Lucky Bunny (9780062202512)

by Dawson, Jill

  He sits on the toilet seat, the equipment—stockings, balaclava, army fatigues—across his knee. “Put them on for me. Cover your face, an all. No one will know. If you keep your mouth shut . . . I don’t know, can’t you strap your tits down?”

  And then he’s sobbing, truly sobbing, like I haven’t seen him do since he was a little boy, since long before those borstal years, when he was small and lost, when no coin had yet been flipped, when it was still in his hand, shiny and new, ready to toss towards the future. Now he’s clutching at his ribs and I’m terrified that they’ll rupture, spill him out, that it will all of it have been for nothing. He needs that whack, he sobs.

  And more than that. “Look at that,” he says, and he’s practically screaming. “They only went and painted the inside of the lorry!” A shiver runs up and down my back, his voice sounds so frightened. I follow his eyes. A tin of paint, that’s all. A squashed tin of yellow paint. Please, Queenie.

  And so. That train, lighting up the night sky as it arrives. A sound rushing in my ears, of blood, of money, of something else. I remember. That’s all I’m saying. Whether I was there or not, believe what you like, all the men say I wasn’t, could never have been. They’ll concede that Bruce stayed with his pal Mary near the Thames, after the job. They’ll admit that one of them had a German wife who picked him up in the morning; that Footpad used a girl he picked up as an attempt at an alibi, to say he was in Ireland at the time. But a bird on the track, or down on the embankment, lifting mailbags? No bleeding way. Even Bobby would tell you that I was never there. Jack knew. I’m somehow sure that Jack could tell it was me. Maybe I’m wrong, because it was dark, and no one was looking at each other. We were simply working, efficiently, quickly, putting our talents to use.

  That clanking sound as the train is uncoupled. The tang of hot grass, metal, and cat piss. The taste of nylon stocking in my mouth, the feeling of my eyelashes being stuck. I can’t even blink. And someone or something, like a lover, you know—that long-delayed, always expected something we live for, who never quite arrives—calling to me through the night air.

  What I remember now is a fox, streaking across the grass. I don’t know if anyone else saw it, saw her. A vixen, cubs in front. I was on the track, and she was whisking along the embankment—grey, ghostly in the moonlight, her low tail stroking the ground, ears back, nosing the cubs in front of her. She disappeared and appeared again as I glanced up, like a scarf weaving through a magician’s fingers. I blinked, tried to concentrate. The mailbags were heavy. There were 120 of them. My task was to stand there, say nothing, and heave the bag passed to me along to the man standing at my right, who would heave it to the waiting lorry. Give nothing away about how heavy I found them, not make any kind of feminine grunt or sound.

  The vixen had been keeping her body low, swift but unhurried. Pretending to be casual instead of what she really was: intent. Every inch of her twitching with it, and in that strange indistinct light she seemed ablaze. I can’t now remember the drive back to the farm, or how I lifted and threw those heavy bags, stood my ground. I just remember that vixen, the only thing glowing in that soft grey night. She was beautiful, I remember thinking.

  For most of us, myself included, the habit goes as deep as Brighton in a stick of rock of boasting. Exaggerating. Lying, if you like. Or best of all saying nothing at all. Perhaps I’m making it up, you know, putting myself at the center, everywhere that mattered? That’s me. Right at the heart of the criminal world since landing there in 1933.

  The papers said at first that a million was stolen. When I read that a shoot of anger went through me because it was such a lie. They knew it was more than that. They were playing with us. Just like that day years ago in Bethnal Green when I lost Nan. The bastards think they know what it’s good for the British public to hear. Two and a half million was worth a hell of a lot back then.

  Three days later me and Bobby are back in London. We’ve missed one of our drops—a bag in a telephone box near the farm that got abruptly left because Old Bill is now crawling all over Leatherslade. But the whack is so good that we’re not complaining. We follow it all on the radio and on the television all through the night until the early hours, when we get back to Stella’s, hugging ourselves, drinking hot sweet tea, keeping the curtains drawn at her flat and trying hard not to whoop and holler too much, in case the neighbors hear. Sweating, flushing—hot, cold—whenever we hear things. The police believe the robbers are holed up within a thirty-mile radius of Sears Crossing.

