Lucky Bunny: A Novel

By Jill Dawson

"Pacy and atmospheric…wickedly good."
—Marie Claire (UK)

"Dawson's heroine is so fresh and spirited that she carries the day."
—Sunday Times (London)

Having already made waves in the United Kingdom, Lucky Bunny has come to America. Acclaimed poet and author Jill Dawson, whose previous novels have been shortlisted for England's Whitbread Award and Orange Prize, now gives us the story of vivacious and endearing thief Queenie Dove, a Moll Flanders for World War II Britain. Brilliantly recreating mid-twentieth century London, from the bustling streets to the seamy underworld, from the Depression Era through the Blitz and into the 1950s, Lucky Bunny entangles readers in the adventurous life of a truly captivating anti-heroine, a self-proclaimed genius in the art of survival. Before the Krays, there was Queenie Dove… and readers will never forget her.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Oct 30, 2012
• ISBN: 9780062202512

Jill Dawson

Jill Dawson is the author of Trick of the Light, Magpie, Fred and Edie, which was short-listed for the Whitbread Novel Award and the Orange Prize, Wild Boy, Watch Me Disappear, which was long-listed for the Orange Prize, The Great Lover, and Lucky Bunny. She has edited six anthologies of short stories and poetry, and has written for numerous UK publications, including The Guardian, The Times, Vogue, and Harper's Bazaar. She lives in Norfolk with her husband and two sons.

Book preview

PART ONE

Queenie’s not my real name, of course. The name I was given at birth is plain enough, well known, and easily looked-up. Queenie’s the name I took, chose for myself. Only the best for me, I remember thinking, at the time: the Queen of Everything. A cracking name. I wanted it, I took it, I made it mine. As there might be some proper consequences attached to my real name, it wouldn’t be right to set my given name down. I shouldn’t even call that one my real name because now I think of it, isn’t that the point? Queenie’s real, to me. For the purposes of this account, then, best you think of me as Queenie throughout: the name I’ve gone by for most of my life.

My best friend Stella knows my given name, but never calls me it. Yesterday she drove me up here, to my new home by the river, and as we picked up the keys from the estate agent’s office and I signed Queenie Dove on the contract, she was giggling and shoving me in the ribs and trying to hide her excitement, whispering in my ear:  . . . Can you believe your luck sometimes? Go on—can you?

When I’d turned the key to my own front door, Stella went on: "Don’t you ever ask yourself: ‘Blimey, how did I get here in one piece, and get away with it all?’ "

You might find this strange, but honestly, I never have asked myself that. And it struck me hard, Stella saying it. As if now that she’s mentioned it, I’ll have to pinch myself. My luck might fly off. I don’t think I’ve breathed out yet. Am I safe? This old cottage has a back door and a garden that can’t be seen from the front, and a garden wall with a door in it that leads to the river: an escape route. I noticed it right away. And it’s nothing flash, either, doesn’t draw attention to itself. I’m not swanking, it’s nothing like what I could actually afford. Bricks and mortar and my own garden shed; a wad of money all cozy in the silk lining of my red leather handbag; a child sleeping outside in the car: those things are real, those are things, not ideas, but luck, and getting away with it? How did I get here, after all?

So after Stella’s gone back to London, and it’s late, midnight, and I’m lying for the first time in the brand-new, stiffly squeaking bed, snuggling in the fresh shop-scented linen, and geese are honking outside by the water, and there’s the rest of the money, fat and solid, all piled up high in the otherwise empty white cupboard, I can’t sleep for thinking about it, for wanting to answer Stella’s question.

I’m so wide awake I have to get out of bed and wander into the living room, bumping into a crate. I put the light on and blink hard. My eyes fall on the open door to the kitchen, on the wooden table, to the bag of cherries, bought from a roadside stall, that Stella’s dumped in a blue china bowl—her contribution to the unpacking. I walk over to it. Crumpled newspaper springs around the bowl: the purple-red cherries glistening against the blue. A bowl of cherries: I pop one in my mouth. I spread the newspaper out, glance at the headlines: look at the faces, the wanted list. Even now, years later, there are more arrests, names I know. No one has ever said anything that could lead to me. Stella’s right then, surely? This is luck. I’m here, in one piece, in a life better than anyone might think I deserve. Because don’t we all believe that bad behavior will be punished, that those who stick to the rules will get their reward eventually? If not in heaven, then in a beautiful cottage by the river and a healthy child and a table filled with fresh cherries in a bowl.

Not me, though. I don’t think I ever believed in fairness. Where would I have learned that? And like the song says, I regret nothing. I promised myself that long ago. No moaning and groaning and tearing at my clothes. I’ve read Moll Flanders—it’s one of my favorites, I know the form. But it’s not me: you won’t catch me repenting. Puzzling, yes, but not repenting . . .

