by Annie Groves
‘Hold these for me, please, will you, Agnes?’ Tilly begged her friend, handing them over to her whilst she opened her purse to get the money to pay the waiting boy.
‘Eightpence for three handkerchiefs?’ Dulcie grumbled after the boy had gone.
‘I bet they charge more than that for them in Selfridges,’ Tilly pointed out.
‘Yes, but them as they sell are from Selfridges,’ Dulcie retorted.
‘They are so pretty, Tilly.’ Agnes tried to pour comforting oil on the potentially troubled waters.
‘Oh, look there’s a label on the bottom that says Harrods,’ Tilly squeaked in excitement, when she turned the box over.
‘Probably come out of some Chelsea lady’s dressing table drawer,’ Dulcie sniffed, determined as always to have the last word.
Not that Tilly minded. It had been really kind of the stall holder to find another box for her. Mum would love them, she knew. Her mother did so much for other people, and hardly ever got any special treats for herself.
It was a cold crisp day with ice still shining prettily on rooftops, even if the cold did make one’s nose and cheeks pink. Leather Lane Market had originally specialised in leather goods from the many small factories that had surrounded Smithfield Market before the Blitz. The stall holders had obviously taken advantage of shoppers being anxious to make the best of things by filling their stalls with Christmas cheer in the shape of second-hand toys, and decorations. Tilly spotted a stall selling second-hand jigsaw puzzles and games, the sight of them making her smile as she remembered how much she had enjoyed such things herself as a girl. There were still stalls selling leather goods, many of them with signs indicating that what they had for sale was ‘bomb damaged’ in one way or another.
Several stalls were selling second-hand clothes, among them ‘ready darned’ sturdy socks, ‘a special treat for a serving man’s feet’. A solitary clown was attracting a Pied Piper’s trail of small children, and keeping them entertained with tricks on sale at a nearby stall, much to the irritation of their harassed mothers, whilst a small troupe of actors in pantomime costume were handing out advertisements for their panto. A man and a woman in Salvation Army uniform were standing outside the door to a small pie shop, and on impulse Tilly broke away from Dulcie and hurried across to slip a few pennies into their collection.
From there, another stall caught her eye, this one selling brightly coloured Christmas stockings made from red felt and sewn with white felt icicles.
‘What are you getting those for?’ Dulcie demanded, thoroughly exasperated.
‘Because I like them,’ Tilly told her. Secretly she was thinking that if Drew and the other boys should spend Christmas Day with them, then it would be fun to make up stockings for them, and if they didn’t, well, then they would always come in useful for the church’s children’s Christmas party.
It was a busy bustling scene, bright with the colours of Christmas, its brave attempt to get into the spirit of the season highlighted by thin fingers of pale yellow watery sunshine. Tears pricked Tilly’s eyes. If you closed your eyes and breathed in deeply you could just – just – smell the promise of Christmas in the air, even if it was cloaked in layers of dust and despair. They had all come through so much in these last dreadful weeks, Christmas felt like a beacon of hope, a rock, a small haven they must struggle to reach to give them all a small space of time to draw breath for the fight that inevitably lay head.
Christmas. Truly Tilly’s most favourite time of the year – thanks to her mother, who had always made it such a very special time for her.
‘Come on,’ Dulcie urged Tilly, taking a fresh firm hold on her arm and on Agnes’s as she dragged them with her through the crowd until she found a space to stop and look around purposefully for the boy who had accosted her in the street earlier in the week.
‘What are you looking for?’ Tilly asked.
‘Wait and see,’ Dulcie responded smartly. ‘Wait here,’ she commanded when she spied the boy lurking by several bicycles that had been left on the corner of one of the streets.
‘Dulcie, where are you going?’ Tilly protested. ‘You know Mum said we had to stay together.’
But Dulcie was ignoring her.
‘What’s she doing talking to that boy?’ Agnes asked Tilly.
‘I don’t know. Maybe she knows him,’ Tilly responded.
Having spotted the boy who had approached her on Oxford Street, Dulcie wasn’t about to let him go before she had the information she wanted.
‘So where’s this shampoo you were telling me about then?’ she demanded. ‘Only if you were having me on . . .’
