I was born in Poplar, East London, in 1933. In school we used to sing: “God made the Earth, and God made me.” And all this other stuff that God made. The flowers and the rivers and the bumblebee. And me! I loved that song. Did God make me? Or was it Moll and “Lucky Boy Tommy”—Thomas Dove—one night in Tunnel Gardens, down on East India Dock Wall Road, the tree-lined bit between Blackwall Tunnel and the docks, when he’d plied her with gin and persuaded her to roll up that pink, surgical-looking girdle she wore. A girdle which she would never have needed to wear, Moll, because she was only seventeen and weighed about seven stone, but it was the fashion back then, that kind of underwear. She thought she ought and it would look sophisticated. And sexy. Which to Tommy, it probably did. It turned him on, no doubt: he was Thomas bloody Dove. He would have been insistent, he wouldn’t have taken no for an answer—is it possible to think this, to think about the point when your own father’s juices start flowing, the first moment you are being brought into production, down some tube . . . the first little throb? The idea of me, the dot. Well, yes. Just about possible. But we’ll skip that, because I never did ask them, and I’m only . . . speculating. We’ll go straight to my birth.
I wonder how I knew, one day, that it was my time to arrive. (Doctors still don’t agree on that, do they? A mystery, how labor is triggered. Is it the mother whose pituitary gland secretes oxytocin, or is it actually the baby who sends the signal from its adrenal glands to the mother’s body to signal labor?) This has always interested me. I like to think it was me who decided, that I actually, in some tiny, seedlike part of my consciousness, heard the rag-and-bone man in the street—my granddad!—shouting raaaaagaboooahgh, and decided, yep, sounds good, time’s up, here I come.
He had a horse and cart. Granddad I mean. But he died the year I was born so I only got to ride in it once. There’s a photo of me and whenever I look at it, I’m there: the smell of the horse shit steaming on the street, the bumpiness of that cracked leather seat, the feeling of being Lord of the Manor in my knitted lace baby bonnet and my tie-at-the-neck bouncing pom-poms sodden with dribble, propped up on a bunch of cushions; gazing down from a grand height, jolting round the Isle of Dogs like Lady Muck. You might think this couldn’t possibly be a real memory, I was too young. It must be something made up, something the photograph calls up. What’s the difference? It feels real enough to me.
We lived then in a flat in the tenements built to house dockworkers, and my mum, Molly, was seventeen like I said, and Irish, and a slattern. That’s my word for it. In Poplar the word would have been a bike. She’d arrived in London with her big sister Brodie just a few years before and met my dad, Thomas, at a dance. Dad was twenty-five and all dark and hairy, with the most spectacular temper you ever witnessed. He had—she told me—a good job down the docks when she first met him. Those jobs were well-paid and really sought after, especially since we were in the midst of a depression, and my uncle Charlie was the gang leader so he always assured Dad would get chosen for work, but everyone knew Dad wouldn’t last long, because the job was full of “temptations.”
One thing about Dad that was true his whole life was that he couldn’t work for anybody but himself. He always fell out with a boss, as soon as the poor sod tried to tell him what to do. Dad couldn’t abide being told. And in that moment, when his temper went off, when he yelled all the joined-up obscenities that came to mind or put his face really close to someone’s and pressed his nose against theirs, he loved the freedom of really saying what he felt, of losing it completely. You could feel the joy crackle around him like a sparkler flaring into life when he lost his temper, and nothing at all mattered.
Our tenements were densely packed buildings with external stone steps, about six stories high, set between Blackwall Tunnel and Blackwall Stairs. All the flats were light-starved, as they faced inwards towards a courtyard, heaped with strings of sopping washing where the women would stand, where my nan would be, most days, peg in her mouth, basket at her feet, chatting, laughing, surrounded by bins that were always overflowing.
Moll had wanted to give birth at home, I know, because she was too lazy to get herself to the hospital, but home was a right tip, really filthy, I mean it always stank to high heaven: of urine, my dad’s sweaty baked-bean armpit smell, cigarettes, spilled beer, dirty, unwashed clothes, paraffin for the heater. Those were the smells that would have greeted me after that clean pure smell of blood and adrenaline and the whoosh of arrival. Shit. I should have been warned. But I was nothing but an optimist, from day one, and in that respect maybe I was more like my nan, not my mum. Or more like myself, perhaps. Surely there’s a bit of me that’s inexplicable, that’s just me? It can’t only be genetics and environment can it, otherwise, well, wouldn’t we be repeating everything, walking round like clones? I was never one of those kids who shouted, “I never asked to be born!” because it wasn’t true. I longed to be born, I was even two weeks early. I jumped out, I really did. I couldn’t wait.
I remember Nan telling me that the midwife was just a slip of twenty-two, her name was something like Jennifer, or perhaps Rosie—let’s call her Rosie—and she was still in training with the nuns who delivered babies in our part of London; she would have had a uniform on, and worn a handkerchief over her nose and chin. This girl had managed, with Nan’s help, to get the flat into some sort of state to greet me. Of course I can’t remember this, but you know I can imagine it or make it up and that’s nearly the same thing: the midwife’s young high voice squeaking while I was starting my descent, saying things to my mum like, “The heartbeat’s 126, that’s very good,” and, “Oh—oh, Mrs. Dove, you never said the baby was breech . . . ?”—a question that Mum wouldn’t have known how to answer. There’d be Nan, too, her slightly raspy tone, always clacking her dentures somehow because they were a bad fit; saying things like, “Well for God’s sake, she didn’t know!” And then to herself: “I’ll find someone to tell that good-for-nothing son of mine that he’s been and got a little one on the way,” and her knees snapping and creaking like twigs on a fire, as she knelt by the bed. She’d never be sure where Lucky Boy Tommy was, although even at the cell-dividing stage I could have told her: the betting shop was always worth a try.