Mum once showed me a picture. Of her as a really young girl, with my dad, standing in Docklands at the edge of the water, men loading in the background and those huge cranes towering over her, like a weird insect, and I remember saying, Where am I in that photo then? and her answer: Oh, you wasn’t even a twinkle in your dad’s eye then. A shiver ran through me. Like I could see my own ghost there. How could that be? How could I be looking at a picture of a time when I didn’t exist? But we can, can’t we, it’s what schoolteachers praise us for, and then tell us we have too much of: it’s called having an imagination. I’m good at that, I’ve learned. Making things up. Not telling tales though; I’m not a telltale. I don’t want to drop certain people in it, so I might change some names and the odd fact here and there but not the relevant things, not the gist of it. I don’t think I’m a confessional person. Just a compulsive storyteller.

Take what I say with a pinch of salt if you like, luck always beggars belief. The more someone insists something’s true, the more you’ve got to doubt it, wouldn’t you say? It’s important to me that you don’t know the name my mother chose for me. I hope I’ve left that other-named little girl behind; I’ve worked bloody hard at it. But I do want the answer to Stella’s question. How did I get here in one piece, and get away with it all? If I can understand it, believe it, maybe I can keep it. Maybe I can stay here.

This magistrate, a woman, once said to me, I am rather tired of hearing time and again from those breaking the law, that they had a terribly troubled childhood. Everyone who passes through this court claims to have had an appalling childhood. Surely some people can transcend their childhood, once in a while? Could we at least stop using it as an excuse for everything?

She had this glossy black hair, like the oiled hair of a Doberman Pinscher, and she flashed a smile round the court as she said it, you know, like a dog baring its teeth. What did I think, listening to her, back then? I thought she had a point. I was all for not making excuses. But she annoyed me, too, I’ll admit. I didn’t examine things too much in those days, but dimly, somewhere, I might have wondered, does anyone transcend their childhood? I mean, did she? Did she rise above it, to be someone entirely different from the shape cut out for her? Did her family expect a tearaway, a hoister, a criminal, or a madam, for instance, and instead they got her—a homework-producing Head Girl?

I wasn’t allowed to answer back, of course. I knew she didn’t want an answer. She was bright and hard, skin stretched tight over that gleaming smile. It was probably a throwaway remark; she was just fed up at hearing the same sob stories time and again. It’s funny how that comment from years ago—ten years ago—sailed back just now. I’m standing in my bare feet and nightie on the wooden floorboards in my kitchen, my very own kitchen, eating cherries. Not an excuse then, my childhood; no. But how does anyone do it, really? How did I get here, get to be me? Here goes.

1

My Early Years

I was born in Poplar, East London, in 1933. In school we used to sing: God made the Earth, and God made me. And all this other stuff that God made. The flowers and the rivers and the bumblebee. And me! I loved that song. Did God make me? Or was it Moll and Lucky Boy Tommy—Thomas Dove—one night in Tunnel Gardens, down on East India Dock Wall Road, the tree-lined bit between Blackwall Tunnel and the docks, when he’d plied her with gin and persuaded her to roll up that pink, surgical-looking girdle she wore. A girdle which she would never have needed to wear, Moll, because she was only seventeen and weighed about seven stone, but it was the fashion back then, that kind of underwear. She thought she ought and it would look sophisticated. And sexy. Which to Tommy, it probably did. It turned him on, no doubt: he was Thomas bloody Dove. He would have been insistent, he wouldn’t have taken no for an answer—is it possible to think this, to think about the point when your own father’s juices start flowing, the first moment you are being brought into production, down some tube . . . the first little throb? The idea of me, the dot. Well, yes. Just about possible. But we’ll skip that, because I never did ask them, and I’m only . . . speculating. We’ll go straight to my birth.

I wonder how I knew, one day, that it was my time to arrive. (Doctors still don’t agree on that, do they? A mystery, how labor is triggered. Is it the mother whose pituitary gland secretes oxytocin, or is it actually the baby who sends the signal from its adrenal glands to the mother’s body to signal labor?) This has always interested me. I like to think it was me who decided, that I actually, in some tiny, seedlike part of my consciousness, heard the rag-and-bone man in the street—my granddad!—shouting raaaaagaboooahgh, and decided, yep, sounds good, time’s up, here I come.

He had a horse and cart. Granddad I mean. But he died the year I was born so I only got to ride in it once. There’s a photo of me and whenever I look at it, I’m there: the smell of the horse shit steaming on the street, the bumpiness of that cracked leather seat, the feeling of being Lord of the Manor in my knitted lace baby bonnet and my tie-at-the-neck bouncing pom-poms sodden with dribble, propped up on a bunch of cushions; gazing down from a grand height, jolting round the Isle of Dogs like Lady Muck. You might think this couldn’t possibly be a real memory, I was too young. It must be something made up, something the photograph calls up. What’s the difference? It feels real enough to me.

