Queenie
Authors: Jacqueline Wilson
Contents
About the Book
It’s 1953, the year Elizabeth is to be crowned Queen of England. Elsie Kettle can’t wait to go to London with her beloved nan to see the Coronation Day celebrations. Then tragedy strikes. Nan and Elsie both fall ill with tuberculosis and Elsie is whisked away to the children’s ward of Miltree Hospital. Confined to bed for months, Elsie misses Nan desperately, and struggles to adapt to the hospital’s strict rules. But every night after lights-out she tells magical tales of adventure to the other children on the ward. For the first time, Elsie finds herself surrounded by true friends – including Queenie, the hospital’s majestic white cat.
Finally, Elsie is well enough to leave the hospital. But before she does, she has one very special, very unexpected visitor . . .
To June Bendall and all her colleagues at the Florence Nightingale Museum
I LIVED WITH
my nan. It was wonderful, just the two of us, in our cosy basement flat. We both had a bedroom. Mine was just a little box room, and I didn’t have a proper bed, just a couch with a pillow and an eiderdown, but Nan turned it into a Wendy house for me, with a lovely Tinkerbell lampshade. She let me keep the light on all night because I was afraid of the dark. Sometimes I crept into bed with Nan in her room, but she never minded.
I was used to Mum coming and going. She was
sometimes
away for weeks at a time. The year she had a job at Butlin’s she was away from March till September, and Nan and I were ever so happy, just the two of us together. We had several Saturday trips to the seaside to see Mum, and that was fine, though we had to take carrier bags on the coach because I was usually travel sick. Nan always packed a damp flannel and a packet of Spangles to freshen my mouth, so it wasn’t too worrying. Nan hardly ever told me off. I was her girl and she was my nan and we didn’t really need anyone else, not even Mum.
But then Nan got poorly. We both had bad colds in the winter, and had to slather our chests in Vick and suck blackcurrant lozenges when we got to the cough stage. Nan’s cough didn’t get better for weeks, even though she sucked lozenges until her tongue was deep purple.
‘I’ll be right as rain when it gets a bit warmer. I’ve always hated the cold,’ Nan gasped, coughing and coughing, and lighting up another Player’s Navy Cut.
‘Your Player’s make you cough worse, Nan,’ I said.
‘I dare say, but they get me going,’ she said.
She found it really hard to get up in the mornings. She rose really early, long before me, because she had a cleaning job. She started at the factory at five, and then came rushing home at half past seven to make our tea and toast before I went to school. Then Nan had a little nap before going to
her
school as a dinner
lady.
I
wished
she worked at my school. It would be wonderful to see Nan at lunch time, especially when Marilyn and Susan were being extra spiteful. But Nan worked at the secondary modern on the other side of town. I’d maybe be able to go there when I was eleven, though Nan said I was bright and hoped I’d pass my scholarship and go to the grammar and get proper qualifications.
‘
I’ve
done all right for myself without passing any silly fancy exams. You’re working yourself to death, Mum. You don’t have to get up at the crack of dawn. Don’t I bring enough home?’ my mum said irritably.
‘I don’t want to sponge off my own daughter, thanks very much, Sheila,’ said Nan. ‘Besides, I’m saving up.’
‘What are you saving for? I tell you, I’m rolling in it,’ said Mum.
Nan sniffed. She didn’t always approve of Mum’s jobs. She was currently in the chorus of a travelling revue, wearing feathers and high heels and very little else, according to Nan.
I
knew what Nan was saving for. It was our special secret. She was saving for the fare to London for when the Queen had her Coronation in June. We were going together, Nan and me, planning a proper little holiday. Nan said she’d take me to a huge great toyshop called Hamleys, and we’d eat in a proper restaurant with waitresses, called Lyons Corner
House
and, best of all, we’d stand as near to Westminster Abbey as we could get and watch the Queen arrive in her gold coach. Nan had already bought me a little gilt replica of this coach with tiny white horses. I’d drive it along the carpet and across the sideboard and up and down the walls, imagining a weeny Queen being tossed about inside, squealing as if she were on a roller coaster.
‘It’ll be a holiday to remember, Elsie,’ Nan told me. ‘When you’re an old lady my age, you’ll tell your own grand-daughter, “My nanny took me up to London and we saw the Queen’s Coronation.”’
I was longing to go. Laura Totteridge was going to see the Coronation – her whole dancing class were travelling up in a coach because they were doing a special display somewhere – but no one else was planning a trip, though Marilyn said she was going to be watching on her brand-new television. Marilyn always had to be one better than anyone else.
