All the housewives seemed to take out their frustrations about being at war with a renewed fervour for cleaning, and Bessie was no exception.
She stood, feet firmly planted, beating the living daylights out of a rag rug on the line she’d strung up across the patch of earth she called a back garden.
‘Oh, I’d like to give that Mr Hitler what for, I would,’ she said, whacking it with fresh vigour, sending dust and dirt flying all over the place.
Annie nodded in agreement. Bessie had forearms like two giant hams from all the years she’d spent scrubbing at the washtubs in the laundries. There were so many laundries crammed into the little terraced streets of South Acton it had the nickname Soapsud Island and the area had been the lifeblood of Annie’s family for as long as she could remember. She had worked there as a laundry maid when she was young; her stepdad, Bill, had spent long years as a dollyman, heaving wet blankets out of the tubs; and her mum still took in ironing for the laundry bosses as a favour now and again, because she was such a skilled silk presser. The family had toiled long and hard at one of the small hand laundries, Hope Cottage, before it closed and then Mum went on to one of the new power laundries with all the steam irons and presses, which she still grumbled about for being ‘newfangled’. Her methods had been tried and tested for generations. She still preferred to use the heavy ‘sad’ irons which she warmed on the range before working them with almost lightning speed across crumpled garments and turning out clothes which would be fit to hang in a shop window.
Some of the Soapsud Island washerwomen were as tough as old boots and Bill said only last night that Churchill should have thought of sending an army of them over to bash the Germans. ‘They wouldn’t stand a chance against the likes of Bessie! They’d be better at fighting than the bloody Belgians.’ The mere thought of Bessie knocking Hitler and his cronies for six was enough to raise a smile, even if they were all still worried sick about what was happening to George.
All the talk was of how the Belgian army had surrendered and the whole town was picking over every little bit of news they could get about what was happening to our boys at the front. Everyone had a brother, husband or uncle fighting over there.
‘Now,’ said Bessie, ‘Let me get you that shawl I’ve been knitting for the baby. Not long to go now, Annie. You sure you ain’t carrying twins?’
Annie looked down at the bump in front of her. She hadn’t seen her toes since Easter and her belly was straining against the thin cotton of the maternity smock she’d made for herself.
‘Doctor says it’s just one, but I’ve got to go up to the hospital in Willesden Lane when the time comes to have it,’ said Annie.
‘What for?’ said Bessie. ‘You’re fit as a fiddle! I thought you’d be having it round your mum’s in Grove Road.’
It was a bit embarrassing really, but all Annie’s medical forms had the words ‘elderly mother’ written over them in red ink. She didn’t feel old, at thirty-five, but compared to the rest of the mums going for their check-ups at the mother and baby clinic in Gunnersbury Lane, she was positively ancient. She’d worked all the hours God sent in the laundry from the age of twelve and then she’d helped her mum raise her half-sisters, Elsie and Ivy, so there hadn’t been much time for romance until Harry walked into her life, when she – and everybody else – thought she’d been left on the shelf.
Annie felt herself colouring up.
‘Sorry, love,’ said Bessie, realizing she’d hit a raw nerve. ‘It’s none of my business. It’s just if you were my daughter, I’d want to be there with you, at home, where I could be with you all the way through, that’s all.’ She patted Annie on the shoulders. ‘Doctor knows best, though.’
Bessie had known her since she was a girl and was a bit like a second mum to her, so she hadn’t meant to upset her at all. She was always fussing around people she cared about because she’d lost her only son in the Great War.
‘Will it hurt when the baby comes, do you think?’ said Annie, almost in a whisper.
No one really talked about it, giving birth. People exchanged glances and gossiped in hushed tones about ‘women’s troubles’ after they’d had a baby, but no one really explained it, not even her friend Esther, who had three of her own.
‘It’s best not to focus on the pain of it,’ Bessie said. ‘It goes very quickly and then you forget it because you have a beautiful baby in your arms. Just ask your mum.’
Annie didn’t want to bother her mum with her fears about giving birth, not now, not when everyone was so worried about the threat of invasion that the whole country had been told to go to church at the weekend to pray for the troops abroad.
Bessie bustled Annie inside to her upstairs flat. She had a couple of rooms in one of the run-down terraces in Stirling Road. ‘You look like you could use a brew. It’s not good for a woman to be standing up too long in your condition.’ Annie knew that protesting was useless. Bessie in full flow was more forceful than one of Hitler’s tanks, which meant she probably had some titbit of gossip to share.