We lived then in a flat in the tenements built to house dockworkers, and my mum, Molly, was seventeen like I said, and Irish, and a slattern. That’s my word for it. In Poplar the word would have been a bike. She’d arrived in London with her big sister Brodie just a few years before and met my dad, Thomas, at a dance. Dad was twenty-five and all dark and hairy, with the most spectacular temper you ever witnessed. He had—she told me—a good job down the docks when she first met him. Those jobs were well-paid and really sought after, especially since we were in the midst of a depression, and my uncle Charlie was the gang leader so he always assured Dad would get chosen for work, but everyone knew Dad wouldn’t last long, because the job was full of temptations.

One thing about Dad that was true his whole life was that he couldn’t work for anybody but himself. He always fell out with a boss, as soon as the poor sod tried to tell him what to do. Dad couldn’t abide being told. And in that moment, when his temper went off, when he yelled all the joined-up obscenities that came to mind or put his face really close to someone’s and pressed his nose against theirs, he loved the freedom of really saying what he felt, of losing it completely. You could feel the joy crackle around him like a sparkler flaring into life when he lost his temper, and nothing at all mattered.

Our tenements were densely packed buildings with external stone steps, about six stories high, set between Blackwall Tunnel and Blackwall Stairs. All the flats were light-starved, as they faced inwards towards a courtyard, heaped with strings of sopping washing where the women would stand, where my nan would be, most days, peg in her mouth, basket at her feet, chatting, laughing, surrounded by bins that were always overflowing.

Moll had wanted to give birth at home, I know, because she was too lazy to get herself to the hospital, but home was a right tip, really filthy, I mean it always stank to high heaven: of urine, my dad’s sweaty baked-bean armpit smell, cigarettes, spilled beer, dirty, unwashed clothes, paraffin for the heater. Those were the smells that would have greeted me after that clean pure smell of blood and adrenaline and the whoosh of arrival. Shit. I should have been warned. But I was nothing but an optimist, from day one, and in that respect maybe I was more like my nan, not my mum. Or more like myself, perhaps. Surely there’s a bit of me that’s inexplicable, that’s just me? It can’t only be genetics and environment can it, otherwise, well, wouldn’t we be repeating everything, walking round like clones? I was never one of those kids who shouted, I never asked to be born! because it wasn’t true. I longed to be born, I was even two weeks early. I jumped out, I really did. I couldn’t wait.

I remember Nan telling me that the midwife was just a slip of twenty-two, her name was something like Jennifer, or perhaps Rosie—let’s call her Rosie—and she was still in training with the nuns who delivered babies in our part of London; she would have had a uniform on, and worn a handkerchief over her nose and chin. This girl had managed, with Nan’s help, to get the flat into some sort of state to greet me. Of course I can’t remember this, but you know I can imagine it or make it up and that’s nearly the same thing: the midwife’s young high voice squeaking while I was starting my descent, saying things to my mum like, The heartbeat’s 126, that’s very good, and, Oh—oh, Mrs. Dove, you never said the baby was breech . . . ?—a question that Mum wouldn’t have known how to answer. There’d be Nan, too, her slightly raspy tone, always clacking her dentures somehow because they were a bad fit; saying things like, Well for God’s sake, she didn’t know! And then to herself: I’ll find someone to tell that good-for-nothing son of mine that he’s been and got a little one on the way, and her knees snapping and creaking like twigs on a fire, as she knelt by the bed. She’d never be sure where Lucky Boy Tommy was, although even at the cell-dividing stage I could have told her: the betting shop was always worth a try.

I was pushed about, then, or whatever it is that a baby feels, pulled and pummeled in a corkscrew fashion, and all around me the seething walls sort of pumping me and squeezing me. Nan says I ventured one little foot out and it was dramatic: it caused such a shriek—What’s that? My God, what’s that?—that I tried again.

I was still in the sac, all nicely sealed up and wet, and you know mine had to be an original entrance—not a slimy red head like the cliché, no not for me—but a foot inside a bulging transparent sac, like the eye of some fantastical insect or a sea monster, something like that. Nan said they couldn’t believe it when they first saw me: they thought I’d come from the moon! She said the midwife, the young Rosie, actually screamed with astonishment: Oh my word, a footling breech!

In a rush of liquid, all at once, here I am, then, one foot after the other, and no time really for Moll to push, that’s what Nan said; when a baby’s in this position there’s no stopping her. They’re shouting and fussing, the midwife, Nan, Mum . . . and I’m making my first great escape—feet first, leaping, heading for the open, for the light!