I was pushed about, then, or whatever it is that a baby feels, pulled and pummeled in a corkscrew fashion, and all around me the seething walls sort of pumping me and squeezing me. Nan says I ventured one little foot out and it was dramatic: it caused such a shriek—“What’s that? My God, what’s that?”—that I tried again.
I was still in the sac, all nicely sealed up and wet, and you know mine had to be an original entrance—not a slimy red head like the cliché, no not for me—but a foot inside a bulging transparent sac, like the eye of some fantastical insect or a sea monster, something like that. Nan said they couldn’t believe it when they first saw me: they thought I’d come from the moon! She said the midwife, the young Rosie, actually screamed with astonishment: “Oh my word, a footling breech!”
In a rush of liquid, all at once, here I am, then, one foot after the other, and no time really for Moll to push, that’s what Nan said; when a baby’s in this position there’s no stopping her. They’re shouting and fussing, the midwife, Nan, Mum . . . and I’m making my first great escape—feet first, leaping, heading for the open, for the light!
That then was the fanfare and kerfuffle when I arrived in such an unusual way, and a few hours later, when he was found (yes, at the betting shop, and in a grand mood, Nan remembers, because he’d won two a pound and brought home a crate of beer), would have been the first time I met my gorgeous dad.
It must have been late by then. The midwife would be long gone, and Nan would have been snoozing by the fire, her knitting pattern sliding off her knee, a giant gobstopper clacking against her dentures; one foot in her pink slipper on the cradle she’d popped me into to rock me now and then. Mum lying with her face to the wall on a bed in the same room, her long auburn hair spread out on the pillow like a mess of hay. I guess Mum was sometimes a looker—I think I learned that over the years, the reactions she got when she pranced down the park with us in the pram, all bound up in her tightest skirt and her clickiest heels, her hair washed and piled on top of her head in curls. But this was rare. She mostly lay in bed in those early years, with her face to the wall, and allowed Nan to do any taking care of us that happened. If she did get herself tarted up, she did it with a giddy, brittle kind of feeling and we knew it was all going to end badly.
So now Dad came in, and he had his wild black hair slicked down, and such a big, big grin on his face and such pale icy blue eyes. He scooped me up from the cradle and if I close my eyes now I can imagine the massive beating of his heart beside me and the metal buttons on his jacket digging into me and the tickly hair rising up from inside his collar and the powerful smell of him—beer, tobacco, the leather strap from his watch, which was too big for him and he’d been piercing with a knife; a strong, animal smell, sort of bitter and warm all at once. “Look what I’ve been and got for my little rosebud,” he’s saying, producing from inside his jacket a bunny rabbit, white and sprawling legged, and dangling it in front of me.
Did he really? Did he bring me that bunny the first night I was born? I have a vivid memory of it. It traveled through my childhood with me, turning grey eventually like all of us, and one ear flopping hopelessly over its eye, but then it would have been new, made of felted wool, with soft white ears carrying little flecks of crumbled leather from Dad’s watch strap, and smelling of him. It had a glamorous pink bow around the neck, so I knew the bunny was a girl. Why do I think he must have given me it then and there, the first time we met? Because the shape of my life had begun and I feel certain it was Dad who began it. Things. That was what he gave me from the start in place of anything else and it’s what I ended up craving. Gifts and glamour and novelty, and if it came with a whiff of contraband so much the better.
Nan told me I opened just one newborn baby eye because the other was crusted with gunk and the eyelid wouldn’t budge and my dad laughed, saying to my mum, “That baby is winking at me! The gel’s on my side, Molly, and don’t you forget it,” and he tucked the rabbit in the blanket I was wrapped in and snuggled me back into the cradle. That was it, in fact. He was gone three weeks and didn’t so much as ask after his new daughter—or her mother—in that time, but why would I care about that? I had the bunny. “Came in here like bleeding King Kong . . . upsetting the baby,” Nan said, describing him later, unimpressed. King Kong was showing at the new Troxy cinema on Commercial Road: everyone was talking about it.
My brother, Bobby, came along barely ten months later and looked like a scrappy black-haired doll. I do remember staring into the drawer they’d pulled out and laid him in, like he was a pet guinea pig or something, and pushing the empty teat of a bottle towards his mouth and watching his tiny eyes stare at me over the top of it, grateful, I supposed, or desperate.
There was one tap for cold running water and one lavatory shed down in the courtyard at that time, for a whole row of families to use. If it was dark and raining, the corridor and stairs would gleam slick as the skin of a black slug. I wouldn’t dare to venture there, preferring to use the chipped china pot in the corner of the bedroom. It seems to me a little easier to forgive Mum for being so disgusting in her personal habits when I remember that. That was the first five years of my life.
