Limehouse, 1945-55
Dolly Farrell went to the bad early on in life, but when she was born, a blank page for history to write on, she already had one major distinction: she came into the world just as Adolf Hitler left it. She was yanked, already screaming, from her mother’s body on the same day the beaten Fuhrer, trapped in his Berlin bunker by the oncoming Allies, decided that the party was over, and put a bullet in his brain.
‘And not a minute too soon. Fucking shame the crazy bastard didn’t do that five years earlier,’ said Sam, Dolly’s father, as he heard the news while smoking a celebratory Player’s down in the sitting room of their rented terrace house. He could hear the new baby bawling its head off upstairs and thought in admiration, Jesus, the mouth on that kid.
My son, he thought, and smiled to himself.
The Farrells were Catholic; not practising as such – there was no church on Sundays for them, no confession – but more or less going by the Catholic creed they’d been raised with. Which meant that this first child, now Dad was demobbed and home from the war and wanting to work on the railways like his dad before him, was going to be followed by many more.
Sam went up after the midwife had done the necessary, cleaned all the muck away, and there was his wife Edie, looking flushed and exhausted, holding the new baby in a blue blanket. Of course it was blue. The blanket was blue because Sam had wanted a boy and refused to countenance anything else. He’d been convinced that the bulge on Edie’s front contained his son, who would play footie with him and be a big healthy lad, take after his dad.
‘My son’s in there,’ he’d once said happily, ecstatic that his wife had got pregnant so quick after he’d come home from the war. Hadn’t expected to live through it, not really, Adolf throwing so much shit at them all, but he had, and he’d climbed down off the train, come home, dropped his trousers and bingo! There was Edie, pregnant.
She’d wanted a girl, of course, but he’d said, ‘No, it’s a boy. Course it’s a boy,’ and he wouldn’t let her get pink stuff for the spare room, only the blue, he was that certain he was right. Sam was always right.
And now look at this. A fucking girl.
Edie’s face was sheepish; she knew he’d be disappointed.
