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little pleasure, went into your making but I do not know, I cannot guess, if the dark-eyed stranger who put his hand up the skirt of the penniless orphan was cynical, or tender, or desperate, or carried away by the moment. Had she done it before, did she know what she was doing? Was she scared? Or full of desire? Or half raped? He was good-looking enough, God knows. Women went mad for him. Perhaps she was the first woman who went mad for him. Did she think about him when she made his bed up in the mornings? Had she pressed her cheek against the pillow and wished the pillow were his cheek?
    ‘She was only a slip of a thing but she was bold as brass,’ Grandma used to say.
    I’d like to think it went like this: She closed the door behind her, locked it. There he was on the bed, brushing up his Shakespeare. He looked up, hastily laying aside his well-thumbed copy of the Collected Works. She started pulling off her chemise. ‘Now I’ve got you where I want you!’ she said. What else could a gentleman do but succumb?
    Nine months later, her heart gave out when we were born. Apart from that, I don’t know anything about her. We don’t even know what she looked like, there isn’t a picture. She was called Kitty, like a little stray cat. Fatherless, motherless. Perhaps Mrs Chance’s house was even a haven to her, in spite of the stairs – she must have run up and down the stairs twenty times a day, thirty times a day. And the grates to be leaded, the front steps to be scoured.
    Not that Mrs Chance was what the French call exigeante. She didn’t run the fanciest boarding house in Brixton, it barely managed to cling on to respectability by the skin of its teeth, and you could have said the same of her. There were Boston ferns, in green glazed pots, on stands, and Turkey rugs, but the whole place never looked plausible . It looked like the stage set of a theatrical boarding house, as if Grandma had done it up to suit a role she’d chosen on purpose. She was a mystery, was Mrs Chance.
    Melchior Hazard slept here, but not for long. His theatre-doorstep vigils, his audition ordeals paid off. He and his cardboard crown were gone by the time our mother missed her first period. She vomited every morning, quietly, so that Mrs Chance would not hear. The war began, that August, but I don’t think our mother cared. Mrs Chance never heard the vomiting but she heard the tears.
    We came bursting out on a Monday morning, on a day of sunshine and high wind when the Zeppelins were falling. First one wee, bawling girl; then the other, while Mrs Chance did all the necessary. She’d called the doctor but he never got there. Our mother took a look, too weak to hold us, she’d been in labour since the day before yesterday, but Mrs Chance always told us she took a good look and managed a smile.
    Why should she have smiled? She was just seventeen years old, no man, no home. There was a war on. All the same, Mrs Chance always told us that she smiled and Mrs Chance was sometimes stingy with the truth but never lied. ‘Why shouldn’t she smile? She hadn’t got a mum or dad. A baby is the next best thing.’
    The sky was blue, that morning, said Mrs Chance, and there was a wind that made the washing on the clotheslines dance. Monday, washday. What a sight! All over Brixton, long black stockings stepping out with gents’ longjohns, striped shirts doing the Lambeth Walk with flannel nighties, French knickers doing the cancan with the frilly petticoats, pillowslips, sheets, towels, hankies all a-flutter, like flags and banners, everything in motion. The bombs stopped and the little kids came out to play again. The sun shone, the kids were singing. When Grandma Chance had had a couple, she sometimes sang the song they sang when we were born:
    The moon shines bright on Charlie Chaplin
    And his shoes are crackin’
    For want of blackin’
    And his little baggy trousers they need mendin’
    Before they send him
    To the Dardanelles.
    Poor old Charlie,