A Lesser Evil - Lesley Pearse [41]
It felt so safe living above such nice, decent people, and the low rent meant they didn’t have to worry about money.
Yet it was the other neighbours who had really changed Fifi’s mind about Dale Street, for they were all so fascinating. Back in Kingsdown in Bristol, none of the other tenants had ever spoken to Dan or Fifi. In her parents’ street the neighbours had always seemed to lead such narrow lives, and though they were pleasant, they couldn’t talk about any subject other than their homes, children and gardens. She hadn’t thought anything of it when she was there, but now, after living here for a month, she realized that they were all afraid ever to let their real feelings show.
People around here didn’t have that problem. If something good had happened to them, they wanted the world to know. They’d drag you in to show you their new television or three-piece suite, or a new baby. They aired their disapproval as well. Fifi had heard people ranting about their unscrupulous landlords, hated in-laws, and even children who had disappointed them. They liked to laugh at themselves too. Back at home no housewife would admit she’d made a cake and forgot the sugar in it, or burned her husband’s dinner because she was chatting over the fence. But they did here, seeing no shame in showing they were flawed.
Fifi really liked that. It was real, it was good. She had always believed that the only way you could make real friends was if there was mutual opening up, seeing the differences in people and liking them for it.
Yvette the French dressmaker and Stan the Pole had come here in 1947 as refugees. Ivy Helass had been a dancer before she married Cecil, and it was said that John Bolton had robbed a bank and gone to prison for it. Fifi wanted to get to know everyone in the street, to hear their stories and make friends with them. But sadly, now she was working, she didn’t get much opportunity.
She had been taken on by a firm of solicitors in Chancery Lane during her first week in London. She liked the work as it was more varied than back in Bristol. Sometimes, if there was no junior available to deliver documents to one of the barristers in their chambers at the Temple, or the law courts, she took them. Aside from this breaking up the day and providing a chance to be out in the fresh air, she found the Temple appealing because it was so ancient.
It was exciting living in London. Everything seemed to go at twice the speed of Bristol. Rush hour had been terrifying at first; she couldn’t bring herself to elbow her way on to buses and the tube the way everyone else did. But she learned to, and now she could run after a bus and jump on the back as it was moving, leap off at traffic lights, even cross the road dodging through cars. She loved the incredible mixture of people too. Businessmen in bowler hats with furled umbrellas, strap-hanging on the tube alongside manual workers. Young girls in market-style clothing, their hair in beehives and Cleopatra-style eye makeup, mingling with women who looked as if they’d stepped out of the pages of Vogue.
There were so many different nationalities too. In just one day she could hear Germans, French, Greeks, Australians and Americans, and see Africans, West Indians, Arabs, Chinese and Japanese. And the shops catered for everyone – in Kennington alone you could buy anything from a kebab to a yam, fantastic sari material or halal meat. She and Dan had been up to Soho a few times at night, and had been both shocked and amused by the number of strip clubs and dirty-book shops. Yet even more incredible was that it was theatreland too. As people in evening dress hailed cabs or went into the expensive restaurants, just around the corner