Faith (11 page)

Music blared out from the large sitting room at the front of the house. ‘Runaway’ was played over and over again, along with Roy Orbison, Elvis Presley and the Everly Brothers, but every now and then an adult would come in and put on Frank Sinatra or something equally old-fashioned. The younger children chased around the house, the adults moved on out into the overgrown garden for more serious drinking, while Jackie and her friends took over the kitchen.

Laura didn’t bother to change out of her pink and white spotted sheath dress when she saw that Jackie intended to wear a pair of boy’s jeans and a plain white cotton shirt which she tied in a knot at her waist. ‘I like myself in jeans,’ she said when Laura looked at her in surprise. ‘You are the frilly type. I’m not.’

That evening everything Laura had hitherto imagined about what went on in middle-class homes was turned upside down. She saw adult women getting drunk and dancing like teenagers and grown men playing with small children. No one seemed the least concerned about mess, noise or what the younger people were getting up to, yet strangely enough it was these friends of Jackie’s who seemed to be the most sensible. One girl in four-inch stiletto winklepickers and a beehive hairdo took it upon herself to wash up. And a Teddy boy in a pink drape jacket swept up a broken glass from the kitchen floor.

Yet to Laura the most wonderful thing of all was that she was totally accepted by everyone. No one asked her awkward questions about where she came from; they didn’t appear to notice that she wasn’t as well spoken as they were. She almost felt that she could announce her father was in prison, her mother living in sin with an old man who’d wanted to have sex with her, and that she worked in the Home and Colonial, and they wouldn’t raise an eyebrow.

Laura tucked Belle into bed around ten that night when she was almost keeling over with tiredness and Lena slung her arm around her drunkenly as she came out of the child’s bedroom and declared that she was ‘a poppet’. Later a boy called Dave asked her to dance with him, and as he held her tightly to ‘It’s Now or Never’ by Elvis Presley, he asked her if he could take her to the pictures the following evening.

By midnight the party had dwindled to just a dozen or so of the older people and Jackie insisted that Laura stay the night. ‘You can go to work from here,’ she said with a grin. ‘I’ll lend you a clean pair of knickers.’

It must have been after two when Laura finally got into the spare twin bed in her friend’s room, and in the darkness she heard Jackie murmur sleepily, ‘You know, I think you are going to be my best friend for ever.’

Looking back with an adult perspective, and a great deal more knowledge about Jackie’s early years, Laura felt she understood now why she came to that conclusion, although she’d made it rather prematurely. Jackie had floated through her childhood with boundless love and encouragement and had never had a moment of feeling insecure or worthless. She’d had nothing to rage against, nothing to fight for, and while not spoiled in a material way, for her parents were not rich, she’d been given boundless freedom to mix with whoever she liked, go wherever she wanted.

Jackie saw Laura as being intrepid, worldly, practical and independent, all because she lived alone. She marvelled that Laura could cook a meal in her bedsitter, do her own washing and get herself to work on time. But the clincher was almost certainly that at only sixteen Laura was all alone in the world. Her parents were the kind who welcomed waifs and strays joyfully, and Jackie was just following suit.

From that day on, Laura almost became a member of the Thompson family. Lena often remarked how good she was with her younger children, and she liked the way Laura thought nothing of doing a pile of ironing or cleaning her kitchen for her. Frank often said she was an answer to his and Lena’s prayers because she’d made Jackie more appreciative of them.

Lena did eventually ask her more about her parents’ death and Aunt Mabel who had become her guardian. By then Laura had the story off pat: she said her parents died in a car accident when she was only four so she remembered very little about them, but her father had been a vet. As for her Aunt Mabel, she embellished her into a kindly but scatty spinster who had done her best as her guardian for years, but felt Laura was old enough to look after herself now. Lena tutted with disapproval, saying she thought it very irresponsible of her to clear off abroad while Laura was still so young, but that she admired Laura for her lack of bitterness and ability to cope alone.

‘You’ll go far,’ she said, giving Laura a cuddle. ‘You are bright, level-headed and practical. And if you want a stand-in mother, then you’ve got me.’

