Dad was sitting in his chair nearest the fire, smoking his pipe. He’d been too old to enlist, there was that to be grateful for or they really would have been in the shit, Freda alone with three kids to raise. He read the paper and didn’t look up at Dora dancing and throwing her arms around.

‘You’ll ruin that kid, praising her all the time,’ he often told his wife; he was a firm believer in children being seen and not heard. He’d never had all this claptrap going on with Lil or June, why with Dora?

‘Ah, she’s full of joy, little Dora,’ Mum would say indulgently. ‘Let her dance, where’s the harm in it?’

Mum’s indulgence to Dora seemed to know no bounds. She scrimped and saved enough to send the girl for a few elocution lessons, to iron out the thick Cockney accent in her voice. Singing lessons followed, and then dance classes down at Harry Willoughby’s decrepit old dance hall. It all cost the earth and there had been rows over it, Dad said it was more than they could afford, but to Freda nothing seemed too good for Dora.

Dora was aware that Lil and June watched her resentfully. Poor scrawny June with her built-up left shoe was always eager to please, so eager that being a tell-tale never bothered her for a minute. Dora would watch almost pityingly as June loaded the washing into the Baby Burco in the scullery every Monday before school, getting her hands red and cracked from handling the washing powder, winding the whites through the mangle, then the coloureds, then hanging the clean washing out on the line in the yard. No one ever gave her a pat on the back, but Dora got plenty. She was destined for better things, and she knew it.

So Dora danced and twirled and very soon she blossomed into a beauty, as they all knew she would.

Lil was twenty years old in 1955 when she got married to a dull nervous man twelve years her senior. His name was Alec and he worked as a clerk down the bank and was shell-shocked from being in the infantry during the war.

By her eighteenth, when she was bridesmaid for Lil, June was courting a long lanky streak of piss called Joe who’d been a conscientious objector. Now he painted houses and kept very quiet about his past when he’d been banged up at Her Majesty’s pleasure for refusing to fight. He worked cheap, so even if people

were put out about his history, they were still pleased to employ him. The war had thinned out the men, there wasn’t much for a girl to pick from any more. So Dora knew that June – although Dad raged about it and called him a lily-livered coward and a disgrace – would probably settle for twenty-nine-year-old Joe. What with the club foot, she was lucky to get anyone, really.

Dora was sixteen when she too was bridesmaid to her eldest sister Lil. And it was at Lil’s wedding reception, held in the local church hall, that she first met Dickie Cole.