Jill Dawson's 'Lucky Bunny'

Lucky Bunny is the toy rabbit her father gave her the day she was born –  a delicate, pretty, white soft toy  -  the first clue that better lives are lived, somewhere; safe orderly lives with biscuits for tea, ponies and window boxes full of pansies.

So what is it that makes us who we are? In tackling this mighty question through the viewpoint of the knowing Queenie, a child wise beyond her years who re-names herself at the first opportunity, the book takes a risk; but such is Dawson’s skill that she pulls it off in a breathtaking continuous panoramic sweep that takes in the blitz, Borstal and London in the swinging sixties.

 There are Dawson's usual deft moments of scene-setting

…His favourite game was to go over to Vicky Park with his shilling knife with the bone handle – all the boys had knives in those days – and practise throwing it at trees, while the crows tottered on the grass like fat vicars, and the Jewish boys chased each other around Vicky Fountain, throwing their black caps in the air…:

And her inspired gift with metaphor means that we feel as if we are there too and not just in sharing the sights and smells of the environment but also inside the character, as for example when the six year-old Queenie, mad with hunger, about to steal milk off a doorstep notices that … the light is sticky, warm and making you feel like you’re a wasp in a jar of honey…

From the filth and squalor of a home where her drunken young mother is descending into insanity to the safety of their Nan’s; to evacuation in the Fens, Queenie, the quicksilver child, tries to shield her little brother Bobbie. Always hungry and dirty, resourceful Queenie is drinking in every detail, learning every angle, cottoning on to every hint,  clocking every clue. “What’s a Brass?” she asks her Nan.

When tragedy leads to her mother’s removal and then she loses her Nan in the notorious Bethnal Green Tube disaster (breathtakingly described here) she becomes a skilful apprentice to the glamorous Green Bottle shoplifting gang while her black marketeer father, busy forging, stealing or rigging greyhounds, looks on in approval.

Queenie is a character you can’t help cheering for. At the approved school she is found to have an IQ of 180. ... “No doubt you got hold of your file and changed the figure,” says the nun in charge, “Recite some Shakespeare, can you? Explain Pythagoras’s Theorem? Thought not.” ...

... “They all say they have dreadful backgrounds,”...  sneers a Magistrate, who sees the fact that she has never known an example of a felon who transcended such circumstances as evidence that they must all be lying. Such attitudes inflame further the sense of injustice that gnaws Queenie’s soul.

Whether Dawson’s taut, lucid prose paints the suffocation in the blackness at the foot of the subway stairs, the silky ripple of a stolen mink coat billowing with Christian Dior perfume, a child on a train clutching a stolen bar of soap, teenage girls running away from an outraged john in their Anello and Davide ballet pumps or an ageing  good-time girl, …sinking n her yellow dress like a lemon soufflé, mascara blackening her cheeks…  the narrative, like a well-paced film, never falters.

And does Queenie make it? Well; through friendship, love and finally motherhood, her state of mind always compellingly portrayed, Queenie finally works out what she must do to escape and enable her little daughter to transcend her terrible origins. And the denouement is an absolute cracker which I will not spoil by any kind of hint. Suffice to say it is an audacious imaginative feat of the kind at which Dawson excels.