  The train driver, Jack Mills, is still in hospital. He suffered lacerated injuries to the back of his skull . . .

  Bobby’s suitcase is here at Stella’s; he’s already packed. He’s not the fit man he used to be, and winces as he leans over. I gently take the suitcase from him and lift it myself. Maria and I go with him in the taxi to Heathrow to wave him off; our own plan is to leave later today. Stella is going to drive Maria and me to the Fens, later tonight, to the same village I was evacuated to as a child, where I’ve already found a place to rent. “Maybe someone will recognize you?” Stella says. What, that little East End slum girl? I don’t think so. In any case, there’s nothing at all to link me to the robbery.

  My plan is to rent the cottage—in a village outside of Ely—at first, get Maria into a nice quiet country school, lay low for, say, two years, and then when I’m settled, buy a house in the city of Ely, a cottage at the bottom of Fore Hill, maybe the cottage by the river I saw that day when Bobby and I first arrived, as children, and had the strange feeling about. I remember the sense that there was someone inside it, someone I knew. Funny that.

  “Come visit, won’t you?” Bobby says.

  “Look after yourself,” I tell him. This handful of words will have to do. We hug silently, hoping our bodies can say our goodbyes. We break away. “Stay out of trouble,” he replies. We can’t say more in front of the taxi driver. We still don’t know if we’ve got away with it.

  Paying the driver when I return from the airport is the first time I use the money. They’re all used notes, hard to trace, mostly in the form of one- and ten-pound notes, brown and green with the lovely severe face of our Queen on them. I hand the notes over, waiting while he gives me my change. My hand is sweating—the notes shimmer in front of me, threatening to dissolve. Then I recover, give the cabbie a big grin. Lean in at the window with some of my old brass neck, waving another pound note at him. Keep the change.

  A week later, a postcard arrives at Stella’s. San Pedro, Costa del Sol. Whitewashed houses bristling with red geraniums and a wide strip of blue sea, like a runway. She drives to Ely to bring it to me. We wander round the marketplace, and then down by the river, arm in arm, and she slips the postcard into my pocket. No message, sensibly, but I recognize Bobby’s handwriting on the address—big, capitals, curly loops. I smile, and when I get home—get to my slightly wonky, sloping ivy-covered cottage in a village nearby—I prop it up near the fridge.

  A month after that he sends Stella a photograph. She brings that the following Sunday. I stare at it for a long time, committing it to memory, before tearing it up. It’s Bobby lying by a swimming pool, wearing sunglasses. Bobby who always hated water, flattening himself out alongside the blue square, dipping one hand in. A big fat cigar poking out of his mouth. The pool is surrounded by shrubs, and orange trees.

  A memory floats back then. Something about Bobby as a child on the Salmons’ farm, when he came back on his own here without me. How he loved the horse, the outdoors, the good dirt, as he always called it, and how it was before Bobby’s superstitions—his insistence on lining up coasters and mats and towels—kicked in. I remember that Christmas, too, when he first saw an orange and didn’t know what to do with it, threw it down the stairs in frustration to try and open it. Now he’s lying beside his pool surrounded by orange trees, more oranges than anyone could eat in one lifetime.

  By 1964, most of the train robbers had been
brought in. I followed the stories, reading the paper, watching the television, always waiting, expecting. But I knew I needn’t be worried. No one was looking for a woman. And because Bobby had sat out the whole thing, hiding in another of the outbuildings, his prints weren’t on the mailbags or any part of the train, and no one was looking for him, either. Stupid Roger Cordey was the first to be arrested, by answering an ad for a garage to rent that had been placed by a policeman’s widow. When he paid up, three months cash in advance, from a thick wad, she raised the alarm. Leatherslade had quickly been identified as the hideout. Fingerprints were found on the ketchup and the Monopoly box and on a drum of Saxa salt. (I remember seeing Buster shaking it everywhere like he couldn’t get any out, even when it was pouring.) Ronnie Bigg’s dabs on the Monopoly cards. The public loved that. “Can you believe that, they played Monopoly, with real money?” I heard this woman say, in the butcher’s on Market Street in Ely. I longed to tap her on the shoulder, say casually, “It was Ronnie Bigg’s birthday. They didn’t just play with it, they rolled it up and smoked it, like cigars.”

