Pat Heady, who owned the café, was a woman in her early fifties, skinny, bedraggled and slovenly, and she was often very rude to her customers. The café was as grubby as its owner.
‘What do you want to work here for?’ Pat had asked Molly, looking at her with deep suspicion.
For two pins Molly would have turned and walked out. But she needed a job and, however grubby Pat and her café were, it was just a three-minute walk from home, and she needed to pay her way.
‘Because I need a job,’ Molly said, tempted to add that only a desperate person would want to work in Pat’s.
‘I only pay sixpence an hour, and it’s hard work.’
‘I’ll take it.’ Molly didn’t think she had any choice.
‘God love you!’ Pat’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. ‘I thought a posh bint like you would sooner put a fork in her eyes than work here.’
‘Desperate times call for desperate measures,’ Molly said with a grin. She quite liked being called a posh bint; she thought she would tell George about it when she eventually got round to writing to him. ‘When can I start and what are the hours?’
‘Start tomorrow if you like. I want you ten till two, but if you’re any good I might stretch that from nine to three,’ Pat said. ‘It’s mostly cooking fry-ups.’
Molly could see that the frying pan on the stove was half full of lard and that there were four eggs floating around in it. She thought she could definitely improve the standard of the cooking by using less fat. But she kept that to herself. ‘I’ll be in at ten then. My name is Molly Heywood.’
She got home to find Constance beaming.
‘The landlord has just been round. He said you could use the little box room on the next floor if you clean it out and give it a coat of paint,’ she said gleefully. ‘He doesn’t even want any rent, because it’s too small to let.’
‘How wonderful!’ Molly exclaimed. ‘And I’ve just got a job, too. I’ll pop up and see the room, because it’ll be dark very soon, then I’ll come back and make some tea and tell you about the job.’
The room was hardly bigger than a cupboard, with no gas light in it, but Molly thought once she’d scrubbed it out it would be fine.
Constance was delighted, too, that Molly had found a job. ‘Pat could do with some lessons in hygiene,’ she said. ‘But the café is close to home – a good thing in the winter months – and it’s a chance to get back on your feet. Now let’s think what we can put in your new room to make it homely.’
Pat required nothing more of Molly than the ability to cook things like bacon and eggs, sausage and chips, or cheese on toast, to wash up and ring up money in the till. It was as different from working at Bourne & Hollingsworth as it was possible to be. Almost all the clientele were male, either market traders or local workmen. They were rough, noisy, many with the table manners of pigs, but they appreciated Molly, the time flew by and she could walk home in five minutes.
She had to wait until Sunday to scrub her room out and give it a coat of whitewash. She slotted the truckle bed and a slender chest of drawers of Constance’s in, and some hooks on the back of the door became her wardrobe. She bought a yard of cheap cotton in the market to make a curtain for the tiny window, and Constance dug out a bright-red blanket for her to cover the bed and create a cosier feel.
‘It’s an old ambulance blanket,’ Constance explained. ‘They used to have red ones to hide the blood. A rescue worker gave it to me during the war when I was bombed out, and I never thought to return it.’
The room was terribly cold, of course, and there was no way of heating it, but Molly put a couple of hot-water bottles in the bed at night, and she slept soundly. She was glad to be able to give her friend back her privacy, as both of them sleeping and living in the same room had been far from ideal.
On her first night in the room, she thought about Cassie having lived next door; in fact, in the room on the other side of her wall. Molly couldn’t help but feel it wasn’t just chance that had brought her here but fate, and that she was right to keep on searching for the truth, because it would surface eventually. She hoped that if someone around here did know more about Cassie, or even the identity of the person who took Petal, they might make themselves known to her.
She kept the picture of Cassie and the one of Petal on the counter at Pat’s Café, and every time a new face came in she’d ask them if they knew Cassie. Not many of them did, but there was a sprinkling of younger men who had known and liked her. Every one of them was shocked that she’d been murdered, and horrified that Petal hadn’t been found.
That was one thing here in the East End that she really liked: people cared about children. Not just their own, but all children. In the main, they weren’t concerned about colour or whether the mother was married either. But then, the East End had always been a melting pot of colour, culture and religion. Russians, Poles, Chinese, Jews, lascars, Africans and West Indians – many of them had arrived here as seamen and ended up staying. They had heard the evil racism that Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts had tried to rouse the rabble with in the thirties, yet mostly they shut their ears. They had stuck together and helped one another through the Blitz, too. Molly was beginning to understand why Cassie had stayed here for so long, and also to realize how hurt she must have been by some of the narrow-minded people in Sawbridge.
One Sunday morning right at the end of January it had begun to snow while they were in church, and when they came out it was very thick on the ground and it was hard for Molly to push Constance’s wheelchair. Ted Barlow, a neighbour from Myrdle Street, rushed over to help and, with a lot of laughter, as both Ted and Molly kept slipping, they got Constance and the chair home.
Molly had put a half-shoulder of lamb on a low gas to roast before they went out, and it smelled wonderful. The fire was banked up and, with a little poking, it was soon blazing.
‘I think the snow is going to be around for a while,’ Constance remarked as she looked out the window. ‘It’s a kind of blessing, isn’t it? All the ugliness around us is hidden.’
‘Not much of a blessing for those too poor to buy coal, though,’ Molly said thoughtfully. Since living here, she’d become very aware of what poverty really meant. Back home in Somerset, it wasn’t so clearly defined, as people grew their own vegetables and kept a few chickens. They might have little more than the clothes they stood up in, but they weren’t hungry. She’d seen plenty of people round here who really were; they were gaunt with hollow eyes, stooped and slow with the desperate struggle to get through each day, with no hope things would improve. Hardly a day passed without her reading in the paper about an old person found dead in their home from malnutrition or cold. It preyed on her mind and she wished there was something she could do to help.
‘You are right, my dear.’ Constance sighed deeply. ‘In the bitter winter of 1947 people were burning their furniture to keep warm. Bomb damage had left holes in roofs, and broken windows, and there was no one, or any materials, to fix things. I heard of families who got into one bed together as soon as they got home; it was too cold to do anything else. I was lucky the church provided me with coal. I used to ask people I knew were in a bad way round here for the evening.’
‘I bet you were a tower of strength to people during the war,’ Molly said. Constance always thought of others before herself. She would willingly give away her last crust of bread to someone in need. That was probably the reason people around here did so much for her, now that she needed help.
‘Everyone did their bit during the war. I was nothing special.’ Constance shrugged. ‘But however grim you think it is, Molly, things are getting better. There is plenty of work now, the bomb sites are being cleared and new homes built. As for the new Health Service, that’s miraculous. I often wondered how many died in the East End in the past because they didn’t have a shilling for the doctor.’