Soapsud Island was still home to Annie in a lot of ways. Her family had moved across the High Street, yes, but she’d never escape the feeling that this was where she really belonged, in the grimy streets where kids made their own fun with a tin can, or a plank and some old pram wheels, and everyone knew everybody else’s business. Grove Road was a bit posher and people were friendly but they were in and out of each other’s houses a lot less than people from Soapsud Island.
Some might think the way of life in Soapsud Island was nosy, but there were plenty of old folk left without family to care for them because their relatives had gone away to fight. South Acton looked after its own. Neighbours would cook up a pie or plate up a meal for each other, help with the cleaning or just pop in to pass the time of day.
Bessie poured them both some tea out of her enormous brown pot, covered with a cosy she’d knitted specially, in a Union Jack flag design. ‘Now,’ she said, settling down on a rickety wooden chair, her haunches spilling over the sides, ‘have you heard from Vera lately?’
Annie shook her head. Vera was one of her oldest pals from her days as a laundry maid, her best-looking and most fun friend, but their paths seemed to have taken them in different directions since Annie got married just before the war broke out. Mum didn’t shed too many tears about that because she thought Vera was trouble with a capital T. Annie didn’t see it that way; Vera was more spirited and stubborn than most and she had got herself into some scrapes but it wasn’t her fault that life had been so tough. Her dad came back from the First World War a broken man and hit the bottle almost as hard as he belted Vera’s mum. Vera had learned, early on, she would have to stand up for herself if she was going to make it in this world. Bessie had a big heart and she’d always done her best to take Vera under her wing and keep her on the straight and narrow but something about her tone of voice made Annie wonder whether things had changed.
‘I saw her up the wet fish shop on Acton Lane the other day,’ said Bessie. ‘It ain’t my place to say but I thought she looked a bleeding mess. Hair like a haystack, thin as a stick and bruises all up her arms and legs where she’d been falling down drunk coming out of the pub, if you please! She’d been entertaining some handsome young chaps in uniform it seems and was one over the eight.
‘Mrs Parker said she’d practically picked her out of the gutter. It ain’t right, Annie, not for a lovely girl like that. People will talk.’
‘People are talking,’ said Annie, raising an eyebrow. It was lost on Bessie, who ploughed on: ‘I’m not one to gossip, as you know, but there’s a war on and girls like her, well, they can get themselves a bad reputation for’ – Bessie lowered her voice to a stage whisper – ‘spreading diseases.’
It took a few days for Annie to pluck up the courage to go around to Vera’s house in Stirling Road, which was just a few doors down from Bessie’s. It wasn’t that she didn’t like her friend any more, she just didn’t know quite how to tell her what people were saying behind her back.
Vera’s mum, Old Mrs O’Reilly, had given birth to more kids than Annie had eaten hot dinners and since her husband upped and died, Vera had moved back in to help with the rent and raising her nieces and nephews. Her other siblings had their hands full making ends meet and there were a few who were on their own because their other halves were at Her Majesty’s Pleasure in the Scrubs, but no one liked to mention that. There were always hordes of little O’Reillys stampeding in and out of that house in Stirling Road, being chased out of shops, across the railway tracks or climbing into people’s garden sheds. You couldn’t stray far through South Acton without bumping into one, their startling blue eyes and nit-ridden mop of blond hair a dead giveaway for the local bobby, who’d grab them by the scruff of their neck and march them home.
Annie knocked on the door and Mrs O’Reilly answered, her hair done up in rollers and covered with a hairnet, a snotty-nosed toddler on her hip and another clinging forlornly to her legs. ‘Oh, hello love,’ she said, eyeing Annie up and down. ‘When’s it due, then?’
‘Couple of months,’ said Annie.
‘I didn’t even know you was in the family way!’ she said, her eyes narrowing a little. ‘Haven’t seen much of you lately, have we? Where’ve you been hiding?’
Annie shuffled about a bit, wondering how to explain her absence. She needn’t have bothered because Mrs O’Reilly wasn’t one to bear grudges. ‘Oh, it don’t matter now! Vera’ll be so pleased you’ve called around. I know how it can be when you’re setting up home. Bet your mum’s happy to be having a little grandkid on the way, ain’t she? Mind you, I can always loan her one of mine if she fancies . . .’
Right on cue, a couple of little O’Reillys came tumbling head first down the stairs and landed with a bump, by Mrs O’Reilly’s worn slippers. ‘Get out of it!’ she chided. ‘Go on and play in the street.’
‘Is Vera in?’ said Annie, peering into the darkest recesses of the hallway, which was even grimier than she remembered.
‘No, love,’ said Mrs O’Reilly. ‘I just sent her up to the shops with me ration book. Why don’t you take a walk up there and see if you can find her? She’s been gone ages.’
