Birmingham Rose (38 page)

‘Where was it? Out east somewhere?’

‘Burma,’ Grace told him.

Again they all nodded sadly, lost for words. They didn’t talk about the losses of the war much; everyone bore them privately.

‘Grace tells me you was in Italy?’ Alfie said. ‘What the hell were you doing there?’

‘ATS. I was a driver,’ Rose said, feeling suddenly prickly. His voice held a slight mockery, as if he didn’t believe it. ‘Was through most of the war.’

‘You mean they let you loose on them trucks!’ Alfie chuckled, looking at Grace as if expecting her to confirm the joke. ‘God Almighty, what a thought!’

Rose gave him a hard, defiant look. ‘So where’ve you been all the war then? Found a better hole to go to, did you?’

She saw her words had hit home. Alfie turned red and looked down at his tea cup.

‘It weren’t my fault,’ he said. ‘That’s how it was, going into France. If you’d been there you’d have seen.’

Prisoner of war through the whole thing. It was a hard homecoming. Not much to brag about.

‘Sorry,’ Rose relented. ‘It must have been grim for you.’

‘Thought at times we’d be there for the rest of our lives,’ he said. ‘It was only hearing from people . . .’ He turned to look at her with a hurt expression in his eyes. ‘You could’ve written more.’

‘I did!’ Rose exclaimed guiltily. She knew that her communication with him, especially once she had reached Italy, had been the bare minimum. ‘I’m sorry. We were very busy.’

It was hard for her even to look at him. Had his feelings stood still during the war? What else did you have to change them when you were locked up in a prisoner of war camp?

‘It was such a long time,’ she said wearily.

‘Come out with me tonight,’ Alfie said suddenly. He wanted to be with her away from the others. Kiss her. Get back on their old footing. After all, she was the girl who had promised to be his wife.

Walks, the flicks, evenings spent at her house or his, with Mrs Meredith fussing adoringly round them both. It was more peaceful at Alfie’s. To make ends meet, Mrs Meredith had taken in a lodger, a widow in her fifties, but she kept herself to herself most of the time.

Rose found Alfie easy undemanding company. Gradually she remembered that he had made her laugh sometimes, that he was kind and generous. That he adored her, and being adored was warming in itself, even though the feeling was not mutual and she knew it. During the winter of 1945–6 they met almost daily. Alfie soon found work amidst all the rebuilding of the city. When both had finished for the day they met up, already washed and changed, and spent the evening together. Anything to get out of Catherine Street, with Sid morose, often half drunk, and Grace sad, quiet and dutiful.

‘When we’re married,’ Alfie said one evening, ‘you won’t have to work any more. Not having my wife working.’

Rose looked round at him startled. It was growing dark and they were walking away from Catherine Street after he’d come to pick her up.

‘Oh – and what d’you reckon I’m going to do all day long then?’ she said indignantly. He had not even asked her to marry him again yet.

‘You’ll be looking after the babbies, won’t you?’ he said, as if it was obvious.

He had voiced something that she had not realized yet in herself. Was this not the one thing left that she really wanted? Babies – children? Passion, locked deep in her as a part of the past, did not seem accessible now. Perhaps it was something you could only have for a short time, a dream time, not part of real life. She didn’t see much passion in the tired, struggling people around her.

But babies. Something in her surfaced and said yes. Please. If she could have nothing else out of life now, she could have children. That was what Alfie was offering.

In April 1946, in St Joseph’s Church, Birch Street, Rose became Mrs Alfred Meredith.

‘Rose? Coo-eee. Rose!’

Rose’s neighbour Joan walked down the side of the little prefab house, pulling her eighteen-month-old son Freddie by the hand. She found Rose pegging washing on the line. As she called out again she saw Rose start violently. She turned, the peg-bag in one hand and the other laid over her heart.

‘Oh, Joan. I was miles away. You didn’t half make me jump.’

‘Well, who did you think it might be – Jack the Ripper?’ Joan moved over to the line. ‘Here, let’s give you a hand with the rest of this lot.’

