Paper Faces (2 page)

Dot was glad. She felt safe. Changes were always bad. No change must be good. The nearly worst thing that could happen would be her father coming back. It had to happen one day, but not yet. And the very worst thing would be having to move again. But she didn't tell Gloria.

They were back at Mrs. Parvis's just in time for the evening meal. “By the skin of our teeth!” said Gloria as they scurried for their places at table. It was called high tea. Here, too, there were still no changes that Dot could see. Always toast and dripping followed by a good hot dish. Today's main dish was cabbage and swede stew with dumplings. Dot liked the reassuring look of those dumplings, plump and pale, floating among the shreds of yellowish-green in the huge pan.

“Now that it's over, you'd expect they'd start getting things right at last, wouldn't you?” said Mrs. Parvis, standing up at the end of the table to ladle out to her assembled household.

“Well, things are bound to start looking up soon,” said one of the lodgers. “I mean, they
promised,
didn't they?”

“I'm glad it's finished. But I still got that feeling that we
lost
something. Know what I mean?”

Dot listened as the grown-ups continued to grumble along as they had done for as long as she could remember, like the harmless rumble of gunfire far away.

“For myself,” Mrs. Parvis went on, “I'd have felt more excited-like if it'd finished
last
summer. When we all thought it would. Somehow I can't feel so interested in the peace now. I feel sort of, ‘So what?' Don't you agree, Mr. Brown?”

Mr. Brown gazed down at his plate and nodded. Mrs. Parvis always made him agree with whatever she said. Gloria said he only went along with her because of the housing shortages, because he knew he was lucky to have a room at all, even if it was only half a room at Mrs. Parvis's.

Mr. Brown's room, first landing, back, was tall and narrow like a thin passage. It was a sliver of a larger room that had been partitioned off. Dot peeked in when he was out at work. She wanted to see what there was out of that lanky half-window. Downstairs in the basement, all they had to look at was the brick wall of the coal hole with Mrs. Parvis's aluminum meat safe hanging on it, and a line of smelly bins. Mr. Brown's half-room turned out to be nearly as dark as the basement because of the cardboard panes stuck in the window where the glass had been blown out. That was ages ago. They'd still not been replaced.

Dot didn't hear Mrs. Parvis come creeping up behind her.

“Prying! I've warned you before, you young hoyden,” Mrs. Parvis scolded. “I will not tolerate children wandering around wherever their fancy takes them! Whatever will Mr. Brown think!”

Dot knew that Mrs. Parvis couldn't care less what Mr. Brown thought because Mr. Brown didn't count for anything, because poor Mr. Brown had never been in uniform. Dot had heard Mrs. Parvis say that it was a crying shame, a young fit man like that. He was a steel cutter in the aircraft factory. He was missing two fingers from his right hand. They would never grow again. Dot didn't like watching that two-fingered hand as it grasped the knife to cut the dumplings. Mr. Brown did not like to show it either. At high tea, Dot was glad when he saw her staring and tidied the strange hand out of sight beneath the table. Using only his whole hand, he had to dissect his dumpling with the edge of the fork.

Cutting steel to make airplane bodies was a dangerous job.

“There's over a million homeless in London,” Mrs. Parvis grumbled on. “It's gonna take years to put that right.”

“If you'll pardon the correction, not so much as a million,” said one of the lady lodgers. “I saw the official figures released last week by the Ministry of Information. A hundred and thirty thousand London homes destroyed, so the precise number of homeless is now estimated to be around only a quarter of a million.”

Mrs. Parvis ignored the interruption and carried on. “Single men won't come top of the list for rehousing, not by a long chalk.” She eyed Mr. Brown meaningfully over her hot cauldron of cabbage before going on with her set piece. “First they let us have this great feeling of elation. It's over, we thought. But that only lasted a week or two, didn't it? Now it's like they're saying the party's finished. It seems to me everything's going on just the same as it was before. Except there's less of this and less of that. Which is why I'll be obliged if you don't ask for bread unless you really want it. I queued a long time for that loaf. And I've no doubt it's the last we'll be seeing till Thursday.”

