As they were all getting up to leave, though, Phoebe surprised her by slipping her a piece of paper.

‘My address. I don’t suppose you have a fixed address – but do drop me a line if you think of it, will you?’ There was a hesitant smile on her face.

‘D’you really want me to?’ Molly spoke lightly, jokingly, to cover the fact that she was so touched by the request. She could see that Phoebe Morrison had not found it easy to ask. ‘Course I will – I’ll send you a card now and then, let you know where I’ve got to next!’

‘Do,’ Phoebe said briskly, turning away. ‘I’d like that.’

Forty-Six

All that winter she had kept running. That was how it felt now. Keep moving: don’t settle to anything for too long. That was the way to keep life feeling like an adventure, like being on the road – a place where no one could expect or demand too much of her or get to know her too well.

At first she had been with Liza.

‘You can come back to Mum’s with me,’ she said, as Molly wondered what to do at the end of their first camp summer. The season ended in September. ‘See what we can find.’

After a few nights sleeping downstairs on a lumpy couch at Liza’s house in Plaistow, where her thin, harassed mother was bringing up eight other children, Molly moved out to be a paying guest in another house. Liza’s mother also put in a word for her at Tate & Lyle, where she worked, and Molly got a job packing sugar. It was all right for a bit and helped her get on her feet. But she didn’t like factory work and some of the women got on her nerves, forever taking the rise out of her accent (‘Ow! Yow from Birmigum, boy any chance?’). Liza, back in London now, where she had other friends, began to treat her in a very offhand way. Molly knew when she wasn’t wanted and moved on.

In her bag she had a scrap of paper with the address on it of one of the guests at Clacton, a married man who had taken a blatant fancy to her. But he had also offered her a job in a cinema in South London. Molly had been surprised. He was a big, beefy, red-faced man who looked more like a butcher.

‘You’re just the sort of girl I could do with,’ he’d said, ogling her shamelessly, even in front of his wife, while tucking into his roast chicken. ‘You’d bring in the crowds all right – wouldn’t she, Rene?’

Rene looked mildly across the table. ‘I s’pect she would, Bert, yes.’

‘You’ll want somewhere to go – yer can’t stick here all the year round.’ He had insisted on writing the address down and Molly took it, with no thought of doing anything about it – until now.

‘Albert Carter,’ the paper said, ‘Gaumont Cinema’, followed by a scrawled address. She had to ask someone to decipher it for her.