Secrets of the Homefront Girls Read online

  Contents

  Praise for Kate Thompson

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One: Monday, 4th September 1939

  Chapter 1. Lily

  Chapter 2. Renee

  Chapter 3. Esther

  Chapter 4. Lily

  Chapter 5. Renee

  Chapter 6. Lily

  Chapter 7. Lily

  Chapter 8. Renee

  Chapter 9. Esther

  Chapter 10. Renee

  Chapter 11. Lily

  Chapter 12. Esther

  Chapter 13. Renee

  Part Two: Friday, 24th May 1940

  Chapter 14. Esther

  Chapter 15. Renee

  Chapter 16. Esther

  Chapter 17. Lily

  Chapter 18. Renee

  Chapter 19. Renee

  Chapter 20. Lily

  Chapter 21. Renee

  Chapter 22. Esther

  Chapter 23. Renee

  Chapter 24. Lily

  Chapter 25. Renee

  Part Three: Wednesday, 4th September 1940

  Chapter 26. Esther

  Chapter 27. Renee

  Chapter 28. Lily

  Chapter 29. Esther

  Chapter 30. Renee

  Chapter 31. Lily

  Chapter 32. Esther

  Chapter 33. Lily

  Chapter 34. Renee

  Chapter 35. Lily

  Chapter 36. Esther

  Chapter 37. Renee

  Chapter 38. Lily

  Chapter 39. Lily

  Chapter 40. Esther

  Afterword

  Lily

  Esther

  Author’ Note: Secrets of the Yardley Girls

  Wartime Tips from Britain’s Beauty Bibles

  Sources and Further Reading

  Acknowledgements

  Praise for Kate Thompson

  ‘Inspiring tales of courage in the face of hardship’

  Mail on Sunday

  ‘A lively authentic social history … a hair-raising, but always warmhearted tale’

  My Weekly

  ‘Astonishing’

  Radio 5 Live

  ‘Celebrates the lives of tough wartime matriarchs’

  ITV News

  ‘Crammed full of fascinating stories’

  BBC2 Steve Wright

  ‘Kate Thompson writes books that make you laugh and make you cry, sometimes at the same time. You cannot put them down. I advise you to read them all!’

  Anita Dobson

  About the Author

  Kate Thompson an award-winning journalist, ghostwriter and novelist who has spent the past two decades in the UK mass market and book publishing industry. Over the past eight years Kate has written nine fiction and non-fiction titles, three of which have made the Sunday Times top ten bestseller list. Secrets of the Homefront Girls is her tenth book.

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Kate Thompson 2019

  The right of Kate Thompson to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by herinaccordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  eBook ISBN 9781473698123

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.hodder.co.uk

  I would like to dedicate this book to all the women of the East End who fill my head with stories and my heart with admiration

  We cannot leave men to fight this war alone. Total war makes heavy demands … The slightest hint of a drooping spirit yields a point to the enemy. Never must careless grooming reflect a ‘don’t care’ attitude … We must never forget that good looks and good morale are the closest of companions. Put your best face forward.

  Yardley advert, 1942

  PART ONE

  Monday, 4th September 1939

  Stratford, East London

  1

  Lily

  Lily Gunn gripped her small attaché case, drew in a deep breath and turned into the Shoot. As she picked her way over the dung-smothered cobbles, she had the strangest sensation she was being watched by hundreds of pairs of eyes, peering out from behind Nottingham Lace curtains. She could almost hear the whispers lapping at the old brick walls.

  She’s back!

  News of her return would doubtless be halfway round stinking Stratford come dinnertime.

  Lily shivered and pulled her coat around her shoulders. The smoke-choked sky above her seemed to have shrunk to the size of a matchbox. She’d forgotten how claustrophobic her childhood neighbourhood was, especially now it was wrapped up in anti-blast tape and barricaded behind sandbags.

  The narrow four-storey terraced houses, coated in centuries of industrial soot, bowed inwards into a central square. Lily shuddered as invisible fingers tightened against her throat. All the grime and filth of a hundred years seemed pressed into every crevice and brick. In the middle of the square stood a tiny 18th-century church, slumped in a pool of darkness, smothered in ivy and surrounded by a cluster of graves. There had been violent thunderstorms over London last night after Chamberlain’s announcement, and the sodden graveyard almost seemed to be weeping.

  War had been declared yesterday, but nothing had changed in this small grey corner in the furthest reaches of East London. Tucked away behind Angel Lane Market, this was the Shoot – a maze of alleys and narrow streets that could trap a stranger for a long time. No one strayed down the Shoot by accident.

  Lily had often heard her childhood home referred to as one of the most notorious slums in Stratford: a place where, rumour had it, you’d come in through Cat’s Alley, and your bootlaces would be missing by the time you came out the other end; an area known by the local constabulary as ‘the bunk’, such was its capacity to hide a villain or two.

  To her knowledge, though, apart from the odd merchant navy man getting rolled when he came up from the docks, and the gambling pockets that popped up from time to time, crime here was non-existent. Law-abiding misfits were safe. Lily knew nothing happened in the Shoot without a certain woman’s say-so.

