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‘You mean she’s taken the room already? That means that if the orphan girl says she wants the other room when she comes then you’ll have let them both straight away,’ Tilly praised her mother, after Sally had gone.
‘Yes, and I must say that it’s a relief. I was anxious whether we’d actually get anyone interested, never mind exactly the right type of person. I like your nurse, Tilly.’
‘She’s not my nurse, but I liked her too.’
Dulcie pushed off her forehead a stray curl that had escaped from her smooth Veronica Lake hair-style to curl damply against her skin. In her right hand she was holding her best handbag: white leather, bought off a market trader, probably, she imagined, having been ‘acquired’ by dubious means. Or at least that had been her interpretation of the way in which the stall holder had looked warily up and down the street before producing the bag from a sack tucked away out of sight, when she’d asked to see ‘something good quality’. Dulcie didn’t mind where it had come from. What mattered to her was that it looked exactly like the classy and expensive bags on sale in Selfridges, at prices way beyond her slender means. Dulcie didn’t consider what she had done to be dishonest. It was part and parcel of the way of life for many of those who had the same hand-to-mouth existence of her own family. The fact that her dad and her brother both worked as plumbers in the building trade meant that they both suffered periods when they weren’t working, and Dulcie had grown up knowing that one penny often had to do the work of two. Dulcie had ambitions for herself, though: nice clothes, which, along with her good looks, attracted the attention of men and the envy of other girls, and having a good time.
She wasn’t having a good time right now, though. She was already beginning to regret having said that she would find somewhere else to live. Initially, when she’d looked in the newspaper there had been so many rooms advertised that she thought it would be easy. But now, having spent over two hours of her precious Sunday – the only day she had off work – crisscrossing the streets between her parents’ home in Stepney and Selfridges where she worked, she decided she really wanted something a bit closer to Selfridges than Stepney. But one look down some of the streets in the advertisements had been enough for her to dismiss them as not the kind of places she wanted to live at all, and that was without even asking to see the rooms. She wasn’t going to give up, though; slink home with her tail between her legs, so to speak, and have Edith get one up on her because she’d failed.
Two young men on the opposite side of the road – Italian, by the looks of them – were watching her as they smoked their cigarettes. The trouble with Edith was that she was an out-and-out show off, who always wanted to be the centre of attention, Dulcie decided crossly, as she stopped walking, as though she was unaware of the men’s presence as she pretended to check the seam of her stockings. The result was a gratifying increase in their focus on her. They were good-looking lads, no doubt about that, with their olive complexions, crisp dark wavy hair, and their dark brown gazes, which were paying her such flattering attention.
Reluctantly she straightened up and continued down the street. All she’d heard ever since Edith’s audition was how impressed they’d been at the Empire by her singing, and how Mr Kunz had said that he’d be a fool not to give her a chance. Dulcie would certainly be glad to get away from that – and from her sister.
Her feet, in her white sandals, were beginning to swell up, her toes feeling pinched, the August sunshine hot on her back. As a concession to the fact that it was Sunday – and she’d felt obliged to accompany her family to church after her father had started laying down the law about the importance of still being a family even if she was planning to move out, and that her elder brother could end up having to go to war, thanks to the Government telling Hitler that he wasn’t to invade Poland, and that if he did the British Army would go to its aid – she was wearing a very smart white hat with a deep raised flat brim, trimmed with a bow made from the same fabric as her favourite silk frock. She’d been lucky with that piece of silk, and no mistake, snapping it up when she’d seen it on sale as the last couple of yards on the roll in Selfridges’ haberdashery department. It hadn’t been her fault that the Saturday girl had thought that it was one shilling and sixpence a yard instead of the four shillings and sixpence it should have been because the price written on the inside of the roll had been rubbed away a bit. Dulcie hadn’t rubbed it away.
She was hot and beginning to feel tired and hungry. She looked at the paper again. Only three ringed notices left, the next one advertising a room to let somewhere called Article Row, Holborn.