All through that first summer of 1961, the two girls spent at least two evenings a week together, and all day on Sundays. Jackie worked as a copy typist in the City, so she only worked Monday till Friday, and Laura hated that she had to work in the shop on Saturdays. But Jackie invariably came to meet her after work so that they could get dressed and do each other’s hair together before going out.

Too young to go into pubs, they mostly hung about in coffee bars and parks and went to the rollerskating rink looking for boys. They giggled and flirted, but the relationships they formed with boys never went beyond necking in the park or going to the pictures. Jackie always said she wasn’t going to go ‘all the way’ until she met the boy she intended to marry, and that he would have to be very rich as well as handsome because she had no intention of living in poverty, even for love.

Laura agreed that she felt the same, but she never told Jackie she had real, first-hand experience of poverty and had been put off the idea of any kind of intimacy with men because of Vincent. Sometimes she ached to spill out the truth about her background, especially how much she missed her younger siblings, but she was afraid to. As each week passed she seemed to add more embroidery to the life she’d shared with dotty Aunt Mabel, and the house they’d lived in on Holland Park. She felt she was too far down the road to do a U-turn and admit it wasn’t true because Jackie might despise her for lying.

As the summer slipped by Laura had another problem beyond the lies she’d told. Her wages at the Home and Colonial were very low, and by the time she’d paid the rent on her room and bought food, there was precious little money left for clothes, bus fares or any kind of entertainment.

Jackie’s parents let her keep her entire wages to spend on herself. Laura felt compelled to keep up with her, and the only way she could do it was by stealing. Even before she met Jackie she had been in the habit of helping herself to a few groceries and the odd blouse, skirt or the swimsuit she’d been wearing when she met her friend, but suddenly she found that she needed more cash.

The solution presented itself when she had gone up to Oxford Street to steal a new dress. She found a pretty blue one in Selfridges, which she just tried on in the changing room, then put her own clothes over it and walked out, but then she wished she had money for some new shoes.

While wandering around Marks and Spencer she observed a woman getting a cash refund for a garment which didn’t fit. The assistant didn’t ask for the woman’s receipt, just opened the till and gave her the money back. There and then Laura slipped a cardigan into her bag and left the shop. An hour later she was at the other Marks and Spencer down the bottom of Oxford Street claiming a refund for it.

It was so simple and easy that she hugged herself with delight at her cleverness. She felt no guilt – after all, Marks and Spencer was a big company and they could afford it.

From then on she had a regular source of cash. She varied the branches she went to, always making certain she claimed her refunds at times when the shops were busy, and on these expeditions she invariably helped herself to items in other shops too. Having a wardrobe full of beautiful, expensive new clothes helped her to forget the image of ‘Stinky Wilmslow’, and gave her the confidence she needed to keep up the fictitious background she’d created for herself.

Laura shook her head despairingly as she thought back to those days. It was a miracle she was never caught, and even more surprising that Jackie was never suspicious of how she managed to live and dress so well on a shop assistant’s wages. But then, Jackie was an innocent in those days; she buried her head in glossy magazines and aspired to the kind of glamorous life she saw depicted there. She saw her family as being quite poor because they had no car, didn’t eat out in fancy restaurants or go abroad, and she had no idea of what a struggle life was for most ordinary people.

Yet it was Jackie who persuaded Laura she could do far better than working on the bacon counter of the Home and Colonial, and with her friend’s encouragement she got a job as a junior wages clerk in Pawson and Leaf, a wholesale company by St Paul’s Cathedral.

Pawson and Leaf was an old-fashioned company that supplied everything from corsets to haberdashery to the retail trade. It had a Dickensian atmosphere in its four or five dusty, gloomy floors filled with goods which had to be picked out when a customer rang in with an order. The wages department was on the top floor, with a wonderful panoramic view of London, but when Laura was sent with inquiries to any of the various departments below, she found it all quite fascinating. There was a huge steel chute, something like a helter-skelter, and once the goods had been picked out and invoiced, they were tied up and dropped down the chute to the packing department in the basement. Quite often the younger lads would slide down it during the lunch hour or at the end of the day, accompanied by shrieks and yells.