Nan lived one flight down. She was Dad’s muvver, she’d had a great band of boys, and no girls, and all of them “bad as socks” and sure to be “the death of her.” Like lots of women at that time she’d all her teeth removed for no good reason except that she couldn’t afford dentists’ bills, and if she had any beauty, I think it went that day with the teeth.
The boys had long since left, all except Charlie and her eldest and wildest, my dad, Lucky Boy Tommy, who she doted on; for all he had been such a “bleedin’ handful,” for all he got the needle so often and with such dramatic results. She was horrified by his choice of wife. Skinny hopeless Irish Moll who had no “good Irish” left in her. Moll’s mum had died when she was a girl so in Nan’s view Moll had “no idea on God’s bleedin’ green earth” how to be a mother. Mum’d been raised by her older sisters and only one of them had come to London with her. Those sisters had been useless, as far as Nan was concerned; “they didn’t half bugger up the raising of Moll” by imparting no practical skills and indulging Moll’s laziness and helplessness. Nan had been teetotal all her life, despite the many times when Dad and his brother Charlie had tried to hoodwink her with a slug of Haig in her tea. Molly, now eighteen, and a mother of two, already drank like a fish.
My nan used to say to me when I was little, “Who did she get you off of, eh? Where’d she find you?” It worried me, though I think she meant it kindly. I thought that if it wasn’t the moon, it must have been somewhere far away like Canada. Somewhere icy and clean—a blank slate to drive a glacier through the filth of Molly’s life. I worked out years later that all Nan meant was: how did I get to be so clever? And that was before they tested me, before they knew how clever. Nan couldn’t quite believe I was one of the Dove family. But when she said it then, shaking her head and pursing her mouth, I thought she meant to disown me, or suggest I was the milkman’s daughter, like people did with Meryl Davis.
I didn’t realize it then, but that comment of Dad’s about my winking—if Nan remembered it right, this setting us up together as in cahoots against Mum—was my undoing as far as Mum was concerned. She was depressed, yes, but she was jealous, too. She liked to be the baby herself, the center of attention, and when she clicked first with me and then with Bobby, she loved the fuss. But once the babies came that all changed. It was just crying and pooping and work, work, work. She’d once said to my dad, “Why don’t you do all the bleedin’ nappy-changing and nappy-washing if you love kids so much?” and he’d said (apparently), “You never ought to have had any, you, and all right then I will do the nappies and I’ll do it a hell of a lot better an you do.” So she started this campaign, where she’d never change Bobby until Dad got home so that she could hand him over. I needn’t tell you that in those days men did not change nappies.
Bobby would be sore and red and his little bum kind of scalded looking, but if Dad didn’t turn up for days on end Mum wouldn’t change him. She’d just leave his nappy off and let him piddle and poop anywhere in the flat, like a little rabbit. She was on a protest. I don’t know how she dared to do this, because she must have known it would make Dad mad, mad in a way that always meant fireworks. When he finally did show up, she’d be ready for him. She’d stand in her dressing gown, the house stinking, drawing on her cigarette as she propped up the French dresser, smoking and pretending to be calm. Her heartbeat, the sense that she was ticking, like a bomb ready to go off . . . I could feel it, the moment I heard his key in the door. I’d tug on Bobby’s hand and take him and hide somewhere, under the beds in our bedroom, where we could put our hands over our ears so we couldn’t hear it.
Once I crept out, saw them in the hall. Watched from behind a door crack as he took off his shoe, and threw it at her. It hit her on the shoulder and thudded off the wall, leaving a black smudge, but she just brushed at her shoulder, carried on walking into the kitchen.
“Huh! You think that fucking hurt?” she couldn’t resist saying, over her shoulder.
So he took off the other one . . . I ran into bed then, back under the pillow, Bunny next to me and only the sound of my own sputtering heart for company. That phrase of Dad’s, the allying of me to him, struck deep. I’m not like her, I thought. I had no sympathy at all for her. No one’s ever going to throw a shoe at me.
But it was a confused thought, because Moll was stubborn, and defiant in her way, and perhaps my stubbornness was as much from her as Dad? When Nan visited over the next few years she was horrified by the state of our place and would spend her whole time on her hands and knees with a dustpan and brush, while Bobby would stand playing by the mouse hole next to the fire, poking a pencil into it to see if he could make the mouse come out. Nan would be scooping up dry filth and crying. “What’s got into you, Moll? What on earth are you thinking? I’m telling you, these kids will get sick if you carry on like this . . . it’s the worst pen . . .”
Pen and ink. Stink.
Nan decided, finally, that she was the only one who could improve things in her daughter-in-law’s home, so she took it on herself to bathe us, hauling buckets of water from the tap down in the courtyard up the stairs, and setting up a chipped china basin in front of the fire. Bobby would always scream and get a mere dunk: he’d soon be rolled in a thin blanket—there were never any towels—and left in front of the fire, where he’d wriggle out in an instant. He could never be still for long. Moll and Bobby hated water, but I loved it. I loved that trickling feeling as Nan splashed it over me. I loved sitting up in my cramped bowl, once I could, and gazing at Nan—how she always seemed to me, right from the very beginning, just like a tortoise, with her neck stretching out, all folded and crisscrossed, so many hundreds of times. I loved the tinkle of the drips between her fingers, as she lifted up the old grey flannel and squeezed it; and the way the droplets looked like gold beads when a little flame from the kitchen fire was reflected in them. I loved water—baths, pools, the sea. That was another way that I was different from my mum, who had a suspicion of anyplace green or wet, or not made of bricks.