That then was the fanfare and kerfuffle when I arrived in such an unusual way, and a few hours later, when he was found (yes, at the betting shop, and in a grand mood, Nan remembers, because he’d won two a pound and brought home a crate of beer), would have been the first time I met my gorgeous dad.

It must have been late by then. The midwife would be long gone, and Nan would have been snoozing by the fire, her knitting pattern sliding off her knee, a giant gobstopper clacking against her dentures; one foot in her pink slipper on the cradle she’d popped me into to rock me now and then. Mum lying with her face to the wall on a bed in the same room, her long auburn hair spread out on the pillow like a mess of hay. I guess Mum was sometimes a looker—I think I learned that over the years, the reactions she got when she pranced down the park with us in the pram, all bound up in her tightest skirt and her clickiest heels, her hair washed and piled on top of her head in curls. But this was rare. She mostly lay in bed in those early years, with her face to the wall, and allowed Nan to do any taking care of us that happened. If she did get herself tarted up, she did it with a giddy, brittle kind of feeling and we knew it was all going to end badly.

So now Dad came in, and he had his wild black hair slicked down, and such a big, big grin on his face and such pale icy blue eyes. He scooped me up from the cradle and if I close my eyes now I can imagine the massive beating of his heart beside me and the metal buttons on his jacket digging into me and the tickly hair rising up from inside his collar and the powerful smell of him—beer, tobacco, the leather strap from his watch, which was too big for him and he’d been piercing with a knife; a strong, animal smell, sort of bitter and warm all at once. Look what I’ve been and got for my little rosebud, he’s saying, producing from inside his jacket a bunny rabbit, white and sprawling legged, and dangling it in front of me.

Did he really? Did he bring me that bunny the first night I was born? I have a vivid memory of it. It traveled through my childhood with me, turning grey eventually like all of us, and one ear flopping hopelessly over its eye, but then it would have been new, made of felted wool, with soft white ears carrying little flecks of crumbled leather from Dad’s watch strap, and smelling of him. It had a glamorous pink bow around the neck, so I knew the bunny was a girl. Why do I think he must have given me it then and there, the first time we met? Because the shape of my life had begun and I feel certain it was Dad who began it. Things. That was what he gave me from the start in place of anything else and it’s what I ended up craving. Gifts and glamour and novelty, and if it came with a whiff of contraband so much the better.

Nan told me I opened just one newborn baby eye because the other was crusted with gunk and the eyelid wouldn’t budge and my dad laughed, saying to my mum, That baby is winking at me! The gel’s on my side, Molly, and don’t you forget it, and he tucked the rabbit in the blanket I was wrapped in and snuggled me back into the cradle. That was it, in fact. He was gone three weeks and didn’t so much as ask after his new daughter—or her mother—in that time, but why would I care about that? I had the bunny. Came in here like bleeding King Kong . . . upsetting the baby, Nan said, describing him later, unimpressed. King Kong was showing at the new Troxy cinema on Commercial Road: everyone was talking about it.

My brother, Bobby, came along barely ten months later and looked like a scrappy black-haired doll. I do remember staring into the drawer they’d pulled out and laid him in, like he was a pet guinea pig or something, and pushing the empty teat of a bottle towards his mouth and watching his tiny eyes stare at me over the top of it, grateful, I supposed, or desperate.

There was one tap for cold running water and one lavatory shed down in the courtyard at that time, for a whole row of families to use. If it was dark and raining, the corridor and stairs would gleam slick as the skin of a black slug. I wouldn’t dare to venture there, preferring to use the chipped china pot in the corner of the bedroom. It seems to me a little easier to forgive Mum for being so disgusting in her personal habits when I remember that. That was the first five years of my life.

Nan lived one flight down. She was Dad’s muvver, she’d had a great band of boys, and no girls, and all of them bad as socks and sure to be the death of her. Like lots of women at that time she’d all her teeth removed for no good reason except that she couldn’t afford dentists’ bills, and if she had any beauty, I think it went that day with the teeth.

The boys had long since left, all except Charlie and her eldest and wildest, my dad, Lucky Boy Tommy, who she doted on; for all he had been such a bleedin’ handful, for all he got the needle so often and with such dramatic results. She was horrified by his choice of wife. Skinny hopeless Irish Moll who had no good Irish left in her. Moll’s mum had died when she was a girl so in Nan’s view Moll had no idea on God’s bleedin’ green earth how to be a mother. Mum’d been raised by her older sisters and only one of them had come to London with her. Those sisters had been useless, as far as Nan was concerned; they didn’t half bugger up the raising of Moll by imparting no practical skills and indulging Moll’s laziness and helplessness. Nan had been teetotal all her life, despite the many times when Dad and his brother Charlie had tried to hoodwink her with a slug of Haig in her tea. Molly, now eighteen, and a mother of two, already drank like a fish.