Yet it wasn’t just that it was a more fun place to work, or that she earned two pounds more a week and had the whole weekend off that delighted Laura, it was the whole package of working in the City. It felt so sophisticated to catch the tube to work and never again to have to wear an overall and a net covering her hair. She was proud to say she was ‘in wages’, it was good working alongside people of a similar age, and she often met Jackie straight from work so they could go home together.

She had begun work at Pawson and Leaf in early December and there was already a buzz of excitement in the air about the Christmas party to be held on Christmas Eve. Laura heard it was always a great opportunity to get off with someone you fancied, and she was told many stories about staff who had ‘had it off’ in the post room, a drunken telephonist who was put down the chute, and an elderly floor manager who’d had too many drinks and fell asleep and got locked in the building for the whole of the Christmas holiday.

The girls, it seemed, were in the habit of bringing in their party dresses to change into, so when Jackie suggested the night before the Christmas party that they should go to a pub she knew in Moorgate frequented by bankers and stockbrokers, Laura was all for it. That meant she’d get two opportunities to wear the stunning midnight-blue lace dress she’d recently stolen from a West End shop.

‘It’s time we moved on from boys,’ Jackie said airily. ‘We are never going to meet anyone rich in Crouch End. All the local boys want is sex and they don’t even take you out anywhere. The blokes that stop in this pub for a few drinks before going home are all men of the world, they’ll know how to treat us properly.’

Although the girls had had a lot of fun locally during the summer, since the weather got colder and wetter they’d been stuck for places to go in the evenings. On Saturday nights they often went dancing at The Empire in Leicester Square, but they rarely met anyone they liked enough to make a further date with. Jackie had been saying for quite some time that she thought the best men, the ones with smart suits, good jobs and cars, went to pubs. But it wasn’t really done for girls to go into pubs as it sent out a signal they were there to be picked up. However, at the pub in Moorgate they could pretend they’d just left an office party and were on their way home.

Laura chuckled to herself when she recalled how she’d changed into her dress at the end of the day in the toilets at Pawson and Leaf. Even now, when over the years she’d had many gorgeous dresses, that one was still in her top five. The diaphanous lace sheath dress had a deep scooped neck and three-quarter sleeves, but for decency’s sake it had a built-in skimpy petticoat beneath it. With a mahogany rinse on her hair, which she’d put up in a beehive, sheer black stockings and four-inch stilettos, Laura could have passed for twenty-one, when in fact she was only a couple of weeks short of seventeen.

It wasn’t far to go down Cheapside to Moorgate to meet Jackie but her excitement grew even stronger because several men whistled at her, even though she was clutching her coat round her tightly because it was so cold. Jackie was waiting for her at the tube station, and she got two little crowns of tinsel out of her pocket for them to wear.

Once in the pub they went straight to the toilets to take off their coats, put on more lipstick and check each other’s appearance.

Jackie was wearing an emerald-green satin dress with a boat neck, her auburn hair in loose waves on her shoulders, and she looked like a film star, but when she saw what Laura was wearing she looked stunned.

‘You’re not just pretty, you’re beautiful,’ she gasped. ‘That dress, your hair! I can’t believe it!’

Jackie had often told her she was pretty, but Laura had never really believed it. This was partly because of being insulted at school, but also, next to her friend with her vivid colouring, poise and bounce, she had always felt drab. But she could see in the mirror that the colour of the dress seemed to make her skin glow, and the rinse made her hair shine with coppery lights. Maybe ‘beautiful’ was an exaggeration, but she had certainly never seen herself looking so good before.

As Jackie had predicted, The Plume of Feathers was full of businessmen, and from the moment the girls walked out of the toilets, they got attention. They were not the only girls in the bar, there were perhaps ten or so others, but they were certainly the two most attractive ones. They didn’t even have to buy a drink; the barman just waved their money away when they asked for two Babychams and gestured vaguely to one end of the bar to say it had already been taken care of.