We didn’t get to go to anyplace green, though, until six years after that, when war broke out and Bobby and I were evacuated. We’d moved from Canada Buildings by then, to a house on the Well Street end of Lauriston Road in South Hackney, near the church, and I’d started at Lauriston School and Bobby was in the nursery class. That was the most extraordinary change. I mean, Lucky Boy Tommy really seemed to have struck lucky: he bought us that house for £250, a massive sum, and he bought a car, too, a Chrysler, which was like a Mercedes in those days—we were the only family in the neighborhood who had one. Remembering this now, I realize that I did have some dim understanding of how unusual it was, but on the other hand, like any child, I just accepted it as an enchanting change in my life, like the Tizer and coconut ices he suddenly bought us, and the little shilling knife he bought Bobby, with the bone handle and the leather sheath. The car was a buttery yellow color, with a top that peeled back and these little canvas flaps in the windows that you could coil up around the window rails when the roof was off and big sweeping curves over the wheels and it was so delicious I used to think it was like one giant ice-cream cone when Dad rolled up outside our house.
It was money which had made this magic, I knew that much. Dad would produce a silver sixpence from behind my ear and pop it on my tongue, or fold a ten-bob note up and poke it in the top pocket of my pinafore dress, patting it and telling me to “go buy myself something nice.” Silver coins tasted bitter and pennies tasted like blood, but the inky tang of folded notes when I slipped out my tongue and tried it was the best taste on earth. Rule Britannia, two tanners make a bob, Dad used to sing. He’d throw me up in the air when I was still small enough and there would be breath-holding seconds before he caught me again, where my heart would sail through the air with me, but he always did, and then he’d laugh, and snuggle my face with his, brushing me with his prickly chin.
Those early days in Lauriston Road I’d stand at the corner shop with Bobby, mouth watering over the coconut ice and licorice sticks and know that we could choose them and take them home, where there’d be coal in the fire and Sally Lunn’s from Smulevitch’s bakery in Well Street and our lives would be different, full of calm. I knew that money did this: made our lives into those of children in books—safe and good, with kind parents. I even saw myself differently during this time: I was a girl with auburn ringlets, reading a book in a broderie anglaise dress, under a cherry tree, in a garden full of light.
But being magic, it went up in a puff soon enough. After the thrill of the move and Mum’s joy in riding round the streets in the Chrysler, with her conker-colored hair pinned tightly into a pale pink scarf patterned with rosebuds and wearing a white dress with thin straps and a sweetheart neckline—well after that there was a dreadful ugly night, when we had a spin. The police, the cozzers, came round, opening drawers and cupboards and pulling out things, until our spanking-new place looked just like a hamster’s hutch with all its stuffing pulled out.
Dad sat all through it, glowering on his brand-new red sofa, wearing a vest where hair snaked out from under his armpits, and around the neck, smoking and refusing to say anything. Mum was crying, Bobby was crouching behind the sofa, and I was right next to him. Bobby and me stared right into each other’s eyes, but said nothing. Bobby had the sweetest little face, with cropped black hair and round, sticking-out ears: his nickname was Monkey. Also, because he was cheeky and a scamp and always dangling from some tree or rung of a ladder or something. His favorite game was to go over to Vicky Park with his shilling knife with the bone handle—all the boys had knives in those days—and practice throwing it at trees, while the crows tottered on the grass like fat vicars and the Jewish boys chased each other around Vicky Fountain, throwing their black caps in the air.
Bobby sat now, with his knees up and long arms dangling. I could smell him: a sweaty-socks-and-shoes smell and the smell of these hard sweets he loved—black hard licorice pips, which Nan would give him from a tin and sometimes stuck to his teeth so that he could pretend to be a toothless pirate. I had the strongest feeling that to say anything, I mean a word, not just the wrong word, could make the worst thing ever happen. Could make my dad disappear. So when this policeman’s face looms over the sofa and says, “Hello there, and who have we got here?” I wouldn’t answer him, and I squinted at Bobby who squinted right back, snapping his mouth tight shut. There was another baby by then: Vera, a big fat jowly kind of baby who looked just like a Baby Grumpy doll, and who was lying in her fancy white crib, a little distance from the sofa, staring up at the colored balls of string which on one of her rare visits here Nan had pegged above her head.
The policeman soon gave up, straightening up and taking his notebook out of his top pocket, and we watched as he and another man tried to manhandle our dad and get him out of the room. They told him to get a shirt. We held our breath, wondering what Dad would do. No one spoke to him like that! Even Mum stopped sobbing for a minute, to peep from behind her hands, and watch.
When he wouldn’t move, the policeman made a noise with his tongue and went wandering round our house. We listened in hot silence as he thudded up the stairs and came down with a white shirt, from the airing cupboard. The room crackled with the smell of Dad’s anger, with the feeling I always had when I knew Dad was angry. But to my surprise—to everyone’s surprise—Dad just put the shirt on, grinning all the while, taking the longest time to do up every button, fiddling at his cuffs to do them up really, really carefully, right up to the top collar, and then gave a short laugh. He had this weird laugh. It wasn’t when he found things funny. That laugh frightened me, in fact, because he’d put his face too close to you when he did it, and sort of bark at you, right at you until you could feel the spray. He did this now, and the room felt very silent and small, like being in a cupboard.
