Ellie (25 page)

‘I suppose Jimbo will just spin out his routine,’ Brenda said, getting up to zip Ellie into her uniform dress. ‘Though everyone’s sick to death of his jokes.’

It had turned quiet when the doodle-bugs first arrived, so quiet that Ellie was afraid Jimbo would sack her. But this lull only lasted a few days. People seemed to need entertainment, music and laughter more than the comfort of home and as the club was beneath the ground, to many people it was a safer alternative.

Ellie looked at herself critically in the cracked mirror. The slinky midnight-blue dress suited her dark colouring. When she came for the interview she was wearing Marleen’s only decent dress and so she’d been relieved to find she would be given this to wear. It had a
diamanté
half-moon brooch pinned just above her right breast, and the sweetheart neckline was very attractive. Dressed like all the other girls, she felt she was their equal.

‘Shall I do some seams for you?’ Brenda asked, picking up an eyebrow pencil. ‘I see you still haven’t got any stockings.’

Ellie blushed. Brenda had lovely underwear and silk stockings. ‘I can’t afford any,’ she said in a small voice.

‘You want to cast those lovely eyes at someone,’ Brenda laughed. ‘Now hop up on a chair. I’ll soon give you a pretend pair.’

The seams were painted on quickly; then Ellie turned her attention to her hair. She had always wished for curls and even been tempted to try a home permanent wave, but Brenda had managed to convince her that sleek, shiny hair like hers was far more attractive than frizz.

‘Pin it up at the sides,’ Brenda suggested, offering a pair of
diamanté
hair-slides. ‘You’ve got such a lovely face, it’s a shame to hide it. Besides, it makes you look eighteen!’

Ellie blushed.

‘Your secret’s safe with me,’ Brenda laughed, doing Ellie’s hair for her. ‘One of these nights we must find time to have a chat. I’m very curious about you.’

Five minutes later, both girls went into the club. No one ever arrived to drink until around half past ten and empty, the club felt chilly and smelt musty. The other two waitresses, Hilda and Alice, were helping Cyril the barman polish glasses at the bar. Jimbo was talking heatedly to the musicians up on their platform.

As he saw Ellie and Brenda he broke off for a moment and his sharp look made Ellie nervous.

Jimbo was said to be over fifty, but he didn’t look it. Ellie thought he looked like a tailor’s dummy: he wore sharply tailored suits and his dark hair was slicked back with oil. He was a small, slim man with tiny bright eyes, but he had a curiously mobile face which he could contort at will to impersonate almost anyone.

‘Put the candles out, girls,’ he called across the empty room, his voice echoing around the cave-like interior. ‘We’ve got no singer tonight, so if the punters start leaving you two will have to go home.’

Brenda raised one blonde eyebrow to Ellie. When Jimbo talked of sending girls home early it was always a bad sign, meaning he was worried. That affected his act, drying him up, and he usually blamed someone else for it.

Ellie collected the small glass lamps, put a fresh nightlight in each and placed them on the tables. Jimbo had resumed his conversation with the four musicians; he was trying to persuade Roy the pianist to phone a singer friend of his.

‘She won’t come,’ Roy said, shaking his head. He was in his sixties, and like all the musicians, looked permanently weary. ‘She’s fed up with being used as a stopgap. You told her she sang flat last time, remember?’

Ellie pricked up her ears. Few of the singers Jimbo used were really good. By all accounts, Jimbo’s reputation for paying poorly and being rude meant he was always scraping the barrel.

‘Do I pay you to stand about doing nothing?’ Jimbo suddenly rounded on Ellie. She’d finished putting the lights on the tables and had been so intent on their conversation that she’d forgotten to be discreet about it.

‘I’m sorry.’ Ellie blushed furiously. ‘It was just that –’ she paused, not daring to say what was in her mind.

‘Just what?’ he snapped rudely, frowning with irritation.

‘Well, I can sing,’ she said, twisting her hands together nervously. ‘If you’re really stuck.’

Jimbo was staggered. He was a bumptious little man, so full of his own importance he rarely noticed his staff unless they did something wrong. Mostly he couldn’t even remember their names.

‘You! Sing?’

‘I can,’ she said, suddenly feeling bolder. ‘Try me now before anyone comes in?’

Jimbo turned to Roy, shrugging his shoulders in a gesture of disbelief.