Well, she was in Holborn. She saw a couple of children playing hopscotch out in the street and called out to them, ‘Article Row, where is it?’
‘Right behind you, miss,’ one of them answered her, pointing to the narrow entrance almost hidden by the shadows thrown by the surrounding buildings.
Cautiously Dulcie approached it, stepping into the shadows and then out of them again as Article Row opened out ahead of her, her spirits lifting as she realised how much better the houses were here than in the other streets she had visited. Number 13, the paper said. Determinedly she started to walk down the narrow street of uniformly neat tall houses, with their shining windows and painted front doors. Here and there she noticed a lace curtain move slightly.
‘The orphan girl is very late – it’s gone five o’clock now – do you think that she’s changed her mind or found somewhere else?’ Tilly asked her mother as they sat together in the kitchen, listening for the sound of anyone knocking on the front door. The kitchen door was open to the warm summer air, and Tilly’s faint sigh as she looked towards it had Olive saying lovingly, ‘You go out and enjoy the sunshine, Tilly love, I’ll hang on here a bit longer just in case she does turn up. Oh!’ They both looked towards the door into the hall as they heard the knock on the front door.
‘That must be her. Now you stay here because I want you to meet her. From what Mrs Windle said, she’s a bit on the shy side and I think she’ll probably welcome seeing someone of her own age.’
‘Yes, Mum,’ Tilly agreed. Pulling open the front door, Olive stared in bemusement at the appearance of the young woman who was standing on her doorstep. A quiet shy orphan was how the vicar’s wife had described Olive’s prospective lodger, but this young woman looked anything but quiet or shy, and she was dolled up to the nines, wearing clothes that were just a bit too stylish and attention-attracting for Olive’s taste.
‘I’ve come about the room you’ve got to let,’ Dulcie announced without preamble, stepping forward so that Olive was forced to move back and admit her into the hall.
‘Well, yes . . .’ Olive began, taken aback by both her prospective lodger’s appearance and her manner.
‘It’s this way, I suppose?’ Dulcie continued, heading for the stairs without waiting for Olive to invite her to do so.
From the kitchen Tilly goggled at the passing vision, taking in the close fit of Dulcie’s silk dress and the stylish brim of her hat with a tinge of envy laced with excitement. Tilly was a dutiful daughter and she understood that her mother’s protective attitude towards her was for her own benefit, but sometimes she did yearn for a bit more excitement in her life. The girl whose heels she could now hear on the stairs was, Tilly knew immediately, someone who knew how to have fun, the kind of girl that secretly she half envied and would like to have as a friend even though she suspected that her mother would not be too keen on their friendship.
‘These rooms are on the top floor, are they?’ Dulcie demanded on the first landing. ‘That will play hell with my feet, especially with me standing on them all day.’
Standing on them all day and wearing such high heels, Olive thought wryly, but all she said was, ‘Actually, there is only one room now; the other has been taken.’
It had, had it? Well, Dulcie thought that was probably a good sign, although she certainly wasn’t going to be fobbed off with the second-best room. She’d insist on seeing them both, she decided as they reached the top landing.
‘This is the room that’s left,’ Olive told her.
As she stepped into number 13’s back bedroom, for once Dulcie had nothing sharp to say. The room was easily half as big again as the one she shared with her sister. It had a double bed that she would have all to herself, a large wardrobe for her clothes, a dressing table, the glass top of which was shiny and clean and empty of the clutter that Edith spread all over their own small chest with a mirror stuck on the wall above it. There was even a chair, and a sort of shelf thing.
Dulcie walked over to the window, barely glancing into the garden below, her mind racing, calculating. If this was the room the other lodger hadn’t chosen then what must that room be like?
‘I’d like to see the other room before I make up my mind,’ she told Olive firmly.
‘That room’s already been taken,’ Olive repeated.