Dad had turned rigid, stood with his legs apart, pretending not to notice what they were doing as the two men got his arms behind him, put cuffs on him, and attached him to one of them.
I covered my face with my hands.
But I had to look, I had to glance, as I saw the two policemen move behind him, give him a poke in the back. The one he was locked to had to sort of stumble behind him, like this toy I had once, a little walking toy with a rod between the two wooden characters. Dad looked proud, then, with his ice-blue eyes staring straight ahead, his sweet-scented hair, his strange smile not wobbling at all. They kept on pushing him, shoving him in the back, and they got him to move in the end.
Just as he was leaving he wheeled around, and ducked his head over the top of the sofa to say to me (and only me), “That’s right, my gel. Don’t you ever go and be a grass. Worst thing in the world. Rather die than be a grass, eh?” I thought he might be about to smack me, he looked so furious, but instead he gave me this whoppa of a kiss, a big hard kiss landing like a fist on my head, and that was it: in a whirl of smoke and the sound of Vera wailing, he was gone.
That night I took Bunny to bed with me and sniffed it, trying to breathe some enchantment, something of Dad—the feelings he always brought, the sense that something good might happen to us at last. That rabbit was magic. Dad had produced it, a magician conjuring it from a hat. Dad could snatch at your nose and pretend to pinch it, and then—puff!—it would reappear between his fingers. So maybe Dad would reappear, if I longed for him enough? I slept with Bunny’s pink silky ribbon under my cheek, and in the morning there was a red strip there. I ran my finger along it, the strange ridge on my skin, thinking: if only it would never fade.
I knew we were going to be hungry then. Where would the money for food come from, if Dad wasn’t around? Moll could survive on cigarettes, on “air-pie and a walk around,” as Nan used to say. We often felt hungry, we were used to it, but it started up that night, a more desperate, clawing feeling than I’d had before, and I knew it was here to stay, for a long, long time.
Dad got nine months. The prison was in the country and we never went to visit him. We didn’t know what he’d done; no one mentioned it to us. I somehow got the impression that the house would be taken from us, that what he’d done connected to that, but it never was. Mum told us we should look sad if anyone asked in Hackney and say Daddy was a soldier in Burma—this was before the war had started—and how much we missed him.
“Let me see you say it,” she said to me, and I put my head on one side and slumped my shoulders and said, “My poor daddy is a soldier over—overcease—and we’re all on our own.” “No!” she says. “Don’t ham it up, gel,” and I had to try again, especially with the “overseas” word, until I got it just right and she sat back on her heels and laughed and said, “Well, would you look at that, the gel’s a proper bleeding actress, ain’t she good at lying?”
I beamed at that: the first—maybe only—compliment she ever paid me.
So then the leafleting started, it must have been summer of ’39, and Mum picked one up one day standing waiting in the butcher’s on Well Street market—where she couldn’t afford anything and was just chatting to Sly Roger, the butcher, who was a friend of my dad’s. In fact he was a friend of quite a few men who were inside at that time, and Sly Roger made it his business to look out for them, women whose husbands were “away”; to help their wives out occasionally. He wasn’t actually called Sly, of course; that was Nan’s name for him. She would say, “Roger the Dodger the Dirty old Lodger” and some other rhymes, so that’s how I thought of him. Mum picked a leaflet up from the dusty window ledge of Sly Roger’s shop with flakes of sawdust on it and that blood and sawdust butchers’ smell—and read it out to me and Bobby as we were leaving, pushing Vera with her bouncing pom-poms on her hat in her pram up Well Street.
“MOTHERS SEND THEM OUT OF LONDON,” she read.
Moll stood there with a cigarette in one hand, a leaflet in the other, and fanned her face with it, and she suddenly seemed all whipped up in a hot angry feeling and she’s saying, “Shall I then, shall I send ya?”
At home, once her mood was quiet again and she had her feet up and her nose in My Weekly, I read the leaflet myself. It had a little crown at the top and an arc, a bit like a rainbow, and the words read, “EVACUATION—WHY AND HOW? Public Information Leaflet No 3. Read this and keep it carefully. You may need it.” The words were easy for me, the best reader in my class, in fact, Miss Clarkson said, the best little reader she’d ever come across. But even so. It made no sense. Why did we need to evacuate? I decided to ask Nan when next I saw her, on her weekly visit from Poplar to give me and Vera a bath (she’d given up on Bobby—who stank to high heaven—though if she could manage it she’d try and bring him a Knockout comic that was a few weeks old: she found them in a bin outside the shops on Well Street).
I’d learned from Nan where Mum’s mood swings came from. If Mum had been to the shops and come back with a bottle in brown paper I knew she’d be merry for a while, squeezing our bottoms as she suddenly clutched us in a fierce squishy cuddle. Then she’d slump out, snoring, skirt all rucked up and her knickers on show, on the replacement sofa, a green thing with exploded insides that we rescued from a skip and smelled of dogs.