Annie lumbered her way up Acton Lane towards the grocer’s shop. Things were much quieter these days, with a shortage of petrol meaning fewer cars on the road. The delivery motorbikes, which her brother George used to love zooming around on, had all but disappeared. People still used buses and the trams if they were going further afield, of course, but most folk were just on Shanks’s pony – their own two legs. Hers were killing her from the effort of heaving the baby bump around in front of her like some great zeppelin.
Women stood nattering to their neighbours on their front steps, just as they always had done, but their windows were now criss-crossed with tape to stop the glass shattering if a bomb dropped. That now seemed even more of a possibility than ever before. The notion of there being a Phoney War had ebbed away with the situation in Belgium and Holland, and the atmosphere around town was tense.
She reached the grocer’s, which had some new posters up in the window, warning people not to be ‘squanderbugs’ when they went to the shops. A cartoon figure of an insect called the squanderbug had a little moustache on it, like Hitler’s, and was covered in Swastikas, the sight of which made Annie feel queasy. ‘Beat the squanderbug, keep your war savings!’ warned another poster. Well, Annie and her family didn’t really have much in the way of savings anyway, like most folk around these parts. They barely had two brass farthings to rub together by the end of the week, but she supposed the government knew what it was doing telling people to be careful what they spent their money on.
There was a long queue of customers waiting to be served, with their cardboard boxes on string slung over their shoulders. Annie had nearly gone out without her gas mask the other day and was only reminded by a notice chalked on the pavement to go back and get it. All the women were chatting but Annie quickly spotted one among them who was being studiously ignored by the rest. Her hair was pinned up at the sides and pulled into a fashionable roll at the front. She had too much red lipstick on, her skirt was tight and her blouse had a few too many buttons undone. On her feet she wore the most ridiculously high-heeled peep-toe shoes. It was Vera.
‘Annie!’ she cried, loud enough to wake the dead, as she caught sight of her friend. ‘As I live and breathe! How are you, girl?’
A couple of women in the queue exchanged glances and tutted.
Annie made her way over to Vera’s side and they hugged. ‘Oh my Gawd! You look like the back end of a bus!’ said Vera, giggling. ‘When’s it due?’
‘I’ve still got a couple of months to go,’ said Annie, as the rest of the queue looked on reprovingly.
Just then, a paperboy came running past, waving a newspaper in the air. ‘Read all about it! The miracle of Dunkirk! Our boys rescued from the jaws of defeat by the navy and our little ships!’
There was a stampede out of the shop as mothers, sisters and wives fought to get the latest news on what had happened in France; even the grocer stopped serving and went out the back to switch on the wireless. The colour drained from Annie’s face and she felt the room starting to spin.
‘Steady on, girl,’ said Vera, grasping Annie by the arm. ‘I think we need to find you somewhere to sit down.’
‘It’s George,’ said Annie, her voice little more than a croak. ‘He’s over there . . . what if he’s . . .’
‘Now, now, don’t you be talking nonsense,’ said Vera, marching her friend out of the shop. ‘It sounds like it’s good news, not bad, so keep your pecker up!’
Annie allowed herself to be walked, gently, arm in arm with her friend, up Acton Lane and onto the High Street. Even with the war on, it was still as busy as ever. People always had a reason to go up to the shops, even if it was merely to get a bit of gossip. Just being in the fresh air had stopped Annie feeling dizzy. Vera had to pause every few yards to adjust the strap on the back of her shoes which kept slipping off, because they were a size too big.
‘I know they don’t fit me right, but I just loved them so much, I had to have ’em!’ she said. ‘Make me feel like a film star. In fact, I’ve got an idea. How do you fancy coming to the pictures with me?’ she said, turning to Annie.
Vera was pretty, her blonde pin curls framing a doll’s face, with an upturned nose and a rosebud mouth, but when she spoke, Annie couldn’t help noticing some of her friend’s teeth were black and there was a whiff of booze on her breath.
Annie didn’t want to offend her, but she really wasn’t in the mood to sit through a film. ‘I think I’d rather get home,’ she said, smiling apologetically.
Vera looked crestfallen. ‘I’m not talking about just having a good time to take your mind off it all,’ she said. ‘It’s the newsreel they have on first, before the film. We might get to see if George is on one of them boats. Just think how happy that would make you, and your mum – she must be worried sick. Be good to check, won’t it?’ She puffed her chest out with pride at her great idea.
‘I’m not sure,’ said Annie. ‘Perhaps we could make it another day?’
But Vera would not be dissuaded. ‘Oh, come on!’ she chided. ‘You know we always have fun when we’re together. You need something to get you out of the doldrums and this is just the ticket.’