My nan used to say to me when I was little, Who did she get you off of, eh? Where’d she find you? It worried me, though I think she meant it kindly. I thought that if it wasn’t the moon, it must have been somewhere far away like Canada. Somewhere icy and clean—a blank slate to drive a glacier through the filth of Molly’s life. I worked out years later that all Nan meant was: how did I get to be so clever? And that was before they tested me, before they knew how clever. Nan couldn’t quite believe I was one of the Dove family. But when she said it then, shaking her head and pursing her mouth, I thought she meant to disown me, or suggest I was the milkman’s daughter, like people did with Meryl Davis.

I didn’t realize it then, but that comment of Dad’s about my winking—if Nan remembered it right, this setting us up together as in cahoots against Mum—was my undoing as far as Mum was concerned. She was depressed, yes, but she was jealous, too. She liked to be the baby herself, the center of attention, and when she clicked first with me and then with Bobby, she loved the fuss. But once the babies came that all changed. It was just crying and pooping and work, work, work. She’d once said to my dad, "Why don’t you do all the bleedin’ nappy-changing and nappy-washing if you love kids so much? and he’d said (apparently), You never ought to have had any, you, and all right then I will do the nappies and I’ll do it a hell of a lot better an you do." So she started this campaign, where she’d never change Bobby until Dad got home so that she could hand him over. I needn’t tell you that in those days men did not change nappies.

Bobby would be sore and red and his little bum kind of scalded looking, but if Dad didn’t turn up for days on end Mum wouldn’t change him. She’d just leave his nappy off and let him piddle and poop anywhere in the flat, like a little rabbit. She was on a protest. I don’t know how she dared to do this, because she must have known it would make Dad mad, mad in a way that always meant fireworks. When he finally did show up, she’d be ready for him. She’d stand in her dressing gown, the house stinking, drawing on her cigarette as she propped up the French dresser, smoking and pretending to be calm. Her heartbeat, the sense that she was ticking, like a bomb ready to go off . . . I could feel it, the moment I heard his key in the door. I’d tug on Bobby’s hand and take him and hide somewhere, under the beds in our bedroom, where we could put our hands over our ears so we couldn’t hear it.

Once I crept out, saw them in the hall. Watched from behind a door crack as he took off his shoe, and threw it at her. It hit her on the shoulder and thudded off the wall, leaving a black smudge, but she just brushed at her shoulder, carried on walking into the kitchen.

Huh! You think that fucking hurt? she couldn’t resist saying, over her shoulder.

So he took off the other one . . . I ran into bed then, back under the pillow, Bunny next to me and only the sound of my own sputtering heart for company. That phrase of Dad’s, the allying of me to him, struck deep. I’m not like her, I thought. I had no sympathy at all for her. No one’s ever going to throw a shoe at me.

But it was a confused thought, because Moll was stubborn, and defiant in her way, and perhaps my stubbornness was as much from her as Dad? When Nan visited over the next few years she was horrified by the state of our place and would spend her whole time on her hands and knees with a dustpan and brush, while Bobby would stand playing by the mouse hole next to the fire, poking a pencil into it to see if he could make the mouse come out. Nan would be scooping up dry filth and crying. What’s got into you, Moll? What on earth are you thinking? I’m telling you, these kids will get sick if you carry on like this . . . it’s the worst pen . . .

Pen and ink. Stink.

Nan decided, finally, that she was the only one who could improve things in her daughter-in-law’s home, so she took it on herself to bathe us, hauling buckets of water from the tap down in the courtyard up the stairs, and setting up a chipped china basin in front of the fire. Bobby would always scream and get a mere dunk: he’d soon be rolled in a thin blanket—there were never any towels—and left in front of the fire, where he’d wriggle out in an instant. He could never be still for long. Moll and Bobby hated water, but I loved it. I loved that trickling feeling as Nan splashed it over me. I loved sitting up in my cramped bowl, once I could, and gazing at Nan—how she always seemed to me, right from the very beginning, just like a tortoise, with her neck stretching out, all folded and crisscrossed, so many hundreds of times. I loved the tinkle of the drips between her fingers, as she lifted up the old grey flannel and squeezed it; and the way the droplets looked like gold beads when a little flame from the kitchen fire was reflected in them. I loved water—baths, pools, the sea. That was another way that I was different from my mum, who had a suspicion of anyplace green or wet, or not made of bricks.

