A Vision of Loveliness

Chapter 4


Just remember that your personality

isn’t printed on you like a birthmark.

It can alter for better or worse –

and you’re the girl who alters it.



Jane’s alarm went at half six, a strange soft sound from inside a sandwich of cushions – whoever woke Georgette had to change her and poke Ready Brek into her with a special pink spoon. Jane was most at risk (she got up a good hour before anyone else) but it was usually June who was unlucky. She was rather heavy on her feet but Jane suspected she did it on purpose. She liked taking the pram out as well. Creep.

Jane’s stockings, underwear and quilted nylon dressing gown were already hanging over the back of the chair in front of the fire. She leaped out of bed, switched it on, drew the curtains then jumped back under the covers. A fancy lace of frost had grown on the window panes overnight. It was even colder today. A few more minutes in the warm and Jane was up, huddling into her dressing gown and slippers and tiptoeing along the corridor to the bathroom. Georgette had taken her time getting off to sleep the night before but was dead to the world now, grunting and snoring through some dreamland tantrum.

Jane met Kenneth just coming out of the bathroom, spots glowing after a good wash. Kenneth usually spent his Saturdays loitering at bus stops. But today he was off to Streatham bloody Garage – a lot of really important routes didn’t come as far as Norbury apparently.

Kenneth had left the heater on but it hadn’t even started to take the chill off the room and only ever really heated the ceiling. The bathroom was very bare (Doreen couldn’t abide clutter). There was a bottle of medicated shampoo, a pale blue nailbrush shaped like a swan, a rack of curling toothbrushes and a yellow bar of soap with a label glued into the middle of it. Uncle George liked to keep the Steradent in the bathroom cabinet with the Elastoplast and the iodine bottle but his wife was forever taking it out and putting it in the middle of the glass shelf – in case anyone forgot. On the ledge behind the lavatory sat three wrapped bath cubes. June had once given Doreen a Mothering Sunday present but it wasn’t a mistake you made twice (‘I’m not your mother, thank Gawd’ was the thanks she got). The bath cubes (Goya, Black Rose) had sat there unused and dusty ever since: ‘they dry the skin’.

The Ascot water heater had a big red sign hung round it from the Gas Board pointing out that it had been condemned as unsafe to use. Doreen couldn’t see anything wrong with it. All them water heaters made a noise. The notice was all curled up with age and damp. Either Doreen was right, or they were all living on borrowed time. A smart female will earn enough (or marry enough) to live in a world where constant hot water is never a matter for comment or concern. Jane was prepared to be hissed and banged at for her twice-weekly bath but managed the rest in cold. There was also the danger that the boiler would wake Georgette. She washed quickly with her own soap (Bronnley, English Fern) that she kept in a sponge bag with her shampoo, her face cream, her depilatory cream and a secret supply of tampons: Smart young moderns choose Tampax. Nothing could be daintier. Doreen called these ‘pessaries’ and said only married women could use them but that wasn’t what ‘Sister’ said on the leaflet inside the box.

Jane reckoned it would be all right to wear the Hardy Amies if she wore her half-sleeve black twinset sweater under it. That way she could take off the jacket for work and still pass for Junior Sales. She decided to risk her best pair of stockings (the only unladdered pair she had). She would wear the high heels on her way in but change into her everyday pumps once she got there. She wouldn’t carry the bag (in case someone saw it) but she could put it in the same carrier – a really nice pale green Fortnum’s one that a customer had left behind. Whatever happened, she wanted the thrill of walking along Piccadilly in the full rig-out. Pity about the awful grey bouclé coat but she couldn’t not wear it in this weather. Pity about the hair as well. She wasted a good ten minutes fiddling about with it but she couldn’t find a style that was smart enough for the suit but dowdy enough for work so she just wore it held back with the big brown slide as usual.