Dot waited for her share of the hot dish. She was served last. Mrs. Parvis gave her a reduced portion. Dot watched half a dumpling sliding onto her plate. As Mrs. Parvis had explained to Gloria when they first arrived, “I'm in no position to go showing no favoritisms to some and not to others. If you ask me, that's the first step to black market. What if everybody was demanding full portions for their children? There's been people starved to death in Stalingrad, so don't you go thinking you're something special.”

While Gloria helped dry the dishes after tea, Mrs. Parvis continued to find fault with the people who ran the country.

“They'll nag us now about winning the
peace,
just like they nagged us about winning the
war.
And I don't suppose my old man'll be home for months. Heard from your hubby? Does he know about the poor little kiddy?”

Gloria shrugged.

“R.A.F., isn't it? Not expected back for quite a while yet, I suppose? Something very hush-hush, didn't you say?”

Dot knew that her father was at a place that Gloria rarely talked to other people about, but kept like some kind of secret. Some days, Dot couldn't remember what his face was like. She looked at the snapshot of him in Gloria's handbag, but still couldn't seem to see him properly.

“Oh, but it'll be good to have them back, won't it?” said Mrs. Parvis. “Not that one likes to mention too much of that sort of thing in front of poor Mr. Brown. Of course, one can't hold it against him. It's just, he must have felt so
out
of it, stuck here while all our brave boys have been doing their bit for us.”

Dot thought of Mr. Brown's two missing fingers. Sometimes in her memory, it was her faceless father who was two fingers short instead.

She wondered, if Mr. Brown
were
able to get them back, would he want them, or had he now grown too accustomed to his hand the way it was?

3

A New Tweed Coat

“She's a scrappy little thing, isn't she?” said Mrs. Parvis. “Takes after her father, does she?”

She was discussing Dot.

Gloria shrugged. Dot fingered her victory badge and tried not to listen in case it seemed like prying.

“If you want my advice, lovie, you'll pop her down to the Town Hall and find her a decent coat to wear. When you go to fetch her rations.”

Gloria and Dot went down to the Town Hall once a fortnight to collect Dot's vitamin ration. Two bottles of orange juice, opaque and brilliantly colored, one of cod-liver oil, translucent and greenish-gold. Before the tin victory brooch, these bottles of liquid strength were the only goods that Dot knew were hers alone, belonging to no grown-up. Gloria poured her a spoonful from each bottle every day and said that's why she was tough as old boots, because she always swallowed it down like a good girl. A previous landlady had tried to help herself to the orange juice to put in her gin. When Gloria complained, there'd been a tiff and they'd had to leave.

“You know I can't go buying her nothing!” Gloria said now about the coat.

“They won't ask for no clothing coupons down there,” said Mrs. Parvis.

“It's not coupons I'm short of. They gave me all them extra ones for Baby's nappies what I never used.”

“Didn't you even get him a proper layette, the poor wee mite?”

“I'm not made of money, Mrs. Parvis. I told you I got coupons coming out of my ears. It's cash we're stuck on.”

“At the Clothes Exchange, dear, you don't need no money down there. Nor coupons. It's meant for people like you what haven't got nothing left.”

Dot didn't like it when Mrs. Parvis spoke in this way, as though they were dusty victims from under the rubble. Maybe they hadn't got any clothes, and they couldn't afford one of the nice rooms, and they didn't belong anywhere, but they had each other and they had Baby to visit each day.

“Women's Voluntary's running it.”

“I know all about them,” said Gloria. “Busybodies, the lot of them. Worse than air-raid wardens.”

“Beggars can't be choosers. Anyway, you never know, you might find something there. You want her to look as though you care, don't you? Besides, she'll catch her death with just that little woolly cardigan.”

“If you say so, Mrs. Parvis. Try any dodge once,” said Gloria.

“By the by, you giving her her vitamins? Don't want her to go the way of Baby, do you now?”

“Interfering old bag,” muttered Gloria so that Mrs. Parvis probably heard. But they set out for the Town Hall nonetheless.

