Free Abdication: A Novel by Juliet Nicolson Page B

weather, the food, the traffic, the clothes, all proclaimed how different life was back home. She felt as if she had been turned upside down. She had considered going up to her attic bed but as she had passed the ever-open door to Rachel and Simon’s room she had caught sight of Simon standing in front of the mirror, his back to the door. He was juggling his huge stomach from one hand to the other while chanting to himself loudly enough for May to hear “wobble wibble, wibble wobble.” He was stark naked. May did not want to attract his attention by climbing the squeaky ladder and instead silently retraced her steps downstairs.
    She had hoped to find Sarah there, but then remembered how her cousin had packed up her rollers and hairbrushes before setting off to give a shampoo and set to one of her richer clients, one of several,bored, indulged wives who were only to happy to fill the vacant hours by having their hair curled and styled. May had learned quickly that hard work was the habit of the Oak Street household. Simon and Nat’s buoyant tailoring business brought relative affluence to number 52, and between them the family tried their best to ease a little of the poverty that surrounded them. The neighbourhood was a poor one, with unemployment and the resulting deprivation often leading to desperate behaviour. Petty thieving was rife, even within Oak Street itself. Only the other day, after a pair of prized racing pigeons disappeared from the back yard at number 73, a delicious smell had come seeping from under the Smith’s front door at number 54. There were ten children in the Smith family and the elder ones wore shoes with a hole punched into the side, a warning sign to pawnbrokers that these shoes were the property of the local school and only out on loan. The children tried to hide the hole from their friends by stuffing an extra sock in the side but no one else was fooled. Simon and Nat would pass on cast-off coats and waistcoats that came their way, Rachel was forever popping next door and into other houses in the street to see if they could do with a bit of leftover pie and Sarah cut the neighbours’ children’s hair and helped them with their letters and numbers, in exchange for the occasional bantam’s egg supplied from the backyard coops.
    Apart from Simon wobbling away in his bedroom, the house was empty. Glad for the rare chance to be alone, May went into the parlour where a two-day-old newspaper was lying on the leather sofa. Nat was fascinated by politics and had heard long ago that The Times was the paper of the educated classes. His neighbours, if they were interested at all in reading the news, got their daily information from the Daily Worker . But Nat had become friendly with a butler, a customer from a big house in the West End, for whom Nat had made a smart black working jacket and matching pair of trousers. Each morning, the butler would collect the previous day’s copy of The Times from his employer’ssmoking room, have a quick look at the sports pages and then pass the paper on to Nat. They would meet at the bus stop on Bethnal Green Road when the butler was on his way to work or at Goides, the Whitechapel café where Jewish intellectuals went to discuss politics and literature over small cups of thick Turkish coffee and glasses of lemon tea.
    May turned the pages of Nat’s secondhand paper, looking for the names of the latest winners of the Littlewoods football pools. Sam had suggested the pools might make their fortune.
    “Every day someone wakes up to a morning of good news,” he argued, “and to a means of escape from a hard life. Maybe one day it will be me. Then I will buy a yacht,” he promised, “and we can sail round the world like kings and queens.”
    But May could find no reference in the dog-eared newspaper to anyone celebrating a windfall. The first few pages were covered with columns of boxed-in advertisements. The front page carried notices from financial advisors,