her body would be strong enough to recover, but each bout just damaged her heart that bit further, left her with severe cardiac damage. It cast such a dark shadow.’
The woman’s gaze drifted to the blacked-out window. ‘My sister wanted to let Dolly live, but it blighted her whole childhood. The girl couldn’t so much as throw a ball in the street without my sister dragging her inside. Not that I can blame her for being so protective. It’s a horrible disease. Licks the joints and bites the heart, so they say. The fear of it haunted the whole family. Poor girl was even sterilized so she couldn’t . . .’ Her voice trailed off. ‘I’ve said too much already.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ Flossy heard herself say. ‘But please, ma’am, may I know this? How long have you known time was running out?’
Polly shrugged. ‘The doctor seems to think the bombs and sheltering underground in the damp and cold probably hastened the end. She had an ECG and other tests up at the Chest Hospital, the night it was bleedin’ bombed of all times, that showed she had mitral stenosis. The valve that separated the chambers of her heart wasn’t opening properly and it made the heart chamber swell, gave her fluid on the lungs an’ all. You could see it in the way her ankles used to swell. Poor love couldn’t even sleep lying down for the last six months of her life.’
Flossy nodded. ‘I see,’ she whispered. And she could. Suddenly, everything made perfect sense: Dolly’s dramatic decline, bumping into her in hospital that night, the awful pallor of her skin . . . Deep down, she had known all along Dolly was hiding something. There was only one thing that made no sense.
‘Why didn’t she want anyone at the factory to know?’ she asked.
‘You have to ask?’ Polly replied, raising one eyebrow. ‘My niece was the proudest woman I know. She didn’t want no one’s pity, or folk wrapping her in cotton wool. She’d had a gutful of that growing up. She grew up knowing she would die young, and that has to change a woman, don’t it? Dolly wanted to make the most of what time she had left, make her time count, and for Dolly, working and being in the sewing circle was what counted. She never, ever wanted to be – what is it they call it? – a useless mouth.’
Flossy nodded again, and the action broke the floodgates. Hot, desolate tears started to flow down her cheeks and drip onto her bloodstained pinafore. The sudden wave of grief was so savage it took her breath away. How could Dolly no longer be in this world? How? Never again would she see her lovely, compassionate, remarkable, wonderful friend Dolly. Then came another haunting realization: she would never get to the bottom of why Dolly kept her visits to her in the orphanage a secret.
Suddenly, the door to the front parlour swung open and Flossy jumped. An elderly woman dressed head to toe in black and carrying a heavy bag shut the door carefully behind her.
Auntie Polly sat to attention. ‘Thanks for coming, Vi, but it’s impossible to get a funeral director round ’ere at short notice. They’re harder to find than hen’s teeth at the moment.’
‘They’ve never been so busy,’ said the woman, setting down her bag. ‘I’ve laid Dolly out and prepared her for you. She looks at peace now. I used the lipstick and rouge you gave me, and she’s wearing her favourite.’ She handed Auntie Polly a small bottle of violet-water scent. ‘I know how particular she was over her appearance. My condolences. Dolly was special.’
‘Thanks, Vi. My sister will be very grateful to you; we all are,’ said Polly, slipping sixpence into her pocket.
Flossy knew Vi was Tavern Street’s own ‘layer-out’, an elderly lady called upon to prepare the street’s dead in the absence of a funeral director.
Flossy knew Dolly would have been carefully washed, dressed in a white shroud and stockings with pennies gently placed over her eyes. Heaven was now ready to receive her, but Flossy wasn’t ready to see her. In a trance, she made to follow the women, but when she reached the door to the front parlour, she stopped.
‘I’m sorry,’ she wept. ‘I . . . I can’t.’
With that, she whirled round and fled from the oppressive gloom of the grief-stricken terrace. Flossy couldn’t bear her last abiding memory of Dolly to be cloaked in a shroud, those beautiful blue eyes finally closed forever to the world.