She was a sturdy woman in her early thirties with heavy arms and legs and long, thick brown hair. She soon had the rest of the washing pegged out. Then the two of them turned to watch Freddie and Hilda, who were both bent over something that had caught their attention at the other end of the garden. Hilda was growing up to look the image of her father, though her hair was more manageable than Alfie’s and hung in wispy strands round her head.

‘Mom!’ Hilda shouted imperiously. ‘Come here – look!’

‘You’ll have to watch her,’ Joan said. ‘She’s turning into a right little madam.’ It was said inoffensively and Rose knew it to be true.

‘I know. Sometimes I don’t know how to deal with her. Mind you,’ she laughed, ‘that’s what they all said about me!’

After a moment Joan said, ‘Actually the reason I came over was, I was wondering if you could have Freddie for a bit of today. Dave’s off sick like, and he can’t stand his noise . . .’

‘And you need a break,’ Rose finished for her. ‘Yes, course I can have him. If you bring a bit of something over for his dinner he can stay all day. Be good for Hilda – she’s better when there’s company.’

Joan’s fleshy face broke into a broad smile. ‘Are you sure? Thanks Rose. Oh, what a difference it makes to have good neighbours, eh? Now, if there’s anything I can do for you – bits of washing or anything – you just bring it right over.’

‘Right,’ Rose said. She loathed housework. ‘You’re on.’

As Joan left, full of gratitude, Rose watched her with an amused expression. She wasn’t at all sure she believed the story about Dave being poorly, but it didn’t matter. The fact was, Freddie was a good kid but Joan couldn’t stand to have him round her. Not day in day out. Any excuse and she brought him over to Rose. And she wasn’t the only one. ‘Oh, I ’spect Rose’ll have him’ was a common refrain among her neighbours with small children.

One way or another, most days the house was full of them, sometimes with their mothers, but more often without. In fine weather there were often five or six, with Hilda playing Queen Bee at the centre of it all, bossy, perverse, but generally easier to handle when there were other kids about.

‘I don’t know how you manage it,’ the other women would say gratefully as she ran her unofficial little nursery. ‘You’re a godsend!’ And they repaid her with admiration, company and small offerings they could spare out of their rations. They took in her washing and ironing, and sometimes even offered to clean her house – all of which seemed less fraught than spending their time in the company of their offspring.

This was how Rose filled her days. Alfie wouldn’t allow her to work, so she managed in her own way to do what she loved best, caring for small children.

Rose used everything she could get her hands on for those kids. Alfie didn’t mind how she occupied them, so long as the mess was all cleared up by the time he came home. Often the mothers didn’t come to collect their children until the afternoon, and they’d stop and have a cuppa, sometimes bringing their own tea. They sat round as their little ones told them in shrill, excited voices all they had done during the morning.

‘We helped Rose in the kitchen!’

‘She gave us a apple and toffees!’

‘I sat on the potty!’

And Rose smiled delightedly at them all, at their enjoyment of coming to her house.

‘When you going to have another then?’ Joan asked when she came round later that afternoon. ‘Hilda’s two now, ain’t she? Don’t want to have too big a gap.’

‘When it comes, I ’spose,’ Rose called through from the kitchen. She was mopping Hilda’s cotton dress where she’d spilled her drink down it. ‘Can’t have one any sooner than that, can I?’

‘You do remember what you have to do, don’t you?’ another of the women teased. ‘They don’t just grow inside by magic after the first one, you know!’

‘You try telling my old man that!’ Rose quipped back, going back to join them in the living room.

It was partly a joke. But after the women had left, Rose’s emotions were stirred up by this conversation, leaving her unsettled and sad. There was much less lovemaking between her and Alfie than there had been in their early days of marriage and it was nearly always at his demand. Although she wasn’t sorry he left her alone more nowadays, she did wonder why it was taking her so long to conceive another child. Was there something wrong? She had taken the risk with Falcone but there had been no baby then either. Often she wished there had been. Perhaps she wasn’t able to bear many children?

She thought she had put behind her all those painful feelings of longing and restlessness which had plagued her after the war. She had even managed to quell her frustration at being married to Alfie, burying her desire for a wider, more challenging life by putting all her energy into her most lasting and satisfying love – small children. If this was her life, then she must make the best of it. Look at George, locked away for what might be as much as five years. And Grace, who had been denied the opportunity to achieve even her modest aspirations. She had not been accepted for training by any of the local hospitals, and was still at home, still taking jobs in factories and keeping house for Sid. Wasn’t she, Rose, lucky? She should strive to return Alfie’s kindness and affection and build a life which was good for both of them and for Hilda.

