London Belles

by Annie Groves

  Lizzie laughed at her. ‘The Palais? You’d never get a man like him going somewhere like that.’

  ‘Want to bet?’ Dulcie challenged her. Everyone knew that the Hammersmith Palais was simply the best dancehall in London. That was why Dulcie was prepared to make the trek from the East End to Hammersmith every Saturday night, instead of going somewhere local.

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ Lizzie said, but Dulcie persisted.

  ‘Come on, bet you five bob I can get him to meet me at the Palais, and before Christmas.’

  ‘You’re never serious.’

  ‘I certainly am.’ It was just the sort of challenge that Dulcie loved; daring, reckless, breaking the rules, pushing against boundaries, and using her looks to get her own way.

  Born into a noisy cockney family, with an elder brother and a younger sister, Dulcie had learned young that she had to fight and use what nature had given her to get what she wanted, and to hang on to it once she had.

  Two hours later Dulcie had left Selfridges and Oxford Street behind her, along with her white overall with its pink collar and trimmings. An admiring look from a motorist in a rakish-looking soft-topped car had her pausing to admire her reflection in a nearby shop window, and reflect that the bows she had added to the dress she was wearing, and which she had had copied by a local dressmaker from her own sketches of a dress in Selfridges Young Ladies Models Department looked much fancier than the original. The dress had small puffed sleeves and a close-fitting bodice, the bows adorning the ends of the long seams that ran from the bust down to below the waist. The fabric – silk, no less – had a dark plum background and was covered in a pansy print in a variety of hues from pale lilac through off-white to darkest purple – colours that suited her dark eyes and nicely tanned arms and legs, as well, of course, as drawing attention to her blonde hair.

  White opened-toed high-heeled sandals and a white handbag completed her outfit, and Dulcie wasn’t in the least bit surprised that men turned to look at her and other women cast her assessing and very often antagonistic looks. She was nineteen now and she’d known from being fourteen that she was a head-turner. She’d had more boys asking her for dates than any of the other girls in the bustling street where her family lived, but Dulcie wasn’t daft. They could take her out but they weren’t going to take her for a ride. There was no way that she was going to end up married to some no-hoper and a new baby on the way every year, like the girls she’d been at school with and her own mother. She would marry one day, of course – every woman had to have a husband to keep her – but first she wanted to have fun. And fun for Dulcie was flirting and dressing up and going out to the pictures, or a dance hall. Once she agreed to be someone’s steady girl, all that would have to come to an end, and she wasn’t ready for that – not yet.

  Gleefully she imagined her triumph when she won her bet with Lizzie. A double triumph since in achieving it she would be getting the better of Miss Hoity-Toity, with her stuck-up airs and graces. Dulcie had no doubts about the success of her plan. David James-Thompson would come back to the shop. She knew men and she knew what that gleam in his eyes had meant. He was up for some fun and so was she, although their ideas of what fun was might not be exactly the same. There was no way she would let him get into her knickers. She wasn’t daft. He was the sort that would run a mile if he thought he’d got her sort into trouble. But that wasn’t going to happen.

  She joined the queue waiting for the bus that would take her home to Stepney in the East End. Her father worked in the building trade as a plumber, and the family had a better standard of living than many of their neighbours, with a whole house to themselves, though Dulcie and her sister had to share a room and a bed.

  When she did get married she wasn’t going to be like her mother and have three children – six, if you counted the three that had died before being born. Dulcie didn’t really want any children at all.

  The bus was crowded and Dulcie had to stand, strap hanging and receiving an admiring look from the young conductor, who had to squeeze past her as he collected everyone’s fares, whilst the bus lurched away from the kerb and pulled out into the traffic.

  Dulcie was glad when the bus finally reached her stop and she was able to get off. There’d been an old man coughing away the whole time Dulcie had been standing close to him. A really poor sort he’d looked too, smelling of drink and his clothes shabby. Dulcie wrinkled her nose as she left the bus stop.

