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 was dished out in the ground-floor back or what Doreen liked to call the ‘sitting-cum-dining room’, an expression that was supposed to explain away the fact that they all had to sit and eat and watch television in one room while another perfectly good one was left empty at the front. You could barely move: table, six chairs, sideboard, three-piece suite in cut moquette and three leatherette pouffes all fanned around a huge teak-veneer telly. The TV aerial dangled over it from a hook in the ceiling that had been put there to hold up the Christmas decorations. There was a little bit of pink paper chain still stuck to it. You had to duck to walk under it but it was the only position where you could get ITV (Doreen liked Emergency Ward Ten). There was a blue glass bowl of plastic apples and oranges (Doreen had tried having real fruit but it only got eaten).
Tea was very cold indeed but as it consisted of gala pie and ‘salad’ (two quarters of tomato and Heinz tinned potato in salad cream) this wasn’t really very surprising. There was a grey-green ring round the central disc of hard-boiled egg and a hard, glassy yellow jelly gluing the pink meat to the unnaturally orange pastry.
Aunt Doreen had learned her housekeeping with a ration book in one hand and a tin opener in the other. She had never really got the hang of – or even seen the point of – nice food or nice houses or looking nice and so what you got was food out of packets in a grotty back room served by a lank-haired woman in a dirty nylon housecoat. Do try to greet their homecoming with smooth hair and a well-groomed, bright appearance. There is no excuse for moping about in ‘any old thing’ just because you are doing household chores.
Doreen’s idea of a really nice hot tea was a tinned steak and kidney pie, soggy King Edwards and Surprise dried peas – the surprise being that anyone bought them. Uncle George had other ideas. He would put up with the two veg but he quietly refused to go anywhere near meat pies – tinned or otherwise. His father had been a factory inspector and told disgusting, Sweeney Todd-y tales of what passed for filling in the pie trade and young George was having none of it. Ditto sausages. And potted meat. And faggots. And mince. And fish fingers. Unless it was a recognisable slice of the animal Uncle George wasn’t interested and so he got steak or a nice chop of an evening. Jane wasn’t very interested in Doreen’s repertoire of tinned pie, Spam salad and beans on toast either, and tended to shunt most of hers on to her spotty cousin Kenneth’s plate while his mother banged the eye-level grill around, fussing furiously over her husband’s special diet.
George and Doreen never called each other George or Doreen. When she spoke to him she didn’t call him anything and when she spoke about him he was simply E or Im. He called her Reenie or Reen, both of which drove her mad. He probably knew this.
Doreen had been a 29-year-old mother of the newborn Kenneth when she first came to drag the two sisters back to Norbury. Kenneth was now a great big spotty kid of fifteen with a tiny bedroom full of model aeroplanes (although it was actually Uncle George who made these). Kenneth’s real hobby was bus serial numbers. He would lurk at the bus stop for hours peering at passing Routemasters and noting them down in a little red memo book.
There had just been the three of them until eighteen months ago when, out of the blue, Kenneth’s baby sister arrived. Doreen, who didn’t want the children she’d got, let alone any more, was furious. Even more furious when people mistook her for the baby’s grandmother. She did almost warm to it in the end – it had the lardy pink blonde looks she admired in a child – but nobody else liked it much. It cried whenever you took its dummy out and could only be kept quiet with rusks and Ribena. Its name was Georgette. Georgette Ann.
It turned out that Doreen had had two babies before Kenneth. Jane only found this out when she was seventeen because a letter arrived in the post for a Miss Mary Jane Deeks giving her National Insurance number. Uncle George made Doreen a cup of tea and told them all that there had been a second Miss Deeks as well, born a year later. Both babies had died within days. Pity really. June wasn’t much of a sister. It must have been rotten for Doreen, the babies dying like that, but when Jane dared to say as much her aunt looked genuinely surprised. What were their names?
‘Mary Jane and Sally Ann. Not names I would have chosen but I had to call them something. I never saw them. E saw them. Said they were very pretty babies.’