  Jack Mills, the train driver, gave his testimony in court, and was described in the papers as “nerve-shattered” and “a broken man.” I don’t know how the others felt about this—I can never ask them—but I always had a horrible dive in my stomach whenever his name came up. Bobby’s argument was that it wasn’t just the bastards who hit him but the British Railway Board who shafted him, since he was off sick for a long time afterwards, and stopped work for good only later, and never got any kind of compensation from his bosses. The Railway Board defended themselves, saying that the driver’s sick leave in the year following the attack wasn’t as a result of the train robbery, but because he had leukemia. They claimed one of his medical boards had proved this, but the doctors had chosen not to tell the driver, and they didn’t want to be the ones to break the bad news. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about that.

  Jack, my Jack, was one of those never brought in. No one grassed any of us up, and most of the money was never recovered. We didn’t see each other again after that night, though. I knew we wouldn’t. Jack was proof—to myself—that I could get over Tony, and a distraction, but he was never going to be a contender. There were dramas and escapes—Biggs of course, most famously, and Charlie, too, later. There were newspaper deals and books and films and eventually firsthand accounts by people like Bruce, claiming to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but . . .

  Stella and I put our heads together and laughed every time another story came along. There’s so much that’s disputed that it’s barely worth trying to get a version together. Some claim it was Charlie who gently wiped the driver’s face with a blood-soaked rag. Neither Bruce nor Buster will tell who it was who helped the driver, sat with him, held his hand, offered him a cigarette, while they waited for the train to be shunted forward to Bridego Bridge. Who exactly was there and who did what is never agreed. “What happened to the huge stash of money? And maybe there were others on the track that fateful night . . .”

  There was one detail that interested us. Poor Footpad. He was caught by some traces of paint on his suede shoes, the same paint found in the cabin of the lorry, and matched to the paint in the outhouse at Leatherslade Farm. Yellow paint. So maybe Bobby was right to be frightened of yellow, after all.

  Luck again. Can I believe my luck? I don’t know. Isn’t even luck something you make yourself? Stella doesn’t agree, and later, I mean, the following week, the next time she visits us, we argue about it. “Even in the most hopeless situations, there’s usually something you can do yourself,” I say. “You can make things better or worse.”

  So Stella says, “Well, all right, what, say, what if you was drowning? No lifeguard around, no rope to hold onto . . . nothing. And the current’s dead strong and you ain’t got no strength left and can’t fight it? That’s just plain unlucky . . .”

  “Unlucky might be how you got there, OK, how you start out. But once you’re in the water, you can still do things. Thrash around. Carry on struggling. Or close your eyes, give up. Or . . . think about it; use words, try and make sense of it, even while it’s happening; tell yourself a story about it . . .”

  “A story,” she says. “Trust you to come up with that!”

  She snorts then, lights another cigarette, crosses her long legs, and leans back against a postbox on Lisle Lane. She’s seen a bloke she recognizes, her visits here being so regular, and is giving him a hard, appraising smile. A country postie in his shorts, on a bicycle. He pauses, adjusts the satchel over his shoulder, before smiling back.

  I do miss Tony sometimes. It happens most often when I go to pick up Maria from her school—in a thatched pink building, can you believe!—and she skips to the car in her gingham skirt and red cardigan, and I think of all the things Tony’ll never see: Maria in the nativity play as a sheep with woolly ears tied on her head; Maria winning at hockey with a ferociously determined center forward position; Maria standing proudly in front of the whole school to receive her badge as house captain. This morning on waking she says to me, “Mum, did you know that there’s a kind of squid with 256,000 teeth?” I didn’t even know a squid had teeth. She’s clever, so clever that sometimes I catch myself having that exact same thought that Nan voiced about me: “Where did you come from?” Or maybe: how did I ever deserve such a lovely bright spark as you?