  There was a pub on the corner of the street up ahead of her. Automatically Dulcie crossed the road to avoid having to walk past the group of men and women standing outside it. There were two families in their street who were notorious for the rows and fights they had when they’d been drinking. The Hitchins at number 4 and the Abbotts at number 9. It was nothing unusual to see both husbands and wives sporting bruises and black eyes. Ma Hitchins, all twenty stone of her, loved nothing better than a good set-to, rolling up her sleeves at the drop of a wrong word, ready to go into battle, and her children, as thin and cowed as she was fat and aggressive, knew better than to approach their mother when she’d had a few drinks. ‘Poor little ragamuffins’ was what Dulcie’s own mother called them.

  The house Dulcie’s parents rented was halfway down the street at number 11. Cheaply built and mean-looking, the houses cast shadows over the street that stole its sunlight.

  The street was busy with its normal early evening summer life; children playing with hoops and balls, grandmothers sitting on front steps and gossiping, men returning home from work. Dulcie knew everyone who lived there and they knew her.

  ‘Fancy going down the pictures tonight, Dulce?’ one of a group of young men called out to her as he sat astride his bike, smoking a cigarette.

  ‘Not with you and them roving hands of yours, I don’t, Jimmy Watson,’ Duclie called back without stopping.

  She and Jimmy Watson had gone to school together, and he was a friend of her older brother, Rick.

  ‘Heard the news, have you?’ Jimmy carried on undeterred. ‘About me and your Rick getting our papers.’

  ‘So what’s news about that?’ Dulcie challenged him ‘Every lad’s getting called up.’ She had reached her own front door now, which, like most of the doors in the street, was standing open.

  ‘It’s me, Ma,’ she called out from the hall.

  ‘About time. I need a hand here in the kitchen, Dulcie, getting tea ready.’

  ‘It’s Edith’s turn. And besides, I’ve got to go upstairs and get changed.’

  Edith and Dulcie didn’t get on. Edith had aspirations to become a professional singer. She did have a goodish voice, Dulcie acknowledged grudgingly, but that was no reason for their mother to spoil and pet her in the way that she did, letting her off chores so that she could ‘practise’ singing her scales. Dulcie suspected that Edith was very much their mother’s favourite.

  ‘She’s got an audition tonight, down at the Holborn Empire, and with Charlie Kunz, as an understudy for one of his singers,’ her mother told Dulcie importantly. Charlie Kunz was a very well-known musician and band leader, who had made many records.

  Dulcie, though, refused to be impressed, puckering up her lips to study her reflection in the small mirror incorporated into the dark-oak-stained hat and coat stand. That new lipstick sample she was wearing suited her a real treat. She’d have to find a way of making sure it got ‘lost’ and then found its way into her handbag, she decided, giving her full cherry-red lips another approving look.

  Everyone at home had laughed at her when she had first announced that she wanted to work in the makeup department of Selfridges.

  ‘You’ll never get taken on by a posh place like that,’ her mother had warned her. ‘If you want fancy shop work then why not ask Mr Bryant at the chemist’s if he’ll take you on?’

  ‘Work in that musty old place, handing out aspirin and haemorrhoid cream? No, thanks. I will get a job at Selfridges, just you watch.’

  And of course she had, even if it had taken her six months of p
ersistence to do so, first turning up and hanging about chatting with the cleaners and the like, finding out what was what and, more importantly, who was who.

  Once she’d got all the information she needed, the rest had been easy. Ignoring the disapproving looks of the female lift attendants in their dashing Cossack-style uniforms, every day for a week she’d ‘accidentally’ ridden up in the lift with the manager of the ground-floor cosmetics department, on his way to have his morning coffee in the managerial restaurant, until, via a carefully planned process of acknowledging his presence with a shy smile, through to a welcoming smile that lit up her whole face, he finally asked her which department she worked in. That had been her cue to explain, fake modestly, using the ‘posh voice’ she had learned to mimic, that she didn’t actually have a job at Selfridges, and that she rode in the lift every day hoping to pluck up the courage to put herself forward for one.