We didn’t get to go to anyplace green, though, until six years after that, when war broke out and Bobby and I were evacuated. We’d moved from Canada Buildings by then, to a house on the Well Street end of Lauriston Road in South Hackney, near the church, and I’d started at Lauriston School and Bobby was in the nursery class. That was the most extraordinary change. I mean, Lucky Boy Tommy really seemed to have struck lucky: he bought us that house for £250, a massive sum, and he bought a car, too, a Chrysler, which was like a Mercedes in those days—we were the only family in the neighborhood who had one. Remembering this now, I realize that I did have some dim understanding of how unusual it was, but on the other hand, like any child, I just accepted it as an enchanting change in my life, like the Tizer and coconut ices he suddenly bought us, and the little shilling knife he bought Bobby, with the bone handle and the leather sheath. The car was a buttery yellow color, with a top that peeled back and these little canvas flaps in the windows that you could coil up around the window rails when the roof was off and big sweeping curves over the wheels and it was so delicious I used to think it was like one giant ice-cream cone when Dad rolled up outside our house.

It was money which had made this magic, I knew that much. Dad would produce a silver sixpence from behind my ear and pop it on my tongue, or fold a ten-bob note up and poke it in the top pocket of my pinafore dress, patting it and telling me to go buy myself something nice. Silver coins tasted bitter and pennies tasted like blood, but the inky tang of folded notes when I slipped out my tongue and tried it was the best taste on earth. Rule Britannia, two tanners make a bob, Dad used to sing. He’d throw me up in the air when I was still small enough and there would be breath-holding seconds before he caught me again, where my heart would sail through the air with me, but he always did, and then he’d laugh, and snuggle my face with his, brushing me with his prickly chin.

Those early days in Lauriston Road I’d stand at the corner shop with Bobby, mouth watering over the coconut ice and licorice sticks and know that we could choose them and take them home, where there’d be coal in the fire and Sally Lunn’s from Smulevitch’s bakery in Well Street and our lives would be different, full of calm. I knew that money

Reviews for Lucky Bunny

[elkiedee · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Lucky Bunny is fiction, but it is presented as the memoir of a female criminal, from her birth in 1933 to the 1960s.Queenie, as she has chosen to call herself, was born and brought up in London's East End. Her life of crime starts with stealing some milk, then she moves into shoplifting as a child, often working with older family friends. She has been brought up largely by her grandmother and her dad's girlfriends, most of them involved in various criminal activity.I found Lucky Bunny a joy to read. Queenie is a vivid and memorable character, clever, tough, sharply observant and funny, soaking up all around her. She meets many of the famous, and infamous, Londoners of her day, and is witness to many real episodes in East End history. In some ways, her life has been a bit of a nightmare, with poverty, neglect and deprivation and several family tragedies. Queenie doesn't see it like that. She is no one's victim, but a great survivor. Or is she? I am not totally sure I can trust all of Queenie's statements about herself. Is she really as lucky as she proclaims?I was also fascinated by the way Dawson takes up so many bits of London's social and women's history as well as criminal folklore and weaves them into a terrific yarn. I was amused by Queenie's namedropping of lots of real people and events, including Ruth Ellis and Christine Keeler. Queenie even suggests she might have been delivered at birth in 1933 by a young midwife called Jennifer, undertaking her training with the nuns, a reference to Jennifer Worth's Call the Midwife. In fact, Worth wasn't even born then and her book takes place more than 20 years later - is this a clue that some of Queenie's encounters with other real people are also her own inventions?I received a review copy of this book through the Amazon Vine programme.

[a_reader_of_fictions · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I went into this novel with such high hopes. Audra of Unabridged Chick loved it, and I typically find that I agree with her on books. Unfortunately, my experience of this one was quite different, partly, I think, because of my prior reading history and because of the way the book was billed. For me, this book was slow and torturous, the characters utterly loathsome.

Your enjoyment of this book will likely hinge on how you feel about Queenie Dove. If you find her clever, cool and alluring, then everything will be copacetic. If, like me, you find her obnoxious and really don't care what happens to her, the book will drag on seemingly endlessly. In part, my distaste stemmed from her name, as I read another book with a Queenie at the lead earlier this year: Code Name Verity. That Queenie has so much personality, strength, intelligence and charisma that this one paled in comparison.

My other problem with regards to expectation was that I thought this was a novel about World War II. It's mentioned in the blurb and on the back of the book it's described as "a world war II-era narrative," which may technically be true, but is quite misleading. World War II doesn't matter too much in Queenie's life, though she lives through it. She was evacuated briefly toe the country and survived one tragic bombing, but that's pretty much the extent of it.

