Birmingham Rose (2 page)

Catherine poured tea out of the silver teapot and Rose saw that all the cups matched. At home there were never enough to go round and none of them had the same pattern. Little Judith stared at her so much that she kept missing her mouth with the cake and dropping lots of crumbs. Catherine told her to watch what she was doing. William pretended to ignore Rose, but kept staring at her when he thought she was looking somewhere else. Rose wanted to make a face at him but she thought she’d better not.

‘So, Rose,’ the great big vicar said to her gently. ‘Did you get lost on the way home from your sister’s? Moseley isn’t really on the way to Catherine Street, is it?’

‘No, I wasn’t lost. I just wanted a walk round. Sometimes,’ she announced, ‘I like to have a bit of peace.’

The two adults smiled at each other, both hearing the echo of Rose’s mother who presumably often needed to make the same claim.

‘Well, I’m not sure if you’ve had that exactly,’ said Mr Vicar, as Rose called him to herself. ‘But we shall have to get you home soon, or your poor mother will be worried stiff. I’ll walk that way with you myself. The rain is easing off now.’ Partly he wanted to make up for his lack of initiative earlier.

By the time they had finished tea, the sun had come out and the heaviest clouds seemed pushed away by its warm arms. The air grew hot and heavy with moisture.

‘You can keep the dress,’ Catherine said and, seeing Rose’s eyes full of happiness at the thought, continued, ‘and please come and see us again if you’re out for a bit of peace, won’t you?’

‘
Can
she?’ Diana asked, jumping up and down. ‘I like Rose. Go on, say you will, Rose.’

Diana demanded to be allowed to walk home with Rose too. The gutters were still running with water and there were puddles all over the pavement. As they walked, trying to keep their feet from getting too soaked, they saw broken tiles, glass and pieces of branch and twigs with leaves on. At one point a large tree had been torn up and was lying across the pavement.

‘I do hope people haven’t been injured,’ Ronald said. ‘Thank heavens it didn’t happen yesterday when the shops were open.’

As he spoke, he noticed that Diana had taken Rose’s hand. He smiled, moved by the sight. All her mother’s warmth, he thought. And once more he felt his own inadequacy.

His despondency deepened as they walked towards the middle of the city, the seething, smoking core which circled the Bull Ring, the market at its heart. The houses here were smaller and meaner, crammed back to back in street after grimy street, with factories and mills and small workshops. Those living in their two or three bug-ridden rooms lacked space and light, and their children lived – and often died – in squalid shadowy courts covered with refuse and filth, knowing little of any other street, any other life or possibility of improvement. At least this was his impression that day of this part of the city of which he in fact, to his shame, knew little.

And what about Rose, this curious little person who had suddenly been flung to their door? He watched her as she walked in front of him with his daughter, the two of them chattering as if they had known each other for months. She was hungry for something, knew there was more than her own life was showing her. Surely, he thought, I can learn from this child. He found this more cheering than all his sterile prayers of recent weeks.

Catherine Street was a row of three-storey houses, crushed together, their bricks darkened by the sooty air. The street stood on a rise above the great belly of the city. Walking down it you could see the reddish grey roofs, closely packed, and the church spires and factory chimneys poking up above them. For miles around you could make out the long, pointed spire of St Martin’s Church in the Bull Ring.

‘I’ll go now, ta,’ Rose said suddenly, and she started to run off down the slanting road.

‘But I was going to explain to your mother!’ Ronald’s voice boomed along the street so people turned to look.

Diana ran after her. ‘Are we going to be friends or not?’ she demanded.

‘If you want,’ Rose said. ‘I mean yes – please. You’d best not come to our house though. Better go now.’

Diana went back to her father and they watched Rose’s small form skipping down the street, the long dress flapping round her legs.

Ronald noticed that the sky was beginning to darken again. He steered Diana round to walk home, taking a last glance back at Rose.

‘Extraordinary child,’ he said.

Carrying her old dress and enamel dish, Rose ran down Catherine Street. She thought she might go off pop, her head was so full of all the things she had seen that afternoon: the dress and the elephant in her pocket and Diana. But going off pop was just what she wasn’t going to do.

