Family of Women Read online

  ANNIE MURRAY

  Family of Women

  PAN BOOKS

  Contents

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Part Two

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Part Three

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Part Four

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Part Five

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Chapter Seventy

  Chapter Seventy-One

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  Chapter Seventy-Three

  Chapter Seventy-Four

  Chapter Seventy-Five

  Part Six

  Chapter Seventy-Six

  Chapter Seventy-Seven

  Chapter Seventy-Eight

  Chapter Seventy-Nine

  Chapter Eighty

  Chapter Eighty-One

  Chapter Eighty-Two

  Chapter Eighty-Three

  Chapter Eighty-Four

  Chapter Eighty-Five

  Chapter Eighty-Six

  Chapter Eighty-Seven

  Chapter Eighty-Eight

  Part Seven

  Chapter Eighty-Nine

  Chapter Ninety

  Part One

  1926–36

  Chapter One

  Violet was eleven when the first of the babies came.

  A scrawny, cringing stranger appeared at their door and they had to peer out past Mom to see, she was such a big woman. She and her sister Rosina, who was eight, stood by the range, listening to the whispers.

  ‘My sister . . . Might be able to manage when she’s better . . . A few shillings, that’s all we’ve got . . . They sent me to you . . .’

  On the freezing air through the door came the smoke and stink of the metal-bashing factories and the sweet sawdust from the timber yard.

  Violet’s mother, Bessie, was a strapping matron of thirty-four. She stood with her hands on her hips in her white, starched apron, her face hard as granite, lording it over this poor woman. Bessie was gaffer of the yard here, and she knew it. Everyone looked to Bessie Wiles, but by God you didn’t want to cross her. She’d take her time to answer if she wanted.

  ‘I might be able to,’ she said at last.

  After a few questions – the sick mother of the child lived round in Summer Lane – she said, ‘All right. Give it ’ere,’ and held out her arms.

  The visitor said ‘Thank you’ twice over in a grovelling voice and Violet knew her mother had never seen the woman before and wondered why she had come here.

  It was only when Mom turned that they saw the baby, a pale, odd-looking thing. Its head seemed too big, and was topped with a fuzz of gingery hair.

  Rosina ran straight up and peered at it. ‘A babby! Whose is it?’

  Violet held back, wary of Bessie’s beefy, slapping hands and bullying tongue, and the cat o’nine tails she kept fixed to her belt. Violet was a frail girl, coltishly thin, with pale, almost luminous skin, straggly blonde hair and sad, blue eyes.

  She saw a new glow in her mother’s eyes.

  ‘It’s a little wench. Miserable scrap she is – look at the size of her! The mom’s been taken bad so we’re looking after her. There’re worse ways of earning a few bob. Don’t go poking her, Rosina, you’ll wake her.’

  Marigold came downstairs then and joined in staring at the red-haired baby. Charlie was out playing with his pals. Marigold and Charlie were twins, two years older than Violet, but Marigold wasn’t quite ‘all there’, was what Mom said. ‘She’ll never amount to much.’ She said that too, as if Marigold was a stone with no feeling. Violet saw some flicker of hungry emotion in Marigold’s dark eyes and she clung on at her mother’s side. Marigold couldn’t seem to get enough of the baby.

  ‘You going to give ’er your titty, Mom?’

  Marigold had been old enough to see her mother feed Rosina, and Mrs Cameron next door was seldom without a child hanging off her little pimple breasts.

  Bessie gave a harsh laugh, her big body quivering. ‘Ooh no, I’m past all that, bab, more’s the pity!’ Violet had once heard her saying to Mrs Cameron and Mrs Davis out in the yard that after Rosina she’d had it ‘all taken away’. She said it in a low, mournful voice, with a big sigh from the depths of her. Mrs Davis said that she wished she could bleeding well have it all taken away too, that all these babbies would be the death of her, but Bessie looked at her with tears in her eyes. It was the only time Violet had seen Mom overcome like that.

  ‘Ooh no, Clara – my Jack – God rest him – always liked me with a big belly on me and a babby in my arms. Nothing like it.’

  ‘You daint lose any of yours though, Bess,’ Mrs Davis said. ‘Bring ’em into the world and watch ’em fade away – that’s when it does for you.’

  With a grunt, Bessie knelt down on the rag rug on the rough brick floor, barking out orders as usual. ‘Pass my shawl over, Marigold, and we’ll lay her on it for a bit, have a look over her. Violet – get the kettle on.’

  Violet did as she was commanded, then looked grimly down at the child. She didn’t want the puny thing there. There was barely enough to go round as it was.

  ‘Mom. How long’s it got to stay? Mom?’

  But Bessie wasn’t listening.

  Marigold knelt over the baby. Her black hair was chopped into a bob, chin-length, parted severely down the right side and yanked back from her face with a couple of kirby-grips. She stared and stared.