Of course, had I read the synopsis more closely, I would have noted what the book is actually about: hoisting, theft, in so much as it is about anything. You see, this book doesn't have a plot. AT ALL. I have liked plotless books in the past, because if the writing and ideas and characters are marvelous than I don't need a plot to pull me through to the end of the book. Without it in this instance, it was a struggle to get to the last page. I had similar difficulties with David Copperfield, another fictional biography. Perhaps that subset of fiction is not for me.

I will say that the book improved when Queenie got older. The first 150 pages or so, though, were so entirely boring to me. A large portion of the book is devoted to Queenie's tragic childhood, I guess to promote sympathy in me and make me care about her. Well, that didn't work. Yes, her life sucked (gambler dad, insane mother, etc.), but I still found Queenie off-putting.

Precisely why I disliked Queenie so much, aside from expecting her to be like that other literary Queenie, is a bit hard to place my finger on. I suspect that lies in her narrative style. The book is written in a style that simply didn't work for me, filled with odd slang and long sentences. I read a little selection of it to my parents, who found it pompous and said it sounded like she was 'trying too hard.' The cadence of the sentences just didn't come off particularly naturally. With a really good narrator, though, I imagine this could be a marvelous audiobook.

As much as there was one, the main conflict of the book regarded domestic abuse. Like her mother before her, Queenie settles down with a man who beats her. He first hits her in public and not just once, yet she stays. In the narrative, she considers how much other people blame the abused woman for allowing the abuse, for staying; she calls this victim blaming. She has a point, of course, but I still feel wholeheartedly that she should have kicked him to the curb the first time he slapped her.

Undoubtedly this book will work for others and I urge you to check out other reviews for another viewpoint. The whole book just rubbed me the wrong way.

[sly_wit · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I’m sure there are many people who could just pick this book apart, but it really appealed to me. I loved Queenie’s voice from the opening pages and was eager to see where it would go. I felt it conveyed the flavor of the East End (which, granted, I know nothing about) and I could imagine myself there quite easily. It could have used more “caper” elements, but I loved how the links to actual events had me running to Wikipedia afterwards.

[kraaivrouw · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I have mixed feelings about Lucky Bunny. The concept is great and the book cover is beautiful (yes, I like good book cover), but I can't say that I enjoyed this as a read. Maybe I'm shallow, but the pacing of this was just too slow for my current need. You know how that is, right? Sometimes only a fast-paced novel will do.Lucky Bunny tells the story of Queenie Dove, a woman who turns to crime for her survival in post-WWII London. I wish I'd liked Queenie more, although from a writing perspective she does embody the concept of the unreliable narrator. While trying earnestly to turn her life into one of glamour and derring-do, one can't be sure of the truth of anything she says and I left the book wondering what really happened and how Queenie (not her real name, by the way) really felt about anything. I couldn't sort out for myself whether or not to like her because I was never sure who I might like or dislike in her and this became a problem for me as a reader.Lucky Bunny straddles the lines between historical fiction, women's fiction, and crime fiction, but doesn't settle comfortably anywhere. This disconnectedness added to the disconnectedness I felt from its main character left me feeling disconnected from the entire book. A decent read, but not a great one.

