‘How come bath should be said barth but fat is definitely not fart in high society?’ I asked Auntie Dorothy.

She laughed but cautioned, ‘Just do as she says, it’ll come out all right.’

‘And bank’s not barnk and Mansfield not Marnsfield.’

‘Oh, Queenie love, just do it. She’ll see you married to a prince.’

I brought tears to Mrs Waterfall’s eyes when I finally managed to extinguish the candle while breathing out the word ‘what’. ‘Hope,’ she told me then. ‘Miss Buxton, there is at last reason for hope.’

Auntie Dorothy swore the pink bit on coconut ice tasted different from the white – she knew everything about sophistication. She served coconut ice on a china plate, cut into neat squares, and ate it with a fork. Her feet up on a chair she called a French lounger, with her little poodle Prudence – coiffured into fancy shapes like a posh privet hedge – she delicately stuffed ounce after ounce into her oval mouth as I watched.

She’d inherited the sweet shop from her late husband Montgomery when he died in the Great War. Not in a battle – he was run over by a tram on his way back to barracks. Auntie Dorothy was still upset about the half-pound of treacle toffee that had mysteriously disappeared from his pocket by the time his dead body reached the hospital. ‘Who could do such a thing, Queenie? Would you credit it? We live among barbarians,’ she said.

She’d run the shop on her own for years. ‘With Prudence, Queenie. That dog kept everyone in line for me. Didn’t you, my little poppet?’ But to get out of the French lounger for some little boy with a lazy eye and hair flying up like iron filings, wanting a chew that barely cost a ha’penny, began to try Auntie Dorothy’s patience. ‘Don’t get me wrong, Queenie, it knocked baking pork pies day in day out, like my sister, into a cocked hat. But it’s not what Montgomery would have wanted for me. I was his Duchess.’ With no children of her own to help her, this was where I came in. In the big city, Auntie Dorothy had wanted to start calling me Victoria – it had more elegance as a name. I had my own bedroom, my own wardrobe and a dressing-table with three mirrors. If I angled those mirrors just right, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of Queenies would appear, all smiling smugly at their good fortune. But not one Victoria was waving at me among that crowd. ‘Don’t worry, love, we’ll stick to Queenie – it’ll do till you’re more genteel.’ Auntie Dorothy loosened her corset the day I came to London to live with her. ‘Oh, Queenie, I’ll make a good catch of you,’ she said, tightening mine.

Elocution and deportment lessons twice a week – Bourne and Hollingsworth or Selfridges for a new outfit every Saturday afternoon. At first Auntie Dorothy had come with me to Oxford Street, reclining on the shop seat telling the assistants how I took after her side of the family, all Lees being exceptionally graceful. But when the assistants began to scratch their heads trying to find things in her size – moving buttons, taking out seams – she stopped coming. She started pressing money into my hand instead, only bothering to get off the French lounger to put up the closed sign and measure out some more coconut ice.

I worked in the shop, woken every morning by Prudence attempting to scare off the newspaper delivery with a growl as terrifying as an old man clearing his throat. Men, rushing on their way to work, cast their eyes over my display of papers – neat with all the headlines on show – before choosing which horror they wanted to read about that day. After that it was mostly little kids, two or three coppers sweating their palms green, wanting some liquorice or a quarter of humbugs. As I got the bottles down and shook their favourites into a bag, I was followed round by eyes which, in that moment, loved me better than their mum.

I noticed him at first because he went for the Mail but then picked up The Times. ‘Is it The Times you want?’ I asked him. And he looked round like I’d just bellowed at him from the stars and blushed as pink as bacon.

‘Did you say it right, Queenie?’ Auntie Dorothy asked. ‘Only, men for The Times will want to be spoken to properly.’

I was ready for him the next time. It was my best breathy voice, which would have plumped Mrs Waterfall proud, that said, ‘We have The Times, if that is what you require?’

He gulped as loud as a stone down a well before saying, ‘Thank you, I will take The Times.’

‘What does he look like?’ Auntie Dorothy wanted to know.

‘Tall, skinny, not bad-looking,’ I said.

She was watching for him the next time.

He tipped his hat at me as he left, ‘It’s a lovely day today,’ he said.

That was enough to convince Auntie Dorothy, ‘He has an eye for you, Queenie. I knew it as soon as you said he blushed.’

A lot of men came into the shop trying to make me blush. ‘Aren’t I sweet enough for you?’ most of them got round to joking. Blowing me kisses and winking. Calling me their sweetheart, or their sugar-baby. Offering to show me how sweet they could be if I went with them to the pictures. Auntie Dorothy just shook her head at those advances. ‘The cheeky ones,’ she told me, ‘will be Cockneys. You’ll want nothing to do with Cockneys, they’re all jellied eels and knees-ups. No, that one’s a gentleman. No spivs or ne’er-do-wells ever read The Times.’

He started coming in twice a day. Before every one of his visits – The Times in the morning and a half pound of something or other about quarter past five – Auntie Dorothy got off her lounger long enough to see me dressed right. ‘What about that yellow cardigan, Queenie love? You look like an angel in that.’ She’d check my face for newsprint smudges, taking her hankie and spitting on it to wipe my forehead or a bit off my cheek. You’d think I was going on stage the way she winked at me for good luck as she opened the door from the back room into the shop.

‘Good morning,’ says he.

‘The Times?’ says I.

‘Thank you. A lovely day today.’ Or variations like ‘rather cloudy’ or ‘a little inclement for the time of year’. And I’d agree, no matter what his weather forecast. His gaberdine coat was always done up, every button, and the belt too. His shirt collar was always white. And when he lifted his hat, for that brief moment of hello or goodbye, his hair was shiny as liquorice. Auntie Dorothy thought him the nearest thing to a prince she’d seen since the day her late husband Montgomery adoringly looked up at her from one bended knee.

‘Has he asked you yet?’ she teased me, like a best chum at school.

‘Asked me what?’

‘You’ll soon find out.’ And I did.

A little boy, Sidney, was playing with some tin soldiers on the counter. They were all being executed by Sidney’s firing squad, which was his two straight fingers, a squinting eye and a bang. My job was to flip the dead one over.

‘It ain’t ’im I shot. You killed the wrong one.’

I was just asking Sidney whether his mother wouldn’t be wanting him home for his tea when the man came in. It was neither morning nor quarter past five and he had no gaberdine coat on. Sidney was lining up his victims again.

‘It’s time to go home now, Sidney. You can come again tomorrow.’

‘I ain’t finished yet.’

I swept up his blinking soldiers into a bag, threw in a piece of aniseed twist and said, ‘Go on, hop it.’

After the sulking Sidney had slammed the door the man took a step forward. ‘I wonder if you would care to come for a walk with me tomorrow afternoon, in the park – I’ve been assured it’s to be a lovely day.’ Straight out with it like he’d been practising and had to say it in a rush or his tongue would tie. My mouth was just dropping open with the surprise so it wasn’t me who said yes, it was shouted from the back room by Auntie Dorothy.

‘Good. I’ll call for you at one.’ And he went to leave but then said, ‘I’m sorry but I don’t believe we’ve ever been introduced. Bernard Bligh.’