  The manager had been totally taken in. Her pretty face and perfect skin would be a definite asset to his department. Dulcie had been whisked through the formalities of becoming an employee, but although she might have charmed and taken in the manager, the girls she worked with were not as easily won over. Middle-class girls in the main, and protective of their own status, they were quick to sense that Dulcie was not really one of them. It wasn’t just because they thought of her as lower class that they kept her at a distance, though. In Dulcie’s eyes the truth was that it was because she was by far and away the best-looking girl on the whole of the cosmetics floor. Not that their hostility bothered her. She had wangled things so that her counter, the ‘Movie Star’ range of makeup, was almost the first that people – men – saw when they walked onto the floor, which meant that she got plenty of customers. Traditionally, Selfridges had its perfume counters close to the main doors on Mr Selfridge’s instructions, so that customers coming in would receive a delicious waft of perfume. The idea was that this would tempt them to the counter to buy, as well as adding to the allure and exclusivity of the store itself.

  It wasn’t just her pretty face that kept Dulcie’s sales up, though. She knew how to sell, and how to make ‘her’ customers want to come back to her. The reality may be that ‘Movie Star’ makeup was made in a factory not very far away at all from Smithfield Market, but its management, like Dulcie herself, were determined to ensure that their cosmetics reflected the glamour of Hollywood films and encouraged customers to think that by buying it they too could look like their favourite movie star – or, failing that, the pretty girl who had sold them their precious new lipstick. The manager was very pleased with his decision to take her on, and Dulcie was equally pleased with her own success. Even the senior buyer for the cosmetics floor, Miss Nellie Ellit, had made it her business to seek Dulcie out and give her the once-over. It was thanks to Miss Ellit that Selfridges was well stocked with lipsticks ahead of war potentially breaking out, with more orders soon to be delivered.

  So much for her brother, Rick’s, teasing that the only job she was likely to get in Selfridges was scrubbing its floors.

  Dulcie headed for the kitchen. Unlike some in the area, who only had a couple of rooms to house a whole family and so had to buy hot food from one of the many small shops in the area, Mary Simmonds had her own kitchen. Today the kitchen smelled of cooking fish, making Dulcie wrinkle up her nose. Now that she was working at Selfridges she had a good dinner there in the canteen, and so she wasn’t particularly hungry.

  ‘Rick called by Billingsgate on his way home and brought back with him a nice piece of hake,’ her mother told her.

  ‘I passed Jimmy on my way home. He said that him and Rick had got their papers,’ Dulcie informed her mother.

  ‘That’s right,’ Mary agreed. ‘I don’t know why they’re making them all do this training when there isn’t supposed to be going to be a war.’ She was frowning now.

  Dulcie knew, from the photographs of her as a young girl, that her mother had once been pretty, but now she was thin, and her hair turning grey, and her frown was caused by her anxiety for Rick and what might happen to him if there was a war.

  The Government had bombarded them all with that many leaflets and warnings about blacking out windows, getting fitted for gas masks, children being evacuated to the country, not to mention filling the streets with sandbags and the parks with trenches, and setting up Air Raid Precaution posts all over the place, but at the same time the Prime Minister had said that they weren’t going to go to war with Germany.

  Germany was going to war with other countries, though, and now the same Prime Minister who had said there would not be a war was saying that if Germany went ahead and invaded Poland then Britain simply wouldn’t stand for it. Dulcie didn’t think she trusted Germany – or the Prime Minister.

  ‘Come on, Dulcie,’ her mother instructed sharply now. ‘Get that oilcloth on the table and get the table laid, will you? I’m in a bit of a rush tonight, what with Edith upstairs getting ready for her audition. It’s lucky that Rick’s around to go with her because your dad would never have let her go on her own.’

  ‘Not in my good frock, Mum. I’ll have to get changed first,’ Dulcie protested.

  Although her mother sighed, she didn’t argue, but then, as Dulcie knew, her mother was a stickler for keeping her home and her family clean. She’d been in service before she’d met Dulcie’s father and married him, a country girl brought up to London by the family she worked for, and she had what she called ‘my standards’. Those standards meant that unlike many of their neighbours there were no bedbugs in their beds, even if that did mean standing the feet of the beds in jars of water, and Dulcie’s father regularly putting a coat of lime wash on the bedroom walls.

