Lucky Bunny (9780062202512)

by Dawson, Jill

  And then a horrible sound, a frightening roar and about sixty blasts, one after another goes off, somewhere over the way of Vicky Park, and people start screaming and pushing behind us. We are deep inside the steps; we must be quite near the bottom now and Nan is still clutching my hand beside me but the person behind her is pushing her forward and she is being wrenched away from me, nearly twisting my fingers and I open them and as the screams go up I feel her hand snatch free—Nan! Nan!—her fingers clutching for mine but yanked away from me and then suddenly we’re all falling, a pack of cards, one on top of the other, it’s concrete and bones and soft chins all mashing up together, my nose slamming into something hard—I put my hand up and it feels wet—but I can’t think, there’s just an almighty feeling of being crushed, squashed, all the breath pumped out of me, and my knees buckling beneath me and the pain of people toppling onto me and smashing me against the steps and I can’t see a thing but I know I’m going to die and then someone is pulling my hair and I feel as if the top of my head is being opened up, like the top of a boiled egg—I’m being lugged by the hair and told to “hold on, hold on,” and I’m pulled free somehow of the people on top of me, and a lady’s voice says “gotcha!” and makes me holler with the pain of having my hair yanked so hard. The lady isn’t Nan; I can’t see Nan anywhere in that mass of smelly wool and mothballs and rain and galoshes and wet black sticky stuff that might be blood or sick or I don’t know what.

  “They’re kicking me!” another woman cries. I can’t see her in the treacly dark; I don’t think anyone else can hear her.

  I’m so shocked I’m not even crying anymore, I stop the hollering sound I made a second ago, and the same lady puts her hands under my armpits and drags me somewhere, and I have a feeling that maybe she’s a police-lady or an air-raid warden or something, so I do as I’m told, but my heart feels sick because I know that what we’re climbing over is bodies, is people, I can feel their elbows and their squashy soft bits and sometimes they breathe on me and I smell them and it’s like the smell in the pigpen at Salmon Farm only worse because it’s people. I hear them mutter things but it’s all happening so quickly that I have to just do what the lady says, and get to the shadowy place where she tells me to wait, next to other people. We’re all squished in a flat dark space, and I’m trembling so much that I feel as if the place itself is shaking, this must be what hell is like. A hell full of animals, sheep in a pen, stinking animal smells, and sounds of crying and wailing and not even knowing if any of that sound is coming from me, but the lady says, “Be quiet, be quiet, wait here,” and so I do, but I’m thinking, Nan! Nan! Where is Nan? And I look around and try to see her amongst the shapes, and I strain to hear her voice.

  A match is lit by somebody for a second and in that flare for a moment I see the faces of grown-ups, mostly women: grey, big-eyed ghosts. There is a strange moon-faced girl beside me, and for a moment I think she’s Vera. But that’s silly. She’s much older than Vera: it’s a girl of nine or ten, about the same age as me. She has a beret on and in the match flicker I see her in the flame, and she has huge, frightened eyes, as mine must be, and a sparkly clip, fixed on her beret.

  Where is Nan? My scalp is stinging; I notice how much it hurts but I also don’t really care. My arms and legs feel black and blue with bruises; something black drip drips onto the front of my coat. I think my nose must be bleeding.

  “Stay there on the platform and say nothing!” the ARP lady hisses, as I try to get up and look for Nan. I sit back down again. I close my eyes, and a little part of me thinks that if I just stayed here, closed my eyes, and stopped thinking, no one would notice. They might leave me here; everything would disappear. I could stay with Nan, wherever she is, give up.

  I don’t know if my nose really is bleeding; I might just be crying. I can taste salty blood and snot. A man lying beside me on the platform is making a horrible moaning sound. I feel the girl in the beret edge closer and perhaps she takes my hand, I’m not sure. I think I can see the clip on her hat twinkling; it looks a bit like a rabbit with two big ears. I blink and then wonder if that’s really true; perhaps the shape was just a spark, something else. The girl has Shirley Temple curls sticking out of the bottom of her beret—they look grey in this light, but they must be blond; her coat smells of wet wool. I can feel that she’s there, without really seeing her, and this makes me feel better, feel like I should stay here, stay awake. I close my eyes for one tiny second, and a strange thing happens. I really think it’s not a girl at all, but Nan who is sitting beside me, and I’m too tired to open my eyes and check, I’m sort of drifting somewhere, somewhere stinging and painful, but I feel Nan’s fingers touch my cheek, and I’m glad, glad, glad, that she’s still here after all, she’s here with me, right beside me, and I’m not going to die, it’s all going to be all right. Someone is singing a song I know well:

  “Every Saturday morning, where do we all go? Stealing into mischief, oh dear no! We go to the pictures where we sing this song. Every Saturday morning at the o-dee-on!”