I’m not telling no one about what’s happened, she said to herself. Not Geraldine, not even our Grace. I’m going to keep it all to myself. She watched the cotton dress with its tiny pink roses flying up and down in front of her as her feet took her fast along the familiar blue bricks of the pavement.

I bet when Diana got this it was
new
, Rose thought. She began to skip so that the roses lifted even higher.

Then she saw her father. As she reached the entrance to their court she thought he must have seen her – the smile, the running and skipping and the new dress. She stopped abruptly and began to walk, holding the enamel dish against her stomach as if it was a teddy bear, her old dress rolled up and hidden inside it. She hoped he wouldn’t ask any questions.

Ever since she was a tiny child Rose had had secrets. They were often very small ones, and quite unnoticeable to anyone else: a rounded pebble hidden under a leaf by the wall of the brewhouse or a word of praise at school from Miss Whiteley. It might be what she had seen on one of her walks – often not far, but alone – to neighbouring streets. She felt as if she, Rose Lucas, was the first person in the world ever to see them.

At the sight of her father, though, she felt as if everything she had been thinking must be clear from her face, every detail of it. But as he dragged his large frame towards her, his laborious gait managed on one leg and one rough wooden crutch, his eyes watching the path in front of him, she realized he had not even looked up. When he did notice her he said gruffly, ‘All right Gracie?’

‘I’m
Rose
,’ she said angrily, and instead of walking in with him she left him to struggle home by himself and ran ahead into the yard. Couldn’t he even get her name right?

The sky was half covered by piled grey clouds. A peculiar harsh light was shining down catching one side of the court, the wet bricks and the small windows on which soot and grime accumulated again as fast as they were washed down. The other side, the wall where the tap for the yard was fixed, lay in deep shadow.

Her brother George, who was three, was standing dressed only in a grubby vest, chewing on a hard finger of bread crust mingled with snot from his nose and stamping his bare feet in the puddles. His bottom was naked and his little peter wiggled about with each stamp. Freddie and Daisy Pye from number six were standing with him on their bandy legs. All the family except Mr Pye had rickets.

When George saw Rose he beamed all over his grubby face and ran towards her with his arms out, saying, ‘Rose. Pick me up! Nurse me, Rose!’

Rose got a bit fed up with George’s endless hunger to be picked up. No one had the time, that was the trouble.

‘Look at the state of you!’ she said. ‘I can’t pick you up now. You’ll have to wait.’ The little boy went back to his puddles, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. Rose disappeared into the house. She shot across the downstairs room where her mother stood slicing bread and went dashing up the stairs.

‘Rose!’ Her mother stood at the foot of the stairs, bread knife in hand. ‘Where’ve you been?’

Rose paused for a second to make up her mind whether her mother was really angry. She decided things didn’t sound too serious and carried on climbing the bare boards of the stairs, remembering the banisters at the vicarage, the pedestal at the bottom shaped into a huge shiny acorn.

‘Got caught out in the rain, didn’t I?’ she called back. ‘Down in a mo.’

‘You haven’t been at Marj’s all this time – I know you,’ her mother shouted. ‘And where the hell did you get that dress?’

Rose climbed up to the room at the top of the house where she and Grace shared one single bed and Sam and George shared the other. She wanted to hide the elephant before anyone else saw it. She’d have to think up an explanation for the dress, but they needn’t find out about all that had happened that afternoon. Not yet anyway.

She had tried hiding things up there before, but it wasn’t much good. There was only the black iron rim of the bedstead under the mattress and you could hardly fit anything in there. And if she put it under the blanket Grace was bound to find it.

The Lucases’ furniture had dwindled over the years. This was all part of the change, the decline from ‘before’ when Sid and Dora lived in a house with two proper rooms downstairs, where they had their first two children. Before, when Sid had been a promising apprentice engineer, until he had come home in 1917 without one leg and the lower part of his left arm, and also missing some less tangible part of himself, perished in the scarred pastures of Flanders. All, in fact, before Rose was born. Albert, the oldest child, could just remember his father before the war. As a six-year-old he had taken weeks to accept that the maimed and haunted figure who appeared one day in a greatcoat at their door was the same man.

