Ellie (7 page)

This insult was the last straw. Ellie began to cry. ‘But you don’t like me. I don’t want to be in someone’s ’ouse what ’ates me.’

Grace Gilbert was unmoved by the girl’s tears and a little baffled by this last statement, as she didn’t really know what ‘liking’ someone meant. In fact Ellie’s face disturbed her: those dark eyes were too penetrating, her mouth too wide when she smiled. Amos had already expressed the view that she was ‘a happy soul’ and that sounded too much like approval.

‘You haven’t given me a chance to like you,’ Miss Gilbert said crisply. ‘From what I’ve seen so far you are a liar, greedy and lazy. You don’t even speak correctly. Now sit down and write a proper letter to your mother and let’s have no more of this.’

Ellie wanted to defend herself, but at the same time she was relieved no punishment was about to be dished out. ‘I’m none of those things, and Mum didn’t send me away to get rid of me,’ she said stubbornly, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. ‘She hoped I’d have a better ’ome than in London, that’s all. And I can’t ’elp the way I speak.’

Miss Gilbert half smiled. Inadvertently the girl had shown her the tack she must take. ‘Well, my dear, just write and reassure her. I’m sure she’s got worries enough without you adding to them. Let me have the letter when you’ve done and I’ll enclose one from myself and my brother too. We’ll say no more about this unpleasantness.’

‘Might I speak to Ellie in private?’ Mrs Dunwoody said, ignoring Miss Gilbert’s offer of a chair at the kitchen table. ‘Perhaps in your parlour?’

‘If you think that’s necessary.’ Miss Gilbert bristled with indignation, casting a baleful glance at Ellie. ‘Though goodness knows what you hope to gain from it.’

Ellie controlled her desire to smirk in triumph. Mrs Dunwoody was the woman she’d started to speak to outside the church, almost a week ago. She had called two days later but Miss Gilbert wouldn’t leave them to talk alone. Clearly Mrs Dunwoody was determined not to be put off this time.

‘I just wish to get to know Ellie better,’ Mrs Dunwoody said diplomatically. ‘I’d be derelict in my duties as billeting officer if I didn’t try to smooth out any little problems and worries and it’s easier on a one-to-one basis.’

‘Take Mrs Dunwoody to the parlour then.’ Miss Gilbert gave Ellie a scathing look. ‘I have work to do anyway.’

Once inside the parlour, Mrs Dunwoody sat down on the settee and patted the seat next to her for Ellie to join her. ‘Now my dear, how are things?’

‘Please move me,’ Ellie whispered. She was intimidated by the parlour, which seemed to reflect Miss Gilbert’s character more than any other room in the house. A fussy, over-furnished room, with scarcely space to walk around. Uncomfortable, over-stuffed chairs, highly polished walnut cabinets full of china and glass and dozens of old china figurines, vases and cut-glass bowls, each one sitting on a lace doily. The many pictures were all of biblical scenes. A large aspidistra sitting in an ugly green bowl in the lace-curtained window blocked out most of the natural light.

Ellie blurted out everything, trying hard not to cry and make herself look pathetic.

Since the incident of her letter home, Miss Gilbert had been marginally nicer. She’d slightly increased the size of the meals, she’d suggested Ellie should join the library, and even allowed her out alone for a couple of hours in the afternoons.

The town was fascinating. Just a short walk from High Baxter Street, where she was living, was the old abbey with its beautiful gardens. She’d found an ancient charnel house in the graveyard behind the Norman tower and been spooked by an inscription about a nine-year-old girl struck by lightning. There was a museum called Moyse’s Hall full of strange exhibits, including a death mask from 1827 of a murderer called William Corder and his scalp and ear. Along with these thrillingly gruesome remains there were instruments of torture dating back to the time when the place had been the town gaol.

But loneliness was getting Ellie down most. The local children jeered at evacuees, and she hadn’t run into any of her old classmates yet. She missed not only her mother but the people at the Empire and those from Alder Street. At home she had only to step out into the street and there was someone to talk to. She had always felt secure and cared for, but here she felt as if she was just waiting for time to pass, ignored and unwanted.

