Birmingham Rose (37 page)

Rose nodded silently. She felt disorientated and strange, as if returning to another foreign country, not her own. The feeling took quite some time to wear off.

Once she and Gwen had been to the army clearing house and were released from the ATS, they said their farewells in central London before catching trains for their different parts of the country.

‘You’d better write!’ Gwen said.

Rose nodded. ‘Of course.’ She had already made Tony the same promise.

On her journey out of Euston in a hot, smoke-filled railway carriage bound for the Midlands, she pulled from her bag the letter each of them had been given from the Senior Controller of the ATS.

‘As you say goodbye to service life,’ it began, ‘I am writing to thank you in the name of the Auxiliary Territorial Service for the loyal and devoted service you have given to your King and Country.’

Rose looked up for a moment, glancing at the drab outskirts of north London which were beginning to give way to countryside. The man in the seat next to her glanced curiously at her letter.

‘You will be called upon,’ she read, ‘to make further efforts in the service of your country, and I know that you will make them with the same generosity which has always marked the work of the ATS. Goodbye and the best of luck.’

The train was crowded and a number of those on board were men and women obviously as freshly demobbed as she was. But even amid the hum of conversation and jokes and scraping of matches to light cigarettes, she felt a kind of solitude descend upon her. The letter made the army seem official and impersonal again. There was a sense of it all falling away from her, the experiences of the past four years beginning to recede, dream-like. Now she needed to reshape herself, though how, as yet, she didn’t know. She thought of Gwen heading towards her mother’s home to wait until Bill was released. What would her reception be? And her own? How would it feel to walk into Court 11, Catherine Street, again?

Birmingham came as a shock to her. Although she had been there during the worst of the bombing, the city had somehow reformed itself in her mind while she was away. She had tended to remember it still complete, with the Market Hall standing and the rows of terraced houses undamaged. But now she saw afresh the jagged gaps which the war had left in the city: the bombsites between the houses, a few levelled off, but many still with rubble in place. Young lads took them over as playgrounds, still plundering shrapnel, and thistles and purple fireweed pushed up between the timbers and bricks.

As she stepped in her solid service shoes across the dirty blue bricks of Court 11, she was struck for the first time by just how small were the houses in which thousands like her had spent their years growing up. She put her hand up automatically to knock at the door, forgetting for a moment that this was where she now belonged. This was life now and she had nothing else. She was home.

Only Sid was in. He was sitting at the old table, a paper open in front of him. He looked up as she opened the door, seeing for a moment a beautiful, neatly dressed stranger in khaki, her hair still arranged carefully under the ATS cap as if she was afraid to take it off.

He looked blankly at her for a moment.

‘Rose?’

He pulled himself up, then waited at a loss as she closed the door and came in to stand the other side of the table, putting her bag down on its newspaper surface.

‘All right are you?’ he said eventually.

Rose could tell he was finding it difficult to think of anything to say, and she was faced with the same problem. She felt tears slide into her eyes. Nothing had changed, although everything had. Sid’s face looked thinner, haggard and unshaven.

‘You still at the BSA, Dad?’ she asked finally, looking for a point of contact.

He shook his head, and she saw how many grey hairs there were among the black. He was fifty-four and he looked an old man.

‘They let me go,’ he said. ‘Back to making bikes now the war’s over.’

‘Oh. I’m sorry,’ she said.

Sid shrugged and then frowned, his pallid skin wrinkling as if he was trying to remember something. ‘Where’ve you come from then?’

‘Italy. Near Naples.’

Sid nodded slowly, bemused. ‘Have a good journey then, did you?’

Rose knew at that moment that it would be quite pointless trying to talk to anyone at home about her years out of England. It was too far away, too removed from their own experience.

She nodded. ‘Got cheap tickets on the train – cut rate if you’ve just been demobbed.’

She looked around. So far as she could remember, the room was exactly the same as when she had left, almost eerily so.

‘Where’s Grace?’ she asked.

‘Up Willett’s. She’s got a job. On the bedsteads like.’

After a moment he said, ‘Fancy making us a cuppa tea?’