‘I wasn’t,’ he promised her, making a cross sign with one grubby finger. ‘Cross me heart and hope to die, I wasn’t. He’s down there,’ he told her, gesturing toward the stalls. ‘Fifth stall in. Tell him it’s the special stuff you want.’
‘A book stall?’ Dulcie questioned in disbelief.
‘It’s all right. Dad keeps the stuff hidden away inside the books,’ the boy insisted.
‘And it’s proper shampoo, is it, and not some fake stuff that’s being passed off as shampoo?’ Dulcie demanded suspiciously.
‘It’s the real thing. I swear it.’
‘If you have been having me on you’ll be for it,’ Dulcie warned him, before going back to join Tilly and Agnes.
‘I’ve been thinking. What we could really do with,’ she told them, oh so casually, ‘is some proper shampoo.’
‘Proper shampoo? You’ll never find that,’ Tilly laughed. ‘Nancy was telling Mum the other day that even hairdressers are finding it hard to come by. I don’t know why though, because it isn’t on ration.’
‘Maybe not,’ Dulcie agreed darkly, ‘but there is a shortage, and I know where we can find some. Because a little bird has told me that there’s a stall here that sells shampoo.’
‘What? Real shampoo?’ Tilly demanded eagerly.
Dulcie grabbed hold of her and put her hand firmly over Tilly’s mouth. ‘Keep it down. Don’t tell everyone,’ she warned her. ‘Come on, this way.’
The stall the boy had pointed out to her was stocked, as Dulcie had already seen, with piles of dusty-looking second-hand books. The stall holder, a thin wiry-looking man wearing a pinstriped suit that was almost as sharp as his narrowed gaze, was standing behind it, eyeing the crowds and smoking a cigarette, his pork-pie hat pushed back on his head. The sight of such a dubious-looking character, far from putting Dulcie off, gave her a grudging willingness to believe what the boy had told her.
Marching up to the stall, leaving the other two to follow her, Dulcie told the stall holder without preamble, ‘We want some of your special stock.’
‘Keep it down,’ he urged her, the cigarette dangling out of the side of his mouth as he scanned the crowd before reaching down behind the counter to where Dulcie could see books piled haphazardly on top of a large tin tray, to keep them off the wet pavement.
‘Dulcie, what are you doing?’ Tilly hissed impatiently as she watched the stall holder lift a large battered-looking family Bible onto a stool he had pulled out from beneath the stall.
Ignoring her, Dulcie kept her gaze fixed on the Bible, from which, so speedily she barely saw the cover open, he produced a bottle of Drene shampoo. They were permitted no more than a glimpse of it before it was stashed back in the Bible box, as though it was a gold sovereign, not a bottle of shampoo. The stall holder all the while kept his intense gaze moving over the bustling street.
‘I want a proper look,’ Dulcie announced, reaching out to take the bottle from him.
He was obviously reluctant to hand it to her, and Tilly’s eyes widened when, the minute she’d got it, Dulcie uncapped it, first to sniff it and then put a bit on her finger.
‘Here, wotch it,’ the stall holder protested. ‘You ain’t bought it yet.’
‘No, and we won’t be doing unless it’s the real thing, and not a bit of something else you’ve put in the bottle,’ Dulcie assured him.
<
br /> Tilly, though, who had realised that the bottle hadn’t been properly sealed, nudged Dulcie in the ribs and hissed, ‘Dulcie, I don’t think we should buy it. That bottle was open already.’
‘Yes, I know,’ Dulcie agreed. ‘But it’s full.’ She gave a small shrug. ‘I reckon whoever had it first hasn’t used more than a capful.’
‘Whoever had it first?’ Tilly was shocked.
‘That’s why we’ve got to check that it’s the real thing,’ Dulcie explained impatiently in the kind of voice adults normally reserved for very small children. ‘It’s all very well buying stuff that’s been looted from bombed-out buildings, but I’m not paying good money for something that’s a con.’
‘Looted?’ Tilly looked at Agnes and then back at Dulcie. ‘That means it’s black market.’
‘It’s no such thing,’ the stall holder protested vigorously. ‘Smoke-damaged, it is, that’s all. Got it off a chap who had a warehouse wot got bombed and caught fire. I’m just doing a bit of a favour for him.’
