Ellie (21 page)

Marleen sat up and wiped her eyes. She hadn’t seen Ellie since back in early June when she’d visited London. She’d been stunned then by her slim, womanly shape, the way she spoke and her new maturity. But now, perhaps because of her mother’s death, Ellie seemed to have dropped the last traces of childhood.

‘You’re so like Polly sometimes,’ Marleen sniffed. ‘She was always so practical and worked so ’ard. I wish I was more like ’er.’

‘We always liked you just the way you are.’ Ellie smiled weakly. ‘Don’t worry, Auntie, we’ll get along all right.’

They had only just finished eating their tea when the air-raid warning blasted out.

‘Come on, love.’ Marleen jumped up and grabbed her coat. ‘Down the tube.’

Ellie’s heart pounded with fear as Marleen handed her a rolled-up blanket and a cushion. The siren’s wail seemed to be right inside her head, but still Marleen ran about the kitchen putting things into a basket. Finally she was satisfied and grabbing Ellie’s arm, ran down the stairs, out into the street.

Searchlights sweeping across the dark sky gave enough light to see clearly but added more menace to the sirens. Dozens of people were going the same way as Ellie and Marleen – women pushing prams, old ladies and men hobbling arm in arm, children clutching their parents’ hands. All looked remarkably unperturbed.

They heard the throb of the bombers long before they reached the tube steps, but Ellie could see nothing above her but the dark shape of a barrage balloon caught in the strobe of the searchlight.

‘What’s that?’ Ellie asked as she heard a sound like the tearing of a sheet.

‘’Igh explosive bombs,’ Marleen said breathlessly. ‘Now come on, we can’t stand up ’ere and watch.’

People were converging towards the tube from every direction as incendiaries rattled down. Ellie caught hold of the belt on Marleen’s coat for fear of being separated and they were swept down the steps by the sheer force of numbers behind them.

Polly had described scenes in the tube to Ellie in her letters, making it sound great fun. But Ellie’s first reaction as they reached platform level was horror. People were jammed together like sardines and a hot blast of air from the tunnel brought a terrible smell of excrement.

‘Pongs, don’t it?’ Marleen looked over her shoulder and smiled wanly. ‘They go in the tunnel after the electric rail’s turned off.’

Ellie felt quite ill as Marleen dragged her along the edge of the platform. She had forgotten in her time in the country how sharp and pale Londoners’ faces were. Now they looked sinister in the yellowy lights as they prepared for the night ahead of them. All human life was here: the very old, the very young. Servicemen, a few people in evening dress, businessmen in smart suits, office girls and messenger boys. A woman with a baby at her breast, another trying to change her baby’s nappy while yelling at her small children to sit down. An entire family picnicking as calmly as if they were in a park, and workmen, still plastered in mud, trying vainly to sleep.

A train came in and disgorged more people, adding to the confusion. Two nuns put down a mat each and, folding their legs beneath their habits and their hands into their sleeves, sat like a couple of statues.

The noise was deafening. Chatter, laughter, babies screaming, mouth organs, someone playing a fiddle.

‘Marleen!’ someone yelled. ‘Over ’ere!’

It was Marleen’s friend, Patsy, who’d saved a place. It was barely large enough for one person, but with a hurried explanation that Ellie was Polly’s daughter, suddenly another twelve inches or so were added to it.

‘I’m so sorry, love.’ Patsy reached up and took Ellie’s hands. ‘Your ma was one of the best and we’ll all miss her.’

Patsy was perhaps thirty, but she looked older, her skin a sulphurous yellow, and a scarf tied turban-style round her head with just a few greasy-looking coils of black hair escaping from it.

She reminded Ellie very much of women she knew back in Alder Street, their bodies made shapeless by childbearing, a poor diet robbing them of their looks too soon. But she had that warmth in her eyes Ellie remembered, and in some way it soothed a little of the grief inside her.

Ellie lay down later. Marleen had spread newspaper under one blanket and with the other one over her and her head on the cushion she was reasonably comfortable. It was easier to pretend she was asleep than answer questions, and once Marleen and Patsy were convinced she had nodded off, their conversation became less guarded.

Patsy told Marleen where she needed to go to sort out being guardian to Ellie and possibly get some financial help. It seemed that Marleen’s job was a problem area, because she was worried about leaving Ellie at night.