‘I’d still like to see it,’ Dulcie insisted, pushing past her to go and open the other bedroom door, and then frown as she looked inside and saw that whilst it was the same size as the back bedroom, its décor was nothing like as good. Fancy anyone deliberately choosing all that dull beige and brown over the lemon and daisy-patterned wallpaper of ‘her’ room. Her room and she was determined to have it, but Dulcie wasn’t going to let anyone know that and give them the upper hand.
‘Somewhere a bit better than what’s normally on offer is what I’m looking for,’ she announced. ‘I work at Selfridges, see, and Mr Selfridge, he likes them as works for him to keep up their standards,’ she told Olive, stepping back onto the landing.
The mention of the well-known and very smart Oxford Street store and the information that Dulcie worked there would normally have pleased Olive and been a point in Dulcie’s favour, but on this occasion Olive felt dismayed, and not just because she didn’t think that Dulcie was the kind of young woman she wanted under her roof.
‘You are Agnes Wilson, aren’t you?’ she asked her. ‘Only the vicar’s wife told me that you were going to be working at Chancery Lane underground station, when she said that you were looking for a room.’
Someone else was after ‘her room’? Dulcie wasn’t going to allow that to happen.
‘No, I’m not Agnes Wilson. My name’s Dulcie Simmonds,’ she told Olive. ‘I saw the advertisement for this room in the paper.’
‘Oh!’ Olive felt both relieved and uncomfortable. ‘In that case, I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I can’t let the room to you. I’ve as good as promised it to Agnes. In fact, I was expecting her to come round this afternoon, that’s why I thought you were her.’
The very thought that she might lose the room to someone else was enough to make Dulcie, used to having to compete with her younger sibling, all the more determined to have it.
‘Well, you might have been expecting her but she hasn’t turned up, has she? And even if she did, there’s no saying that she would want the room,’ Dulcie pointed out, adding acutely, ‘I can’t see a landlady wanting to let out a room to someone who isn’t reliable. It’s all very well her not turning up to view the room when she was supposed to, but what if her rent started not turning up when it was due?’
Dulcie had a point, Olive was forced to admit. Even so, she wasn’t keen on letting the room to someone she suspected could be a disruptive influence on the household.
‘It should be first come, first served,’ Dulcie insisted. ‘I am here first, and I’ve got the money to pay my rent.’
As she reached down to open her bag, Olive recognised that Dulcie wasn’t going to be dissuaded and that she was going to have to give in.
‘Very well,’ she agreed, against her better judgement. ‘It will be a week’s rent of ten shillings, including breakfast and an evening meal, in advance, payable the day you move in. I don’t allow gentleman callers to visit my lodgers in their rooms, so if that’s a problem . . . ?’
She was half hoping that Dulcie would say that it was, but Dulcie merely shrugged her shoulders and told her, ‘That suits me. If a lad wants to see me then he can prove it by taking me out somewhere. I’m not courting anyone and I don’t intend to start courting either. Not if there’s to be a war. You never know what might happen.’
Somehow Olive didn’t think that Dulcie was referring so much to the potential loss of a young man’s life as the potential opportunity for her to amuse herself with the variety of young men a war could bring into her life.
As they went back downstairs it was hard for Olive not to feel rather unhappy about the prospect of having Dulcie as a lodger. So much for her belief earlier that everything had worked out really well.
‘Before you go I should introduce you to my daughter, Tilly,’ Olive told Dulcie. ‘She works at Barts in the Lady Almoner’s office, and my other lodger is a nurse from the hospital. A very respectable young woman indeed,’ she emphasised, causing Dulcie to grimace inwardly, imagining what a dull pair her landlady’s daughter and the nurse sounded, as she responded to Tilly’s shy smile with a brief handshake.
Not that that bothered her. Dulcie wasn’t one for girl friends unless for some reason it suited her to have one, like when she wanted to go dancing and neither Rick nor Edith would go with her, and she certainly wasn’t looking for a bosom pal. That kind of thing was for soft schoolgirls.