  I look around, but the song is very quiet, it almost might be happening in my head. The whole place is quiet. I know the words, the tune, so well . . .

  “Where’s my nan?” I say to her, or to anyone. “I never saw where she went . . .”

  Nobody answers me. I’m not even sure I said it, or just thought it. The trembling carries on: we all seem to be trembling. It runs through my body and I feel as though the ground I’m sitting on is shaking. My knees are drawn up to my chin and knock against my chattering teeth. “Tears won’t wash with me, my gel.” Was she here, was she really right beside me? Pull yourself together, Queenie, and look for Nan.

  Right: what color coat did she have on? Her navy good one, buttoned up. But it’s so dark, and difficult to move in here. Did I hear Nan scream, when we first toppled towards the steps? I picture her as she was leaving our house in Lauriston, craning up to look at the window for me, to see if I’d follow her, and her smile when I ran outside to join her. Then the moment when her hand is snatched apart from mine . . . the tearing feeling; Nan clutching at me, trying to get some hold on my fingers.

  I stretch them out now, and the girl I thought was beside me with the diamante clip on her beret is gone. My hand touches wet concrete. Nan loves me: she must be here somewhere; she feels so close. I’ve never felt her closer, or stronger. I feel for Nan again. She must be here. Is that her, that dark coat, did I see her just then, turning away from me?

  Then in panic I wrench at the hankie tied to my coat and put it over my mouth as I realize, just too late, that I’m going to be sick, and a big sour wave of warm liquid spills over my hands, soaking the hankie and sploshing my coat.

  Oh Nan, don’t turn away. Don’t leave me, please. I forgot to tell you that I really love you too, with your silly sayings and your clacking teeth and your lumpy ankles. Nan, where are you? Nan! Come back.

  My Nan—Mrs. Ida Dove—is among the 173 people, some say 178, who were crushed to death down that tube shelter that night.

  After the all-clear, people help us out. I keep my eyes fixed on that girl, who I can’t really see, but only feel is leading me out of the darkness, the glitter on her clip the only flickering thing to follow. Somehow I’m taken home to Dad, I think by an ARP officer; there are quite a few children in the car, but I don’t remember saying where I live, I just remember asking, “Where’s my nan?”

  I remember Dad’s face at the door and his look, one I’ve never seen before. For a moment I think the wildest thing: that someone is sticking a knife in him from behind; he’s about to topple forward on the doorstep. But he doesn’t. The ARP ladies are shown in. Annie trots downstairs looking sleepy, tying a silky violet robe around her. I hear mutterings in the hall and the phrase “two hundred dead” and that “the bodies are laid out in the church on Bethnal Green Road and can Mr. Dove come and identify her . . .”

  The body. Bits of talking as Annie
wraps me in a big blanket and goes to put the kettle on, to make me an Oxo. Angry words between Dad and the ladies with their whistles and hats. The lady who brought me home saying something like, “Of course it matters! For morale, for keeping up morale!” and then even more tartly, “I won’t ask why you’re not in uniform, Mr. Dove.” Annie is crying.

  “They’re telling us we can’t never talk about it,” Annie tells me, as the front door slams, and Dad leaves. “So . . . the Luftwaffe never find out. Or something.” She’s crying harder now, not seeming to notice her robe slipping open and her flat little bosoms peeking out.

  “He loved his mother, you know,” Annie sniffs. She strokes my hair, feeling in the pocket of her gown for Player’s cigarettes. I remember the girl with the sparkly clip, and wonder if I’ll ever see her again and whether she might give it to me.

