by Dawson, Jill
It was understood by all of them that I was the best. It helped to have me with them: I looked so innocent, in my blue pinafore, with the smattering of freckles across my nose. Sly Roger was always trying to put his hand up my skirt when I climbed out of the car and he liked me to sit in the front with him. (He’d bought another Chrysler off my dad at a knock-down price while Dad was inside again, and that’s what we drove around in.) The Green Bottles used to hoot with laughter to see me slap him off, not even slightly tempted by his offers (usually of something he was eating: a chip, or a stick of licorice).
We’d all get done up and go out for the day. It was a time when everything was short, everyone told not to be a squander bug. But that’s not how I remember it at all. The Green Bottles were having none of that. Sometimes there were as many as eight of us.
In the West End there were shop walkers, and the Green Bottles taught me to look out for them. Something about their eyes, their expression, the way they fiddled with a jacket or a dress on the hanger but looking all around them, not interested in the clothes—I got this at once. My job was to let Gloria or Annie or Beattie or whoever know. The signal was my bending down to pull up my socks. This meant: “Shop walker in the area.” If I pulled up the left sock the shop walker was to my left, if I pulled up one after the other, the shop walker was directly behind me. But if my socks were folded over at the tops, and equally matched, and I wasn’t fiddling with them, the coast was perfectly clear.
I was mostly playing hooky from school. The first time a shop assistant asked me why I wasn’t in school I said in such a posh voice that I “hev a music exam this ahfternoon and Miss hes given me the morning orf to practice” that Gloria nearly wet herself trying not to laugh.
“Who learned you to talk like that?” she asked, later, as we were drinking hot chocolate in Debenham’s off Wigmore Street.
“Margaret Lockwood” was my answer. I’d been watching old films at the Children’s Cinema Club on Mare Street. My favorite was one about a posh lady who becomes a highway woman for the adventure. That was the voice I was mimicking.
So then Gloria took me to this friend of hers, to have elocution lessons. It was a house in Brancaster Mews with green walls and a big piano and a fireplace facing you as soon as you walked in, with flowers in a silver vase. Every time I went, the flowers in the vase were different, I noticed. The woman never let them go brown or droop petals. She was a tiny woman, hardly bigger than me, with these glasses with little diamonds at the corners, and she wore them low down on her nose, and she’d stare at me over the top of them, and tap me sometimes, on my chin, or upper lip, with a pencil.
She’d make me recite things, poems, and say in this funny deep voice that I had to breathe from low in my belly, which she patted with her small, pink-nailed hand as she spoke. Gloria would watch her, waiting for me, sipping tea from a china cup that the teacher—I think she was called Mrs. Sin-gin Sargent or something that sounded like that—would make her whenever we arrived.
“The sense of danger must not disappear,” I’d say. “The way is certainly both short and steep.”
“Steep,” Mrs. Sin-gin Sargent repeated, pursing her mouth over the “p” to make it pop. “Short and steep. However gradual it looks from here: look if you like, but you will have to leap.”
And then it would be back to the beginning, to recite the whole poem, carefully, slowly forming each word:
“A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep sustains the bed on which we lie, my dear; although I love you, you will have to leap; our dream of safety has to disappear.”
“Leap Before You Look, by Mr. W. H. Auden,” Mrs. Sin-gin Sargent would say at the end with satisfaction, and make me repeat it, popping the “p”s and cracking the “k.” A great poem for a girl like me to learn. It was drilled into me, that poem, and in its way became my motto.
“Much can be said for social savoir-faire. But to rejoice when no one else is there . . .”
I droned on, wondering what “savoir-faire” could be, but liking the sound of it, just the same.
“ . . . is even harder than it is to weep . . .”
No one is watching, but you have to leap.
It’s Gloria who’s the boldest and the best, the one I want to be like.
This day, this one day, we’re walking along Bond Street and she says, “How about some cucumber sandwiches and a spot of chocolate cake in The Dorchester? Just you and me.”
After the trip to see Mum last summer I know she looks out for me, somehow. She says it’s her job to teach me, as I don’t have another woman to do it. (Annie is big as a house and not coming out with us so much now the baby’s nearly due.)