‘So that’s that then,’ Tilly announced after Dulcie had gone, with a final, ‘Right then. I’ll be round Tuesday evening then, about eight o’clock, if that suits?’
‘Now we’ve got two lodgers.’
‘Yes,’ Olive agreed. ‘Although I’m not sure that Dulcie will fit in as well as Sally.’
Working in the orphanage kitchen buttering bread for the orphans’ tea, Agnes hoped desperately that Matron would not take it into her head to come in. Because if she did, she was bound to ask her how she had got on this afternoon going to look at that room she had been supposed to go and see.
She had intended to go. She’d got the directions to it from Cook, whose husband worked on the London trams and knew everywhere, and she’d told herself that it was silly for her to feel so alone and afraid. After all, she was seventeen, and most of the orphans had to leave the orphanage at fourteen. She’d been lucky that Matron had taken pity on her and allowed her to stay on and work to earn her keep.
To Agnes the orphanage wasn’t just her home, it was her whole life. The orphanage had taken her in when she had been left on its doorstep as an almost newly born baby, left in a shopping basket wrapped in a shabby pink blanket, which she still had, and wearing a flannelette nightdress and a nappy.
All of the other orphans knew something of their parentage and many of them had family, even if that family could not afford to house and feed them. Agnes was unique in the fact that she had no one. There’d been articles in the papers about her, Cook had once told her, attempts made to find the mother who had abandoned her. Sometimes even now Agnes looked at her reflection in the mirror and had wondered if she bore any resemblance to that mother, if her mother also had pale skin that flushed too easily, a pointed chin, pale blue eyes and light brown hair that sometimes refused to curl and at others curled where she didn’t want it to. Had she been thin, like Agnes herself was? However much she thought and wondered, even ached privately about her mother, Agnes never thought about her father. Cook had, after all, come right out with what no one else would lower themselves to say, especially Matron, who was so good and who had been a missionary in Africa in her youth, and that was that a baby who had been abandoned on an orphanage doorstep probably did not have a father, at least not a respectable married-to-her-mother kind of father, a father who would want to acknowledge that Agnes was his daughter.
Agnes didn’t really mind being an orphan. Not like some of the other children, who came into the orphanage when they were older and who could remember their parents. Those children had been Agnes’s special little ones before she had been told that she had to leave. She had comforted them and assured them that they would come to like being at the orphanage and feel safe there, like she did. Agnes feared the outside world. She feared being judged by it because of her birth. She rarely left the orphanage other than to go to church and to walk with a crocodile of children escorting them on some improving visit to a museum or a walk in Hyde Park. At fourteen, when other orphans her age were boasting about the fun they would have when they were free of the orphanage’s rules and restrictions, she had cried under her bedclothes for weeks, she had been so miserable at the thought of leaving.
That had been when Matron had said that she could stay on and work to earn her keep. She had been so grateful, feeling that her prayers had been answered and that she would be safe for ever. But now this war they might be having meant that the orphanage was being evacuated to another church orphanage in the country and that there wouldn’t be room for Agnes, or for some of the other staff either.
Matron had explained it all to her and had told her that they had found her a job working at Chancery Lane underground station, selling tickets, and a room in a house owned by a friend of a vicar’s wife.
‘You’ll like it at the station, Agnes,’ she had said. ‘And you know it well, from taking the little ones there on the underground. As for the landlady, she has a daughter your own age, and I am sure that the two of you will quickly become good friends.’ Matron had told her this in that jolly kind of voice that people used when they didn’t want you to be upset and cry.
Agnes had nodded her head, but inside she had felt sick with misery and fear. She still did, but now those feelings were even worse because this afternoon, instead of going to see Mrs Robbins at 13 Article Row, she had gone and sat on a bench in Hyde Park, where she had wished desperately that she didn’t have to leave the orphanage and that the orphanage didn’t have to be evacuated to the country. Agnes had never hated anyone in her life, but right now she felt that she could hate Adolf Hitler. She would have to go and see Mrs Robbins eventually, she knew that. And tomorrow morning she would have to present herself at Chancery Lane underground station, ready to start her new job. She wouldn’t be able to escape doing that, because Matron was going to take her there herself.