Nan had said on her last visit that Dad was lucky to be inside because no one outside had a job anyway and knowing him he’d have only gone and fought the Blackshirts and got himself into more trouble. She saw him as “lucky” no matter what. She had a blind spot about Dad for all her goodness, but she didn’t know the half about the way we were living, about how hungry we were and how it was for Vera, and I never thought to tell her. What could she have done? She had no money, I knew that much. Only Dad could make a silver coin appear from nowhere.
We were so poor by then. We were still living in that big house but every twig of furniture had been pawned and Moll had no idea, without Dad, how to do anything at all. There was nothing in for breakfast. There was no coal in the fire. We had long had to give back our fabulous new electric cooker that we’d been renting from the showroom, and the electric iron, too. The baby cried all night long, and Mum would sleep heavily through it, helped by a visit to Sly Roger and whatever gift he’d given her. Bobby and me took turns to walk Vera, to lift her from her crib and put her against our shoulders, the weight of her bouncing against us; to—when we felt really desperate—sneak our hand under Mum’s pillow, brave the stink of her breath, and dab at her gin with our fingers, so that we could let Vera suck on them to quieten her.
That’s when I did it. The first time. It was a stroke of brilliance, if I say it myself. A talent I didn’t know I had was born.
It’s like this: Bobby and I are running along Lauriston Road towards school. The bright green spire of St. John of Jerusalem church points up towards God in heaven. Bobby is nipping about in his monkey-boy style, sometimes jumping up from the pavement and scampering along a wall instead. We’ve had no breakfast, and we left Vera at home crying, snuggled up in bed with Mum, and something about this worries me; even though it’s the same every day, on this day I don’t feel good at all. We love to go to school, though Bobby has only just started and Mum is always trying to keep us home with her. Today she’s not fierce; she’s in one of her heavy moods. She’s slow and—well, I just don’t have a good feeling about her. Maybe she’ll roll over on Vera and crush her. I’m thinking of this and not really listening to Bobby, but then I do hear him, his little tuppence-ha’penny voice as he leaps down from a wall, saying, “I’m starving,” and, “My stomach’s aching.” As he says this, school is there, with its big arch and the word “BOYS” calling to Bobby, who is in the first year, the youngest class, but for some reason, I think it might be that I get a sniff of bread from the baker’s boy in his van, or just for mischief, I don’t know, I suddenly grab Bobby’s hand and snatch him away from that arch, and back the way we’ve come, running. Bobby laughs and follows me.
We run back past the churchyard and the double-arched doorway of St. John of Jerusalem with its funny Jesus with his hand missing and the message saying, “I be not afraid,” and I think: right, I’m not, ta very much, I’m not afraid! And we run as far as Cassland Road, past privet hedges and gravestones and droopy bluebells in people’s gardens and dust bins, and tweety morning birds and propped-up bicycles, and past the stinky beer smell of the Albion pub, and past a sweep carrying all his brushes, and now there are no children going to school, and we’re on our own and the light is sticky, warm, and making you feel like you’re a wasp in a jar of honey.
The milk van has already been up the street; the horse with its nose stuck in its nosebag. And on one of the steps of one of the fancier houses, in this little neat bit called Cassland Crescent, a maid or a housewife or someone has left it there on the step: a pint of milk sitting in a bottle with the top all curling and pecked by the birds. The street seems suddenly quiet. I look up and down it and don’t see a soul. I can’t even hear a dog barking, or the clop of the horse from the milk van, which must be long gone, away to Hackney Wick.
Birds hold their breath, watching me. I’m listening to my own heartbeat. Bobby is bouncing on one leg, and then sniveling, and the white milk bottle smiles at me, glowing, handsome. Take me. I’m yours. Come on, gel. You can do it. Come on.
I watch the long tall houses, staring down their noses at me, from the highfalutin street. I walk over towards the gate, and quietly undo the latch. The door is painted a color Nan always calls royal blue. It has one of those huge brass knockers, a lion’s head, but he’s just peering down towards the front step like he’s lost his body down there. Bobby is a stride away, one finger in his mouth. My heart is thumping: loud, now. Steady, though.
So then I dart forward. I snatch at it, at the bottle, and it’s cold, the glass slippery. I hold it tight, clutch it to my chest and half-run, half-walk back towards the gate. I’m not sure if I imagine it, but there seems to be someone at the window of the house, or was there a voice, did someone shout, “Oi! You gel!”? I grab Bobby, almost spinning him round, and shove him towards Cassland Road, and in a kind of running walk, carefully so as not to drop the milk, I follow him.
We stop then, in the doorway of a house on Gascoyne Road, and start laughing and shrieking, and Bobby is saying, “Give it, then, give us a drink!” and I’m scared I might drop it because it’s slippery and I’ve hugged it to me like a doll, or like my beloved white Bunny.
We’ve found ourselves now far away from school and near to the Cawley Gate bit of Vicky Park. So we hop over the low fence, run towards the Vicky Fountain, and sit down behind it on the stone, right beneath the fat cherub riding an elephant. At least I think it’s an elephant—it could be a dolphin with teeth like a shark. But that would be silly.
I pass the milk to Bobby, and let him take a sip.
“Wonder if Flash Gordon has got himself to Mars?” Bobby says happily, after glugging a huge amount. He wipes his mouth with his sleeve.
“Give it me, then.” I take a sip myself.
