Trouble In Paradise
Page 1
About the Book
It is 1945, and all over England people are looking forward to being at peace.
Except for recently married Zelda Fluck, for whom peace means the return of her husband – and this is bad news indeed. Not only is she frightened of him – and she has reason to be – but she is also concerned for the safety of her good friend Zinnia Makepeace, owner of one of the choicest of garden allotments in London’s East End.
Meanwhile young Tony, Zelda’s nephew, is going off the rails. His dad’s missing, presumed dead, his mum’s in a state, and he is running wild with the local gang of thugs and thieves. But Tony can sing – he has, in fact, the voice of an angel – and Zelda thinks she may have found a solution to all their problems. But she has reckoned without the trouble raging in Paradise Gardens …
Also by Pip Granger
NOT ALL TARTS ARE APPLE
THE WIDOW GINGER
NO PEACE FOR THE WICKED
Trouble in
Paradise
PIP GRANGER
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
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Published 2004 by Bantam Press a division of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Pip Granger 2004
The right of Pip Granger to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 0593 05136X
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Contents
Cover
About the Book
Also by Pip Granger
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
This one is in loving memory of my mother Joan,
my brother Pots and my half-sister Valerie
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Ray for all his help, support and forebearance. Also thanks to Selina Walker and Jane Conway-Gordon for not losing their patience or their grip when things looked hairy. Last, but by no means least, thanks to everyone at Transworld who work so hard behind the scenes to bring us books – you know who you are …
1
‘Zeld! Zeld! Zelda! Have you heard? It’s over, it’s finally bloody over. Answer the door, there’s a love. I feel a right prune standing here, yelling myself hoarse.’
It was my friend Dilly’s voice, husky with excitement. It was late Monday afternoon; I’d just finished my shift at the canteen, or British Restaurant as it patriotically called itself, and was up to my eyebrows in cold, scummy water at home. I was wrestling with a greasy frying pan without benefit of either soap or a shilling for the gas, so it was a relief to drop the thing and hurry downstairs to the street door. Dilly’s lovely face, normally pale, was glowing with joy under her blue headscarf, and her brown eyes glittered with tears. Dilly was always inclined to blub when she was happy; and when she wasn’t.
‘Oh, Zeld!’ she yelled, then threw her arms around me, yanked me into the street and hurled me up the road to Hobbs the butcher’s and back again in a mad polka. It took a fair amount of navigational skill to dodge the broken paving stones and pot-holes that still littered our East London streets despite the best efforts of the authorities.
It was a good half an hour before we were free of the small crowd we’d collected and had settled at my kitchen table, toasting the great news in weak tea with no sugar. The war in Europe was over! Hitler had chucked in the towel. Of course, we’d been hearing rumours for days and our harkers had been glued to the wireless at the canteen, but there’d been no official announcement, so we’d hardly dared to believe it until we heard it from Mr Churchill’s own lips. The buzz around London would not be denied a second longer, though. We had won at last, announcement or no announcement!
We were ready to let our corsets out and our hair down and to throw caution to the wind. We were sick of it, heartily sick of it, and we wanted our proper lives back. Of course, some of us didn’t really know what our adult lives were supposed to be like, having been young when the war started, but we were willing to find out. Most of us were, anyway. I had a horrible feeling I knew what my real life with Charlie was going to be like, and I was sure I wasn’t going to like it. Still, the time to worry about that was when I heard the bleeder’s hobnails on the stairs. Until then, I could join in the merriment along with everybody else.
‘Some Yank told me that Hitler blew his own brains out,’ Dilly told me. Her face split in an evil grin as she lit up a Chesterfield. American servicemen kept her supplied with life’s luxuries like cigarettes, stockings and, God bless ’em, chocolate. Which was very handy indeed, what with the black market not being cheap and us being broke most of the time.
‘Ma Hole says he swallowed poison and Hobbs the butcher says he’s been hanged, drawn and quartered by his own bodyguard, but I reckon that’s wishful thinking myself. Nobody’s found the body yet, so it’s all guesswork. He’s a
lways been bloodthirsty, that Lenny Hobbs. He was like it when he was at school, you remember.’ Dilly’s face was getting pinker by the second.
Lenny Hobbs had indeed been a bloodthirsty kid. A picture of his large, red face when he was a schoolboy floated across my mind. We were all huddled behind the toilets staring at a pair of sheep’s eyeballs in the palm of his grubby hand. There was no telling what Lenny Hobbs was likely to whip out of his pocket next – once it had been a pig’s trotter – and we girls learned to scuttle to the toilet at top speed when he and his pals were on the loose. But he didn’t matter at that moment, and neither did Hitler. The main thing was that the war in our neck of the woods was over.
