Birmingham Rose (17 page)

Her mother nodded and whispered, ‘Best out of it.’ Then she said, ‘Grace is a good girl.’

Rose smiled.

‘And so are you,’ Dora went on in her rasping voice.

‘Don’t talk if it hurts, Mom.’

‘No – I wanted to say—’ Dora went on, and then started coughing, her body curling in pain as she held her side tightly. It was some time before she had enough breath to speak again.

‘You’ve had some bad things happen to you – before you should have—’

‘Don’t, Mom—’

‘No . . .’ She stopped to get her breath. ‘It’s as rough as it gets losing a babby. And your friend – Diana . . .’ She saw Rose look at the floor. It was the first time anyone else had mentioned Diana, and hearing her name suddenly was more painful than she expected. ‘All I was going to say was – I’m proud of you – how you’ve come through it. Alfie’ll make you a good husband. And you can have some more of your own kiddies then.’

For a moment Rose couldn’t think of anything to say, she was so moved by the fact that her mother understood how bad she still felt about Diana. And at the same time she realized with a wave of guilt how seldom she worried about Alfie.

She just said, ‘Thanks Mom. Shall I get you some camomile tea now?’

As she was preparing the hot drink, George came back into the house carrying a bag of trinkets which he’d rifled out of another of the houses bombed the night before. He laid them out quite brazenly on top of the shelter.

‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself,’ Rose said.

‘Oh yeah? How’s that?’ he said, insolently. His little pinched face was hard and bitter.

‘Look,‘ Rose said, infuriated, her hands on her hips. Small as she was, she looked forbidding in her anger, her slim curving figure outlined by the red dress. ‘I know you think you’re a special case and everyone’s got to apologize to you for the rest of your life. But you’re not. Mom sent you away because she wanted the best for you, and there’s no excuse for you acting like a thieving litle urchin and taking advantage of other people.’

‘Aw, sod off,’ George said.

Rose marched up to him and gave his face a sharp slap. She turned, shaking with anger, to begin preparing their rations of food for the evening meal.

‘You’re a selfish little bugger,’ she shouted after him as he went out of the door.

He left the door swinging open so that the forbidden light streamed into the yard. Rose went and slammed it shut.

‘We’ll have the ARP lot round carrying on next,’ she muttered to herself. Despite her anger she saw in her mind George as a tiny child forever running to her to be picked up. She felt sorry for being so hard on him. But all their nerves were on edge and he’d become so distant and infuriating.

Soon Sid came in with a cabbage and a handful of carrots in a bag dangling from his crutch. ‘You can throw these in the pot,’ he said proudly. ‘How’s your mother?’

‘She’s just had some tea,’ Rose told him. ‘She’s about the same, I think.’ She took the cabbage and started to clean it up. ‘How’s it at the BSA?’

‘Hell of a mess up there,’ Sid said, easing his coat off. ‘The whole of the new building went up. Awful lot of blokes went with it. We’re carrying on the best we can.’

While she finished preparing the meal, Sid went round the house and checked it was properly blacked out. She heard his voice upstairs as he said a few words to her mother. It was odd getting used to seeing him differently. Now he was someone with things to do, with a role. Like a proper dad, she thought.

When he came down, she said, ‘How do we get Mom into the shelter?’

‘She won’t come,’ Sid said flatly.

‘Is that what she said?’

‘She didn’t need to say. She hasn’t been in there since she was taken bad.’

Rose gaped at him. ‘You mean . . . ? Well, who’s looked after her?’

‘Our Grace has stayed up with her. Your mother told her to go down and leave her, but Grace wouldn’t hear of it.’

‘Grace? You mean all these nights they’ve been bombing the guts out of us those two have both been . . .’ She pointed towards the ceiling. Sid nodded. ‘Why didn’t you make them come down?’

‘Don’t you think I’ve tried?’ His voice was loud with guilt and worry. ‘She just won’t hear of it.’

‘Good God,’ Rose said. ‘Our Grace is tougher than you’d think. Well’ – she looked defiantly at Sid – ‘if she can put up with it, so can I.’

Sid shook his head. ‘I thought you might’ve been the one that’d talk her down. I just wish there was something I—’

‘It’s all right. Save your breath,’ Rose said irritably, and then added more gently, ‘It only takes one to see to her, doesn’t it?’

Her father sat down, quiet for a moment. Then he said, ‘Grace is very like your mother used to be. She was always one for looking after people.’

