Lucky Bunny (9780062202512) Read Online Free Page B

visit him. We didn’t know what he’d done; no one mentioned it to us. I somehow got the impression that the house would be taken from us, that what he’d done connected to that, but it never was. Mum told us we should look sad if anyone asked in Hackney and say Daddy was a soldier in Burma—this was before the war had started—and how much we missed him.
    â€œLet me see you say it,” she said to me, and I put my head on one side and slumped my shoulders and said, “My poor daddy is a soldier over—over cease —and we’re all on our own.” “No!” she says. “Don’t ham it up, gel,” and I had to try again, especially with the “overseas” word, until I got it just right and she sat back on her heels and laughed and said, “Well, would you look at that, the gel’s a proper bleeding actress , ain’t she good at lying?”
    I beamed at that: the first—maybe only—compliment she ever paid me.
    So then the leafleting started, it must have been summer of ’39, and Mum picked one up one day standing waiting in the butcher’s on Well Street market—where she couldn’t afford anything and was just chatting to Sly Roger, the butcher, who was a friend of my dad’s. In fact he was a friend of quite a few men who were inside at that time, and Sly Roger made it his business to look out for them, women whose husbands were “away”; to help their wives out occasionally. He wasn’t actually called Sly, of course; that was Nan’s name for him. She would say, “Roger the Dodger the Dirty old Lodger” and some other rhymes, so that’s how I thought of him. Mum picked a leaflet up from the dusty window ledge of Sly Roger’s shop with flakes of sawdust on it and that blood and sawdust butchers’ smell—and read it out to me and Bobby as we were leaving, pushing Vera with her bouncing pom-poms on her hat in her pram up Well Street.
    â€œ MOTHERS SEND THEM OUT OF LONDON ,” she read.
    Moll stood there with a cigarette in one hand, a leaflet in the other, and fanned her face with it, and she suddenly seemed all whipped up in a hot angry feeling and she’s saying, “Shall I then, shall I send ya?”
    At home, once her mood was quiet again and she had her feet up and her nose in My Weekly , I read the leaflet myself. It had a little crown at the top and an arc, a bit like a rainbow, and the words read, “EVACUATION—WHY AND HOW? Public Information Leaflet No 3. Read this and keep it carefully. You may need it. ” The words were easy for me, the best reader in my class, in fact, Miss Clarkson said, the best little reader she’d ever come across. But even so. It made no sense. Why did we need to evacuate? I decided to ask Nan when next I saw her, on her weekly visit from Poplar to give me and Vera a bath (she’d given up on Bobby—who stank to high heaven—though if she could manage it she’d try and bring him a Knockout comic that was a few weeks old: she found them in a bin outside the shops on Well Street).
    I’d learned from Nan where Mum’s mood swings came from. If Mum had been to the shops and come back with a bottle in brown paper I knew she’d be merry for a while, squeezing our bottoms as she suddenly clutched us in a fierce squishy cuddle. Then she’d slump out, snoring, skirt all rucked up and her knickers on show, on the replacement sofa, a green thing with exploded insides that we rescued from a skip and smelled of dogs.
    Nan had said on her last visit that Dad was lucky to be inside because no one outside had a job anyway and knowing him he’d have only gone and fought the Blackshirts and got himself into more trouble. She saw him as “lucky” no matter what. She had a blind spot about Dad for all her goodness, but she didn’t know the half about the way we were living, about how hungry we were and how it