  A pale sun was struggling to penetrate the curdled sky, but the blackout blinds were already down and the mothers of the street were out, scrubbing their doorsteps as if their very lives depended on it.

  Lily snorted as she sidestepped a pail of soapy water. Hitler might be trampling across borders, but God forbid you be branded the filthy cow of the Shoot. Give it half an hour and the lanes would be covered in a flannelly carbolic-scented heat as washday proper began.

  The women of the square had high standards and Lily knew who set them. Her. Nell Gunn. The Shoot’s chief female. The woman they respectfully called ‘Auntie’.

  But to Lily, Mother.

  Lily’s gaze swivelled to the graveyard and her heart knocked against her ribs. How can you love and fear a person all at once? Time had not dulled the red-hot mass of conflicting emotions churning her insides. Six years she had been away from this place. Six! So many times she had steeled herself to make the journey across London to see her family. Once, last Christmas, she’d even got as far as the bridge at Bow, clutching at brightly wrapped presents and false bravado, but her nerve had failed her when the smoking chimney stacks of Stratford hove into sight. So she had blamed her absence on work, throwing up excuse after excuse. Somehow, it had always seemed easier to stay away than to confront the turmoil of her past.

  But now, this blasted war had forced her hand. The time for excuses was over.

  ‘Come on, you silly chump,’ she muttered to herself. ‘You can do this.’

  Lily’s eyes roamed the tombstones until she spotted the familiar figure. She had imagined something would have changed in all these years, but sure enough, her mum was right where she had expected her to be. On her hands and knees, tugging weeds from the rank earth of the graveyard. Nell Gunn tended to that graveyard like it was a prize allotment.

  Lily swore her mother had eyes in the back of her head because, in that moment, she rose up like a battered old sail and turned to face her, unblinking. Nothing about Stratford’s mightiest matriarch had changed. Same deep-set penetrating green eyes, same coarse blonde curls scraped under a turban, the face underneath as hard as a hatchet. My God, she even had on the same starched pinny she’d worn the day Lily left, albeit a little more faded. Even soldiers got a new uniform every few years, didn’t they?

  ‘Coming in for a brew then, or what?’ Nell sniffed, looking her eldest daughter up and down as if she’d seen her only yesterday.

  ‘Hello, Mum,’ Lily said weakly, suddenly feeling like she had when Nell had caught her smoking aged thirteen, not a bit like the confident twenty-three-year-old woman she now was. ‘You don’t seem all that surprised to see me.’

  Nell shrugged and pulled a Craven ‘A’ cigarette from under her turban. She lit up and inhaled deeply.

  ‘When we heard the news on the wireless yesterday, I says to your father you’d be home.’ She blew the smoke out on a sigh and picked a bit of lint off her apron. ‘Fucking Hitler …’

  Anger iced her voice. ‘Give me a couple of bricks, a mallet and half an hour alone with that man.’

  Lily winced at her mother’s coarse tongue. Everything had changed, and yet, nothing had changed. She took in Nell’s well-upholstered body, wrapped up in the ubiquitous pinny, her red, blistered hands and mouth as tight as a white-knuckle fist. Her mother had a fearsome reputation that was, for the most part, well-earned. No one wanted to stare down the barrel of an irate Nell Gunn.

  ‘So how comes you’re home? They lay you off?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Lily replied cagily. ‘They’ve had a reshuffle of staff, on account of the hostilities.’

  Nell’s sudden laugh was like a motorcar backfiring.

  ‘Hostilities is it now?’ she mocked. ‘How la-di-da! They put a plum in your mouth down Bond Street?’ Her gravelly voice dropped an octave. ‘Let’s call it what it is, shall we? War!’

  ‘They’re relocating me back to Carpenters Road,’ Lily continued, ignoring her mother’s acid aside, ‘as a charge hand. An advancement they’re calling it, but it doesn’t feel that way. More like a step backwards.’

  Lily thought of her job as a sales girl in Yardley’s gleaming modern showroom and salon at 33 Old Bond Street, and of her small but comfortable lodgings in Hammersmith.

  There had been a gentle rhythm to her life there under the tutelage of Miss Olive Carmen. Close her eyes and she could still see the frieze floral decoration, the queues that stretched round the block for their famous cosmetics. The scent of lavender, which drifted through the graceful salon, lingered in her imagination.

  ‘Well, welcome back to the real world, girl,’ said her mother, wiping out her memories like vanishing cream.

  ‘I’d say you’re bleedin’ lucky to make charge hand at the factory. No one gets made up off the floor. Look at your sister, five years she’s been there now and she’s still on the belt in the lipstick room.’

  Out of nowhere, hot tears burned Lily’s eyes and angrily she dashed them away.

  Nell’s face softened, and she reached out.

  ‘Come on, love, look on the bright side. Renee and Frankie’ll be made up to have you home, as will your father. It ain’t all bad.’

  ‘I’m all right,’ Lily murmured, recoiling from her mother’s touch and plucking a handkerchief from her sleeve. ‘I’ve just got grit in my eye. I’d forgotten how rotten the air is round here.’

  Nell’s expression remained impassive, obscured by the clouds of blue smoke that curled round her face.