  As she reached the top of the stairs, Dulcie saw Rick coming out of the bathroom, his chest bare and damp, his trouser braces hanging from his waist, and his face obviously freshly shaved, a towel slung over one shoulder.

  ‘It’s Edith who’s being auditioned,’ she mocked him, ‘not you, or are you hoping that one of the chorus girls might take a fancy to you?’

  ‘Can’t see why they shouldn’t take a shine to a good-looking chap like me,’ Rick grinned back, not in the least bit put out by his sister’s taunt. But then nothing and no one ever got under Rick’s skin, Dulcie was forced to admit.

  Over six foot tall, broad-chested and strong-armed from the local lads’ boxing club he’d attended when he’d been at school, Rick, like Dulcie, had inherited their mother’s family’s good looks, although his hair was much darker than his sister’s. Easy-going, with a sense of humour, Rick liked taking the mickey out of his sisters, especially Dulcie, who had such a high opinion of herself.

  ‘Well, seeing as you’ve got your papers to go and do your training, and that means you getting a short back and sides, I don’t reckon much to your chances.’

  Rick laughed and winked at her. ‘Much you know. Girls love a chap in uniform. Why don’t you come with me and Edith down to the Empire?’

  ‘What, and have to listen to her caterwauling and then banging on about her ruddy singing for the rest of the evening? No, thanks.’ Her mother and her brother could fuss round Edith as much as they liked, Dulcie wasn’t going to join in.

  Turning on her heel, Dulcie pushed open the door to the bedroom she shared with her sister, and then froze, as she saw what Edith was wearing as she sat at their shared dressing table, brushing her hair.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing thieving my new blouse?’ she demanded furiously, dropping her handbag onto the bed and going over to her sister.

  ‘I’m not thieving it, I’m only borrowing it.’

  ‘On, no, you aren’t. You can take it off right this minute.’

  As she spoke Dulcie reached out and grabbed hold of her sister, who immediately tried to push her off, yelling as she did so, ‘Mum, Mum, Dulcie’s being rotten to me.’

  ‘That’s my blouse and you aren’t wearing it.’ Dulcie had to raise her voice to make herself heard above her sister’s screams of prot
est as Dulcie tried to unfasten her blouse. ‘You’re always thieving my things, helping yourself to them, and then ruining them.’

  ‘No I’m not.’

  ‘Yes you are. Now get my blouse off.’

  ‘Dulcie, I’ve got to borrow it. I’m going for my audition this evening and I haven’t got anything decent to wear. I’m not like you, working at Selfridges. Oww!’ Edith screamed as Dulcie grabbed her hair and gave it a furious tug.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  Both of them turned to look at their mother, who was standing in the open doorway.

  ‘It’s her, she’s pinched my best blouse.’

  ‘It’s Dulcie, Mum, she’s being mean to me.’

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Dulcie, why shouldn’t she borrow your blouse? She won’t harm it. She is your sister, after all.’

  ‘Sister? She’s a thieving nuisance, and she’s not wearing my blouse,’ Dulcie insisted, her temper well and truly up now. ‘I’m sick and tired of her treating my things like they’re hers, borrowing my stuff without so much as a by-your-leave.’

  ‘That’s enough, Dulcie,’ her mother told her sharply. ‘Look how you’ve upset Edith.’ She gestured to the younger girl’s tear-stained face. ‘I thought better of you than this, I really did.’

  ‘That’s it,’ Dulcie exploded. ‘I’ve had enough of this and her treating my clothes like she owns them. Do you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to find myself somewhere to live. Somewhere I’ve got a room of my own, with no thieving sister sharing it.’

  ‘Dulcie!’ Both her sister and her mother looked shocked.

  Rick came in to join the fray, shaking his head and warning her, ‘It’s all very well saying that, Miss Hoity-Toity, but who’s going to rent you a room? Mind you, I’m not saying that this place won’t be a lot more peaceful without you around.’

  As always when she was challenged, Dulcie immediately dug her toes in and refused to back down. As the elder girl in her family it was her opinion that her younger sister should look up to her, and their mother should put her first and not fuss over Edith like she did. Dulcie’s pride was smarting, and even though right now she had no idea how she would get herself a room of her own, she was determined that she would do so.