  I try not to think of Nan, of the hundreds of piled-up bodies, now dawn is breaking, all covered in trample marks, lying in the church. It’s a horrible church, St. John at Bethnal Green—ugly and plain like a big box that no one cares about with a nasty blue chipped door and a weathercock that always makes me think of a dart, it’s so rubbish. I picture Nan as a bundle of knitted things, her legs sticking out like the twig legs of a fat robin. Suddenly that horrible enormous heap of beets that Bobby had been loading—the color of bones, of skeletons—comes into my head and sticks. I won’t ever talk about it, so they needn’t worry. Tittle tattle lost the battle. But I’m still shaking, and I can’t swallow. The smell of sick wafts all around me. My drink of Oxo stays in my mouth and then just dribbles out again, brown stains trickling down my dress. Hot tears mix with the salty taste.

  I picture Nan, sitting next to the radio, listening to her favorite program, singing along. “We’ll meet again . . .” Such a stupid song, because everybody knows the only people singing it don’t really believe it, they just want it so much to be true.

  Then an important thought pops up: thank God I nicked that Lux soap for Nan. The beauty soap of the film stars. All Nan’s favorites used it: Vera Lynn. Deanna Durbin. All those posters about being careful with soap, using up every last measly ounce! Nan said Dad had fallen for the “squander bug,” but I knew that the Lux pleased her. She put it out in a little dish on her kitchen windowsill and she must have used it now and then, because it had a pattern on it of the popped bubbles that looked like lace.

  I feel so strange then, thinking that. A terrible stretching feeling, as if my heart is yawning. But I’m certain, too. Nicking that soap is the first really good thing I’ve ever done and thank God I did, because Nan’s life was hard, you can see that, and that soap was the only bit of luxury she’d ever known.

  Bobby comes back for Nan’s funeral. He’s had scabies and he looks a fright: his skin all purple with the ointment they paste on you for it. He’s grown bigger and talks all the time about punt guns and air rifles; he’s got pretty good at shooting.

  The funeral is bewildering; there are so many coffins in the little church and so many different families hemmed in together, lots of them injured with bandages on their heads and arms in slings; everyone whispering about what happened, but nothing like the fancy funerals we sometimes see, with horses and black plumes. No one showing off, or properly allowed to say anything. “His face was that bruised, I couldn’t identify him . . .”

  They’ve done something fishy to the tube steps now, everyone says. Put rope ladders for handrails and painted the bottom of the steps white, to try and look as if they cared. As if they were helping people find their way in the dark, when everyone knew they weren’t. Helping, that is. All concrete and bones and soft chins all mashing up together. I keep expecting to see Mum, or Nan. I crane my neck for them and then remind myself: Nan’s gone. Mum’s . . .

  Dad’s wearing his best suit, pinstriped, with really wide trousers and a beautiful grey felt hat with a black ribbon on it. I stare at his face beside me in the line, but it is hard to read what Annie says he feels: any love for his old muvver. Instead he is darting glances left and right, shuffling his feet and smiling at people he recognizes—is that The Southpaw Cannonball, old John Lee, the Jewish fighter, from the Salmon and Ball?

  Bobby says something was going on in Victoria Park; the northeast corner had been fenced off that night. It was a “hot new gun site.” They didn’t look like guns to me when we passed by the park. Bobby whispers that they were anti-aircraft rockets manned by the Home Guard. On the evening it happened (that’s how everyone talks about it, we all know what we mean) the rockets must have been fired over the heads of the people making their way to the shelter. The noise was frightening. It made people bolt, like horses.

  Whenever anyone mentions it, I tremble again and a wave surges up. I’m not sure what it is, but it makes me rush to the lavatory, because I keep feeling like I need to go. Every night since that day I’ve woken in the dead of night, fast asleep standing up, opening a drawer, looking for something.

  The ARP lady is at the funeral, smiling at me, but I never smile back. She has a dog with her, and I know the dog’s name is RIP; it’s a special dog, for finding bodies, and it makes me feel sick, I don’t want to pet it. My scalp still hurts from the place where my hair was pulled. Annie murmurs now that “not a single bleedin’ paper has mentioned it.” She’s looked and looked.

  “How can they ask us to never say nothing? People are in shock,” Annie whispers, putting her face close to Dad’s in the row. “ . . . like it never happened.”