  ‘You still ain’t forgiven me, have you?’

  A rag and boner clattered by, the driver shifting the reins to one hand, so he could tip his cap to Nell.

  ‘Morning, Auntie.’

  Nell nodded back as she mashed her fag end out in the gutter.

  ‘I did what I had to do, Lily,’ she said softly, her eyes dark in the pallid grey light.

  Lily stared bleakly out over the graveyard. ‘I know, Mum, but it’s hard being back. Surely you can understand why?’

  But her mother had no chance to answer, for just then the steam hooter from the gasworks shrieked out. Six a.m. Another hour and all the Carpenters Road factories would be going off, wrenching the workers of Stratford from their beds.

  ‘Right then,’ said Nell briskly, clearly relieved at the interruption. Like most women of her generation, born in the shadows of the Victorian East End, emotions were not something Nell Gunn was comfortable discussing. ‘The nippers’ll be arriving soon. Frankie’s up, Renee’s out fetching the bread. I’ve still gotta make Snowball a cuppa and a bit of breakfast.’

  ‘He still here?’ Lily sniffed, staring over at the tatty bundle of rags that was slowly stirring into life. ‘Why isn’t he with the other tramps down Itchy Park?’

  Bundled under a pile of coats in the church porch was Snowball, the local tramp. Life was fragile down the Shoot and for most, there was more week than money. Five services kept them going – goods on tick, the pawnshop, the tallyman, and a baker’s on the Broadway that would sell Shoot families three loaves of bread and a lump of bread pudding out the back door for sixpence. The fifth service was Nell Gunn.

  ‘Don’t you look down your nose at him, madam,’ Nell snapped. ‘The only thing that separates you from him is the mud and blood of the trenches.’

  ‘All right, Mum,’ said Lily wearily, ‘don’t start.’

  ‘You coming in then, or what?’

  ‘I’m not stopping. I got a room in East Ham.’

  ‘Suit yourself,’ Nell replied. ‘But make sure you come for your tea.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Lily turned smartly and hurried off through the Shoot so her mother wouldn’t see the tears that were now streaking down her cheeks. She had hoped that time away would’ve blunted her fear and shame, that somehow it wouldn’t matter any more. But just being here again in the stench and grime of matriarchal Stratford had set off a wave of emotion that threatened to swamp her.

  How could she set foot in that house again, so choked with memories? How could she ever undo what she had seen?

  She shot a last look at the gravestones emerging from the tenebrous light.

  Secrets. Secrets. Everywhere. Stinking Stratford was built on them.

  2

  Renee

  Renee Gunn’s breath came in gasps as she ran fast … faster still and with a sudden lunge, leapt up onto the back of the lorry that was trundling down Carpenters Road.

  Gripping hard onto the tailboard, she whooped with all the bravado of a nineteen-year-old, laughing as her blonde curls whipped round her face. Only a chump would fork out on bus fares to the factory.

  Carpenters Road at 7.45 a.m. was bedlam. Cranes loading and offloading barges from the canal next to the street, screeching and clashing, men shouting, factory girls in turbans streaming down the street, smoking and giggling. Horses and ca rts, milkmen, buses and, over it all, the incessant blasting of a dozen or so factory hooters …

  This was Renee’s kingdom, the noxious industrial backwater of Stratford, better known to all as Stink Bomb Alley. Bethnal Green had its blind beggar, Bow its bells and Whitechapel its Ripper, but Stinky Stratford made stuff. And of that, Renee was immensely proud. Her corner of East London might have been the poor relation of its famous neighbours, but its factories and firms kept generations of families in work, churning out goods for the whole country.

  Factories flashed past in a blur as the lorry rattled under a low railway bridge, straight through the dirty puddle of stagnant water that always congealed there, showering a group of Clarnico sweet factory workers walking by.

  ‘Time you took a shower, girls!’ Renee hollered. ‘But then, I always knew you was filthy!’

  ‘Sod you, Renee Gunn!’ screamed one of the girls, wringing out her sopping dress skirts.

  ‘Charming!’ Renee grinned back, flicking up her middle finger.

  Renee Gunn was the blue-eyed, blonde-haired golden girl of Yardley’s, cruising through life with a born insouciance and switchblade charm.

  As the lorry picked up speed down the twisty-turny street, the stench of boiling animal carcasses from the abattoir mingled with the sickly scent from the marzipan factory.

  The sound of the hooters began to fade away. Bugger it, that must mean it was nearly eight a.m. They’d be closing the gates any minute.

  As they drew level with Yardley’s neighbouring factory, Berger’s, a chorus of wolf whistles filled the air.

  ‘Aye-aye! Up the Lavender Girls!’

  There he was, smoking his morning fag. Alfie Buckle, a so-called ‘Berger’s baby’ who lived near the paint factory in one of the tied properties. Alfie was definitely the alpha-male of the factory – tall, blue-eyed, with a body honed in a boxing gym.

  ‘Oi-oi, lads, here she is, Stratford’s answer to Jean Harlow. Get down here and give us a kiss, Renee Gunn.’

  ‘You wanna kiss? Come here and get it.’