Free Ellie by Lesley Pearse

health improved as he tended the garden in his spare time. Doris sewed and knitted for the baby. Each strong kick reassured her nothing could go wrong this time and as each day passed Doris seemed to regain the youth and vitality that had drained away in Bethnal Green.
    Their baby was born in April 1929, a small, but healthy, six-pound girl, and although they had intended to name her Hilda after her maternal grandmother, Doris took it into her head to call her Bonny, a name she’d seen in a film magazine.
    A great many people suggested that Bonny was pretty because she had been awaited for so long. Behind Doris’s back they often spitefully added that her looks wouldn’t last, that she’d soon be as ordinary as her middle-aged parents. But Bonny confounded them all by not only retaining her looks, but becoming prettier with each passing year.
    Moving to Dagenham and all at once finding their dreams fulfilled had a profound effect on the Phillipses. Doris became house-proud, checking to see her windows were the cleanest in the street, her baby’s nappies the whitest. Gradually Arnold was affected by it too, making sure his roses were bigger and the lawn neater than his neighbours’. Doris would walk proudly to the shops with Bonny sitting up in her pram in a sparkling white dress and starched sun bonnet, and even though she observed the effect the Depression was having on some of her neighbours, instead of feeling sympathy for those who had lost their jobs, she began to feel she and Arnold were just a cut above others.
    Arnold was fortunate that as well as being a diligent worker, he was liked by his superiors. Although other men were laid off at Ford’s, he not only kept his job but was promoted, becoming foreman of his section, and this in turn increased their feelings of superiority. If Arnold sometimes felt saddened that he was no longer ‘one of the lads’, he kept it to himself and put his energies into working overtime to buy the little luxuries he and Doris had always dreamed of.
    Bit by bit, the old shabby furniture in their living-room was replaced by a brown Rexine three-piece suite, an oak gateleg table with matching chairs, an Axminster red carpet with gold scrolls and an elegant standard lamp. They had two sets of curtains – heavy red ones for the winter and flowery cotton ones for the summer – but Doris’s pride and joy was a walnut, glass-fronted china cabinet where she could display the tea-set given to them by Dr Freeman and a set of glasses which looked like real crystal.
    But Bonny was the axis Doris and Arnold’s world spun on. Everything they did was with her in mind. Arnold never had a pint in the pub on the way home because he had to get back to read Bonny a bedtime story. Doris would stop anything she was doing if Bonny wanted her. Every fine Sunday they took her out for picnics; on summer evenings they took her to the park together; if she was fretful she slept between her parents; if she was naughty they blamed themselves.
    By the time Bonny was five and starting school across the road, Doris was already looking ahead, sure that Dagenham didn’t have enough to offer their precious daughter. She cringed when she saw how other children played in the streets and saw danger lurking behind every bush and tree.
    Without Bonny at home during the day, Doris had so much more free time. When she heard that a woman’s group based in Romford were looking for new members to expand their charity work, it seemed the perfect way to break into what she called ‘polite society’.
    In a year of helping out in soup kitchens for the unemployed, sewing circles, hospital visiting and fund-raising, Doris learned a great deal. She managed to modulate her cockney accent and to dress with a little more style, but above all she discovered that middle-class people gave their daughters dancing lessons.
    Arnold was hard to convince. He saw it as a waste of good money to take his daughter to Romford every Saturday