‘Your mum says to come round to the Gardens tonight,’ Dilly continued, still breathless with it all. ‘I bumped into her and she says there’s going to be a knees-up to end all knees-ups. They’ve decided the weekend for the street party, but there’ll be a bit of a do tonight.’
And Mum should know, because she could drum up a party in an empty house. She just loved to celebrate. Any old excuse would do. She’d been known to bung a candle in our bread and dripping and call it a ‘Bloody Monday party’ because she hated bloody Mondays with the mountains of wet, smelly washing hanging all over the place, and would do anything to put a shine on things. Added to her natural inclination towards jollity, she dearly loved to organize anything with a heartbeat, which was handy because she’d had six kids and a husband to care for on a very few quid most weeks. She always said that Winnie, Mr Churchill, should have had some mums in his war cabinet; they would have shown him a thing or two about getting the right bodies in the right place at the right time, fully clothed and with bellies suitably filled.
Paradise Gardens was a miracle, or so everybody said. Somehow, throughout the war, it had remained more or less intact, although large chunks of the surrounding area had been flattened by doodlebugs or burned to blackened stumps by incendiary bombs. The only things missing from Paradise Gardens were the railings, and the Men from the Ministry had had those away at the beginning of the war, along with our pots and pans, to churn out ammunition and to build ships, tanks and Spitfires. I often wondered if Grandpa’s tin chamber-pot had wound up landing on some Nazi’s nut, but of course, there was no way of finding out. I simply had to hope.
Apart from the ironwork, though, there had been very little damage to the Gardens. The odd roof tile had been shifted by the shock waves from nights of particularly heavy bombing in our bit of Hackney, and Zinnia Makepeace’s shed window was blown in at number 23, but that was about it. As people said, it was a miracle, especially with the Gardens being so near the railway line and presenting such a beautiful sitting target.
Mum and Dad had lived at 3 Arcadia Buildings ever since they’d married and moved in with Gran and Grandpa. All six of us had been born in that narrow, three-storey terraced house. We had the top two floors, four rooms in all. One doubled up as kitchen, living room, and bathroom on bath nights. Mum and Dad slept in one room, us girls were in the one next to them and the boys had the room next to the kitchen. Gran and Grandpa lived on the ground floor and had their kitchen in the basement, with a window overlooking the area and the dustbins. We all shared the one toilet, which was at the end of the garden by the back gate on to Paradise Alley. The Alley ran behind our rank of buildings, snaked behind Zinnia’s place and joined the narrow path that hugged the far side of number 23 and led from the Gardens out on to Paradise Gardens allotments and the railway just beyond. The line was so close that Zinnia’s house shook whenever the heavy coal and munitions trains went by, while our carrots, onions and King Edwards got liberal doses of soot from the belching engines.
Grandpa was long dead. My sister Vi lived with Gran now, along with her son Tony and, when he was on leave from the army, her husband, Fred. But Fred hadn’t been home in some considerable time. He had gone missing in action and nothing had been heard of him. Fred was Dilly’s older brother, so the pain of losing him had spread through my family and my best mate’s family as well. He was a good bloke, was Fred; kind, funny and solid.
Tony missed him more than any of us; he idolized his dad and they had been very close. Like all the kids around our way, Tony had been evacuated, but like a good many others, he was soon back. The phony war and homesickness saw to that. Once the Blitz started in earnest, it was clear that he, his cousin Reggie and a lot of their friends wouldn’t be wrenched away to the sticks again, bombs or no bombs. I think that later Tony believed that, if he took his eye off of us, we’d disappear the way his dad had done when he marched off to war, and he simply couldn’t bear it.
Upstairs, Mum and Dad rattled about in their four rooms, mostly empty now, with their chicks scattered to the four winds. Well, littered about the surrounding houses, streets and the army and navy, to be exact. Except for Albert, the oldest: he’d bought it early on in France, and nobody liked to talk about him for fear of setting Mum off again. The telegram from the War Office had sent Mum spiralling into one of the darkest moods we had ever seen. If Winston Churchill was stalked by a ‘black dog’, then our mum had the whole bleeding pack baying at her heels. It took her ages to come out of it. As she said, losing her eldest boy and a much loved son-in-law to a bloody madman wasn’t something a body’s quick to forget. And she never, ever did: nor forgave it either.