‘She can come down ’ere wiv me,’ Patsy said. ‘She ain’t no trouble. I expected her to be more of a live wire from wot Polly said.’

‘Leave it out,’ Marleen said. ‘The poor kid’s still in a state of shock. She’s a funny little bugger usually, brilliant at takin’ off people, and she can sing like a bleedin’ canary. But you gotta remember her and her ma were real close, it’s gonna take some time for ’er to get over it.’

Patsy asked Marleen about Kurt. ‘Any future in it?’ she said, with a gust of ribald laughter that showed she knew a great deal about the Yank.

‘I don’t knows that I want a future with ’im, not after yesterday. Talk about insensitive!’ Marleen said pointedly. ‘I’m okay when I keep ’em at bay, know what I mean? A few nights out, a bit of fun. But soon as I starts to want more it all gets nasty.’

‘I like my Sid better now ’e’s out my ’air,’ Patsy said. ‘On ’is last leave it was the best we’ve ever known, wiv the kids away an’ all. But when ’e comes back it’ll all start up again, knocking me around, banging me up every year. Sometimes I wonder if there’s a man alive that ain’t a monster once ’e’s got you loving ’im.’

The sound of the two women’s voices was soothing. Ellie heard Marleen tell Patsy all about Grace Gilbert and Amos.

‘’E weren’t a bad geezer,’ Marleen said reflectively. ‘I reckon ’e’d got real fond of our Ellie. Course I tore ’im off a strip, blamed ’im like, but when we was leaving ’e looked real sad. He gave me ten quid to ’elp out, an’ all.’

‘Good job Poll never knew what ’is sister were like,’ Patsy said. ‘Funny Ellie never let on!’

‘Keeping secrets runs in the family,’ Marleen said tartly.

‘What’cha mean?’ Patsy asked.

Ellie was wide awake now, listening carefully, but she kept her eyes tightly shut, wondering what Marleen was going to reveal.

‘Nothin’ Patsy,’ Marleen replied, in that voice she always used when she thought she’d opened her mouth too wide. ‘I don’t tell people’s secrets either.’

Their voices became muffled after that and Ellie dropped off, wondering what Marleen had meant.

The all-clear signal woke Ellie with a start. Immediately people started to move and pack up all around her.

‘All right, love?’ Marleen helped Ellie roll up the blankets. ‘Grim, ain’t it?’

Ellie smiled faintly. She was as stiff as a plank, she felt dirty and she longed for some fresh air. ‘Better than being with Miss Gilbert,’ she said, wondering if she’d be able to say that truthfully after a week or two of sleeping down here. ‘I’d rather be roughing it with you than comfortable anywhere else.’

‘You little charmer.’ Marleen gave a warm, wide smile. ‘Now let’s see if we’ve still got an ’ome out there. After a wash and brush-up we’ve got to sort out a few things. D’you feel up to that?’

Ellie knew Marleen was talking about her mother’s death and getting guardianship sorted out. She wasn’t ready for it, but one glance at all these other people packing up intending to go to work regardless of how they’d spent the night decided her.

‘I’m up to it.’ She attempted a smile. ‘As Mum always said, “The show must go on.”’

‘That’s the spirit,’ Marleen chuckled. ‘And I want you to do the roots of my ’air later on an’ all. I look like a bleedin’ old tart from Cable Street.’

Chapter Eight

Amberley, June 1943

‘I’ll just die if they make me go home.’

Jack smiled at Bonny’s dramatic statement. He stood up from the engine he was mending, wiped his oily hands on a rag and turned to look at her.

Jack was seventeen and an apprentice mechanic at the Turnpike garage in Houghton Bridge. To his disappointment, he hadn’t grown tall. In his first year living with Mr and Mrs Baker he grew three inches, but the rate had slowed down since, making him an unremarkable five foot eight. But his body was lean and muscular, his shoulders wide, and he still had the same irrepressible cheeky grin, and the freckles. His red hair, though subdued a little by Brylcreem, was still spiky fire and Alec Hatt, his employer, often teased him by calling him ‘the torch’.

It was a hot Saturday afternoon in June. Bonny had dropped by at the garage on her way to play tennis. She was fourteen now and she’d passed from an outstandingly pretty child to a devastatingly beautiful girl without ever touching on the awkward coltish stage most teenagers endured.