  Rosina, baby of the family herself, stood twiddling her long plaits, full of questions and jack-in-the-box energy. No one could ever miss the fact that Rosina was there. Violet stayed back, feeling outside it all, seeing her mother’s thick, stockinged calves and the wo
rn heels of her shoes as she knelt over the child.

  ‘Mom?’

  ‘Oh, shurrup, Violet – stop keeping on!’ Bessie was peeling back the rags in which the baby was wrapped.

  ‘Don’t see why we have to have it,’ Violet said sulkily. ‘It’s ugly.’

  ‘Not half as ugly as you were. And it’s a girl, not an it.’

  ‘What’s her name?’ Rosina asked.

  ‘The woman never said.’ Bessie knelt back on her haunches. ‘We’ll have to think of summat. What about Daisy? Marigold – there’s a tanner in the jug up there – run over to Mrs Bigley’s and ask her for a tin of Carnation. I’ll have to feed her, soon as she wakes.’

  Marigold followed her orders, as usual.

  Bessie scooped the child off the floor and stood looking at her, deaf to anyone else. She started humming a little tune and carried her through to the back, with Rosina following as if the baby was a magnet. Rosy wasn’t frightened of Mom.

  Violet stood scowling in the front room, in her old dress that was too short, socks sagging down round her ankles. She stuck her thumb in her mouth. As usual, she felt invisible.

  Chapter Two

  Daisy was the first in a long line.

  There was nothing official about it, not then. In the seething, over-populated slum houses of north Birmingham there was many a mother at the end of her tether, worn down by having child after child. Bessie made her name in the district.

  ‘Take the babby round to Bessie Wiles – number two, back of sixteen in Spring Street. She’ll have it off you for a bit. And her house is clean as a pin.’

  She was already a tough heroine of survival in their eyes. There was Bessie, widowed at twenty-six with four to bring up, worked like a Trojan, up cleaning pubs before dawn, taking in washing, carding buttons and pins for the factories. All the energy in the world, while weaker vessels fell along the way. And everyone came to her for advice. She had the neighbourhood just where she wanted them – respectful, fearful and under her thumb.

  Bessie took in the babies of mothers who died birthing them, or were taken with infections or plain worn out. She kept them until they went back to their families, or handed them over to the orphanage and was paid for her trouble.

  That wasn’t the first time they had had other children living in the house. Bessie had once taken in some of Mrs Davis’s children. Mrs Davis, a weak, cringing woman, lived two doors away then, and life was one long struggle. They were ‘three-up’ houses, with two tiny bedrooms on the second floor and cockroach-infested attics, and Mrs Davis had eleven children, nine of them boys, a wastrel of a husband and her father-in-law lodged with them as well. For two years, off and on, during the Great War, Bessie had taken the two girls in every night and they slept top to toe with Violet and Rosina.

  ‘You’re golden, Bessie,’ Mrs Davis frequently said, with whining gratitude. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you, that I don’t.’

  ‘Oh, I know what it’s like in a big family, Clara,’ Bessie would say magnanimously. ‘What are neighbours for, bab, if not to help?’

  Violet was four when the Davis children started sleeping in her bed. They were wriggly, vexing girls, prone to itchy suppurating rashes. Violet could remember the feel of little Ethel Davis’s freezing cold feet if she stretched out, and Florrie Davis wet the bed. The room always stank of wee and every morning when they woke the mattress was freezing cold and wet. She was overjoyed when the Davises did a moonlight flit to dodge the landlord and she could sleep in a dry bed again without Ethel’s scratchy toenails.

  Now it seemed that a whole parade of babies couldn’t do without Bessie either. As fast as one was sent off to a new home a new one arrived, and at times there were as many as three at once. Bessie rose to the occasion magnificently. She got Uncle Clarence, her brother who lived with them, to build cradles out of apple boxes. She knitted coloured squares for blankets. There were always kettles of water on for cleaning out babies’ bottles and Bessie was seldom without a child in her arms. All life seemed to revolve round her.

  Marigold and Charlie were thirteen then, and Bessie made a decision. One evening as they sat over tea in the sputtering gaslight, with a baby asleep in the corner, she said, ‘I’ve been thinking about our Marigold, Clarence. There ain’t no point in her stopping on at school – ’er’s never going to be one for books and learning, not the way she is. You can stop at home and give me a hand from now on, Mari.’

  Marigold looked dreamily up from her plate of liver and onions, barely seeming to realize what was being said. There was a thick streak of gravy down the front of her blouse. Violet knew that Marigold didn’t like school. She could just about read and write but she was slow in every way, couldn’t keep up with the running about, and all the teasing from the others.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Clarence said. He ruffled a hand through his receding hair as he often did when Bessie asked his opinion. He was as thin and weedy as she was big and ebullient. Even in his early thirties he seemed like an old man, sitting there in his shirtsleeves, shoulders hunched. ‘We’ll have the bloke keep coming round from the Board if you keep her home.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll soon see to him,’ Bessie said, drawing in a fierce breath that expanded her enormous bosom even further under her black frock. ‘You’d like to help with the babbies, Marigold, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Can I stop at home an’ all?’ Rosina asked.