  But then I discover that whatever decision I took, however guilty I feel about leaving him, Tony wouldn’t be seeing any of these things anyway. Tears are wasted on him. Stella told me recently that he’s inside, Durham again, doing a good long stretch. Armed robbery, and this time his trigger finger found its target, as I knew someday it would. Maria is growing up in the cookies-and-milk kind of life I can provide her with, and I’ll leave it up to her whether she wants to see him, when she’s older. She knows where to find him.

  I miss Nan, too, sometimes, remembering all she gave me, what a loving person she was. She deserved a gentler death. I think of all those people who died that night in Bethnal Green and I wonder—not for the first time—why I didn’t. Why somebody, or something, saved me. Was that luck then? Or something else? Somebody helped me, the woman who pulled me by my hair, but more than that, I remember the strong feeling of a person sitting beside me in those worst moments, feeling for my hand. Maybe Nan, maybe someone else. Wasn’t there a little girl wearing a beret with a sparkly rabbit clip?

  Am I ashamed of how I got here, that it wasn’t honest, that it wasn’t legal or what—regular, or orthodox, conventional, is that the word? I told you at the start I wasn’t and you won’t catch me repenting. People love to believe they’re so much better than they are. People who have never been tested, they’re so quick to judge. What do they really know about themselves? All I’m saying is this: unless you’ve been there, found yourself with nothing, nothing but your own talent, you can’t tell me you wouldn’t do it the same way, too.

  One day, driving Maria to school, in a mad rush as usual, turning right on the Stuntney Road, I glance up and see Ely Cathedral on the horizon, sitting there as always, above everything else, dominating. The Ship of the Fens. And I remember Nan and the tea-leaf sludge she moved around with her finger in the empty cup, not so much reading the future as indulging a family trait she passed down to me: relentless hopefulness. Optimism. I see her soft skin, her blue eyes, the same blue eyes Dad has, and now Maria. I see a ship, Nan would say. One day your ship will come in.

  Acknowledgments

  Queenie is a fictional character.

  However, the events at Bethnal Green tube station did happen, as described, and a group called Stairway to Heaven has been campaigning for a permanent memorial. You can donate to the fund.

  I’d like to gratefully acknowledge the following:

  All of Me: My Extraordinary Life by Barbara Windsor and Robin McGibbon. Headline Book Publishing, 2000.

  Mandy by Mandy Rice-D
avies with Shirley Flack. Michael Joseph Ltd, 1980.

  Gone Shopping: The Story of Shirley Pitts, Queen of Thieves by Lorraine Gamman. Signet, 1996.

  Ruth Ellis, My Sister’s Secret Life by Muriel Jakubait with Monica Weller. Constable and Robinson Ltd, 2005.

  Behind Closed Doors by Diana Dors. WH Allen & Co Ltd, 1979.

  Come by Sunday, The Fabulous Ruined Life of Diana Dors by Damon Wise. Sidgwick and Jackson, 1998.

  An English Madam, The Life and Work of Cynthia Payne by Paul Bailey. Jonathan Cape, Ltd, 1982.

  Borstal Boy by Brendan Behan. Hutchinson and Co. Ltd, 1958.

  Crime Archive: The Great Train Robbery by Peter Guttridge. The National Archives, Kew, Richmond, 2008.

  The Autobiography of a Thief by Bruce Reynolds. Virgin Books Ltd, 2005.

  With warmest thanks to Iris Cannon, Frank and Margaret Bowles, and Josie Bowles for sharing their wartime reminiscences. Also to Jake Arnott and Lorraine Gamman for generosity with their time and specialized knowledge. To Suzanne Howlett for her invaluable insights and input. To good friends Sally Cline, Geraldine Harmsworth, Kathryn Heyman, and Louise Doughty for keeping me going. To my agent, Caroline Dawnay, for her clearheaded professionalism and kindness; to my editor, Carole Welch, and her assistant, Ruth Tross, for input in the first draft of this novel, which was transformative.

  This novel is for the Dawson girls: Maud, Debra, Beth, Lotte, and Rose.

  And for Meredith, with love, as ever.

  About the Author

  JILL DAWSON is an award-winning poet and the author of six previous novels, including The Great Lover, Trick of the Light, and Fred & Edie, which was short-listed for the Whitbread Novel Award and the Orange Prize. She lives in Cambridgeshire, England, with her husband and two sons.