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Italian.
    Rosa was struggling to keep up. They spoke only English at home. Mamma had never spoken a word of Italian since the Big Fall-out.
    ‘You are English now … no more peasant talk,’ Mamma had said when they went to live with the Winstanleys in Division Street all those years ago. Rosa now depended on her nonna to hear the old tongue.
    Perhaps Nonna was right and she could try another way. She was going to learn rock and roll and jive for the next charity show. There was the silver medal tap exam coming up soon. Perhaps there was another way to get on a stage.
    They were practising her jive routine in the playground, Maureen, Celia and a group of older girls who were trying to copy the moves, when Sister Gilberte and Sister Monica caught her doing the split jump and throwing her legs around Bernardette Dumphy with her brown knickers bared for all to see.
    ‘Santini, put your legs down this minute and get back into the form room! The devil is in your drawers already and you’re not above twelve years old. We shall have to knock some sense into you before you shame the good name of the Sorrows.’
    She took the full force of the beating without a sound. It was only what she deserved for all her devilment, lies and deceit. Sin would always be punished, they were told often enough, so she would offer this pain for the starving orphans of Hungary. She winced at each stroke but bit back her pain, swallowed her tears. No one was going to thrash out her determination. Do your worst, she thought, you can’t touch me. I’m a Santini.
    Now she could start over with a clean slate to make her dreams come true. This time she would not fail.

4
Neville
    It was Neville’s big idea to start a skiffle band. Everyone wanted to be Lonnie Donegan in the youth clubs and coffee bars around the town in 1957. There were enough lads around the Green Lane Club to form a group, and once Neville got an idea in his head there was no stopping him. Connie’s Youth Club at Zion Chapel was getting a bit tame, with its ping pong table and weekly Brains Trusts. All the best boys were chucked out for smoking, swearing and wearing drainpipes. She and Joy just hung around to see the talent that was getting thinner by the week and so they soon drifted over in Neville’s direction.
    He’d got a tea chest with strings to make a bass, a real washboard that they could thrash with thimbles and a biscuit-tin drum, banging away for all they were worth, even though their rendition of ‘RockIsland Line’ was so awful that the rest of the club backed off to make tea in the kitchen of the tennis clubhouse, away from the racket.
    Neville had a guitar for Christmas and was still learning chords from his Bert Weedon tutor book but he could only manage a decent E chord. All the band had bought trousers that Auntie Su had taken in at the sides.
    However loyal the girls were to their cousin, Connie thought his group tuneless and wooden.
    ‘You need someone up front to sing in tune,’ she suggested, but Nev took the hump.
    ‘Well, none of you are up for it,’ he snapped.
    This snub was just the call to arms Connie needed and she was round to Rosa’s in a flash, along with Joy.
    Sometimes she didn’t know what to make of Neville. He mooned around Division Street with them, chatting and gossiping with Su and the lodgers. He was very up to date with the hit parade but when he was crossed he sulked like a schoolgirl.
    His parents gave him everything he wanted, even when he failed his eleven-plus twice, and he got his bike and a posh new uniform for the Lawns School for Boys in the west end of town.
    Going to Rosa’s was always fun. It was generally chaos in the Bertorelli flat above the salon, smelling of rotten eggs and ammonia and nappy buckets – Maria had produced another son, Luca – but Rosawas fed up of baby-minding and glad to get out of the house.
    ‘We’re going to form our own skiffle band,’ Connie announced. ‘If Nev’s lot are all that’s