2
Although there still hadn’t been an official announcement that the war in Europe was over, London heaved that night. Everywhere you went, men, women and children were delirious with joy. People were hanging off the lampposts in Trafalgar Square, there being no room to stand, and the Palace was besieged by a mass of loyal subjects, hell-bent on sharing their ecstasy with the Royal Household, even if a lot of them were away at Windsor. Every pub in London, and probably the whole country, was stuffed to the rafters with happy punters. Bomb sites were raided to provide the wherewithal to build victory bonfires that twinkled like millions of giant fireflies. And the fire in Paradise Gardens outshone them all.
Unless you knew your way around our bit of Hackney, you’d never find Paradise Gardens. It was tucked away down a narrow alley – Paradise Row – that led from one of the maze of little side streets that huddled behind the bustling main road. Most of the Gardens was made up of terraces of tall brick houses shoe-horned into the meanest possible space. Those Georgian speculators knew a thing or twenty about squeezing the last farthing from their investment. Some things never change.
However, they hadn’t managed to get their greedy hands on the narrow end – the bit with the footpath that led out on to the allotments. Number 23 Paradise Gardens hogged that, sprawling untidily, like an ancient mongrel, over the whole plot. Our mum’s good friend, Zinnia Makepeace, lived there alone, apart from a motley crew of cats and dogs that came daily to be fed and her own pair of tabbies, Hepzibah and Hallelujah. Makepeaces had lived at number 23 as far back as anyone could remember. They were a funny lot. Everybody said so. Our dad swore they were witches, and that the presence of Zinnia in the Gardens explained its amazing escape from Hitler’s evil intentions.
‘Let’s face it, would you take the old battle-axe on?’ he’d ask, then plough ahead, without waiting for a reply. Our dad didn’t usually need replies, being certain in his own mind about what was what. ‘I know I wouldn’t, and ’Itler wouldn’t neither, not if he wanted to hang on to that last bollock of his, that is. One look from her and it’d shrivel to a sultana, only smaller.’
There was no love lost between Zinnia and our dad. He thought she was a bossy old boot and too lippy by half. According to him, that was why she was still a spinster. I always thought the word ‘spinster’ was a terrible insult, like ‘bastard’, until I married Charlie. During the reading out of the banns, I was referred to as ‘a spinster of this parish’ and as I couldn’t imagine dear old Reverend Cattermole swearing, especially in church, I worked out it couldn’t be rude.
Our mum liked Zinnia, though, and had been her friend since her arrival in th
e Gardens more than thirty years before. That was another thing about Zinnia: she was mysterious, like Primrose Makepeace had been before her. According to our mum, Zinnia arrived one day, hat skew-whiff and scarf stuffed into a lumpy tweed coat that was the colour of peat and heather and smelt strongly of sheep (or what our mum imagined was sheep; if it wasn’t, she shuddered to think what it was).
Anyway, Zinnia arrived carrying a very small suitcase and said she’d come to nurse Primrose. This was the first anyone knew about old Prim being ill, apparently, but sure enough, she died three years later. She lasted just long enough to teach Zinnia everything she knew about the people in and around Paradise Gardens, which came in handy as she was called upon to help us into and out of this world. Zinnia, like Primrose and the other Makepeaces before her, was the local midwife, layer-out of bodies and unofficial first port of call when there was sickness in the house. Before you flashed out your hard-earned cash for the doctor, it was a good idea to find out if it was necessary, or whether a little something from Zinnia’s garden or allotment, mixed with a drop of brandy or, more boringly, a slosh of boiling water, would do the trick. Either way, Zinnia was asked to make the judgement. If a doctor was needed, she’d even lend you the money if your old man’s suit had already been pawned. By the end of the war, I think even our dad had a sneaking respect for her, despite her ways.
Old Primrose may have told Zinnia all about us and our doings, but even after all those years, we still knew bugger all about her. Well, about her past, anyway. As far as our mum could gather, she was an obscure cousin of Primrose and was brought up on some island called Harris, where the tweed comes from, and it was way up north. And that was it.
That, and the fact that she was a good friend, an excellent gardener, the soul of discretion when the need arose and a wonderful gossip when it didn’t. There wasn’t a lot that Zinnia didn’t see or hear. She had seen four of our mum’s six kids into the world, had seen Grandpa out of it and was busy keeping Gran’s knees in working order and young Reggie’s chest clear in winter. Reggie was one of my older sister Doris’s brood, a pale, skinny scrap of a lad who was inclined to be chesty.