And that was that. His sole interest in her war.

The distance was there with Grace too, though the two of them embraced and laughed and looked at each other with tearful eyes when she came in from work. Rose was shocked by Grace’s thin, careworn appearance. She felt there ought to be years’ worth of things to say, that they should be making up for lost time, yet no one could think what to say.

‘How are the twins?’ Rose asked eagerly when the two of them were peeling and cutting up vegetables together late that afternoon. ‘Have you seen them?’

‘Oh, they’re full of the joys,’ Grace said. ‘And Harry. All at school near Edna’s. To tell you the truth, she can’t bear the thought of parting with them. I asked her if she wanted to send them back here now it’s all over. But as she says, they’ve been there nearly all their lives.’

‘I’ll have to go over,’ Rose said. More people, she felt, who would be lost to her.

As the days and weeks passed after her homecoming, Rose fast began to resent the narrowness of the life she had been thrown back into, and her own lack of independence. How restless she felt! How could she ever settle down to this drab existence of rationing and dreariness after her time in Italy?

It was ‘Where’ve you been? Make sure you’re in by ten. Who’ve you been with?’ From Sid, from Grace. Not that she went out much anyway. But Grace had got into the habit of questioning her as if she was her mother. She had completely taken over the role of woman of the house.

Everything seemed shrunken and oppressive. Even the clothes Rose had left behind when she joined up no longer fitted her new, rounder figure. Number five was like a doll’s house, while Rose felt like a giant who had been out striding across the world. Why couldn’t they realize that after these four years she was now an adult who could run her life without being questioned all the time?

Once more, when there were important considerations like the family’s mourning for Sam and Grace’s personal grief over Joe, Rose found herself cast in the role of the restless, selfish one, always looking over the wall for fresher, greener grass.

After a month at home she found herself a job as a delivery driver for Snell’s grocery store in Balsall Heath. Of course it had none of the excitement of her Italian driving, but at least it got her out and about and brought another wage into the house.

She would never forget her sister’s face that day. Usually when Rose reached the house after Grace she found her sister’s skinny form bustling round, tidying, handwashing, the evening meal already in hand.

Opening the door, Rose thought for a few seconds that there was no one in. She put down the few groceries she had bought on the way home – Typhoo and milk and Rinso. A ray of late afternoon autumn sunshine had managed to reach its way through the normally dark court windows and lay in a bright slanting shape on the tabletop. Rose was already adjusting her mind to doing the evening meal herself when she saw her sister sitting there, to her right, the horsehair chair swivelled towards the window which looked over the court.

Grace didn’t turn to look at her. Rose watched for a couple of seconds, seeing her cheeks drained of any colour, and the tight compression of her lips. She was taking in quick, shallow breaths.

‘Are you all right?’ Rose asked anxiously. ‘Got an attack coming on?’

She stepped closer. Still Grace didn’t move. Then Rose saw the letter in her lap, the thin blue paper.

‘What’s happened?’ she asked gently, kneeling down by the arm of the chair, her heart thudding.

Without turning her head, Grace said, ‘It’s from Joe’s mom.’

Rose frowned. Grace knew he was dead. What more could be wrong? ‘Poor woman – she must be in a right state.’

‘No.’ Grace’s head whipped round suddenly. ‘She ain’t in a state. She’s got nothing to be in a state about.’ Her voice suddenly rose to a piercing shriek. ‘Because he’s not dead! He’s not bloody dead! And he’s getting married next month!’

She got up suddenly and moved agitatedly round the room, as if she couldn’t think what to do with her body. She picked up the bread knife.

‘I could stick this in me!’ she screamed at Rose. ‘He’s stuck enough knives in me to make me feel as if I’m bleeding to death!’

And then the sobs broke out of her. Rose took the knife from her, and drew her shaking sister into her arms.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said softly, after she had let Grace have a good cry.

‘That bloke who wrote to me,’ Grace gasped out, her head pressed hard against Rose’s shoulder. ‘He must’ve known Joe was still alive. They were pals. They live in the same town. Joe must’ve told him to say he was dead – just to get rid of me.’

