Annie Groves - London Belles

White opened-toed high-heeled sandals and a white handbag completed her outfit, and Dulcie wasn’t in the least bit surprised that men turned to look at her and other women cast her assessing and very often antagonistic looks. She was nineteen now and she’d known from being fourteen that she was a head-turner. She’d had more boys asking her for dates than any of the other girls in the bustling street where her family lived, but Dulcie wasn’t daft. They could take her out but they weren’t going to take her for a ride. There was no way that she was going to end up married to some no-hoper and a new baby on the way every year, like the girls she’d been at school with and her own mother. She would marry one day, of course – every woman had to have a husband to keep her – but first she wanted to have fun. And fun for Dulcie was flirting and dressing up and going out to the pictures, or a dance hall. Once she agreed to be someone’s steady girl, all that would have to come to an end, and she wasn’t ready for that – not yet.

Gleefully she imagined her triumph when she won her bet with Lizzie. A double triumph since in achieving it she would be getting the better of Miss Hoity-Toity, with her stuck-up airs and graces. Dulcie had no doubts about the success of her plan. David James-Thompson would come back to the shop. She knew men and she knew what that gleam in his eyes had meant. He was up for some fun and so was she, although their ideas of what fun was might not be exactly the same. There was no way she would let him get into her knickers. She wasn’t daft. He was the sort that would run a mile if he thought he’d got her sort into trouble. But that wasn’t going to happen.

She joined the queue waiting for the bus that would take her home to Stepney in the East End. Her father worked in the building trade as a plumber, and the family had a better standard of living than many of their neighbours, with a whole house to themselves, though Dulcie and her sister had to share a room and a bed.

When she did get married she wasn’t going to be like her mother and have three children – six, if you counted the three that had died before being born. Dulcie didn’t really want any children at all.

The bus was crowded and Dulcie had to stand, strap hanging and receiving an admiring look from the young conductor, who had to squeeze past her as he collected everyone’s fares, whilst the bus lurched away from the kerb and pulled out into the traffic.

Dulcie was glad when the bus finally reached her stop and she was able to get off. There’d been an old man coughing away the whole time Dulcie had been standing close to him. A really poor sort he’d looked too, smelling of drink and his clothes shabby. Dulcie wrinkled her nose as she left the bus stop.

There was a pub on the corner of the street up ahead of her. Automatically Dulcie crossed the road to avoid having to walk past the group of men and women standing outside 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 his morning coffee in the managerial restaurant, until, via a carefully planned process of acknowledging his presence with a shy smile, through to a welcoming smile that lit up her whole face, he finally asked her which department she worked in. That had been her cue to explain, fake modestly, using the ‘posh voice’ she had learned to mimic, that she didn’t actually have a job at Selfridges, and that she rode in the lift every day hoping to pluck up the courage to put herself forward for one.

The manager had been totally taken in. Her pretty face and perfect skin would be a definite asset to his department. Dulcie had been whisked through the formalities of becoming an employee, but although she might have charmed and taken in the manager, the girls she worked with were not as easily won over. Middle-class girls in the main, and protective of their own status, they were quick to sense that Dulcie was not really one of them. It wasn’t just because they thought of her as lower class that they kept her at a distance, though. In Dulcie’s eyes the truth was that it was because she was by far and away the best-looking girl on the whole of the cosmetics floor. Not that their hostility bothered her. She had wangled things so that her counter, the ‘Movie Star’ range of makeup, was almost the first that people – men – saw when they walked onto the floor, which meant that she got plenty of customers. Traditionally, Selfridges had its perfume counters close to the main doors on Mr Selfridge’s instructions, so that customers coming in would receive a delicious waft of perfume. The idea was that this would tempt them to the counter to buy, as well as adding to the allure and exclusivity of the store itself.