‘Can’t lose by trying her out,’ Roy said, grinning at Ellie. He wasn’t a bit surprised: many a night he’d noticed her body swaying to the music in quiet moments, her dark eyes lit up with the kind of passion that could only come from a frustrated performer.

‘What numbers do you know?’ Jimbo sneered at her, half expecting her to falter.

‘Almost anything Roy can play,’ Ellie said calmly. ‘Why not try me with “White Cliffs of Dover”?’

Ellie preferred more pacey songs – she wanted to say ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’, but was aware that she’d need rehearsal for that.

‘Go on then.’ Jimbo waved his hand towards the small stage. ‘If you’re lousy I’ll send you home for wasting my time.’

Ellie might have concentrated all her energies on mere survival in the past four years, but she hadn’t stopped practising singing, dancing and acting. Marleen in her sober moments was a good coach, particularly with dancing. Nights down in the tube during the Blitz had honed her comic routines, as anyone who could offer a few moments of entertainment was soon persuaded to forget any bashfulness.

As Roy began the introduction, Ellie took a deep breath. She was aware she would only get this one chance, that Jimbo was nasty enough to carry out his threat. But she wasn’t going to fail.

She began to sing, lifting her head and filling the club with her voice. The words sounded almost prophetic after the scene with Marleen. That thought gave more emotion to her voice and her nervousness just faded away.

In her mind she was back at school in Suffolk, Miss Wilkins playing the piano. She saw Jimbo sit down on a chair, and Brenda, Alice and Hilda standing still beneath the arch listening, and she knew she hadn’t lost the ability to entertain that she’d learnt as a child in Alder Street.

Never had the words of the song – joy, laughter, peace ever after – meant so much to her. She looked right into Jimbo’s eyes, imagined it was her mother sitting there, and all at once she saw he was smiling.

Jimbo was not a nice man. He’d got where he was by backstabbing, conning people and using them. He guessed the girl was under-age, otherwise she would be in the WAAFs, or the ATS. He’d taken her on just because she was pretty and when she turned out to be a good worker that was a bonus. But as he heard her rich, contralto voice, he got a tingle down his spine. The Yanks would love her, he wouldn’t have to pay her much and she’d be so bloody grateful to him she’d never be any trouble.

‘Bravo,’ he called out as she finished and a chorus of clapping came from the other waitresses. ‘Two sets tonight. One before I go on, the other after. Sort out some numbers, Roy!’

‘Well you’re a dark horse.’ Brenda grinned as Ellie came back to the bar to join the other girls. ‘Where’d you learn to sing like that?’

‘I’ve always sung,’ Ellie said shyly, stunned that singing one number to Jimbo had resulted in her suddenly being pushed into the limelight. ‘Was I really okay?’

‘Okay? You were marvellous.’ Brenda patted her back. ‘But don’t count your chickens yet, love. You know what the punters in here can be like!’

The club was packed, so full of smoke Ellie could scarcely breathe. There was a different balance to the crowed tonight, fewer servicemen as so many had gone to Normandy, but more businessmen and theatre people. There were a couple of Americans in one corner who Brenda thought were deserters as they weren’t in uniform and looked decidedly shifty. For her own sake, she hoped the MPs or ‘snowdrops’ as the men called them because of their white helmets, didn’t choose to raid the place tonight. There were also a great many more of the Soho spivs back at the bar and she wondered if Jimbo was in fact a black marketeer himself.

Ellie squeezed through the tiny gaps between chairs, holding her tray of drinks high over the customers’ heads. She didn’t know whether her churning stomach was from terror or excitement. She did know, however, that she’d got to calm down enough to take drink orders without making any mistakes.

‘Hi there.’ A brawny American airman tried to catch hold of her hand as she took the drinks off the tray and handed them round to his five friends. ‘Come and sit with us, babe?’

‘I can’t, I’m working.’ Ellie flashed a big smile and put the bill in front of him.

‘Hell! Surely you don’t work all the time, honey?’ he said as he took his wallet out and handed over a note. ‘Can’t I walk you home later?’

Ellie just laughed and shook her head, even though he had bright blue eyes and a warm smile. She never knew quite how to handle advances from men – she was drawn to them, yet scared too. Sometimes she thought she was the only girl of her age in London who’d never been kissed.

‘Keep the change, honey.’ His hand lingered on hers.