[epkwrsmith · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

SummaryQueenie Dove grows up in a criminal family in the East End slums of London. Stealing, "nicking" or "hoisting" is what she knows. She's praised for her skills while being sent away for her crimes is inevitable and even considered an expected part of life from time to time. There is no question of right or wrong, just doing what you can to survive in an unforgiving environment. Queenie is a survivor. Childhood, adolescence, and into her adult years, including becoming a mother herself, Queenie, an incredibly intelligent, cunning, brave young woman finds her way in a world so harsh that few truly make it to the good life. What I LikedSong lyrics - all throughout Lucky Bunny, Queenie's story is complimented by song lyrics from first children's rhymes and then popular tunes from the radio during Queenie's lifetime.Dialect and vocabulary - gel (Cockney slang for girl...not the stuff you put in your hair), nicked, hoisting, cozzers, "leg it," Old Bill, shop walkers, borstal boys, rolling...not just the dialogue, but the entire story, told by Queenie is written this way...with Queenie from time to time explaining analytically what "modern day" psychologists would label particular patterns of her life, especially during her times "inside." I never felt left out though; I never felt confused; there is enough detail in Lucky Bunny that you can follow the patterns as well as hear the words being said. I found myself many times repeating phrases out loud...just to hear myself (like the goob that I am) talking like Queenie in my best Cockney Southern accent :pMoll Flanders - Queenie's mother's name is Molly...Moll for short, but Queenie knows the story of Moll Flanders and compares her life to the professional "con" who also never reveals her real name.The Green Bottles, Gloria, Stella - the stereotypical idea of women thieves and/or prostitutes leads us to believe that they were all cut-throats and/or out for themselves or from traditional "gangster" movies, always dressed up to please their fella. They don't really play a "part" in the crimes, probably due to the "birds are bad luck" belief. However, within the culture of women thieves in the early 1900's in London, Dawson presents them as more of a family than lone wolves. The cons, robberies, shoplifting, and even prostitution are just a part of their lives. Crime is what they know; it's survival of the fittest; there's no guilt, and many times, it's even a game. The Green Bottles take Queenie in after her mother is sent away. They don't purposely teach her how to steal...they teach her how to stay alive...in the only way they know. There's a serious support system here.Tony in the beginning - unlike my initial jump to conclusions based on the cover photo, this isn't a "love story." Tony is one part of Queenie's life...definitely an important part...but Queenie never thinks of their relationship as lifelong...because nothing is. I think I wished for him to be her Knight in Shining Armour, but Queenie didn't really want to be saved from anything; she wanted to save herself, which makes their relationship that much more powerful.The history - East End London 1930's-1960's, WWII, bombings in London, billeting of children during the war from the cities to rural areas in the hopes that they would be safe from bombings, East End slum culture, tube shelters, ARP officers...silence after the Bethnal Green tube station tragedy, kennel boys at the Greyhound races, Green Bottles, London gangs, Approved Schools, good time girls, Young Offenders place, underground clubs, Summer 1963 and the Profumo Scandal, The Great Train Robbery (Glasgow-to-London postal train), birth control, abortion, and birth, prostitution, etc. I could go on and on here...Lucky Bunny is packed with history and sociology.What I Didn't LikeTony at the end - no spoilers here, but Queenie does prepare us when she tells Stella, "Nothin's for keeps...especially not a fella."Nothing else to see here folks; move along.Overall RecommendationFans of Historical fiction, tough yet flawed heroines, alternate definitions of love and family, women's histories, etc. will love this book. Just like I did.

[gaskella_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Jill Dawson is one of those authors who appears to write a different book every time, although when you look underneath, there are links. 'The Great Lover' tells the story of poet Rupert Brooke partly through the eyes of maid Nell; 'Watch me Disappear' explored the effects of a girl disappearing in a Fenland village in the 1970s and echoes contemporary child abductions and murders; 'Fred and Edie' tells the story of star-crossed lovers, executed for murdering Edie’s husband in 1923. All have a geographical base from South London through the East End into East Anglia and the Fens; but she also has a pre-occupation with working class roots and criminal underclasses. These elements, both geographical and sociological, are both well to the fore in her latest novel 'Lucky Bunny'.Queenie Dove is an Eastender born before the war to a Irish Moll and her big bruiser and small time crook of a father, Tommy. Life is hard for Queenie and her younger brother Bobby – there’s never enough food, Dad in and out of the nick, and Moll slowly going mad and ending up in hospital; only her Nan has any sense. They get evacuated to Ely, but Queenie can’t hack it and returns to London where her Dad is now shacked up with Annie – formerly of the ‘Green Bottles’ – a group of goodtime girls, shoplifters and whores. With lead Green Bottle Gloria’s help, Queenie becomes good at hoisting – shoplifting, but even she gets caught and is sent to reform school where she meets Stella, who will become her best friend. The two go on to have many adventures, resulting in Queenie falling for Tony, the nephew of the Italian coffee-bar owner. Queenie and Tony have a tempestuous relationship – so similar in many ways to that of Moll and Tommy, but Queenie is determined to have a future with her daughter and eventually bails out after one beating too many.You can’t help but warm to Queenie, however naughty she may be, as she is determined right from the start to aim for something better for herself. She sees herself as lucky; lucky that she survives everything that life throws at her. From outside the book though, it’s clear that she’s stuck in the same vicious circle as her parents were – at least until she leaves Tony and escapes her fate – then she’s lucky! There are questions of nature versus nurture too, growing up in poverty, Dad in jail, mother a dipso with post-natal depression, there’s little wonder that it affects the kids with them ending up in a mini-crime wave themselves.Queenie’s adventures are grounded in rich period detail. Being evacuated, and the tragic events at Bethnal Green tube station in 1943 when hundreds died on the steps, (fictionalised in a recent novel, The Report), through to the world of Soho’s coffee bars in the 50s, Ruth Ellis, Diana Dors and culminating in the Great Train Robbery in 1963, when Queenie reaches thirty years old. That’s where Dawson leaves her, looking forward to the rest of her life.I would have liked to have slightly less of childhood Queenie and more of the post-school teenager into twenty-something young woman – Queenie’s early years did take up nearly half the book which made for a slow start. Queenie tells her story how she wants to hear it, and she doesn’t ask for our sympathy or to understand her morals. It did leave me wondering though, what happened next to Queenie Dove? (ARC supplied by Amazon Vine)