Even so, she caused quite a stir at breakfast. Doreen, thank God, had her Lie-in on Saturdays. She also had her Lie-in on Sundays and quite a lot of the school holidays. Uncle George got up extra early on Saturdays and was sat by the radio, soft black book of racing form on the table, drinking his third cup of tea when Jane sashayed into the kitchen.

Uncle George was all right. He thought of kind things to do and he found nice things to say. How he came to get humped up with a nasty, small-minded cat like Doreen Crick was enough to last the huge and very chatty Deeks family an entire wedding breakfast. She hadn’t even been good-looking. Very much the ugly sister – like poor little June really.

‘Don’t you look smashing! Is it new? Turn round.’

Jane smiled and twirled.

‘Nice fit. But then you’ve got a nice figure.’

He was the only person on earth who could say something like that without meaning something else. June might say such a thing but would really be saying ‘a nicer figure than mine’. One of the senior salesladies might say something like it but only in a ‘much good may it do you’ sort of way. And Alan and Bill and Keith (was it Keith or Kevin?) and Tony wouldn’t say anything about her figure without rolling their eyes over it. Compliments were like coupons that they saved up and stuck down until they’d got enough for what they really wanted.

The only person apart from Uncle George who could make a compliment a statement of fact had been the woman at the Trudi Morton modelling academy. Yes, Jane did have a perfect figure. Possibly a shade too short for photographic work but just right otherwise. But it would take work. The walk. The make-up. The wigs – models used a lot of wigs apparently. And that meant money. Twenty-five guineas for a two-week course and diploma. No point asking George and Doreen.

The Trudi Morton woman seemed really, really nice at first. Jane had gone to the academy in her lunch hour just after she’d started working in the arcade. The reception area had been quite crowded with two completely different sorts: girls who were models and girls who wanted to be models. The most obvious difference was that the models all had a dirty great canvas suitcase which Jane knew to be full of stockings, shoes, wigs, petticoats, scarves, gloves – all sorts of stuff you might need on a job. It seemed that the people you worked for only supplied whatever it was you were modelling: frocks, Hoovers, cat food and whatnot and anything else was supposed to be in your bag. Must weigh a ton.

The other big difference was that the girls who wanted to be models looked like they’d done each other’s hair and make-up in the dark for a bet. Jane had her hair in its usual slide (she’d come straight from a morning’s work) and wore no make-up at all. She hadn’t time and besides she’d actually talked to Vanda about this. Vanda was no fool and Vanda reckoned that it was all about Potential and that they’d get a better idea from a bare face. Funnily enough, she was absolutely right. The Trudi Morton woman had said how refreshing it was to see a girl with her own natural complexion and was her bra padded? That was when she spent five minutes carefully taking Jane’s measurements and that was when Jane went off the whole thing.

Jane had a cup of tea and an apple for her breakfast. It was all she usually had but at least on Saturdays there was no fat Doreen sat there telling her she ought to eat more. Today’s smart girl cannot possibly be too thin. Pay no heed to anyone who pretends otherwise. A slim figure is your most priceless asset. She ran her cup under the tap, kissed Uncle George goodbye and put on her coat and gloves. She’d have to get a new coat from somewhere. She still had £15 in the Post Office. All that was left of her Vanda Modes money.

The walk to the bus stop was good practice with the high heels. They made her two inches taller and made the model walk much easier. She’d only worn them once before, to go dancing at the Locarno with a bunch of girls she’d been at school with. She wore them with a floral stripe California cotton frock: big blue poppies with sooty black centres. She had two net petticoats under it – one black, one white – and her black twinset cardigan over it.

She’d got the dress for half price in a funny little shop halfway in to Croydon. She’d only gone in there for dress shields. Vanda didn’t sell these. Dress shields weren’t Lingerie, they were Haberdashery, and Haberdashery was where Vanda drew the line. The shop’s window had been full of creepy little woollen vests, tenderly laid out on brass T-shapes and draped with yellow cellophane to keep the sun off – as if it mattered what bloody colour the things were – but once inside, she was surprised to see a rail of gaudy fat sun dresses. The woman who ran the shop looked quite surprised herself. A salesman had been round and she couldn’t resist the lovely flowers – like seed packets – but when she’d tried putting one in the window it looked all wrong somehow so they were left on the rail inside. Her regular customers just tutted at them or said they’d make nice loose covers.