I haven’t heard of The Dorchester but she takes my silence as a yes and hails us a cab. I watch closely how she does this. She doesn’t wave her arm or shout like Annie or Beattie. She just steps a little closer to the curb and tilts her chin. It’s a nippy little movement. She stares down the first cab driver who approaches and then it’s just a flicker of her white glove, and the cab stops and we’re climbing inside. She pats the seat beside her and sort of purrs at the driver:
“Park Lane, please. The Dorchester.”
We all like it best up the West End. We’re sick of roped-off streets with signs about “Unexploded Bombs,” and pubs like the Nags Head on Whitechapel Road saying “Business as Usual,” but where the building is flapping open and hanging on by a thread. In the West End there are tiny purple flowers spilling out of window boxes, and post boxes and telephone boxes gleaming with new paint. As the taxi slides past I squint my eyes a little, making the streets blur into soft putty colors with bright splashes of tomato red.
But as we get out and the doorman in his big hat sweeps us in, my mouth feels dry. The height of the ceiling threatens me, dangling the most dangerous looking chandeliers over us. Gloria smoothes a hand over my hair and smiles at a fixed spot over my head, heading for the cloakroom.
She hands over her coat, a dark velvet, not her best, and as we wait there a fat, powdered lady arrives. Gloria steps back and says, “Oh, after you my dear,” and the lady hands over her coat to the girl behind the desk, who gives her a button for it, with the number 26 on it in black letters. It’s a floor-sweeping, silky sable fur, and I see Gloria glance at it. I register her look. I wonder just how out of the blue this little trip was, really.
Bending a little, Gloria whispers, “Fat slug.”
She then straightens up and allows one of the waiters to show us to a table.
We walk past the marble columns—the Promenade Bar, Gloria says—safest place in London during the war, she says, Churchill had his own suite here. Everywhere is green and gold, full of fronds and gigantic sprays of flowers. Instead of fountains and streams there’s bubbling chatter, and the sound of cutlery chinking, and crockery. It’s just so big—high ceilings loom over us like those huge Fen skies back near Ely, and I nearly stumble into a statue of a black boy holding some golden fruit, next to a golden lamp.
As we sit down, Gloria notices that I’m trembling. The waiter is hovering, staring right through me.
“Relax, Queenie,” Gloria whispers. She picks up the menu and flaps herself with it.
“My niece and I would like afternoon tea, please,” she says.
He dips in a sort of bow, picks up our menus, and leaves us.
Gloria leans in close towards me and mutters, “Just speak in your Margaret Lockwood voice.” When I say nothing, she gets out her compact and uses the mirror to see who is sitting behind her. Then she takes the green velvet cushion I’m holding like a shield and puts it firmly on the seat beside me.
“You know,” she says, “I used to work here.”
“Did you?” I can hardly believe it. Here, amongst the tinkling silver and the sparkling mirrors and the golden fruit and . . .
“Yeah. I was a chambermaid. Look, Queenie, we’ve earned this. When
you’ve wiped round the bath of one of those fat slugs for the umpteenth time, you get to enjoy sipping from the best bone china, OK?”
The waiter reappears with a silver tray. He places a cup close to me, and a little silver tea strainer, in its own silver pot. Seeing my hand shake as I go to pick up the spoon, Gloria waits for him to leave and then whispers, “He’s just a bleeding waiter. A waiter! His mum works as a cleaner down the Troxy on Commercial Road.”
And yet to me, he seems like the poshest, scariest representative of another world I’ve ever come across. I glance again at Gloria, grateful, and take a bite of the triangle of crustless cucumber sandwich she offers me.
“Is there any vinegar?” I ask, which makes her laugh for some reason.
I risk a little glimpse around. The restaurant area is full of women, all of them drinking tea and talking. I’m struck by how much they use their hands when they talk, these posh women. That’s all I can see. Hands: flapping, gesturing, waving, wagging, clutching, grasping in amongst the hothouse fronds. Their hands look like birds to me: dipping, now spreading, soaring . . . a restaurant full of birds, pecking over their crumbs, sipping at their tea.
