six-year-old Jane (who had never been allowed to forget it). The replacement had ‘foreign’ stamped accusingly on its bottom and had come from a curio shop on the Streatham High Road.
Jane knocked on the door with the approved amount of force. It wasn’t usually loud enough to penetrate the running argument that took place in Aunt Doreen’s kitchen but if anyone rapped too hard there were more reproaches. Jane didn’t have the key-of-the-door. Aunt Doreen took the words of the song entirely literally and wouldn’t be letting Jane have one until she was twenty-one, two whole years away.
She knocked again, fractionally louder, and instants later a light appeared at the end of the passage and her aunt tore open the door, cheered up by a fresh grievance.
‘Banging and banging like that! Anyone would think it was the bailiffs!’
What bailiffs? Jane doubted very much she’d ever seen a bloody bailiff. No hello. No nice day. No kiss my arse. Nothing.
‘Your tea’s on the table. Don’t blame me if it’s cold.’
Chapter 2
Early man lived in the Croydon
area but avoided Norbury.*
Only fourteen bombs had fallen on Norbury (by mistake: the Germans wanted Croydon – or thought they did). But one of them, a flying one, fell on Jane’s happy, smiling mother and her shy, squinting father who had decided to go and see Fanny By Gaslight while he was home on leave in 1944. Both were killed instantly – funny how people always were killed instantly. Jane had been only three at the time and her image of her parents was based on a dog-eared snapshot of her mother, stuck for ever in black and white gingham, and one photograph of the two of them at Brighton in the boiling hot summer of 1939, sat on the stony beach fully dressed in floral flock and flannels with a nice tray of tea between them. There were no wedding photographs. Aunt Doreen had lost them – except the one of herself as matron of honour looking like Charley’s Aunt in a huge crêpe dress and a neighbour’s moth-eaten silver fox.
Doreen was in a nursing home expecting a baby (Kenneth Leonard Deeks) when Jane’s parents were killed and so motherless little Jane and her two-year-old sister June were packed off to a war orphanage down in Kent somewhere until the Women’s Voluntary Service could arrange to billet them on some unsuspecting old couple. Asked to point out her baby sister in the recreation room, Jane’s three-year-old eyes passed over fat little June with her grubby frock and the cold sore that gnawed at her upper lip summer and winter and pointed, unhesitatingly, to a smiley-faced blonde in a pale blue polka-dotted sundress. The house they had stayed in had a lovely big garden with apple trees and a swing and a beautiful little Wendy house full of lovely old dressing-up clothes. Jane had enjoyed three months playing at sisters with that nice, friendly, pretty little girl who had followed her everywhere and who joined delightedly in all her make-believe.
It wasn’t until Doreen turned up (reluctantly) to claim her nieces that the mistake was spotted and June was fished out of the orphanage (they hadn’t been able to find anyone to foster her). Fortunately Doreen and the family had assumed it was all just a cock-up by the WVS (‘interfering bunch of prats’ was Doreen’s verdict) but Jane was still teased mercilessly about leaving her sister to the horrors of an institution: cabbage; bed-wetting; saying grace before meals. June had had nightmares about it for years. She knew it wasn’t the WVS’s fault. Jane never saw the pretty little girl again.
The hall smelled. A nasty, stale, mumsy mixture of bleach and burned toast. Jane ran across the dusty lino and up the stairs. She stuffed the crocodile bag under her pillow and quickly hung her new suit from the picture rail – she couldn’t bear to put it away but it did look funny against the wallpaper’s grubby pink rosebuds. There was a knock at her bedroom door. June, Kenneth and Uncle George had all been trained to do this. Doreen would have just burst in, mid-complaint. It was June. Minus the cold sore but just as unappealing. She was seventeen and had been at teachers’ training college since leaving school the previous summer.
‘Auntie says your tea’s stone cold.’
June was not Doreen’s favourite; Doreen disliked and resented all the children equally, but June ran errands and told tales on Jane and there were rewards for this.
Tea