‘There isn’t anywhere to move you to,’ Mrs Dunwoody said with a sigh. Her fingers moved up to fiddle with some beads at her neck. She knew Miss Gilbert was strange: rumours about her were always flying around the town. But she couldn’t believe it was as bad as the child was saying. ‘We had over seven hundred boys and girls sent to us here, not to mention all the mothers with small children, and I’ve got problems with some of them which are a great deal more serious than yours. Just give it a little longer, my dear. School will be starting again on Monday. You and the other evacuees will be attending in the afternoons, the local children in the mornings. Perhaps that will ease things a little for you. But Miss Gilbert hasn’t any complaints about you, Ellie, and Mr Gilbert stated how helpful you’ve been to him.’

‘I don’t mind Mr Gilbert,’ Ellie said quietly, afraid Miss Gilbert was listening outside the door. ‘I’ve been ’elping ’im line coffins with scrim and I quite like it. It’s ’er!’ She jerked her head towards the door.

She couldn’t adequately explain how unpleasant it was to feel she was being watched constantly, or how she felt something nasty was about to happen.

‘Have you heard from your mother?’ Mrs Dunwoody was aware that almost all of the evacuees’ problems were just plain homesickness.

‘Yes.’ Ellie frowned. ‘The theatre she was working in ’as closed down and until it opens again she ain’t got a job.’ Her mother had made light of this, saying she was going to work as a waitress in Lyons Corner House, but Ellie had sensed she was very anxious about money, because she’d said she couldn’t manage to enclose any pocket money just yet.

Mrs Dunwoody was the wife of a banker and lived in an elegant detached Georgian house by the Abbey. Until these evacuee children landed in the town her only real contact with the working classes had been her servants. Her eyes had been opened in the last week, though, when she met the children from Stepney. A great many of them didn’t even have a change of underwear; they had holes in their shoes; almost all of them were undernourished and they spoke so badly.

Ellie, however, was as fat as butter, had decent clothes and it was obvious from the girl’s demeanour that she was not only well loved and cared for, but also sensible enough to appreciate that in an emergency such as this, sacrifices had to be made.

‘Well, you mustn’t add to her problems,’ Mrs Dunwoody said gently. ‘I’m sure all the theatres will open again soon, especially as they haven’t had any air raids yet in London. Let’s see how you feel once you’re back at school, eh? Write Mummy a nice cheerful letter and keep your pecker up. If you still want to move in a few weeks’ time, I’ll see what I can arrange.’

Ellie gave a glum smile. Mrs Dunwoody was kindly enough, but she hadn’t really grasped anything she’d been told. She was just another of those rich do-gooders, like the ones who swanned down to the East End and made sympathetic noises about slum conditions. She didn’t understand why Ellie resented Miss Gilbert reading both the letters she wrote and received. Or what it felt like to be hungry all the time and treated worse than a Victorian scullery maid. Neither could she understand Ellie’s dilemma that even if she could tell her mother the truth about what it was like in this house, she was reluctant to do so because sending Ellie the fare home would strain her mother’s finances still more.

‘I’d better be going.’ Mrs Dunwoody got up. ‘I’ve got so many serious problems to deal with, children wetting the bed, others with lice. Some children won’t eat, others are stealing food. As for some of the mothers with babies!’ She shook her head, as if baffled by it all. ‘Would you believe that one mother complained because it was too quiet here? I don’t think it dawns on some people that this country is at war and we have to put up with a few inconveniences.’

Chapter Three

Dagenham, March 1940

Bonny Phillips stood at the top of the stairs, ears pricked up. It was after ten on Friday night, and she’d been sent to bed an hour earlier, but a certain tension between her parents during the evening and now their raised voices had made her creep out of her bedroom to try and discover what was going on.

‘I’ve been over and over it.’ Her father’s voice sounded weary with exasperation. ‘We must do what’s right for her, Doris.’

It was pitch dark on the stairs, except for a faint golden glow beneath the living-room door. Bonny shivered in her thin nightdress and the sisal stair carpet prickled her bare feet.

‘I don’t want Bonny to go, Am,’ her mother replied, her voice strangled as if she was crying. ‘She’s not quite eleven, just a baby, I couldn’t bear being separated from her.’

‘Do you think I
want
her to go?’ Arnold replied. ‘But this isn’t sending her off to just anyone, she’ll have a good life with Miss Wynter. She’ll be safe when the bombing starts and she’ll have her dancing lessons free.’