Jane told her she worked at Vanda Modes and offered to re-do the window for her. Only took ten minutes. She put all the vests and elastic stockings in the side window and left just two frocks in the main one, one on each side, with a hand-written ticket: ‘Perfect for dancing. Only sizes eight and ten remaining.’ They were actually the only sizes the woman had got.

‘He had bigger,’ she confessed, giggling, ‘but I can’t see big girls wearing all those flowers, can you?’

She could if she went to the Locarno. The dance floor last summer had been heaving with size fourteens in yards and yards of waxed cotton begonias and peonies and sunflowers. Like a great big, sweaty municipal flowerbed.

Jane had taken the bus into Streatham and met her old schoolfriends outside as arranged. Two of them were engaged already – tiny little diamonds to prove it. The other two were working on it, slyly eyeing up the Brylcreem boys and spotty Herberts who stood round the edges of the room ready to make a move when the music slowed down. Couples were showing off their practised steps, plain girls were dancing with each other. It was yet another filthy hot night and the room stank of body odour and Evening in Paris.

Jane had pushed her way to the bar for an orange squash, and a man – quite old, thirty at least – had started chatting her up. He used the usual rubbish lines but differently somehow. As if he were taking the mick out of the whole thing.

‘Now what, to coin a phrase, is a nice’ – he put a lot of work into the ‘nice’ – ‘a very nice girl like you doing in a place like this?’

He had a nice deep voice. Not Streatham at all. More Rex Harrison.

Jane selected one of her own smarter voices.

‘I’m here with some old schoolfriends.’

‘To dance? Or are you just on a man hunt?’

He had spotted the four of them, giggling and stealing glances at Jane’s new friend in the blue suit. Hand-stitched lapels. Four proper working cuff buttons.

Jane crossed her legs – high on the thigh to keep the calves parallel – and his eyes slid politely down them to her black suede toes. Nothing grabs the average male’s attention faster than a pair of pretty legs.

‘Smart little shoes. But can you dance in them?’

Norma and the other three seemed about to muscle in for introductions.

‘You bet.’

The band were playing ‘C’mon Everybody’ and the room had decided to jive to it. He looked a bit old for all that. A bit big, too, but he turned out to be a lovely mover. Twirling her and her blue poppies round him with just a flick of his strong wrists. People made room. They even had the spotlight on them for a bit. He watched her the whole time. She had twirled in the wardrobe mirror enough times to know how she looked: the smiling face; the flash of stocking tops under the lace and the tidy little black suede feet.

When it was over he led her back to the bar and bought her another orange squash (no funny business, just plain squash). Norma was hovering again. He spotted her approaching and everything happened very fast after that. He leaned down, placed a hand behind Jane’s back and kissed her right on the lips. Not sloppy, but not a peck either.

‘That was very, very nice indeed.’ That word again. She could practically feel his voice between her legs. ‘But, sadly . . .’ he looked at his watch (nice watch) and took his car keys from his pocket (nice car) ‘. . . I have to see a man’ – he had timed it brilliantly – ‘about a dog.’

He left just as Norma arrived, leaving this vague insult hanging in the air. Doreen always said that Norma must take Ugly Pills. She looked extra terrible that evening. She had looked better in her old school gymslip, quite honestly. Her mother helped her with her beehives, big yellow busbies of lacquer and backcombing with a bow on the back to match whatever outfit she had on. Norma never went to the West End. If she wanted something really special she went to Croydon. The plainest woman alive can find a man somewhere who will marry her and happily have intercourse with her. Not in Norma’s experience.