She had made an enormous effort to create this new life, like a person who has had a couple of limbs amputated and must adjust to new ways of living.

‘It’s good to see you looking happier,’ Alfie had said to her recently. ‘All that looking back to the war – don’t do anyone any good, you know.’

She knew he resented her war, even though she had told him only the barest details of her life in the ATS. His own had been so limited, so unheroic. She tried for her own peace of mind to block out her memories. It was another country, another time. Over.

She submitted dutifully to Alfie whenever he turned to her in bed. She had almost forgotten the feelings her body was capable of. Alfie was quickly aroused and very soon satisfied. Invariably he mounted her almost immediately after a kiss and a quick feel of her breasts and he would enter her, almost unable to wait until he was inside, and then it was over. Rose patiently held his slim, pale shoulders time after time as he murmured ‘Oh, Rosie, Rosie’ into her left ear, feeling nothing except his moist, softening member withdrawing from her. He expected nothing more, and seemed never to notice that she got as much excitement from peeling potatoes as from his lovemaking. He was content. He had a good, pretty wife whom other men envied him for. She never complained, so she must be all right. He was not aware there could be anything more and Rose had shut out any expectation that there might be.

But if she could not even have more children . . . She began to shake, her body letting out the tension that her mind had been keeping so tightly under control. She sat in the little living room as Hilda sat watching her with wide, frightened eyes. Finally, the tears came and Hilda began to cry too.

Rose picked her up and cuddled her. ‘It’s all right love, don’t you worry. Mommy’s just feeling a bit poorly, that’s all.’ She felt steadied by the child’s warm body.

Could there ever really be love between a man and a woman? Mr Lazenby, Alfie – both used her in their way. And what about Tony? That was unreasonable, she knew, but in her state such terrible thoughts came. Worst of all, the one she tried to keep furthest from her mind persisted. What about Falcone? Had his words, his confusion, the looks of tenderness and desire that she had from him all been his way of using her? Of getting what he wanted and then dropping her for a ‘higher calling’? Had she been deluded even when she responded to a man with every fibre of herself? All these doubts stabbed into her mind.

Though she had tried to avoid thinking of Italy, and especially of Il Rifugio, she knew that what sustained her and kept her feeling worth something was the knowledge that she could truly love and be loved in return. If no one else ever showed her that, then Falcone had done so. Try as she might to forget Italy and him, the thoughts still came to her from time to time.

Sometimes she dreamed of him, seeing his dark, serious eyes close to hers. In some of the dreams he was telling her how much he loved her. She saw herself back in the Finzis’ house with the moon slanting through the windows on to their naked bodies. Or in Il Rifugio, making love with him on the thin straw pallets where she had first seen him sleeping. In other dreams he kept telling her over and over again that he had to leave her. He was cold and distant, cruel even. She would repeat the feeling of desolation of returning to Il Rifugio to find him gone. Sometimes she would wake crying, finding Alfie stirring next to her. The depth of her disappointment that he was not Falcone made her weep even more – harsh, quiet tears that she could never share with him.

A few weeks earlier she had had a letter from Gwen. She and Bill had compromised between their two sets of parents and settled in a small village in Berkshire. Bill was working in a bank in the nearby town.

‘We’re not very far from where we all started out together!’ Gwen had told her. She already had a son and a daughter, Edward and Elizabeth, and was expecting her third child.

‘I must say, I’m awfully happy,’ Gwen wrote. ‘Bill is a good husband and father and provides wonderful protection against Mummy when necessary! I should so love you to see E and E and to meet Alfie and your little Hilda. Perhaps we shall all be able to meet up one day?’

Gwen had apparently found a settled, serene sort of happiness with someone she loved. It was possible. But Rose knew she did not love Alfie.

As she sat that afternoon, holding a now rather drowsy Hilda and looking blankly over the child’s shoulder, she knew starkly that though she had settled for what she could get, for filling her life with children, it was not and never could be enough.