‘A favour for himself, more like,’ Dulcie muttered in an aside to Tilly and Agnes, before turning back to the stall holder. ‘How much?’
‘Tenpence to you, darling,’ he responded, giving her a smile that revealed that several of his teeth were either missing or black.
Dulcie, though, wasn’t interested in his teeth. ‘Tenpence?’ she challenged him. ‘That’s daylight robbery, that is. A bit like the way you got the shampoo in the first place, I dare say,’ she added meaningfully.
‘Here,’ the stall holder leaned across to her, a hard look on his face, ‘I don’t need the likes of you telling me what’s what. If you don’t want it, you can go and buzz off, ’cos I’m telling that there’s plenty that does.’
‘Three bottles, we want, and we’ll pay you sixpence a bottle, and they’d better be full,’ Dulcie announced, ignoring both the semi-threatening pose he had adopted, and Tilly’s impressed gasp at her audacity.
‘Sixpence! I’ve got five kids to feed,’ he told her. ‘And I won’t take a penny less than ninepence a bottle.’
‘Sevenpence,’ Dulcie argued.
‘Look, you’ve had your little joke, now why don’t you clear off and let someone who really wants to do business have a go?’ the stall holder suggested, removing the butt of his cigarette from his mouth and grinding it out under the heel of his shoe.
‘There’s three of us and that’s three bottles, three guaranteed sales,’ Dulcie told him.
‘Four if we get a bottle for Sally,’ Tilly said.
‘Five if we get one for your mum as well, Tilly,’ Agnes added.
‘That’s if you’ve got five bottles?’ Dulcie challenged the stall holder.
‘What? Of course I have,’ he told her, diving beneath the counter to re-emerge with four more bottles, each of which Dulcie insisted on opening and testing.
Several other shoppers had paused to see what was going on, a crowd was starting to gather on the pavement, something that seemed to please the stallholder, until a distant shrill whistle had him cursing under his breath.
‘Ruddy market inspectors,’ he muttered, before telling the girls, ‘Come on, give us those.’
‘Hold this,’ Dulcie told Tilly, thrusting the bottles of shampoo into her hands and then producing her purse. ‘Here’s half a crown for the five bottles,’ she said, pushing the coin towards the man, and then, before he could object: ‘Come on, girls, I’m that desperate for a cup of tea I’m spitting feathers.’
Several minutes later, as they sat squashed together in a café made suddenly busy by a shower of heavy rain, Dulcie said gleefully, ‘Five for half a crown. That’s sixpence each, and they’re all full, I checked.’
‘Perhaps they are damaged stock?’ Tilly said hopefully.
Dulcie laughed. ‘Who cares where they came from? We’ve got them now and that’s all that matters. Come on,’ she cajoled when Tilly looked uncertain, ‘your mum stocked up her cupboards before the war, didn’t she? That’s all we’re doing now: making sure we’ve got some shampoo.’
‘Mum wasn’t hoarding. She was just following instructions from the Government,’ Tilly defended her mother. ‘It was in all the magazines that housewives had to stock up just in case.’
‘And that’s exactly what we’re doing: stocking up just in case,’ Dulcie told Tilly virtuously, adding disparagingly, ‘Poo, this place stinks of bacon and wet wool. I reckon we should head back to number 13 and get our hair washed ready for tonight. I just hope that Drew keeps his promise to bring along some of those American pilots.’
* * *
It was mid-afternoon before Olive got to hear about the shampoo and its purchase. She’d been out helping to sort through a donation of second-hand clothes, along with the other members of the WVS, ready to distribute to their local rest centre. On her return she found the three girls jostling for space in front of the front room fire as they dried their newly washed hair.
‘I suppose we should have turned it down,’ admitted Tilly, getting up from the hearthrug where she’d been kneeling with her head tipped forward to dry the back of her hair. Now she let Agnes take her turn in front of the fire. ‘But since Nancy told you that even hairdressers are struggling to get shampoo it seemed silly to pass it up, especially when Dulcie had bargained the man down to sixpence a bottle.’