Ellie blushed. She wasn’t sure if it was caused by the big tip, his blue eyes, or the touch of skin on skin.

‘You’re a very pretty girl,’ he drawled, his eyes fixed on hers. ‘Change your mind about joining me, and I’ll be right here.’

Just before eleven, she slipped out to the changing-room to check her hair and put on some more lipstick. She was quivering with nerves and the quiet of the changing-room made it worse. Over the din from the club she could hear that the band had stopped playing and Jimbo was telling jokes. She took a deep breath and walked back into the club.

‘Tonight I’ve got a treat for you,’ Jimbo said, catching sight of her standing beneath the archway. ‘A lovely young lady who’s been hiding her light behind my very own bar. I give you “Our Ellie”.’

Ellie had to push her way through the crowd. Her legs felt as if they were made of rubber. Roy smiled encouragingly at her and patted the piano to indicate she should come and sing by him.

He began the introduction of ‘Shine on Harvest Moon’, before she actually reached him, perhaps guessing that it was better to push her into singing immediately, before she had time to look at the audience and panic.

Ellie could see no further than the tables right by the dance floor. The rest of the club was full of swirling smoke and shadowy shapes, punctuated here and there by a brilliant white shirt and the red glow of cigarette ends.

Her nervousness faded with the first line. Singing always made her feel good, lifting her from reality. Around halfway through the song she realised everyone had actually stopped talking and with that her confidence grew. The next number was ‘I’m Going to Get Lit Up’ and she let go of the edge of the piano and quite unselfconsciously began to move with the music. By the third number, which had been her choice, ‘The Thingummy-Bob Song’, she was acting it out.

They loved it. She could hear people tapping their feet, see heads nodding, and as she got to the last line, wild applause broke out.

‘She’s bloody good,’ one of the spivs back at the bar said to Jimbo. ‘Where’s you find ’er?’

Jimbo looked at the slender, dark girl up on the stage and a shiver of pleasure went down his spine. She had magnetism, the kind of stage presence he associated with Marie Lloyd and other great music hall stars.

‘Right under my nose,’ Jimbo grinned. ‘And that’s where I’m gonna keep her.’

*

It was some time after two when Ellie left the club and she was so full of excitement she felt like whooping with joy. Jimbo had offered her a regular spot on Friday nights for which he’d give her an extra five bob on top of her wages and he’d also said he’d use her as a stand-in if other entertainers let him down. As she slipped down the deserted back streets towards High Holborn she was humming ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’, hearing again the whistles, the clapping and stamping of feet.

Nothing mattered any more; not her shabby dress, not having to do a flit from Gray’s Mansions in a few hours, not even Marleen’s drinking. She was on her way: she felt it with utter certainty. Tonight maybe it was only a handful of songs in a seedy dive, but she had a lot more up her sleeve to show people. One day she would look back on June 21st, 1944 as the day her career started.

She looked up at the sky as she walked and smiled. Marleen had once pointed out a bright star and said that was Polly looking down on them and the thought had comforted Ellie on many a dark night.

‘Did you hear me, Mum?’ she whispered to herself. ‘Were you proud?’

Ellie laughed aloud then, hugging to herself the shock in the airman’s eyes after her first set, Brenda’s praise and even Cyril the barman’s laconic ‘You ain’t just a pretty face’.

She was on High Holborn, nearly at Gray’s Inn Road, when she heard the roar of a doodle-bug coming from the direction of Blackfriars. She stopped in her tracks looking up, paralysed by fear. It seemed to be coming right for her, a blast of flame from its exhaust making the bark of the engine even more menacing.

‘Get to the shelter!’ she heard a man yell from somewhere behind her and in that moment she was overcome with the strangest feeling of
déjà vu
. She was only yards from the place where Polly had been killed running for the shelter of the tube.

The rocket was right overhead now, and the roar of the engine louder than a dozen motor bikes revving up. She wheeled round, not knowing which way was the safest to run. She didn’t dare look up: boarded windows were rattling and a pub sign cranked to and fro, squeaking in protest. Diving into a shop doorway, she crouched down, arms protecting her head.

The engine cut out. It was like being suspended in space, every muscle tensing as she waited for the explosion and death.

‘Not me, not now,’ she whimpered.

The boom was so close she felt the ground shudder beneath her and it was some minutes before she dared remove her arms from her head and open her eyes.