I said I was going to see the real Coronation
and
I said we had a brand-new television too, my mum had bought it specially – but Marilyn said I was a liar. She said horrid things about Mum too. I told her to go and boil her head and she punched me right in the stomach, making me fall over. Mum told me to stand up for myself when they were mean to me at school, but it only made things worse.
I knew Nan still wasn’t well. She never once complained, but she kept coughing, and she got breathless easily. I could hear her as she bumbled about our flat doing the housework, panting like a little dog.
‘You sit down, Nanny. I’ll do it,’ I said, pulling the carpet sweeper out of her hands.
Sometimes she’d argue with me. Other times she’d simply sag onto the sofa with a cup of tea and a cigarette and let me go ahead. This was much more worrying. I couldn’t get the knack of carpet sweeping at all. Every time I banged into anything, grey snakes of dust slipped out onto the carpet, so I had to creep around with a dustpan and brush, doing bunny hops.
I put the washing in to soak – Nan’s huge vests and long pink knickers that hung right down past her knees, and my grey knicks and socks and my school blouse. This was meant to be white but was starting to look grey too. Nan wouldn’t let me do the ironing in case I burned myself. When she didn’t feel up to it either, we decided we didn’t mind a few wrinkles.
Nan sometimes nodded off straight after breakfast so I had to take myself to school, but I was considered a big girl now so that was no problem. I always looked right and left and right again before I crossed any roads, and I never talked to strangers. I
did
have a little chat with Bert the milkman because he was my friend, and I always patted his horse, Jenny, and gave
her
a sugar lump stolen from the bowl at home.
On the way back from school I did the shopping. I kept the housekeeping money safe in a purse round my neck, along with the door key. It made a little thump on my chest whenever I ran.
I bought a tin loaf from the baker’s, and Bath buns for a treat; four ounces of streaky bacon, and marge, and Robertson’s strawberry jam and a bottle of orange squash from Mr Harris the grocer; potatoes and cabbage and carrots from Florrie, the green-grocer’s daughter. She lined my string bag with paper so that the carrots couldn’t poke through, and sometimes she gave me a bashed apple or a bruised banana for nothing.
I felt as if I had gorilla arms hauling all the shopping home. My leg always started aching too, making me limp. It was hard work avoiding the pavement cracks when I turned into our street. I always had to do that just to make sure Nan wouldn’t get any worse. I was ultra-careful, but I was clumsy in my horrible big boy’s shoes, and maybe I trod on a line without realizing.
One day I came home from school and Nan was lying on the sofa, her face pale grey and her chest heaving after a bad coughing fit.
‘Oh Nan!’ I cried, rushing to her.
‘I’m fine, I’m fine, don’t you worry now,’ Nan
gasped,
mopping her lips with her hankie. ‘I’ve just had a bit of a funny turn. My head started spinning. But I’m fine now, I promise.’
Nan looked anything but fine, but she was very insistent. I cuddled up beside her on the sofa, stroking her papery cheek, and after a while she rallied.
‘There, chickie, I’m right as rain now,’ she said, trying to sit up.
‘No, you stay where you are, Nan. I’ll make you a cup of tea,’ I said, springing up.
I made it very carefully, warming the pot first, and letting the tea steep for a few minutes before pouring. Then I reached for the biscuit barrel. We kept the best biscuits for visitors and Sundays, making do with Woolworths mixed assortment for every day – but I wanted Nan to have a treat. She helped herself to a bourbon and a custard cream, and I had a squashed fly and a pink wafer.
‘There! All better now,’ said Nan. ‘You’re a good little nurse, Elsie. You’d better put on that nurse’s apron! Oh, you used to love that nurse’s kit, remember?’
Mum’s friend Uncle Stanley had given me the nurse’s kit on my fifth birthday. We usually didn’t think much of Mum’s friends, but Uncle Stanley had been lovely while he lasted. He was quite old and nearly bald, but he was very kind. He bought Mum lots of presents, and gave stuff to Nan and me too. He
bought
us a huge satin box of chocolates at Christmas with a picture of kittens on the front, a white one and a black one and a little ginger one.
Nan used it as a button box after all the chocolates were eaten. I loved to sit with the box on my lap while Nan sewed. I’d gently stroke each kitten. The satin was so soft and smooth it was almost as if they were real. We couldn’t have pets in our flat – the landlord wouldn’t even let you keep a budgie or a goldfish. I pretended instead. I played with my three kittens, Snow White and Sooty and funny little Marmalade.
Mum said I looked soft in the head, crooning to a chocolate box, but Nan understood, and sometimes joined in my games, pretending the kittens were real too.
We were both pretending now as we licked the biscuit crumbs off our lips and listened to the Light Programme on the wireless. We acted as if Nan really were right as rain again, though she was still grey-faced and shaky, and when she tried to stand she had to cling onto the edge of the sofa.