Chapter Four
‘So you’re going ahead then with this taking in lodgers business?’
Nancy had caught Olive just when Olive was in the middle of hanging out her washing, coming to the hedge that separated their back gardens and obviously determined to have her say.
‘Yes. I’ve got lodgers for both rooms now,’ Olive agreed as she pegged out the towels she had just washed. There was a decent breeze blowing, so they should dry quickly.
‘And one of them’s from the orphanage, so I’ve heard.’ Nancy’s voice was ominously disapproving. ‘You wouldn’t catch me taking in an orphan. You never know what bad blood they might have in their veins.’
‘According to the vicar’s wife, Agnes is a very quiet, respectable girl.’
‘Well, that certainly wasn’t her I saw coming walking down the Row yesterday afternoon then, all dressed up to the nines and on a Sunday too. Anyone could see what sort she is. Too full of herself for her own good. I hope you won’t be giving her a room.’
‘I think you must mean Dulcie,’ Olive felt obliged to say. ‘Yes, she is going to be moving in. She works in Selfridges.’
‘She might work in Selfridges but it’s plain where she’s come from, and where she’s going to end up if she isn’t careful. I don’t want to worry you, Olive, but there’s going to be a lot of people in the Row who won’t be at all happy about what you’re doing. You know me – I like to mind my own business – but I wouldn’t be being a good neighbour if I didn’t warn you for your own good. It’s like I was saying to Sergeant Dawson after church yesterday: we’ve got standards here in the Row.’
Olive nodded but didn’t say anything. Inwardly, though, she suspected that she hadn’t heard the last of her neighbour’s disapproval.
Agnes had had the most terrible day, the worst day of her life, starting from when Matron had left her in the charge of Mr Smith, the portly, moustached, stern-looking man who was in charge of the ticket office at Chancery Lane station and thus in charge of her.
Her new dull grey worsted uniform piped in blue, which London Transport supplied for its female employees working on buses, trams and the underground, was too big for her. They hadn’t been able to find anything to fit her when she’d been taken to the large supply depot where the uniforms were handed out because she was so small and thin. Agnes knew she’d only been taken on in the first place because Matron had spoken up for her, and that had only made her feel even more as though she wasn’t really good enough. The grey serge didn’t do anything for her pale complexion and mouse-brown hair, her uniform somehow making her face look pinched and thin, and she’d seen from the look that Mr Smith had given her that her appearance hadn’t impressed him.
She’d felt sick with anxiety before she’d even tried to follow Mr Smith’s brisk instructions, but that had been nothing to the horrible churning feeling that had gripped her stomach when a customer had complained loudly about her slowness and then she’d gone and given him the wrong change.
After that the day had gone from bad to worse, leaving her filled with panic and despair. She’d seen from the look that Mr Smith had given her at five past five, when he’d told her to clock off because the evening shift was about to start, that he was angry with her because of all the mistakes she’d made. She’d let Matron down, she knew, and soon she was going to have to admit to her that she’d deliberately not kept her appointment with Mrs Robbins in Article Row.
Now, still wearing her second-hand uniform, her head down, and tears not very far away, Agnes headed for the steps that would take her out of the station and into the daylight, gasping as she was almost knocked flying.
Immediately a pair of male hands gripped her, a male voice saying, ‘I’m sorry. Are you all right?’
Those words – the first of any kindness she had heard all day – were too much for her and to her shame she couldn’t stop herself from bursting into tears.
Immediately the young man – she could see through her tears that he was a young man – pulled her into the privacy of a shadowy area against the wall and announced, ‘You must be the new girl that started at the ticket office this morning. I’m Ted Jackson, one of the drivers. What’s wrong?’