  ‘Don’t talk stupid,’ Charlie sneered at her.

  Rosy stuck her tongue out at him when Mom wasn’t looking and Charlie gave her one of his stodgy looks. He was like an old man as well, Violet thought.

  Clarence wiped his chin on the back of his hand. ‘Whatever you think’s best, Bess.’ That was what he alway said in the end.

  So at thirteen, Marigold stopped going to school and stayed at home and learned about looking after babies. She never said if she cared either way. In any case, Violet never heard anyone ask her.

  Chapter Three

  1927

  ‘Cat’s got the measles, the measles, the measles . . .’ Rosina was skipping ahead, dark plaits switching up and down.

  Cat’s got the measles, the measles got the cat! Oi – ’ She swivelled round, landing on both feet. ‘Vi – d’you think Mom’d give us a tanner to go up the Picture House?’

  ‘You’ll be lucky!’

  Violet stared at her in amazement. Trust Rosy! She’d never dare ask Mom for money, straight out.

  ‘You ask – bet she won’t.’

  It was the end of the summer term and school was out. Eight weeks of freedom stretching ahead, and the day was hot as they trotted along in the blue shadow of the houses with the heady feeling of being set free from school routine into the wide, shapeless time of the holidays. Long days ahead to play out at hopscotch and tip-cat and hide-and-seek!

  Violet was excited, because you couldn’t not be excited at the end of term with all of them pouring out of the school gates on to the street, everyone running, shouting, cheering and tearing off home or to the park. But there was also a sad feeling because she liked her teacher Miss Green, who was about to leave the school. Miss Green was plump and comforting, with curly brown hair, and she knew Miss Green liked her and had taken notice of her the way no one else had ever done, so she’d done her very best for her.

  ‘You’re my star pupil in arithmetic,’ Miss Green had said a few days ago, smiling through her spectacles. ‘You’re working very well, Violet.’

  These were words of very high praise from a teacher. Miss Green was very strict but she was fair-minded, and any words of praise coming Violet’s way were rare indeed. She carried them inside her as if they were fragile birds’ eggs. Clutched in her hand was the envelope containing her school report. Had Miss Green written something nice in there as well? If only she could get it out and read it, but she didn’t dare – what would Mom say? She bubbled inside in anticipation.

  Rosina adored the pictures. She’d sit through anything, laughing at Buster Keaton and
Laurel and Hardy until she was nearly sick, riding in her seat through Westerns until people behind snapped at her to sit still, and most of all enjoying the ones with the actresses, with their big soulful eyes full of emotion and their lovely clothes like none they’d ever seen in real life. Rosina laughed, cried, trembled with them. She lived every second of it. She especially loved Lillian Gish and Mary Pickford.

  They ran up the entry. Mrs Cameron was mangling clothes in the yard. The door was open as usual and they ran straight in. Charlie had beaten them home and was filling his face with a crust of bread and lard. Bessie stood, perspiring in the heat and rocking the latest orphaned infant in her arms, and the room was full of his wailing.

  ‘Mom, Mom – can we go to the flicks?’ Rosina demanded.

  ‘I’ve got my report, Mom!’ Violet thrust the envelope towards her mother. She knew it was the wrong thing to do but she couldn’t help herself.

  ‘Can’t you see this babby’s running me ragged!’ Bessie roared. ‘Can’t you see, you stupid wench. What’s that flaming thing?’ She looked at the brown envelope as if it was dirt. ‘I don’t want that – stick it on the mantel.’

  Heart sinking, Violet did as she was told. Stupid – yes, to think Mom might want to know. Rosina carelessly put her report up there as well, then persisted with what she wanted.

  ‘Mom, Mom – can we? It’ll get us out from under your feet.’ Rosina never gave up. If she couldn’t get her way one way round she could think of half a dozen other avenues to try.

  ‘You’d wear out rock, the way you keep on,’ Bessie said crossly over the baby’s screams. But she dug under her apron pocket, just near where she kept the leather cat o’ nine tails which could switch stingingly across hands or legs. Instead she brought out a shilling. ‘Go on then, all of you – clear off. I don’t know what Clarence’ll say though.’

  Bessie always said this, even though Clarence never said anything of much note and she was firmly in charge and always had been.

  ‘Come on, Vi!’ Rosina cried.

  Charlie and Marigold came as well and they sat in their threepenny seats through something all about the Alps, and then a Buster Keaton picture called The Navigator. Violet laughed along with Rosina and the others, but all the time in the back of her mind there was that envelope on the mantelpiece where things were written about her and she wanted to know what. Could she, Violet Wiles, be good at something – anything? Had Miss Green seen something in her that no one else had?