horses’ hooves clattering over the cobbles outside: all the familiar sounds that spoke to her of morning . For a moment or two, she just lay there, letting them wash over her, but at last she forced her eyes to open once more. She could already feel the warmth of the sun streaming through the chinks in the curtains, falling in long stripes over the bedclothes. She had overslept again, and Mum might be in a scolding mood.
Hurriedly, she sat up in bed, and pushed aside the curtain that separated her corner of the room from the larger portion where her three brothers slept. Their beds were already empty: her eldest brother, Song, must have left for his job in the kitchen at Ah Wei’s Eating House, and the twins, Shen and Jian, would be on their way to school.
At once, she hopped out of bed. It really must be late: why hadn’t Mum called her? Only a minute or two later she was hastening down the stairs, still doing up the buttons on her striped frock as she went.
The stairs were steep and narrow and creaked as she went down them. The Lim family house was an odd little place, squashed right up against its neighbours in a cramped street in Limehouse, East London. It was all crooked angles and dark corners and patches of damp, but every square inch of it was friendly to Mei. She had been born here in the bedroom above the shop; she and her brothers had grown up here; she couldn’t imagine what it would be like to live anywhere else.
As she always did, she jumped down the last few steps into the stone-flagged hallway. To one side was the door into the shop, which stood ajar, letting all the familiar scents of tea and spices and tobacco flood in. To the other was the back room, where the range was, and where the family spent most of their time. But before she pushed the door open and went in, she came to a sudden halt outside.
She could hear Mum and Dad talking in the back room. There was nothing unusual in that, but what was strange was the way they were talking. Their voices sounded hushed, even anxious.
For a moment, she hesitated outside the door. Dad was saying in an urgent tone: ‘We’ve got no other option, Lou. You must see that.’
‘But if we give them what they want, we’ll hardly be scraping by! And what if next month, they ask for more? I’ll not be intimidated like this,’ said Mum indignantly.
Dad’s voice was tight. ‘Do you want to lose this house, the shop, everything that we’ve worked for?’ His voice dropped lower. ‘Remember what happened to the Goldsteins. Is that how you want us to end up?’
The Goldsteins . Mei felt a little shiver run along her spine. Mr Goldstein had been a pawnbroker: his little shop was just a few streets away. He and his wife had been a quiet old couple, though Mrs Goldstein had always said good morning when Mei and her brothers went past on their way to school. But just a couple of months ago there had been a terrible fire: the whole building, including the pawnbroker’s shop, had been burned to the ground, and both Mr and Mrs Goldstein had died. It had been a dreadful accident, Mei had thought, but now it seemed suddenly far more sinister and terrible. Is that how you want us to end up? What could Dad possibly mean by that?
‘Of course not! But –’ Mum began.
It came to Mei suddenly that she was eavesdropping; something that she had always been taught was a low-down thing to do. She pushed the door open and went through into the back room. Immediately, both her parents stopped talking.
‘Well, here she is at last, the Sleeping Princess herself,’ said Mum in her ordinary voice, just as if nothing out of the usual way had been happening. She was rolling out some pastry, stopping occasionally to stir or season a pan of broth that was steaming at her elbow. Whatever she was doing, Mum always seemed to be doing something else at the same time. More often than not, she was undertaking half a dozen things at once.
‘Hope those boys have left you some breakfast,’ said Dad, tweaking the end of Mei’s long plait, as she slipped into a seat beside him at the well-scrubbed wooden table.
‘You’d sleep the whole day through if we let you,’ Mum said, shaking her head at Mei, but her eyes were twinkling. ‘You must get those lazy bones from your Dad’s side of the family.’
Dad made a shocked face, as if he was mortally offended, then jabbed playfully at Mum with his newspaper. She pretended she was going to retaliate with the rolling pin, then shrieked and dived behind Mei’s chair, laughing, as Dad got to his feet to give chase.
Mei couldn’t help laughing too, and in the corner, the green parrot squawked happily as though he were joining in. It was quite as if the tense conversation she had heard through the door had never happened, and she almost began to wonder if she had imagined those serious, fearful voices. They hadn’t sounded like Mum and Dad at all.
Mei knew that her parents weren’t quite like everyone else’s. They were always laughing and joking, and doing what Mr Walker, the schoolmaster, would call ‘playing the fool ’ in his most disapproving voice. Mei had once been invited to tea with Jessie Bates, and her family had been so different: Jessie’s father was so grim and strict that everyone sat around in silence, not daring to say anything more than ‘pass the salt’. Mei had scarcely been able to believe it. Imagine being frightened of your own father! Mei’s Dad was one of the kindest and gentlest people she knew. And to think that Jessie and some of the others had actually turned up their noses at her family, just because her mother was English and her father Chinese!
Happily, she did not have to worry about that kind of thing much any more. Now that she’d turned fourteen and left school, she rarely needed to step outside the little network of Limehouse streets that people called ‘China Town’. Here, there were just as many Chinese faces as there were English ones – most of them merchant sailors – firemen, seamen, stewards, cooks and carpenters, who served on board the steamers plying between China and the Port of London, and would pass a few weeks at one of the lodging houses before working their passage back home on another steamship. But there was also a sprinkling of families like Mei’s own. She’d heard people say that China Town was dangerous and sinister – a dark place of opium dens and gaming houses, but that wasn’t the Limehouse that Mei knew. The streets might be dirty; the people might be poor; but here, she felt at ease. Here, no one turned up their noses. On the contrary: Lim’s shop was at the very heart of China Town, just down the street from Ah Wei’s Eating House; across from the laundry and the Seven Stars Inn; and around the corner from Madame Wu’s Magnificent Magic Lantern Show. Everyone came to Lim’s shop, and everyone knew Mei and her family.
‘You’ll run some errands for me this morning,’ Mum was saying now, bouncing Mei suddenly back out of her thoughts. She realised that the clock on the mantelpiece was striking the hour and that Dad was going through to the shop. ‘I need you to go to the baker, and the fish shop, and the cobbler. And for mercy’s sake, don’t come back without the fish like last time!’
Since Mei had left school, it was her job to help around the house and in the shop. Her older brother Song went out to work, of course, but as the only girl of the family, it was up to her to help Mum and Dad. She knew she was lucky to be able to do so. Most Limehouse families didn’t have the luxury of keeping their daughters at home, and half the girls in her old class at school were now working in the white-lead factory, or at the box-maker’s.
‘But take this upstairs before you go,’ Mum went on, handing her some folded linen, smelling soapy-clean from Monday’s wash. ‘I’ve got people coming to see about the room later.’
Mei took the stack of linens carefully up the steep stairs to the attics. Up here, little windows in the roof let in tiny glimpses of sky and patches of sunshine, and she almost tripped over their white cat, Tibby, who was sitting on the attic landing outside Uncle Huan’s room, basking in one of the squares of yellow
