Chapter One
With the cream-coloured hearth tiles biting into her knees, Eleanor Jolly, Ella to her friends, leaned forward and brushed the soot that had fallen down the chimney overnight on to the hand shovel and threw it back into the empty grate.
It was the last Friday in November, just after five in the morning and just over three weeks before Christmas Day. After his early-morning bottle, her six-month-old son James was asleep in the pram tucked in the corner, so Ella was doing what she had done every morning since the day she got married back in February: lighting the ancient black-lead range in her mother-in-law’s kitchen.
Returning the fire utensils to the battered tin at the side of the stove, Ella breathed over her hands then rubbed them together vigorously to restore the circulation. A sheen of ice had sparkled on the pavement puddles as she’d made her way home from the shelter an hour earlier. She’d even caught the faint whiff of snow in the air, although this could have been wishful thinking. After three months of nightly visits from the Luftwaffe, even a blanket of Christmas snow wouldn’t turn the bombed and burnt-out streets of Stepney festive.
Turning her attention back to the task at hand, Ella grabbed a couple of sheets of last week’sDaily Mirror and scrunched them up. Placing them evenly in the stove’s firebox, she added the handful of kindling she’d carried in with the coal scuttle in the back yard. Rummaging in the pocket of her wraparound apron that was probably older than she was, Ella pulled out a box of matches. Lighting one, she thrust it into the crumpled paper. It flared in an instant. Ella added a couple of small nuggets of coal then, after a moment, a couple of larger ones. Satisfied that the fire was established, she shut the cast-iron door.
Rocking on to the balls of her feet, she stood up as the cellar door handle rattled, warning of her mother-in-law’s imminent arrival.
Mindful that she would need enough water for a pot of tea and her in-laws’ morning ablutions, Ella took the kettle from the top of the stove. She put it under tap just as the door burst open. With her greasy, grey hair hanging in rats’ tails around her face, a cigarette dangling from her lips and her well-worn slippers scuffing the lino, Ruby Jolly, Ella’s mother-in-law, lumbered in.
Just shy of her fifty-second birthday, Ruby Jolly described herself as big boned; in truth, being four foot ten and weighing in at twelve stone, she gave the appearance of being as wide as she was tall. With forearms that would be the envy of any wrestler and a temper like a firework, Ruby ruled her husband and the costermongers who traded in the Waste Market, where the Jollys had their fruit and veg stall, in much the same way that a lion tamer commanded their beasts.
‘Is that water ’ot yet?’ she asked, the front of her stained dressing gown flapping open to reveal her crumpled flannelette nightdress and unstockinged bloated white calves.
‘Almost,’ said Ella, setting the kettle back on top of the stove.
‘Well, I ’ope it is because my Ernie’s expecting us on the stall in an hour,’ said Ruby, lowering herself on to one of the kitchen chairs.
Ruby was often heard to remark that she and her husband Ernest had never had a cross word in over thirty years of married life. Ella could believe it.
Except for Sunday, Ernie rose every morning a