And the chink of china sounding like coins in a pocket, jangling.
Gloria sees me looking and leans in to whisper, “Most of this lot were brasses. What you so impressed for? They married their client, that’s all. Me, I cut out the middleman and made money my husband, which if you ask me is much nicer.”
At the cloakroom Gloria is all charm and innocence, as she seems to have lost the button with the number on it that allows her to collect her coat. I say nothing and the room swarms and contracts. I’m small and then big. My face on the outside of a kettle. A silver spoon.
“Oh dear, what was my number again, darling?” Gloria tinkles.
“Twenty-six,” I reply, without missing a beat.
The fur is brought. The sable fur. The fat slug’s coat: long, a gorgeous color.
Gloria looks a knockout in it. She slides her arms into the sleeves, strokes the collar up to her neck as if she’s petting a big sleepy cat, and gives the girl behind the desk a cheeky smile.
“Thank you so much, darling.”
She gives a little twirl in the coat, almost giving the game away, she’s so delighted.
And Gloria turns and stalks through the doors as if she’s a big cat herself. I’m two paces away: I’m right behind her.
As we step outside I see the car. Sly Roger is waiting. Beattie is there in the back and we roll smoothly away, no great hurry, car magically appearing, knowing always what Gloria was planning. This part of London is patterned with neat, distinct shadows. The pointy black spikes have disappeared—for scrap, Sly Roger says—and instead there are little wooden fences, almost like being in the country. Pointing up to a sky that looks like a clean blue handkerchief.
Beattie is admiring the sable, sniffing it, rubbing it against her cheek, stroking it. Annie isn’t with them; the baby is due any day soon, and she’s home with her feet up.
“Gawd, it’s a beauty,” she says. “Bleedin’ hell. Must be worth about three thousand.”
They carry on like this for a while and I learn that a really lovely mink coat would cost about three thousand pounds in Harrods but Gloria could only get about £250 for this sable if she sells it to someone they know, who’ll buy “crooked.” She doesn’t want to part with it and there’s a bit of arguing for a while and then they start laughing about a friend of theirs who did a job in Bond Street towards the end of the war.
“So he’s smashed the window of the shop and bad luck for him—bleedin’ Special Police comes along. So this Special says, ‘What’s going on here, sir?’ And he’s loading up the car, and quick as a flash he says, ‘Unexploded bomb in the shop, sir, stand well back,’ and blow me if the Special don’t help him load up!”
They giggle then. Put their heads together, snuffling like little pigs. “Best war we ever had . . .”
I know how shocked Nan would have been at that comment, but I push that thought aside. Gloria, Beattie, Annie: they’re my family now.
I stare out of the window. Roger is taking us to a restaurant. The streets here are smaller, and so pretty, with trees looming out of pavements and scattering pink blossoms everywhere; and a frill of lilac-colored pansies at the bottom of every window. I close my eyes for a moment, hearing only the purr of the black cabs and the ting ting of bicycle bells through the opened car window. A lady’s heels tap down the street like typewriter keys.
Even with my eyes closed, this could never be Bethnal Green. Everything is being repaired. The lampposts are newly painted: black gloss. Each has a fat clump of yellow and blue flowers in a hanging basket at the bottom. The scent of petrol mixing with new paint drifts in through the car window, along with a rich smell of coffee beans from one of the cafés on the corner. This, I’m sure, must be how Paris or Rome or Venice or somewhere like that smells. Of blossoms only faintly littered with cigarette butts. The spring light is so sharp that the pavement is full of shadow puppets. I say to myself, remembering the taste of the cucumber sandwich, the crunch of green on white, that I’m probably a proper posh West End girl at heart. I’m going to have a flat one day with a window box full of pansies and a tree with blossoms that litter the pavement with a thousand pale pink fingerprints.