“Matter of fact, Dot, what I really fancy you in is one of them nice Scottish tartan kilts like the princesses had when they was little. Remember them on their summer holiday? Matching check kilts, playing in the purple heather. With a nice fluffy jumper. Fair Isle, that's what they called it.”

The clerk behind the hatch asked for their empties before she'd hand over the new bottles, but they hadn't got them. They were still half full back at their room.

“Try and remember next time,” the clerk snapped. “We can't go wasting glass. Remember, we've all got to fight for the future now.”

“You don't say!”

Sometimes Dot wished Gloria wouldn't answer back to people in authority because then they noticed them more.

The hall where the Children's Clothes Exchange was taking place was organized by another bossy lady in green uniform, sitting importantly behind a desk in the doorway.

“This is an
exchange,
not a rummage sale,” she said when she saw that Gloria had brought along no clothes to swap.

“Well, I haven't got nothing to hand in, have I? And if I had, she'd be wearing it. Then I wouldn't need to bring her up here, would I?”

The lady in green pursed her lips. “Oh, all right, in you go, but don't go taking too much. I know what some of you lot are up to.”

“Ta ever so,” said Gloria. “She's got to look nice for when we go up to the hospital to see my little boy.”

In a huge bare hall, trestle tables were heaped with children's garments and there was a thick, stifling smell in the air. Women in head scarves were sifting through the untidy muddle like rescue workers scrabbling in rubble for survivors, while children stood by, waiting for the emergence of something to look at. Sometimes children grizzled, sometimes they wailed.

Dot didn't like the smell of old clothes or of brick dust and escaping gas, but she rarely wailed.

“Are they clean?” one woman asked, picking out a little colored dress to measure up against her own child.

“I should think so, too!” snapped the lady keeping order behind the table. “They've all been fumigated quite properly under Ministry supervision.” But Dot could see how the lady herself wore white cotton gloves to handle the clothing, so as not to touch it directly.

Dot waited quietly till Gloria emerged from the jostling crowd holding up a fawn coat, triumphant like the A.R.P. men when they'd retrieved a live person, or even a dead one. Once Dot had seen a canary in a bent cage pulled out, black like a little sparrow from the ashes and soot, yet still singing even though its owner was gone.

“Real tweed. And look at that label!” said Gloria. “Daniel Neal. That means it's quality. The princesses used to have their clothes from there. ‘By Appointment to Her Majesty,' it says.”

The coat smelled musty, and the cuffs felt greasy. Dot didn't think the princesses had ever had greasy cuffs.

“I'd have preferred it pink, that's more feminine-like, but them dull colors, that's just like the princesses used to wear.” It was double-breasted with two rows of pearl buttons up the front. Gloria buttoned Dot up.

“Well, aren't you the one! All dressed up like the cat's dinner.”

Gloria seemed so pleased that Dot didn't like to say how constricting the coat felt round the neck.

“Here, I got you these, too.” Gloria had two white woollen socks. “Don't quite match, but near as makes no difference.” One was longer than the other and a different, more yellowy, shade of white. “You're going to look a proper little madam. Nice white socks and a proper little coat. See, it's got velvet on it just like the princesses used to have when they was little. You're going to look too posh to go walking with me. People'll think I'm your nanny.”

Dot felt in the pockets. They had velvet flaps over them like letter boxes. She found a used tram ticket to Holborn in one, and a little hanky scrumpled up in the bottom of the other. She smoothed it over with her hand. It was trimmed with a border of lace and printed with a pattern of flowers.

“Ooh, violets! Isn't that lucky! A hanky for you too. That's fine Swiss cotton, that is. When we get back, I'll rinse it through. Then you can keep it in there so you've always got it.”

Gloria was always telling Dot she should try to hold on to things so she'd have them as keepsakes forever. Yet Gloria herself never seemed to hold on to more than the bare essentials that they had in their two paper carriers. The only keepsakes Gloria had were her best peep-toe shoes and her little black hat with the veil.

“Funny, isn't it, how things just slip away without you noticing? Someone once gave me ever such a lovely little china cup when you was born, with pictures on it. Flowers and that. That was gone before you'd even learned to sit up by yourself.”