Bert Baker called her a ‘heart-breaker’. Five foot six, slender, yet curvy, hair like gold satin and wide, turquoise blue eyes which gave her a curious mix of girlish innocence and womanly sensuality. Her white tennis shorts and blouse showed off her sensational, lightly tanned legs and there wasn’t a man in the village who wasn’t distracted when she rode by on her bicycle.

Beryl Baker called her ‘a minx’. Lydia veered between calling her an angel and a devil. Jack knew she was both, but adored her just the same.

‘I don’t know why you mind going back to London so much,’ he said after a while. He didn’t want her to go, but any other girl of her age in the village would give her eye-teeth for the chance to be in London. ‘It’s got a lot more to offer than here.’

‘I want to stay for the same reasons as you,’ Bonny pouted.

Jack just laughed. He and Bonny had been inseparable ever since the day he rescued her from the river, but he wasn’t blind to her faults. She might pretend to love the country, but when it came down to it her real reason for staying here was pure snobbishness. She was ashamed of her parents, and she couldn’t bear the thought of living on a council estate after Briar Bank.

‘What’s wrong with going to secretarial college?’ he asked. This place her parents had found for her in Romford sounded very nice.

‘I just don’t want to be a secretary,’ she said stubbornly. ‘You know what I want.’

Jack sighed and turned back to his engine. Bonny was set on going to Hollywood. She’d made him sit through endless Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers films and was convinced she could do even better. But though she was a brilliant tap-dancer, she couldn’t act and her voice, though sweet, just wasn’t strong enough.

‘It’s tough breaking into films,’ Jack reminded her. ‘It might be better to have something else behind you.’

Bonny had been home to Dagenham for several brief holidays in the three years she’d lived in Amberley. Each visit made the differences between her life with Lydia and that of her parents more extreme. Her parents were so dull and strait-laced. Her mother could talk of nothing but rationing, war damage and the ingredients for her cakes; her father, his garden and Ford’s. Their imagination didn’t stretch beyond Bonny getting a nice secure office job, marrying a white-collar worker and settling down in a semidetached house in Chigwell or Romford.

Bonny was consumed with dreams of Hollywood. She saw herself in a spangled costume, dancing her way through spectacular Busby Berkeley routines. If and when she married it would be to someone fabulously rich and she’d set her sights a little higher than Romford.

Four years of war had made everything so grim in London. All the way through the East End there was nothing to see but bomb-sites, roofs covered by tarpaulins, broken windows, walls shored up and gaunt shells of old tenements. Her parents’ house in Flamstead Road was so poky and shabby after Briar Bank. She couldn’t bear to see her father shaving at the kitchen sink, or watch her mother soaking her corns in a bowl of water. Everything about the way they lived offended her.

She hated having to go into the Anderson shelter in the garden when the sirens went off, with that awful smell of damp earth, the cold and the fear that tonight might be a direct hit. Sitting for hours by candle-light, with her mother knitting and going on and on about neighbours who’d been bombed out.

But it was her parents’ mentality that got Bonny down more than anything. They were so old and set in their ways. Everything was so serious to them, and they stuck to regulations as if someone was spying on them. The government said no more than five inches of bath water, so her mother measured it. Every scrap of paper was saved, every bone was washed and dried, every tin flattened religiously. They wouldn’t dream of buying anything on the black market, not even for a special occasion. When her mother heard a rumour that a pig was being kept illegally by a group of neighbours, she shopped them.

Aunt Lydia did her bit for the war effort, far more than Bonny’s parents, but she didn’t make an issue of it. She had joined the WVS two years ago and she did everything from driving mobile canteens to helping out with finding homes for people bombed out in Southampton. Dancing and music lessons had to be fitted in when she was free, as often she was working for twenty-four hours at a stretch. The spare bedroom at Briar Bank was used as an emergency billet for anyone who needed it.

In Sussex there was just enough war to be exciting, yet it was distant enough to be safe. There had been one exciting day back in the August of 1940. It was a lovely hot Sunday and after lunch Bonny had persuaded Aunt Lydia to drive her and the three Eastons into Arundel to see a German plane which had crashed close to the castle walls.

Lydia had only just dropped them at the Great Park gates when they heard the roar of planes coming over from Bognor Regis. Dozens of bombers and an escort of fighter-planes in wing-to-wing formation flew in so close they could see the black and white crosses under their wings. As they watched, the planes wheeled round towards Littlehampton and dived in groups of three. Although the Germans’ target was some distance away, the noise of bombs and guns was deafening.