‘Everything,’ Agnes told him tearfully. ‘I made a customer cross because I was too slow and I got his change wrong. Mr Smith is really angry with me, and I know he’ll give me the sack and then Matron at the orphanage will be upset because I’ve let them down.’
‘Orphanage?’
‘Yes. I’m an orphan but I can’t stay at the orphanage any more because they’re going to be evacuated, and anyway you can’t stay once you’re fourteen. I was lucky that they let me stay for so long.’
The poor kid looked as pathetic as a half drowned kitten he’d once rescued from the river, Ted thought sympathetically.
‘Look, I’m not due to start work yet, so why don’t you and me go upsides and have a cup of tea? It will help calm you down,’ he suggested, putting his hand under her elbow and leading her back towards the steps.
Agnes experienced another surge of panic, but a different one this time. Matron was very strict with her girls, and Agnes had never ever been alone with a young man.
‘Come on, it’s all right, you’ll be safe with me,’ Ted assured her as though he had guessed what was worrying her. ‘Got two sisters of me own at home, I have.’
They’d reached the top of the steps and somehow Agnes discovered that she was being bustled into a small café where the woman behind the counter greeted Ted with a broad smile.
‘Your usual, is it, Ted?’ ‘Nah, just two cups of tea this time, Mrs M.’ He glanced at Agnes and then added, ‘And a couple of toasted teacakes.’
A toasted teacake – Agnes’s mouth watered. She hadn’t been able to eat the egg sandwiches she’d brought with her for her dinner because she’d been so worked up and upset.
The café was only small but it was homely and looked clean and welcoming. It smelled of strong tea and hot toast. The counter had a glass display case in which there were some scones and sausage rolls and sandwiches. Opposite the counter was a window with a sign in it saying ‘Café’. A row of wooden tables and chairs ran the length of the wall from the doorway, past the window and into the corner of the room. There were red and white checked cloths on the table and the same fabric had been used to make curtains for the window. Brown linoleum covered the floor, and the two women behind the counter serving the customers were large and jolly-looking.
‘You don’t want to take too much notice of old Smithy,’ Ted advised Agnes once they were settled at a table, their mugs of tea and toasted teacakes in front of them. ‘His bark is worse than his bite.’
‘But I got everything so wrong.’
‘That’s only natural on your first day.’
‘I couldn’t remember which line was which, or any of the stations,’ Agnes admitted in a low voice. ‘I’ll be sacked, I know I will, and then Matron will be cross with me as well, especially when she finds out that I didn’t go to Article Row like she told me.’
‘Article Row? What were you going there for?’
‘To get myself a room. The vicar’s wife had told Matron that there was a room there for me and I was supposed to go round yesterday to see it but I didn’t . . . I couldn’t.’ Her eyes filled with fresh tears. ‘I don’t want to go anywhere. I want to stay at the orphanage.’
‘What, and end up stuck in the country? That’s daft. I’ll tell you what, why don’t you go round to this Article Row after you and me have finished our tea? You can tell the landlady that you made a mistake and that you thought it was tonight you were supposed to go. That way you won’t get into trouble with your matron and you’ll have somewhere to live.’
Ted made it all seem so simple and so sensible. He made her feel better, somehow.
‘I’ll still lose my job. Mr Smith told me that I’d got to learn the stations on every single line, or else.’
‘Well, that’s easy enough to do,’ Ted told her.
Agnes’s eyes widened with hope and then darkened with doubt.
‘I mean it,’ Ted assured her, adding, ‘I could teach them to you if you wanted. See, my dad worked on the underground as a driver all his life, and now I’m doing the same. Grown up with knowing what the lines and the stations are, I suppose. Dad used to sing the names to me when I was a kid and lying in bed.’
‘Sing them to you? You mean like . . . like hymns?’ Agnes asked in amazement.
‘Well, not hymns, perhaps, but like what you might hear down at the Odeon, you know . . .’ He cleared his throat and began to sing in a pleasant baritone, as though to a marching tune that he had made up.
