Lucky Bunny A Novel by Jill Dawson

Author:Jill Dawson
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Romance, Mystery, Contemporary, Historical
ISBN: 9780062202505
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Published: 2010-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

6

My Apprenticeship

That then was my education. I was about seventeen by the time I got out, and had learned plenty. The girls in the Young Offenders place found it hilarious that I was still a virgin and had loads of suggestions for how to put that right. The way they talked (like Stella), I realized that it was unheard of for a girl like me not to have been interfered with by somebody. Gloria and Beattie and the other Green Bottles must have been protecting me. I mean, Sly Roger. And others besides.

I couldn’t wait to meet up with Stella again, and best of all, Bobby. He’d been out a few months earlier. The year was 1950 and boys were looking different: a sort of American style. You know, cut-back collar with large knotted tie, “Boston Slash Back” haircut and a housecoat jacket in light fawn, normally with brown flannels to match. And there were dance halls everywhere, with jiving and no one over twenty-five and a few American stragglers left over from the war, and colored men. There was still rationing—that was a shock, I’d have thought that would be over by now—but things had changed, and so had I: despite all that terrible bread and cubes of cheese and sweet tea and the stew with big lumps of pork fat in it, I’d got myself quite a figure. (I’ve never been one of those women who looks at herself in the mirror and takes everything apart, critical, you know. What a waste of time that attitude is! Young girls today make me sorry for them, always dissecting their own bodies, like they’re one of those maps of a cow in a butcher’s shop. Me, I take my lead from Gloria. I look in the mirror, slap my lovely fat behind and say to myself: yep, Queenie, looking good!)

I had a tiny waist, just like Scarlett O’Hara. (If I pulled the tape hard it read eighteen inches.) I suddenly had hips, making the fabric of my dress stretch in these sexy creases across the thighs. As for that lorry-driving geezer back then calling me “Chesty”—what can I say? I mean, I didn’t ask for them. But they don’t half draw the eye, and if I left one button on my little cardigan (always bought a size too small) undone and wore the bras that Gloria showed me— these conical numbers that point them like missiles—well, it made me laugh to see men’s eyes pop. They just couldn’t help themselves, even the nice ones.

Bobby could hardly believe it was me, that time, when I came back home and we went up to our favorite café on Bethnal Green Road to celebrate. I saw at once that he’d changed, too. I didn’t know what to say about it. Maybe it wasn’t a change exactly, but just a certainty, a solidifying of something that had been there all along. Or more likely it was just that I understood more, you know; that I’d learned after my time inside that such things existed.

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