London Belles Read Online Free PDF Page A

it. There were two families in their street who were notorious for the rows and fights they had when they’d been drinking. The Hitchins at number 4 and the Abbotts at number 9. It was nothing unusual to see both husbands and wives sporting bruises and black eyes. Ma Hitchins, all twenty stone of her, loved nothing better than a good set-to, rolling up her sleeves at the drop of a wrong word, ready to go into battle, and her children, as thin and cowed as she was fat and aggressive, knew better than to approach their mother when she’d had a few drinks. ‘Poor little ragamuffins’ was what Dulcie’s own mother called them.
    The house Dulcie’s parents rented was halfway down the street at number 11. Cheaply built and mean-looking, the houses cast shadows over the street that stole its sunlight.
    The street was busy with its normal early evening summer life; children playing with hoops and balls, grandmothers sitting on front steps and gossiping, men returning home from work. Dulcie knew everyone who lived there and they knew her.
    ‘Fancy going down the pictures tonight, Dulce?’ one of a group of young men called out to her as he sat astride his bike, smoking a cigarette.
    ‘Not with you and them roving hands of yours, I don’t, Jimmy Watson,’ Duclie called back without stopping.
    She and Jimmy Watson had gone to school together, and he was a friend of her older brother, Rick.
    ‘Heard the news, have you?’ Jimmy carried on undeterred. ‘About me and your Rick getting our papers.’
    ‘So what’s news about that?’ Dulcie challenged him ‘Every lad’s getting called up.’ She had reached her own front door now, which, like most of the doors in the street, was standing open.
    ‘It’s me, Ma,’ she called out from the hall.
    ‘About time. I need a hand here in the kitchen, Dulcie, getting tea ready.’
    ‘It’s Edith’s turn. And besides, I’ve got to go upstairs and get changed.’
    Edith and Dulcie didn’t get on. Edith had aspirations to become a professional singer. She did have a goodish voice, Dulcie acknowledged grudgingly, but that was no reason for their mother to spoil and pet her in the way that she did, letting her off chores so that she could ‘practise’ singing her scales. Dulcie suspected that Edith was very much their mother’s favourite.
    ‘She’s got an audition tonight, down at the Holborn Empire, and with Charlie Kunz, as an understudy for one of his singers,’ her mother told Dulcie importantly. Charlie Kunz was a very well-known musician and band leader, who had made many records.
    Dulcie, though, refused to be impressed, puckering up her lips to study her reflection in the small mirror incorporated into the dark-oak-stained hat and coat stand. That new lipstick sample she was wearing suited her a real treat. She’d have to find a way of making sure it got ‘lost’ and then found its way into her handbag, she decided, giving her full cherry-red lips another approving look.
    Everyone at home had laughed at her when she had first announced that she wanted to work in the makeup department of Selfridges.
    ‘You’ll never get taken on by a posh place like that,’ her mother had warned her. ‘If you want fancy shop work then why not ask Mr Bryant at the chemist’s if he’ll take you on?’
    ‘Work in that musty old place, handing out aspirin and haemorrhoid cream? No, thanks. I will get a job at Selfridges, just you watch.’
    And of course she had, even if it had taken her six months of persistence to do so, first turning up and hanging about chatting with the cleaners and the like, finding out what was what and, more importantly, who was who.
    Once she’d got all the information she needed, the rest had been easy. Ignoring the disapproving looks of the female lift attendants in their dashing Cossack-style uniforms, every day for a week she’d ‘accidentally’ ridden up in the lift with the manager of the ground-floor cosmetics department, on his way to have