A couple of soldiers, who barely looked old enough to lather up shaving soap, were hanging around outside the Crown Cinema. Annie pulled some coins out of her purse to pay for herself and Vera. It was only a shilling each but Vera had a ten-bob note and she didn’t want to break into that so Annie stumped up for both of them. As Vera and Annie made their way in, with Vera wiggling in her too-tight skirt, one of the soldiers let out a low wolf whistle. She turned and flashed them a broad grin while Annie turned scarlet with embarrassment.
There was a Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh film showing and, on any other occasion, Annie would have been delighted to sit through it, but right now, it felt like the weight of the world was pressing down on her shoulders with the worry of what was happening over in France.
The cinema lights had already been dimmed and they shuffled their way along the back row, where there were double seats, because Vera had decided there would be more room for Annie to sit comfortably. There were a few old blokes dotted about, whiling away the hours until they could get another pint, some youngsters who were skiving off school and a few smoochy couples who planned to make good use of the darkness to get up to no good. God only knows what Harry would make of her going to such a notorious fleapit, and that was before she got onto the fact that she was there with Vera. Annie couldn’t quite get the way those women in the grocer’s were so openly snubbing her friend out of her mind.
She didn’t have time to dwell on it because the Pathé newsreel started up and the voice of the news announcer filled the cinema. ‘Our man has risked his life to bring you these images of the beaches of Dunkirk under enemy fire, our own guns replying.’
Annie’s mouth fell open as she watched the scenes on the big screen before her, the sky filled with the thickest pall of black smoke she had ever seen. This was war, real war, and it was horrific. The noise of gunfire was deafening as the announcer continued: ‘And here, on their way home, home from the hell that is Dunkirk, our brave boys from the army are rescued by the navy. Alongside them, the little ships that turned a military disaster into a miracle of deliverance.’
Hundreds and hundreds of soldiers were crammed onto the decks of boats of all shapes and sizes. It was a wonder they could stay afloat. ‘See how many of them are getting out?’ said Vera. ‘There’s blooming loads of them. Look! That boat is stuffed to the gunnels. Oh, I think I just saw George!’
‘Shhhh!’ said a man in the row in front. ‘I’m trying to watch the news!’
‘So are we!’ said Vera, angrily tapping him on the shoulder. ‘And what’s more, she’s in the family way and her brother is over there fighting rather than sitting on his bum in this cinema. So, we can talk if we like.’
The man tutted his disapproval and the usherette appeared, shining her torch right into Annie’s face, making her squint. ‘Sorry,’ Annie mouthed.
The usherette shone the torch over them both, caught sight of Annie’s pregnant bump, rolled her eyes and walked away.
‘You could get away with murder with that baby inside you, Annie,’ said Vera. ‘People treat you with respect.’ She clasped her hands in front of her for a moment. ‘Not like me . . .’
It was a relief when the news came to an end and the film started up. Annie allowed herself to be transported into another world, in 21 Days Together, where Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh had but twenty-one days to spend together, before he would be hanged for a murder he’d committed as a crime of passion. As the credits rolled and they strolled out into the foyer, Annie turned to Vera and said, ‘Thanks for making me come along.’
Vera had been right: watching the film had made her feel a bit better. Of course, she hadn’t seen George on the grainy black and white newsreel; there were so many soldiers crammed into those ships, all looking exhausted and filthy, more like a rag-tag bunch of tramps than an army. It would be a wonder if their own mothers could recognize them. But at least she had some hope now.
Pressing her hands together to give herself the strength to broach the subject, Annie turned once more to her friend as they left the cinema. ‘Vera,’ said Annie, struggling to find the right words, ‘there’s something I wanted to ask you. Bessie told me about the other night—’
But a tall chap, handsome and in uniform, with slicked-back hair, and a toothy grin, cut in. ‘Afternoon, ladies. I was wondering if you might be free later to come to a dance up in Shepherd’s Bush?’
He caught sight of Annie’s bump and took a step back. ‘Oh, pardon me, I didn’t mean to intrude.’
‘No, don’t go,’ said Vera, eagerly reaching out to him. ‘She’s my pregnant sister. I was just taking her out because our brother’s away in Dunkirk and we wanted to try to spot him. She’s got to go home now, haven’t you, Annie?’
Annie nodded, watching Vera depart on her new shoes that were slightly too big, walking with a wobble, leaning on the soldier.
Just before they rounded the corner, Vera looked back over her shoulder and gave Annie a knowing wink. As she did so, Annie felt her heart sink, right into her poor swollen feet. She walked home alone.