Rose moved the chest of drawers a fraction from the wall and hid the elephant behind it. That would do for now. She’d find somewhere better later.

Downstairs, her mother had disappeared and her father was easing himself awkwardly on to one of the family’s two easy chairs. He propped the crutch against the wall beside him. Grace was sitting bent over a steaming bowl of water, her head covered by a strip of sacking. She was wheezing heavily. Rose realized she was trying to stave off one of her asthma attacks. We’re in for a bad night then, Rose thought, not feeling very amiable about it. She felt irritable being back here with pee in a bucket in the bedroom after the new things she’d seen in the afternoon.

‘Get me some tea,’ Sid demanded, pushing the muddy shoe off his one foot and putting it against the fender to dry. Rose went to the hob and found there was freshly brewed tea in the pot. A tin of condensed milk was waiting with the bread on the table. She sugared the tea and passed it over without speaking. Sid gave a grunt of thanks.

‘Where’s Mom gone?’ she asked.

‘The lav – sick,’ Grace gasped tetchily from under the sacking, as if she’d already answered the question once. She pointed in the direction of the four toilets at the end of the yard, shared by the six houses. ‘Rose,’ she whispered. ‘I need a drink.’

‘What did your last slave die of?’ Rose snapped and then, realizing how unkind she was being, poured out more tea and placed it on the floor by her sister.

Grace peered up through her wispy fringe. ‘Ta.’

‘You bad again?’

‘S’getting better now.’ She looked up with a pink, damp face and tried to smile. She took in a deep breath so that her shoulders pulled back and her lungs whispered the air in.

Rose looked at her and then moved her gaze to their father, raising her eyebrows at Grace as she tried to gauge what mood he was in. Sid was sitting silently with his copy of the
Gazette
. There often seemed to be some intense emotion caged up in him which couldn’t find a way out. When it did, they were terrified of him. Their mother took the worst of it: the lashings with his tongue and the force of his fist. Sometimes he left the house abruptly, saying nothing, and went off pulling himself round the streets for an hour or two, trying to repress the violence inside him which he so loathed. Sometimes he came back easier in himself. Other times the mood had deepened so the children hardly dared open their mouths.

It was hard to read his mood now, but Grace pulled down the corners of her mouth and rolled her eyes as if to say, ‘Better watch our step.’

Through the window Rose saw her mother’s thin figure walking across the yard, in her faded brown and white dress. Her arms were folded and pressed into her middle and she was holding herself rather bent forward as she did when she felt ill. Rain was falling again, and hurriedly she went to the tap across from the house and swallowed a few mouthfuls of water before coming inside.

Rose waited for her mother to start on her, but Dora sat down at the table as if drained of any strength. She was working four nights a week and in the second month of another pregnancy. She felt constantly faint and sick.

‘Get me a cup of tea, Rose,’ she said weakly. ‘I want you carding tonight. Sam’s at the Pyes and Grace ain’t up to it, but you can get on with some of it or we’ll never get them back.’

Rose groaned inside at the thought of another evening of work. To make ends meet they took in work from local factories. Rose had spent many evenings of her childhood sewing pearl buttons on to cards in the precise stitches expected by the factory until her eyes stung and watered under the gaslight. This time it was safety pins – fixing them on to cards for the shops. They’d get tuppence ha’penny a gross, and that, as Dora was forever pointing out, was worth a bag of sugar.

‘Why can’t Sam come back from the Pyes and do some too?’ Rose asked. ‘He always gets out of it.’

She saw her father’s dark eyes swivel away from his paper. ‘Don’t give your mother lip like that,’ he said. ‘That’s no work for a lad anyhow.’

Dora, sipping the tea with dry lips, waved her other hand at Rose to shut her up. ‘Anyroad, they’re feeding him, so that’s one less of us. Aaah – that’s better.’ The colour was coming back into her cheeks. She sat nibbling half-heartedly at a piece of bread. She was already a slim woman, and every pregnancy, each baby carried and suckled shrank her thinner and made her look more gaunt and bony. In the overcast light of the evening her cheekbones were emphasized by the shadows beneath them and the skin under her eyes showed blue half-moons of exhaustion.