All the time we rushed away from that house, my heart was jabbering, sort of shouting at me. Something inside me rushing, rushing. Is my blood flowing faster? Something else, too. Something like the thing I described when Dad loses his temper. A feeling like shredding things, tearing things up, making them flutter in the wind. It’s such a blowy day, I notice suddenly. I glance around, at a stand of big trees near Victoria Park Road, staring down at me like a row of teachers. A paper bag bowls along between them. It doesn’t matter. They’ll never stop me. I can do it—do what I like. It’s mine, not theirs, this world, and I want it, I do, I do!
It’s brilliant to watch Bobby put his mouth to the lip of the bottle and glug glug glug the milk down. His eyes wide and his ears waggling as he drinks, and his little nose all milky. He’s not a bit worried about what I’ve just done; he’s too busy thinking about Flash Gordon. But I am, and not because I think I’ll get caught. I know that no one saw me. I can sit under this sign that reads something like, “For the love of God and the Gooded,” or does it even say, “For the love of God and Good Food”? Perfect! The words are a bit scratched out, being old.
I let Bobby take his time, and slurp the rest when he’s ready. The reason I’m worried is because it was so easy and I know that this won’t be the last time. The world is full of milk on doorsteps. And bread left by the baker’s vans, and coal from the coal man. As long as I don’t pick the same doorstep, as long as no one spies me, I can do it every morning, can’t I? I can drink it then and there, the way the birds do sometimes, perching on rims to dip their heads in the skin of milk.
Only yesterday we’d sat in St. John of Jerusalem, moss under our fingernails where we’d been picking it from the tops of walls, green smells under our noses, and the church organ plonking away and the vicar booming about Proverbs and saying, “Open thy mouth, judge righteously, and plead the cause of the poor and needy.”
Cheers, the poor and the needy. Ta very much. I be not afraid.
I can take some home for Vera and say I found it, somebody left it behind. Finders keepers. It’s not as if Mum will ask. I don’t think I’ve eaten anything since the pie and mash that Nan brought us last Friday.
So I’m thinking this on my way home, a little later that morning, as the clouds roll over the rooftops and everything, leaves, paper, is caught up and flapping, wheeling along as fast as a child’s hoop. I’m happily picturing Vera holding out her chubby little arms for a bottle of milk. I’m a bit surprised to see the knitted figure of Nan at the front door of our house, and see from the way she’s standing that she’s been there a while. I turn to go back, but she’s already spotted me and Bobby, who’s bouncing from one foot to the other behind me.
She clacks her dentures at us as we get up close; moves the gobstopper to the side of her mouth so that it bulges scarily as she speaks, stretching her tortoise neck out.
“And where you bin, my gel?”
“School, course.”
“School my arse. School’s the other way. It’s nearly ten o’clock. And where’s your mum? I can’t get an answer at this door. Is she in?”
That scares me. As she says it I realize something: I’ve had this feeling, a cold stone-in-the-stomach kind of feeling, all morning, and I suddenly know that I didn’t want to go to school with Bobby to get away from it. And I did for a bit, there were stronger feelings, but now they’re gone and the stone in my stomach is back, all cold and heavy again. I don’t understand why, or what it was that I was dreading. I only know that now it’s happening. Something bad. Happening to Mum, or Vera.
Nan gets her umbrella then and starts bashing the door. She peeks in at the window but the curtains are closed and all she can see is the backside of green velvet.
“Might be asleep,” I say. “She was asleep when we left. She had Vera in bed with her.”
Nan stops bashing the door and stares at me. She looks into my face for a minute. The gobstopper bulges in her cheek like a giant boil.
“Had your mum . . . what kind of state was she in, when you two went out this morning?”
I know what she’s asking but I can’t say it. Cat’s got my tongue.
So now Nan seems really worried, and goes next door, and starts knocking on that door instead.
Mr. Barry appears in his shirtsleeves. This is a posh street, not used to the likes of us. Mr. Barry is a night watchman and he sleeps in the day, so we’ve just woken him, too. He gives Nan a bad look, which Bobby and me can read perfectly well.
“Molly. My daughter-in-law. I think she’s had an . . . accident,” Nan says, and I notice her voice changes a little, and she’s trying to speak “proper.” My stomach twists: I feel embarrassed for her.
“You couldn’t . . . could you help us get inside?”
Mr. Barry goes back inside his house without a word, and then he comes out again and says to Bobby and me, in a very important voice, “Stand Back, Children.”
He has this big crowbar and he’s going to bash the door down. As he lifts it, swinging it behind him, Nan suddenly says, “I thought Moll might have given you a spare key?”
At this, his missus, Glenda, appears, and after a chat it seems clear that Mum did give Glenda a spare key and the door is opened without the need to smash it up, and Mr. Barry puts his crowbar down and his handkerchief over his mouth and says, “What the—” and me and Bobby hang back and I know again, with the same stone-heavy feeling, that this is going to be as bad as Dad going away, maybe even worse. That something too bad to say has happened.