Olive sighed, she’d heard – and seen – enough of what some unscrupulous emergency service workers did in the aftermath of bombing raids not to guess how the shampoo had been come by. Theoretically, no decent person could approve of looting, especially when the looted goods were then sold on at a profit to the looter. But whilst they were working together Mrs Morrison had confided to her that she’d snatched up a handful of stair rods she’d seen lying in the street on her way past a recently bombed out house.
‘I know I shouldn’t have done,’ she said guiltily, ‘but my niece is getting married at Christmas and they’re desperate for household goods, and I couldn’t help thinking that if she didn’t have them, someone else would. Now, of course, I feel dreadfully guilty about it. But these clothes we’re sorting are all from bombed-out properties. You can tell that by the state they’re in.’
What she’d said was true, Olive knew.
‘The stall holder said that the shampoo was fire-damaged stock,’ Tilly added.
‘Well, it’s done now,’ was all Olive felt able to say.
The front room certainly smelled very pleasantly of shampoo and clean hair, and she supposed that she couldn’t really blame the girls for being girls.
Two hours later Olive was beginning to wish that her lodger and her daughter were perhaps not quite so much girls after all, as the whole house seemed to have been taken over by preparations for their evening out at the Palais.
The ironing board had had to be set up in the kitchen so that Dulcie could press the semicircular black satin skirt as well as the cream silk blouse she was going to wear with it. Not to be outdone, Tilly had insisted on boiling the kettle so that she could steam some very small creases out of the rose-coloured silk velvet dress Olive had had made for her the previous autumn.
Surveying the chaos into which her normally organised and tidy kitchen had been turned, Olive could only reflect that it was just as well that only two of them were going to the dance and not all four.
Two heads of newly washed, pin-curled hair bobbed up and down as their owners giggled and squabbled. Thankfully Agnes, as an officially paired-up young woman, was not obliged to put herself through the Saturday afternoon ritual of ‘getting ready’ with quite the same intensity as Tilly and Dulcie. She was going to the cinema with Ted.
Tilly, after carefully carrying her newly steamed dress up to the bedroom she shared with Agnes bounced back into the kitchen announcing that she was going to do her nails.
‘Not near my skirt, you aren’t,’ Dulcie warned her. ‘I don’t want nail polish all over it, thank you very much.’
‘It would be better doing your nails some
where a bit cooler, darling,’ Olive felt obliged to point out, ‘that way the varnish will dry better. It’s like a laundry in here with all the steam.’
‘Somewhere cooler. That means the bedroom, and that’s freezing,’ Tilly complained.
They were having some of Olive’s vegetable soup for tea. It would be warming for them, and, she hoped, wouldn’t leave a smell that would linger on their newly washed hair, Olive decided, as she watched her daughter, her tongue protruding slightly from between her teeth, as she applied the rose-coloured polish to her nails.
Dulcie had opted for bright scarlet polish for hers, and now, as she finished ironing her silk blouse and put it carefully back on its padded satin hanger, she announced, ‘I’m going to go for that Pompadour curls hairstyle tonight. I saw it in a copy of Woman magazine that someone had left in the staff canteen.’
‘Pompadour curls? What’s that?’ Agnes asked.
‘You’ve got to draw your hair back from your ears and then pin it into big formal curls on top of your head, and then you tuck the hair from the back under the side curls with some Kirbigrips,’ Dulcie explained, adding, ‘Of course, I’ll need a bit of a hand. Not you, Tilly,’ she told Tilly, who looked up from doing her nails and was about to speak. ‘Your mum can do it for me.’
‘That’s very generous of you, Dulcie,’ Olive told her, her mouth twitching slightly. You couldn’t help but laugh sometimes at Dulcie’s wilyness, even though you knew how adept she was at getting her own way, Olive acknowledged.
‘If it’s still raining when you go out you’ll need to tie a scarf over your hair,’ she warned Dulcie.
‘Oh, I hope it isn’t,’ Tilly wailed. ‘My hair will go all curly if it is.’
‘I thought you weren’t interested in Drew,’ Dulcie pointed out.
‘I’m not,’ Tilly insisted, ‘but that doesn’t mean that I want to look like a fright with wild curls.’
‘What I want is to see this table cleared ready for tea in five minutes,’ Olive took the opportunity to tell them both.
‘I’ll do the table,’ Agnes offered. ‘It won’t take me long to get ready.’