‘Good job really, wasn’t it?’ Rose retorted. She was finding being alone with her father for the first time in years strange and uncomfortable. She suddenly realized that Dora had always stood between them so they had seldom talked to one another without someone else to mediate.

‘You can be a hard bitch, you can,’ Sid said matter-of-factly. He stared at the plates Rose was laying on top of the shelter as he spoke. ‘Whatever you think, I do love that woman up there.’

Rose turned away, knowing that whatever tender feelings she’d ever had towards her father, or might have now, she was damned if she’d ever be able to show him.

The raids began early that night. Rose spent part of those long hours lying in Sid’s place in the bed beside Dora’s restless, feverish body. The rest of the time she sat up or stood by the window, frozen in spite of the blanket wrapped round her.

The seemingly endless groups of planes droned past overhead, ack-ack defences hammered at them, and finally there came the crump of bombs landing at a distance or a much louder explosion if they were nearer. Then the planes roared away again. She peeped out from behind the blackout curtains and saw the searchlights moving over the city and the sky orange from the reflected light of the burning buildings. She thought she could smell smoke, but wasn’t certain if it was her imagination.

She thought of Jo Pye out there helping to put out the fires, and Gladys and the kids all crushed into their shelter.

I should have volunteered for the ARP or something like that, she thought. Where I could have been out helping people.

Suddenly there was a huge explosion, so close that the house shook and the windows rattled. Rose found that she was lying flat on the floorboards without having thought about it.

Dora stirred. ‘Grace . . . ?’

Rose crawled shakily over to the bed. ‘It’s me – Rose.’

‘Oh. What was that?’ Dora sounded very drowsy.

‘Don’t know. Wasn’t us, anyway!’ It could only have been a street or two away though, she thought. Astonishing that the glass was still in the window. Good job they’d taped it across. If she hadn’t had her mother to look after she felt she would have panicked, her nerves were stretched so taut.

‘D’you want a drink?’ she whispered.

Dora accepted a few sips of water, with Rose supporting her arm. She was so frail, her face and limbs pared right down to the bones. Feeling the ghostliness of her mother’s body, Rose knew that she didn’t have much time left to her.

‘D’you remember those nights we spent together up with the babbies?’ she asked Dora.

Her mother nodded her head very slightly. ‘It weren’t right – you losing yours like that.’

‘I miss him still – terrible sometimes.’

‘Course you do – mine too – it never goes.’ The coughing took her over again, and the attack seemed to go on for a long time. Rose was quite oblivious now to what was going on outside. Dora seemed to doze off again when the coughing eased up, but suddenly she said, ‘You’ll always have Billy and Susan.’

Rose knew she was saying, look after them, keep an eye on them for me. She reached out and took her mother’s hand gently in her own.

‘Sod them out there,’ she said. ‘I’m coming in to lie down.’

When she returned wearily to work the following night she noticed that the space beside her where Maureen usually worked had been filled by another girl, whom she’d never seen before.

‘You done a swap have you?’ she said, puzzled. ‘What’s happened to Maureen?’

The girl said she didn’t know because she’d been asked to move over from another block. Rose saw Madge, an older woman who worked in a position near by, moving quickly over to her.

‘You’ll have to know, Rose,’ she said. ‘Maureen was killed last night on the way to work. One came down when she was going for the bus. House came down on her. She never stood a chance.’

Hurriedly someone fetched a chair for Rose, who had turned a sick-looking white in the face.

‘You all right love?’ Madge asked. ‘I never meant to give you such a shock. Only I didn’t think you two that close.’

Rose sat under the remorseless lights of the vast factory, her mind a collage of confused thoughts. Maureen walking out for her bus from her lonely digs, the bomb coming down like a great slug in the darkness, and a small Irish girl called Josie, little Josie whom Maureen adored and whose heart would break.

A fortnight later, on a frozen, gusty December afternoon, Rose, looking pale and exhausted, stood between her father and sister at Dora’s funeral. They walked back from the graveside under an iron sky, between the leafless trees, Sid, Rose, Grace and George. They hadn’t called the little ones back. With Sam away, this, for now, was the family.

But as the wind murmured in between the skinny branches of the trees that bleak afternoon, Rose glanced back to the spot from where they had walked. And she knew that the centre of the family, the person who had kept them together, now lay buried beneath the fast-freezing ground.

