the baby was a boy.
‘Of course it’s a boy,’ he’d said with a mixture of indignation and pride when she’d challenged his assumptions. ‘That’s my boy. In my family, the first one is always a boy.’ And when she’d laughed, he’d kissed her until she was breathless.
It was quite ridiculous but the thing she worried about most of all was the locket George had given her. It was her first real present and when he had given it to her, George had declared his undying love. It wasn’t new. The catch looked a bit insecure but she was sure that if it did come off it would only fall into her bra. She must have dropped it in the factory because she remembered fingering it just outside the door.
When she’d arrived at the old factory on that last day in Worthing, it was deserted but the door leading to the street was open. She’d heard someone moving about in a room somewhere inside and had gone to see if it was George but she was met by a man in a brown overalls she presumed was the caretaker. He had his back to her and didn’t know she was there but she’d panicked and made a bolt for the entrance, tripped and dropped her bag. She was just by the door when he spotted her and shouted. She’d been so anxious to get away she’d just stuffed everything in her bag and run. The locket must have been lost then. If only she had stopped and turned around for a minute, she might have seen it on the ground. She missed it very much. Apart from the baby, it was the only thing she had to remember George by.
To ease her anguish, Bonnie began to write letters to the address in Pavilion Road. She didn’t post all of them, but every chance she got she told George about her day. Of the three or four that she did post, she wrote her address at the top of the page and begged him to let her know how he was. Through her tears, she promised not to make any demands on him. She only needed to know that he was alive and well. She did her best to make the letters upbeat. He mustn’t know how miserable she was. Once the envelope was sealed, she put her name and address on the back so that Mrs Kerr could get in touch with her and tell her if George was ill or something. Sometimes Bonnie was so miserable she thought she was losing her mind with grief but there was something within her that wanted the whole world to know how much she cared for him.
She did make contact with someone – Miss Reeves. Bonnie had remembered seeing an advertisement in the local paper with a box number for replies. That gave her the idea of going to the post office and asking about it. Bonnie discovered that, for a small rental fee, she could have her own box number with a key in the local branch. It was an ideal way of keeping in touch without anyone knowing where she lived. She reasoned that she had upset her mother enough so she would not worry her again but she was desperate for news of her and her sister. Miss Reeves was the obvious choice. At Sunday school she had made much of honesty and being trustworthy, so Bonnie wrote to her, asking for information about her family. In her letter, she explained that she could not, for very personal reasons, contact them herself, and asked Miss Reeves to send her news of her mother and sister.
Bonnie did her level best to stop thinking about George all the time but the bittersweet memories kept slipping through the crevices of her mind. She was careful not to let Richard or Lady Brayfield see her upset, but night after night her pillow was wet with tears.
Richard turned out to be a boy with a real thirst for knowledge. After a cautious beginning, he and Bonnie quickly became friends. She did her best to keep him occupied whenever he was in the house. After a while, even she could see that Lady Brayfield was less stressed with life. It seemed that if the boy was happy, everyone else was happy. The whole household was more relaxed.
Lady Brayfield visited her daughter two or three times a week.
‘She’s looking better all the time,’ she confided in Bonnie, and nothing more was said about Kenya.
Bonnie was more or less left to her own devices. So long as Richard was happy, Lady Brayfield left them to it. Richard had a fairly full timetable. Bonnie made sure he ate a good breakfast and then they walked to the prep school where he was a dayboy. He was an average student but under Bonnie’s tuition, or perhaps it was her encouragement that helped him go that extra mile, his grades began to show a marked improvement. Whenever she could, Bonnie took Richard to see the sights of London. They would walk around Trafalgar Square, or go up to Buckingham Palace. Richard’s favourite place in the whole world was the British Museum. He loved looking at the fossils and stuffed animals in cases and gradually his enthusiasm sparked a similar interest in Bonnie.
Back in the town house, she taught him to play whist and patience while he taught her the rudiments of chess. He beat her every time (which he loved) but gradually she got the hang of it. In the evenings, when he’d finished his homework, they would read together, do jigsaws or make Meccano models. Bonnie wasn’t so good at the model making, but it gave Richard a real sense of achievement to be able to show an adult what to do. He never talked about his father but at night as he knelt by his bed, he always prayed for his mother.
‘God bless Mummy and please help her to get better. I miss her very much but I pray she won’t miss me and be unhappy.’
His prayer never failed to bring a tear to Bonnie’s eye. What was her own mother doing now? With Christmas only three weeks away, she’d be sorting out the Thrift Club. It was only a small thing but it made such a big difference to her neighbours. Her mother was always thinking of others. Bonnie was proud of her and longed to give her a hug and tell her so. She missed her so much and the small house where they lived had taken on a romantic rose-coloured hue in her memories. Bonnie forgot about the lack of privacy, the freezing cold bedrooms and the fact that she had to wash in the scullery. All she remembered was the fun and laughter she, Rita and Mum shared together.
As she tucked Richard into his bed, she was thinking about the singsongs they’d had around the piano. That piano was her mother’s pride and joy, a present from Dad when they were young. Mum was a good pianist and she could pick up a tune in no time. Her father always said she could have been aconcert pianist but Mum would push his arm playfully and say, ‘Get away with you, you daft ’apeth.’
Bonnie’s voice cracked slightly as she said, ‘Goodnight, Richard’, but the boy didn’t notice.
Turning over he snuggled down under his eiderdown with a sleepy, ‘’Night.’
Bonnie’s evenings were her own. If she had no socks to darn (even the wealthy darned their socks it seemed) Bonnie could sit with Dora and Cook in the little parlour and listen to the radio or she could spend time in her own room, knitting booties and matinee jackets for the baby.
Cook and Dora had worked for Lady Brayfield for years. They didn’t talk a lot but it didn’t take Bonnie long to realise that life hadn’t been kind to them. Dora was roughly the same age as Lady Brayfield. They had played together as children.
‘My mother worked in the big ’ouse,’ Dora told her with pride. ‘She cleaned the master’s rooms. Lady Brayfield says she were the best cleaner they ever ’ad.’
When she was sixteen, Dora had fallen for a smooth-talking man and been ‘put in the family way’ as Cook put it. Her baby was stillborn and Dora was so upset she had been declared mentally unstable and put into an institution. It took Lady Brayfield more than twenty years to get her out. The years of incarceration had left Dora deeply scarred. She was a slave to routine and became upset at any deviation but she was a hard worker. Grey-haired, even though she couldn’t be more than forty, Dora was a heavy woman with square hard-working hands.
If Dora was chunky, Cook was dainty. Standing at less than five foot tall, Cook was reluctant to even tell anyone her name. She was an intelligent woman but she found socialising difficult. Bonnie had no idea what had happened to Cook but a chance remark from Lady Brayfield made her wonder if Cook had been the victim of child cruelty. The pair of them were