Jane went to the Locarno the next week and the next but she never saw the handsome stranger in the blue suit. Why would she? What would a nice man like him be doing in a place like that? He hadn’t exactly spoiled her for the local talent but she couldn’t even be bothered to dance with them any more. Norma said she was stuck up. She didn’t dare say this to Jane’s face but Jane could imagine her saying it just the same.

Jane was in the West End six days a week so she didn’t really have a lot of time for Norma and that lot. Norma and Joy had gone to secretarial college and had got jobs in the council typing pool. Carol and Eileen were just killing time working in Woolworths until the Big Days in May. They talked about their Big Days all the time. Carol’s mum, who’d had to make do with a hideous old borrowed frock and a pitiful little wedding cake made with powdered egg, wanted Carol to have four tiers and eight bridesmaids – her dad could afford them – but Eileen cried so hard they’d agreed to both have three and six. Carol’s wedding was still going to be the biggest. Reception for two hundred at the Nelson Hotel; honeymoon at the Palace in Torquay.

Turned out that Carol had managed to pick Princess Margaret’s Big Day so they were going to have to rent a television for the reception so no one would miss it. The happy couple would then be living happily ever after in an ugly brick doll’s house on a brand-new estate just outside Crawley. Joy had never been to Crawley – none of them had except Carol and she’d only been for twenty minutes to look at where the house was going to be (semi-detached, own garage, picture windows, separate toilet) – but Joy was very snide about it: ‘Very suburban’. Joy reckoned you hadn’t reached the suburbs as long as the buses still said London Transport on the side – which let South Norwood off the hook.

Kenneth had already started scribbling down bus numbers when Jane got to the stop. A couple of his buddies were there with him and they were all laughing at some joke Kenneth had just told them. She didn’t know he knew any jokes. He looked different suddenly: smiling, relaxed, almost handsome – apart from the spots. Like a younger, skinnier version of Uncle George. He seemed to shrink when he saw Jane, when he saw his mates looking at her legs in their Bear Brand 15-denier. He didn’t say hello and nor did any of the long line of familiar faces in the tidy little queue. She tried it once but they all looked at you like you were trying to sell them something. The buses weren’t too full at that time on a Saturday and she managed to get a seat downstairs. She decided she’d better change into her old black pumps on the bus. You weren’t allowed to wear stilettos in the shop anyway – it knackered the parquet. Customers did enough damage. The whole floor was pockmarked with the traces of their spiky heels. ‘A woman in stiletto heels,’ as Mr Philip kept on saying, ‘exerts the same pressure as an elephant standing on one leg.’ He’d read it in the Daily Express.

It was a bit tricky getting the shoes on and off but the man next to her was very nice about it. Skinny dark-haired bloke. She’d seen him somewhere before. He worked in a shoe shop in Bond Street. Jane had a funny feeling he was a poof but she didn’t mind that particularly as long as they kept themselves to themselves. Doreen minded very much although Norbury didn’t give her much chance to show it except on Sundays when the News of the World sometimes served up a nice scoutmaster.

The shoe-shop man was speaking.

‘Lovely courts. Nice low vamp.’ Definitely queer.

‘Aren’t they? They’re yours, aren’t they? I didn’t buy them myself, to be honest. A customer left them in the shop and never came back for them. I was the only one with feet small enough: three and a half double A.’

‘Sample size. Tell you what, we’re having a sample sale next Monday after the shop shuts. You’re welcome to come if you like. Only ten bob a pair. There won’t be many of you. A few really, really special customers and friends with small feet.’

‘Ooh. Yes please. That would be super.’ Super. Doreen should hear her.

New shoes. And no annoying little thank-you drinks to pay him back.

‘My name’s Jane, by the way. I work at Drayke’s. Jane James.’ She had been Jane Deeks at school to make life easier for everybody but Uncle George had never got round to adopting her so it still said Jane James on her cards. It sounded better anyway.