And I’m going to look like Gloria. She’s like Jane in the Daily Mail cartoon. All silky bosoms—my favorite bra of hers is a peachy satin number, swirled with stitching, and these great big pants with satin ruffles up the sides. I’ve seen her dress up in the ladies’ powder room when we’re getting ready to go out, and she’ll catch me looking and she’ll pat her bum and say, “Will you take a look at that? No wonder I have them all slavering.” Then she’ll curl my eyelashes for me with this little gadget she has and tell me again how special I am:
“You’re gifted, darlin’, no mistake. If Queenie says the coast’s clear, if Queenie’s socks are all pulled up—I know all’s well with the world!” she says.
Up West it’s not all rubble and houses gashed and luxury all nipped off. Rationing—well, there’s rationing I suppose but you just don’t feel it in the same way, not with the Green Bottles, of course, nor the nasty cheap demob suits and children hobbling on wooden sticks and the old ladies with the faces stripped and stunned like they’ve burned and crumbled themselves, along with their houses. No. In the West End there are women wearing red hunting caps and silk scarves and check skirts and eating rich cakes. Not tortured poor women. Women like Nan.
Hoisting was the best possible way not to miss Bobby. There was so much excitement, and nervousness; there were just so many feelings—brilliant, sweeping feelings to fill you up, to push out any other thoughts. By the time I was thirteen I was the best. The Queen of Shoplifters—or the Best Green Bottle of all. They all said it. I would nick things for Bobby and keep them under the bed at home. A shirt in his favorite lucky blue. Brylcream. A tortoiseshell comb. Taylor of Old Bond Street sandalwood shaving cream. (I didn’t know if Bobby was shaving yet, but when he did, I wanted him to smell expensive.)
It was my daring the Green Bottles admired—my fearlessness. I never glanced back, or hesitated, or looked shifty; all of which would have given the game away. Shop walkers were trained to look for that kind of thing—a nervous look, a furtive movement. My heart might be going berserk, sweat streaming from my armpits to my waist, soaking my vest and reaching my blue serge slacks, but I was just brilliant at hiding all of that, at ignoring it; at being, as Mum said all those years ago, “a proper little actress.”
The Green Bottles would kiss me and feed me violet creams and praise me and dangle their warm pearls round my throat and squirt me with their Chanel No. 5—and so I just got better and better, more daring, more of a “bloody child genius,” as Gloria put it.
I remain grateful, whatever you might think, to the fabulous Green Bott
les for all they taught me, despite what happened next. It was inevitable. The day came, naturally enough, when I was caught.
It starts badly. The morning starts with Dad yelling at Annie, trapping her in the door because she wants to go out, and a scrap between them, Annie screaming, that brings half the street out to see what’s going on. Dad sticks his head out over Annie’s shoulder and booms at them all: “Yeah! Stare all you like, you dozy bitches!” and they all go back in again, to twitch at their curtains. The baby—Annie’s baby, my half sister, Gracie, who is about six months old—is sleeping through all of this, in the pram in the front garden where I’ve been sitting on a wall, swinging my legs and watching all of this, and so I decide to get the baby some shoes.
I can still hear them shouting as I turn down Well Street. My heartbeat is quick, the way it always is when Dad gets the dead needle. I never like to admit this to myself, how frightening he can be. Other memories will float at me, occasions with Mum, times when I’d bury my head under the pillow and whisper to Bunny, but I can’t remember the occasions properly, only the feelings around them. I push them away.
I try whistling as I walk down Well Street, bouncing the big wheels of the pram over every stone and crack in the pavement. The pram is a fancy navy and silver one. It has little silver handles to push up to make the hood stretch up and a navy gabardine cover that buttons at the sides with little elastic hoops slipping round these silver buttons on the side of the pram. Trouble is that once it’s up you can’t see Gracie’s face. I peep in over this and check that her dummy is in her mouth and doesn’t need a new dip in sugar. Saturday. I wonder what Bobby is doing, and when I might see him again. I’m fourteen, and floating through my head is some old story line from a Nancy Spain detective story about a sleuth called Miriam Birdseye. Poison for Teacher. I like detective stories, especially ones set in schools like this one, with its “problem pupils,” a phrase that makes me scoff. I’m also dimly aware that something doesn’t feel right and that I have a faint stomachache.