And it has, because now Nan is in the front room and screaming, a sound I’ve never heard before, and Glenda is crying jesus christ almighty and they’re pushing us back outside into the front garden, and trying to block our eyes and not let Bobby squeeze under their legs and run back into the front room. I think that it’s Mum—Mum must be dead—and I start screaming, too, until Nan stops and her skin is the color of ash from the fire and she says sshh ssshhh and I do at last push past Nan’s knobbly knitted shape into the front room and I see then Mr. Barry is helping Mum up from the bed on the floor and she’s not dead, and I rush to her, and try to cuddle her; I bury my face in her legs in her shiny stockings, but she smells bad, really bad, like petrol or beer or something, but the crying is now from Nan, and Nan is holding my baby sister Vera, wrapped mostly in a sopping wet blanket, and the baby is all wrong, I can see that, with her head over to one side like a chicken when its neck is broken. Nan takes the baby and sits on the stairs, and now Mr. Barry is helping Mum over to their house, but I hear Glenda is asking if we have a telephone, does anyone have a telephone (we don’t) in the street? And I know she’s going to ring the Old Bill, that she’s going to tell them, to “grass,” which can only be a Terrible Thing.
That night we spend at Nan’s, back at Canada Buildings. Mum is in hospital, and the cozzers are waiting to talk to her.
Vera is in heaven. No one tells us why or what happened. Whenever I think of it, of what they were all trying to hide from us—we kept getting shooed back outside, onto the street, like we were chickens—I remember the kettle, and the fire in the grate, and then I have a funny surprise: Mum lit a fire? Mum got some coal from somewhere? Then I picture the kettle on its side, lying on the floor with no whistle in it, and remember there was water everywhere, as if it had been dropped from a long way. Mum’s mattress was on the floor in the front room where she always sleeps in the day and I saw that the bed was wet. Did she drop boiling water on Vera? Would that be enough to kill a baby? Vera did look terrible, her head a blackened red color—that was all I saw.
But no one tells us. That night we sleep high up in Nan’s big bed, in her bedroom, the bed with the great black snaky springs, bursting through one little hole in the mattress at the bottom sometimes to poke at your foot. I usually loved Nan’s candlewick spread with the patterns to pluck at, and the tickly tassels that Bobby likes hiding under, and chewing. But I hardly sleep at all, because every time I close my eyes Vera rolls up, and she’s crying, and scolding me, and won’t stop.
The next morning Nan says the welfare lady is coming to talk to us because Mum is going to be in a special hospital for a while and that we should be glad because it could be worse. We wonder how it could be worse.
“Your dad’ll have to be told . . . and there’ll have to be a bleedin’ funeral for poor little Vera . . . and that ain’t no place for you nippers,” Nan says, eyes wet. The old tortoise seems older than ever—she hasn’t even done her hair, which bounces out from her ears like tufts of cotton wool now that it isn’t caught in a net, and I stare into her old blue eyes thinking: how many times has her face folded up that way, like a nice clean handkerchief, crumpled and crumpled in your hand? The welfare lady wants to send us to Elephant and Castle to be with a foster family, Nan says, but she—Nan—has a better idea and will do her “bleedin’ best” for us. Nan’s legs are gnarly like a tree with veins and don’t work so well, and the dirt at our house is too much these days, even for her, she says, and she’d love to keep us, but she knows they’d never let her. If she makes a fuss they might send us to a home. I can’t believe those legs can hold her up at all, let alone take her up the flights of stairs she has to climb to get to her flat: they look so spindly, like twigs, so I know she’s telling the truth.
Nan has been listening to the wireless and since May the government has been warning parents about something, about the “biggest sacrifice of all”: sending their children to the country. Sounds quite nice to me.
She smiles a bit, ducking her head to look really closely at me and Bobby. There’s a huge creaky noise as she bends down to whisper in my ear, and a whiff of her, the perfume smell of parma-violet sweets: “And I’m telling you, at least you’ll get a bleedin’ wash there, and fed, too, and you can’t do any worse than Moll now, can you?” It sounds like a holiday, a trip to the country, Bobby says. He can’t wait.
That night in Nan’s parma-violet-scented bed I have another horrible dream. Little Vera is an angel in heaven but she’s unhappy. She’s crying and waving her red arms—really in pain. In my hand I’m clutching a bottle of milk and I’m holding it out towards Bobby, and Vera is howling. Give me the milk! I’m the baby! What about me? Look what you’ve done.
It’s my fault, I think. I’m the cleverest: I can see things differently from Bobby and Mum, and Nan. I’m more like Dad, I’m the one who does things. I’m the only one who can make things happen like he can: like he made a car appear from nowhere, and that’s my job, too.
Waking up I remember something. “Like taking sweets from a baby.” I don’t know where I first heard that, but I picture the milk on the doorstep. How easy it was to nick it. And then more from that boring vicar, Proverbs again: “The wicked flee when no man pursueth: but the righteous are bold as a lion.” Yes. Bold as a lion—that’s me. Lying in the bed with Nan snoring beside me, a hot lump like a meat pie cooking, and Bobby’s elbow sticking in me on the other side, I think: I must take care of Bobby. And next time, when Mum is there, I’ll bring the milk home. If only I’d done it this time, I would have saved Vera. Next time I’ll bring home the bacon. Another funny sentence, heard somewhere, all mixing up. I want my mum, I’m thinking. I remember trying to hug her, at the house, trying to wrap my arms around her legs while they were taking her, and how she was being led by Mr. Barry, and how she stumbled against me and didn’t seem to see me and trod on my foot, and it hurt. I want Mum, I’m saying, into my pillow. Where is she? I don’t understand. Bad as Nan says you are, Mum, I want you.