London Belles. Annie Groves
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once he knew that there was to be a baby. How he had loved Tilly. And his mother had softened towards Olive once she had become a grandmother.
Olive had repaid her in-laws’ kindness by nursing first her mother-in-law through ill health to her death, and then more recently her father-in-law, Bert.
A better daughter-in-law than Olive it would be impossible to find, her late mother-in-law had been given to saying in her later years.
‘Lodgers?’ Nancy queried sharply now, breaking into Olive’s thoughts, her narrow face beneath her greying hair taking on an expression of pursed-lipped disapproval. ‘Well, I don’t know about that. That’s not the kind of thing we do round here. I don’t want to disappoint you, Olive, especially with you needing to replace Bert’s pension – after all, no one can live on fresh air – but I’d think twice if I were you. After all, you don’t want people thinking you’re lowering the tone. Of course, if you was to think of selling the house, then I reckon that my daughter and her husband might be willing to take it off your hands.’
Aware that Nancy was trying to manipulate her, Olive smiled pleasantly and pointed out, ‘There’s plenty of houses in the Row already owned by a landlord and rented out.’
‘Yes, but they’re respectable types. After all, most of them work in the civil service for the Government, and they’re decent families who rent the whole house, not just a room. You get all sorts when you just let out a room: young men – and young women – behaving like they shouldn’t. There could be all sorts of goings-on going on.’ Nancy sniffed again, her pursed mouth becoming even more prune-like with disapproval. ‘Anyway, I don’t know how you could take in lodgers, seeing as you’ve only got two bedrooms, same as the rest of us, and there’s you and Tilly living there already.’
‘There’s the attics: that makes two more,’ Olive pointed out calmly. ‘I’ve made up my mind to give it a try, Nancy. Like you said, our Tilly doesn’t bring in that much.’
‘You could go back cleaning, like you did before Bert got took bad. There’s still plenty staying on in the Inns of Court, despite all this talk of war.’
‘Well, that’s another thing, Nancy,’ Olive responded, playing her trump card. ‘Tilly’s been telling me that the Lady Almoner, up the hospital, has been saying that if there is a war then anyone with spare rooms is going to have to take in other folk on the Government’s orders, and to my way of thinking it’s better that I let my rooms now whilst I’ve still got a chance to choose who I have living in them.’
For a few seconds Nancy was silent. But never one to give up on an argument she wanted to win, she announced triumphantly, ‘Well, I’m not saying that I don’t admire you for thinking of it, but you’ll have to be careful, you not having a man around. You don’t want the wrong sort. Like I said before, this is a respectable street and you’ll have some saying they don’t want anyone lowering the tone.’
Yes, and you’d be one of the first to complain, Olive thought wryly.
Nancy shook her head. ‘And as for there being a war, well, I’m telling you now there won’t be one. It’s all just talk, you mark my words.’
‘I hope you’re right, Nancy,’ Olive answered quietly.
Olive knew perfectly well that her plans to let out her spare bedrooms to bring in the money they would need to live on now that her father-in-law had died, and his pension with him, would be all over the street within a couple of hours. It was all right for Nancy, Olive thought wryly. She had a husband who brought in a good wage from his work at a factory where they made artificial limbs, close to Barts Hospital, a business that had boomed, thanks to the Great War. Of course, Nancy would have been delighted if she could have persuaded her to sell her house to Nancy’s daughter, who was married with a child of her own, Olive knew. But Olive loved the neat little house in Article Row she had inherited from her father-inlaw, and had no intention of selling it.
‘So how are you going to get these lodgers then?’ Nancy wanted to know, obviously still eager to disapprove of Olive’s plan.
‘I’ve thought of putting a notice in the papers, and probably in the bakery, if Mrs Macharios will let me.’
‘The bakery? But that’s run by them Greek foreigners. We don’t want any of them coming living here in Article Row, thank you very much.’
Olive suppressed a small sigh. She liked the Greek family – members of Holborn’s Greek Cypriot community – who owned and ran the small bakery two streets away.
‘The Macharioses aren’t just foreigners, Nancy, they are refugees. And very nice and pleasant they are too. Besides, you won’t get any of their girls wanting lodgings, because they are very strict with them and keep them at home until they get married, you know that.’
Nancy gave another sniff. ‘Refugees, is it? We’ve got a sight too many of them already without getting involved in a war with Hitler that will bring in some more.’
Olive kept her peace. She suspected that in the eyes of most of the other inhabitants of Article Row, she herself was something of a ‘refugee and a foreigner’ since she had not been born and brought up in the area. She personally liked the mix of people living in the small houses that filled the narrow backstreets of the area: Greeks, Italians, Jewish people, flood tides of the lost and desperate, washed up by the Thames and left to make lives for themselves as best they could, clustered together in their small communities, clinging to the ways of the countries and homes they had left.
Nancy’s sharp tongue, though, was a small price to pay for the pleasure of living in Article Row, Olive admitted half an hour later as she poured boiling water onto the tea leaves she had spooned into her warmed teapot. Olive’s kitchen was her pride and joy. The upstairs of the house was filled with the heavy late-Victorian furniture that her in-laws had inherited from their parents, but after her mother-in-law’s death, Bert had allowed Olive to modernise the kitchen and the front room, even paying for the new gas oven, and the coal-fuelled stove, which not only heated the kitchen but provided hot water as well.
In addition to her gas oven, Olive had a whole wall filled with cupboards just like some she’d seen in the newspaper that had seen on display at the Modern Homes Show. Bert had always had an eye for a bargain and a clever tongue for getting himself a good deal, and he had bartered with a friend of a friend who worked at a wood yard, and who knew someone who could knock up the cupboards for them at a quarter of the price of some fancy factory.
Olive had painted them herself, a really pretty duck-egg blue, which went with the kitchen’s cream walls, and the curtains of pale blue, apple green and white gingham. Ever so proud of her kitchen, she was. Her heart swelled with pride every time she walked into it. From the stone sink under the window she could look out into the garden – a long narrow strip, at the bottom of which was the blank brick wall that separated her garden from that of the house beyond. The floor of Olive’s kitchen was covered in a good practical mosaic-patterned linoleum that didn’t show the dirt. Not that there was any dirt on Olive’s kitchen floor – certainly not. She swept and washed it every single day. Very house proud, Olive was, putting her back into whatever task she took on. That was something that, like her domestic skills, she had learned from the grandmother, who had taken her in after her mother had died and her father had then disappeared from her life. Not been very lucky in their dads she and her Tilly hadn’t. But she’d been determined right from the start to make sure that her daughter had the very best mum she could possibly have and that she would grow up knowing how loved she was.
That was why, over the years, Olive had gently but determinedly turned down several men who had tried to court her, some perhaps for her own sake, but some, she suspected, because of what they had hoped she would bring them, be it a good housewife and a stepmother for their children or, in one or two cases, the hope of the inheritance she might one day get from her in-laws. Well, that day had now come and if there was one thing that Olive was determined on it was that she wasn’t going to have any man coming along and disrupting her routine or her life.
It was ten to five. Tilly would be home soon. Tonight,