‘Oh my God.’ Rose suddenly saw it as clearly as Grace had done. ‘What a bastard.’

‘All he’s put me through,’ Grace went on in her distraught voice. ‘Thinking he’d been killed, when all the time . . . He could’ve had the guts to write and say we was finished.’

‘Men have a queer way of going about things,’ Rose said drily.

She led Grace back to the chair to sit down, and knelt beside her, holding her and letting her cry, as Margherita had done for her only a few months ago. For days and weeks afterwards she comforted her sister through the shock of this betrayal and, perhaps Grace’s most hurtful realization, that at least if he had been truly dead, she could still have carried on believing that he loved her.

During her first weeks at home, Rose had to try to adjust to all the details of living back in an England freshly recovering from war.

Closest to home were the changes which had taken place in the court. The only familiar faces left were the Pye family and Mabel Gooch’s household. The two sisters from number four had both died during the war, one quickly succeeding the other, and the house was now occupied by an old couple. Moonstruck House still had occasional tenants, who never stayed long, probably more because of its atrocious state of repair than any other kind of blight on the place. And there was a new family at number three.

Apart from learning the names of the new neighbours, she found she had to carry an identity card, use a ration book and clothing coupons still and register with the grocer and the butcher. There was the damp, drizzly weather and the worn, grey people around her, many of whom – with some justification she soon realized – gibed at her for being ‘well out of it’ down there in Italy.

The elections that year also shocked many people by removing Winston Churchill as prime minister and replacing him with Clement Attlee.

‘How could they do it to him?’ Grace demanded. ‘After all he’s seen us through. They’ll be throwing the king out next.’

Rose, who had looked round at her country with new eyes on her return, had heard all the voices clamouring for change and decided to join them. Things had to be moved on, to be improved after the war, otherwise what was the point of it all? She didn’t tell Grace, but her vote had gone to Attlee, and she rather suspected Sid’s had as well.

There was talk of all kinds of changes, of visions almost unheard of before the war. Of a ‘Welfare State’ – better support for the out of work, for big families – even for getting looked after when you were sick. Who would not vote for that?

During all this time when change seemed to be constantly in the air and Rose struggled to endure this regressive state, as it felt to her, of living back at home, she had one more adjustment to make – really the biggest of them all.

When she walked in from work one afternoon, Alfie was waiting for her.

‘Look who’s here!’ Grace said as Rose pushed open the door. There was a note of warning in her voice, Rose realized. ‘Don’t waste this opportunity,’ she was saying. ‘Make the most of him. You don’t know how lucky you are.’

‘Alfie!’ Rose cried, more startled than pleased. She had known he must come home soon if he had survived the war, and no one had heard that he hadn’t. But she had kept pushing the thought from her mind.

There he was, in his slightly too big demob suit, thin and pale, his hair cropped so short there was not enough of it to stick up in its unruly spikes. He looked older, Rose realized. His jaw was stronger as if his whole face had broadened a little.

‘How are you?’ she asked, full of confusion. So strange him being there, looking much the same, yet with these small changes which were all that signified nearly six years’ absence.

‘I’m all right.’ Bashful and nervous, his eyes lingered over her wonderingly. How her figure had filled out! His eyes moved hungrily down over her breasts, her curving sides. She was wearing a tight-fitting jumper of moss green, and a straight tweedy skirt cut with all the meagreness of war garments, which she had managed to alter so it fitted her.

‘You look a treat,’ he said.

Rose blushed. She wasn’t ready for this, this directness, this talking as if the war had passed in only a few days and nothing had changed.

‘Have a cuppa tea,’ Grace said firmly, pouring hastily from the brown teapot. ‘He wouldn’t have one till you got here, Rose. Come on, sit down both of you.’ She handed Sid a cup and then sat at the table with Rose and Alfie. Rose watched her smile at him – about the warmest smile she had seen on Grace’s face since she’d arrived home.

‘I’m sorry to hear about Sam,’ Alfie began awkwardly. ‘He were a good bloke.’

Rose and Grace both nodded. ‘Thanks,’ Rose said. ‘Yes, he was.’