1943–1945

The truck swayed along the narrow country lanes, its huge khaki bulk looking out of place between hawthorn hedges and elms. From the half-open back of the truck women’s faces looked out at the early spring countryside and they waved at people they passed. They all held on to anything they could to keep from falling on top of one another. Deeper inside the truck, where it was almost too dark to see, someone was singing ‘My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean’ in a loud, tuneless voice.

‘So this is the British army,’ a voice piped up over towards the daylight end. ‘You can see why they call them cattle trucks, can’t you! I say – you’ve got your foot on my case. Move it, would you? There’s a dear. Mustn’t have my things crushed before we’ve even started.’

‘You won’t be needing crêpe de Chine where we’re going!’ someone shouted over the growling engine, and the others round her tittered. The voice had come from a large woman with peroxide blond hair. ‘And stop that bleedin’ racket, will you?’ she yelled down at the singer. ‘Me head’s thumping something awful already.’

Rose, who was standing near her towards the back, silently agreed. As the afternoon had worn on a tight band of pain had stretched between her temples so she felt almost unable to think, exhausted as she was from all the newness and strain of the journey further away from home than she’d ever been before. She could hardly feel her feet in her old down-at-heel shoes and she was hungry. The few sandwiches Grace had packed for her were long gone. The day seemed to be going on forever.

‘Here . . .’ She realized the blonde was speaking to her through the gloom of the truck. ‘You deaf or something? I said pass us me bag will you? Yeah. That one.’

Rose bent down unsteadily and got hold of the heavy carpet bag. She pushed it to the other woman along the floor of the truck.

‘Ta. Where’d you come from then?’

‘Birmingham.’

‘Ooh ar!’ the blonde squawked. ‘Yow’m a Brummoy then – orroight are yer!’ she mocked.

‘That’s all right with you is it?’ Rose snapped at her. She couldn’t place the woman’s own accent.

‘Now girls,’ a voice called from the light end. ‘No point in being cattish. We’ve all got to get along and live together. There’s a war on, remember.’

The blonde said, ‘Oooh, yes. I’d almost forgot!’ and rolled her eyes round in such a comical way that Rose couldn’t help grinning.

‘What’s your name then?’

‘Rose. What’s yours?’

‘Gloria. From Deptford. That’s London to you. This is a lark innit?’ Gloria stood with her solid legs braced apart as far as space would allow. ‘Could do without the old school tie brigade though.’

While they had waited for their transport at Didcot Station surrounded by piles of army supplies, the women had gathered instinctively into two groups. The old school tie group, as Gloria called them, looked much better dressed and cared for, and one of them even had a fur collar on her coat. From the loud conversations in their posh accents, Rose gathered that several of them were bound eventually for the élite Intelligence Corps. There was a rather mousy, timid-looking girl with reddish brown hair who Rose noticed because she seemed to be constantly on the point of bursting into tears. She didn’t seem to be sure which group she belonged in, and hung around the posher ones as if hoping to be taken under their wing. The second group, which Rose and Gloria had fallen into, looked scruffier, mostly togged up in second- or third-hand clothes and lumpish old coats. Gloria seemed the most brashly confident. A couple of them looked pale and unhealthy and terrified. One clearly had nits, so everyone shrank back from her.

The journey from the station to the camp was roughly four miles.

‘I say – I think we’re here!’ someone soon called out. Others pushed towards the back end to get their first sight of the camp where they were to spend their first three weeks of initial training. Rose could see nothing at all.

‘Golly, sentry boxes,’ one of the posh girls said. ‘Those chaps look jolly cold, don’t they?’

‘Look at all that barbed wire. Makes it look frightfully serious, doesn’t it?’

‘Let’s hope they’ll let us have a cup of tea now. I’m quite parched.’

The truck stopped abruptly at the reception hut and they scrambled out with their bags, those from the dark inside screwing up their eyes as they reached the daylight. The March afternoon had turned damp and windy. They all looked round at the camp which extended along the edge of the Berkshire Downs. There were row upon row of Nissen huts with corrugated-iron roofs, and round the camp stretched the spiky border of the barbed wire. It was a bleak scene, with no trees and few bushes between the huts, and the rounded greyish hills curving away beyond. Rose experienced the same feeling as on her first day at Castle Bromwich, an urge to turn round and run home. But home was much further away now, and there wasn’t much to run back there for.