The Knock

To my mother –
And to mothers and daughters everywhere.
And of course, as always, to Cliff, with all my love.
You make it possible.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To Steve and Lynne Ottaway, to my Facebook and Twitter and Instagram followers, in fact to everyone on Team Keane who regularly get me up there in the Top Ten Sunday Times Bestseller List, thank you, guys. It is appreciated.

BOOK ONE

1

1955

There were three of them, the O’Brien girls, growing up. Lil the eldest, then June with the remaining limp after the childhood spent in callipers and orthopaedic shoes, then Dora the baby of the family. While Mum worked part-time at the local shop to bring in a few extra pennies, big capable Lil saw to the two younger girls and helped keep the house clean. Not that it was much of a house. It was a measly little rented two-up-two-down in East London, so the three girls had to share a bed and the lav was out in the back yard, a tin bath hanging on a nail beside it.

The girls amused themselves on winter evenings by scraping the ice off the inside of their bedroom window, making pretty patterns. Sometimes the older two would make their hands into rabbit heads and horses and project them onto the wall by

the light of the gas lamp. Christmases and birthdays, if they were very lucky, they got one gift each, and it was never a lavish one. Dad was on the bins. They were poor, but happy.

Except for the bitching, that was. Lil was stoic, robust. June

was nervy, skinny, always cold, shivering in the winter, her feet and hands like blocks of ice even in the heat of summer. And Dora?

It was as if a good fairy had come down off the Christmas tree, waved her magic wand and said: ‘To you, Dora, I give the gift of beauty.’

Dora the baby of the family was the pretty one with her silvery hair, pouty lips and languid blue eyes. The one Mum cuddled, and sighed over, the one people stopped in the street to stare at.

‘What a little beauty!’ they exclaimed.

‘She could be a film star, looks like that.’

‘You must be so proud!’

Dora’s mother Freda was proud of her youngest. None of her family were prizewinners in the looks department. But Dora was the exception and so she was full of confidence, buoyed up by praise, radiant with it. She twirled around their little sitting room to the radio, while Perry Como sang ‘Papa Loves Mambo’ and Dean Martin crooned ‘That’s Amore’. Times were pretty good, things still tight but mending. The war was long over, rationing was – at last – being phased out.

Lil as the eldest child watched her mother clapping and laughing as Dora ‘The Adored’ – her sisters’ nickname for her – leapt around the room. Lil vacuumed the carpets, washed the scullery floor, shopped, caught the rag-and-bone man with his cart at the gate to get the pots mended or sell their old clothes on for a few pennies. She spent most of the week too tired to drag herself around the place, and what thanks did she ever get?