  “Two hundred East Enders don’t mean nothing to them,” Dad replies. He’s not smiling.

  After the service in church about Ida Dove God Rest Her Soul and all the other names and the smell of the lilies and the sound of quiet crying like rain pattering on the roof, I feel as if I can’t breathe, and I’m glad when we’re back at ours. Bobby sits in a corner, flicking through his Knockout and trying to get somebody to give him a cigarette. But without Nan there to make it there isn’t even a funeral tea, there’s just Dad on the piano and some of the Green Bottles singing; Annie lets me have a sip of her Mackeson’s milk stout. It has a black taste, plain and warm like bathwater, and my stomach rumbles.

  Gloria—the one with the black hair in gleaming curls all around her head, the one who gave me the perfume, and who looks just like a doll with red lips and rosy cheeks, and is today wearing a dress in lovely peachy satin stuff, with black velvet trim around the pockets and collar, and buttons in the front that look like they’ll pop when she waves her arms about, which she does a lot—is laughing about something they call “the bomb lark.” I’m outraged—is this what they call what happened to Nan?

  Bobby nudges me in the ribs, telling me not to be silly. This is what they do, he says. Dad, he means, and Charlie and Buster and the others. They make claims to the Assistance Board under different names, stating they lived in places they haven’t lived in so that they can get the money for the bombed-out houses and the things that were in them.

  “Do they?” I feel blinkin’ silly. It’s usually me who knows things, not Bobby. The Bomb Lark.

  Dad is plonking away and Annie is singing that song about meeting again, don’t know where, don’t know when, and for once, for just a moment, for the first time, I look at Dad, and I see something in his face. Something about Nan. He must be thinking of how much she loved that radio show, the one he teased her about, “Sincerely Yours”; he must be thinking about the words. I know we’ll meet again . . . and he never will, will he, we’ll none of us ever see her again as long as we live. But Dad puts his cigarette in his mouth and his head on one side and pounds away at the keys and now it’s a different song, the one about bluebirds, and the others are joining in, and whatever I saw in Dad’s face isn’t there anymore, has moved away.

  I’m glad to have Bobby back, but I don’t think Dad is. Bobby is nine now and something about him annoys Dad, even I can see that. Bobby’s cheeky, but he’s small and he’s not really brave
like me. Dad calls him a “milky”—it means Bobby’s like milky tea: weak. Bobby tries to cheek him, to stand up to Dad, the way I do, but then he’ll lose his nerve, or dart away to sit in a corner, reading about cars, about racing drivers like Woolf Barnato or Dick Seaman. Bobby wants to ask me about Nan, too, about what happened, but he daren’t. I know that just from looking at him.

  Bobby’s happy that there’s still no school and says he’s never going back there if he can help it. Instead he’s always begging Dad or Annie to be taken “down the Dogs.” He wants a job there, or better still, he wants to be a boxer, when he’s older, maybe a feather-weight because he’s so small, but Dad puts his fists up and ducks and sweeps at him and then says, “Bleedin’ hell, Bobby, you’ll always be a milky—go play with the traffic on the Whitechapel Road.”

  Bobby hangs about outside York Hall watching the boxers, especially this one boy he loves to watch, this Irish one with freckles and tufty blond hair and an impish face: Jimmy. He hangs around and tries to get Jimmy to sign his program until someone shoos him away and then it’s down the Dogs with Uncle Charlie and watching the kennel boys. The dogs might work for Bobby as a job, because Bobby is “superstitious,” Annie says. He has a system, involving colors, for making every simple decision, such as which sweet to choose.

  Every day the Green Bottles are round our house. It turns out they knew our mum, knew her from when she first came to London from Dublin with her sister Brodie, and they tell me about her. Easily the prettiest of them all, Gloria says. What happened to Brodie? I ask. They cough then. Didn’t she leave Moll behind, bugger off to America with a fella she met in the first month? Annie says, and then catches Gloria’s eye and puts her hand over her mouth. Moll could sing beautifully, Gloria says, and didn’t Moll used to be the best Irish dancer? I whisper to Gloria that I have a horse named Betsy with a white mane and a pink ribbon and I keep her in the garage. Gloria ruffles my hair and tickles me under the ribs.