Dolly's War by Dorothy Scannell Page A

wedding suit, me large and shiny and, because I’d had my hair cut far too short, looking like an all-in wrestler. (Years later when, a reformed Dorothy, I lived at the home of the Superintendent of the office and his wife because of war-time bombing, he told me he had never forgotten our entrance at the dinner. He thought Chas, a young slim boy, had been trapped by an enormous and elderly woman, although he said it was obvious I was very clever because I won the general knowledge and spelling game they played that night! Chas thought it would have been more diplomatic for me to have lost the game and let someone higher up the strata win. The prize was a make-up kit and ever after Chas never worried whether I made up or not, and I’ve never learned how to.) No one was brave enough to ask me to dance, although I would not have accepted for fear of shaking my baby about. Chas was very much in demand for he was a very good dancer and the agents’ wives all looked so glamorous, beautifully gowned and ‘made up’.
    I knew we just had to get away from the house in which we were living and I spent the days wandering from estate agent to estate agent. Finally, I passed an agents just opening up in Goodmayes. I was their first customer and they had one house to let. This house, an enormous one, had been converted into two flats and we secured the lower one with an enormous garden. No one ever seemed to look at the top flat and it was like living on an island. There were two huge fireplaces in the lounge, our bedroom had been the library, and my mother lent me the money to purchase sixty yards of curtaining. It was very pretty in pale green and pink stripes, but as I could only spend 4½d. per yard it was really only the quality of bandage, so that when Chas was away canvassing in the evenings I had to sit in the dark because the lounge was in front of the house and the curtains transparent. The garden was surrounded by a wall which was broken down at the end and whenever I went into the garden to hang out the clothes an enormous German dog would leap over the wall snarling at me. The house had been empty for so long he thought he owned it so Chas had to do what he could to mend the wall, for the dog’s owner, also a foreign lady, simply thought it all rather amusing. At first Chas, not being a do-it-yourself man, built the wall, brick symmetrically above brick, so that it all fell down, but he managed it in the end, although we could never sit in the garden and always had one eye on the wall during brief trips, for the German hound was always trying to struggle over.
    Our furniture looked like doll’s toys in this lovely old house and it was difficult to keep warm unless one crouched over the fire – we couldn’t afford two fires. But we were happy there; ‘An Englishman’s home is his castle,’ was true for us.

Chapter 5
Pregnant Pause
    With the birth of my first child only weeks away I began to feel very excited, although coupled with the excitement was the fear that because of the previous restless months, fierce dogs, strange landladies and constant upheaval, my baby might have suffered, for Mother had said when hearing of my pregnancy, ‘Now, Dolly, relax and think peaceful thoughts, put a beautiful picture over your bed.’ She was pleased when she knew everything for baby’s needs had been procured, but some people thought it was tempting providence to buy the pram or cot beforehand.
    In one way I had been deceitful where the authorities had been concerned but as I deceived them on behalf of my unborn child I stilled my conscience. I had booked in at the maternity wing of Queen Mary’s hospital at Stratford when I lived at Forest Gate as it was necessary to make reservations in the very early stages of pregnancy, and it would have been too late to have booked up at a maternity hospital when we moved to Ilford.
    We had persuaded my parents to move into the upstairs