Bonny had never been away from home, not even for one night. Last September, when most of the other children at school were evacuated, she was disappointed when her parents declined to send her too. Home was 88 Flamstead Road on the Becontree estate in Dagenham, a very ordinary council house. When many of the children returned home at Christmas with amazing stories about country cottages and big houses at the seaside, Bonny had felt resentful.

In fact, the war had been a great disappointment in every way so far. Last year, when they’d all been given gas masks and practised going into the air raid shelter in the school opposite, Bonny had thought it was all going to be very exciting. She’d even felt a bit like a heroine staying behind at home, facing danger. But nothing had happened, other than planes droning overhead. Even when the siren went off it was only to practise. It had been an exceptionally cold winter, thick snow, pipes freezing up and shortages of everything. Grown-ups talked about rationing all the time, and now Dad had dug up most of the back garden to grow vegetables. They called it the Phoney War. Almost all the evacuees had come home again to stay. Yet from what her dad was saying, it sounded as if something was going to happen at last.

Bonny Phillips was an exceptionally beautiful child, with long, silky blonde hair, wide, almost turquoise blue eyes and the kind of soft, plump lips that made even the most hardened child-hater weaken. Perhaps if she’d been a little less beautiful, or her parents just a little less obvious in their adoration of her, she might have developed a nicer nature. But as it was, Bonny Phillips had an inflated idea of her own importance and a total disregard for others’ feelings. Mrs Salcombe, the Phillipses’ next-door neighbour, had a blunt explanation for anyone who cared to mention how spoilt Bonny was. ‘Doris and Arnold thought she was a bloomin’ miracle, and it’s another bloomin’ miracle someone hasn’t strangled the little bleeder.’

Doris was eighteen in 1907 when Arnold Phillips came to mend the boiler at Dr Freeman’s house in Islington where she worked as a maid. She was a dumpy, plain girl with mousy hair, so shy she rarely even spoke to the female staff, let alone a man. But she was taken by the tall, slender young man with blond hair and a thin moustache and when he asked her to walk out with him on her night off she sensed right away that he was the only man for her.

Their romance flourished as they discovered how much they had in common. They both came from large, poor families, Arnold’s in Shadwell, Doris’s in Bethnal Green, and both had a fierce desire to better themselves. Doris was impressed by Arnold’s knowledge of machinery, his gentle, affectionate nature, while Arnold fell for her bright blue eyes, her clear complexion and her ladylike demeanour.

They married two years later, in 1909, and set up home in the same tenement in Bethnal Green where Doris’s parents lived. Dr Freeman gave them a bone china tea-set as fine as anything he had in his house and the housekeeper, Mrs Oakes, gave them a set of linen sheets. They had such high hopes then. The two-room flat was only temporary; soon they would have a house of their own and children.

But their dreams were not to be. Doris’s first child was still-born. Arnold was called up in the First War, went to France, and returned a different man, haunted by images of the trenches, his teeth rotting and his hair falling out. But they still counted their blessings. Arnold had survived, when so many of his friends had been killed. They had one another and, even if their home was grim, things would get better. A few years later, once Arnold was settled as a fitter in a factory, finally putting the war behind him, Doris became pregnant again. But when their little boy died, at just a few weeks old, they were both so crushed by grief that they gave up struggling to improve themselves.

A glimpse into their home as the New Year bells rang out for 1928 would have shown a forlorn couple, who had nothing more from twenty years of marriage and hard work than a few pieces of shabby furniture. The bone china tea-set Dr Freeman had given them as a wedding present was put away, wrapped in newspaper because they knew now they’d never have use for it. The linen sheets were threadbare. Their wedding photograph on the sideboard was fading, just like their dreams.

They were old beyond their years. Doris’s once clear complexion was muddy, her blue eyes weary, her body like a sagging bolster. Arnold was stooped, almost bald, racked by coughing fits he’d suffered from since the war, made worse by the damp flat. That year they hadn’t even bothered to put up Christmas decorations, or to go out and join in the New Year celebrations. They’d long since accepted that there was nothing to look forward to: Doris too old at forty even to hope for a child, both sets of parents dead, brothers and sisters scattered. Life was just one long, dreary road which appeared to lead nowhere.

It was just a few days into the new year when they received a letter telling them that the tenement was to be pulled down as part of slum clearance and offering them a council house in Dagenham. After a lifetime of disappointments their delight was tempered with a suspicion that there might be a catch in the offer, but they agreed to see the house anyway.