The Women of Lilac Street Read online

  Contents

  February 1925

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  March 1925

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  April 1925

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  May 1925

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  June 1925

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Forty-Nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-One

  Fifty-Two

  Fifty-Three

  Fifty-Four

  Fifty-Five

  July 1925

  Fifty-Six

  Fifty-Seven

  Fifty-Eight

  Fifty-Nine

  Sixty

  Sixty-One

  Sixty-Two

  Sixty-Three

  Sixty-Four

  Sixty-Five

  Sixty-Six

  Sixty-Seven

  September 1925

  Sixty-Eight

  Sixty-Nine

  Seventy

  February 1925

  One

  ‘Aggie? Come ’ere and peg these out for me!’

  Though her mother’s shrill call could not have failed to reach her ears, Aggie didn’t move from the front window where she stood peering out at the street, her little sister May balanced on her right hip, clinging to her like a monkey.

  Aggie was a slender but sturdy twelve-year-old, her solemn face sprinkled with freckles and flyaway red hair cut severely at jaw length. May, who was three, looked quite different, her hair dark and curly, eyes a gravy brown.

  Upstairs, Dad was coughing.

  Though barefoot, Aggie was too caught up in her own thoughts to notice the cold or anything else, like her grandmother’s tutting from behind her. Aggie moved even closer to the window, the ragged net curtain bunched in her left hand. There was a long singe mark at the bottom edge where Dad had fallen asleep with his Woodbine too close to it. Nanna said they’d been lucky the whole house hadn’t gone up.

  ‘Aggie Green,’ she whispered, ‘took a stand by the window, where her enemies could not see her. They had no idea that Aggie was on their trail . . .’ That’s how spies talked, she thought, though she didn’t really know.

  Outside, passers-by were like blurred ghosts in the murk. A feeble winter sun was just beginning to strain through a fog that was so thick you could hardly see the houses on the other side. The terraces faced each other like a resigned old married couple across Lilac Street, in an ordinary Birmingham neighbourhood.

  ‘Aggie!’ It was a furious shriek now.

  ‘Coming, Mom!’

  But still she didn’t obey.

  ‘Better shift yerself, wench.’ Nanna’s voice broke into her thoughts. ‘Or there’ll be trouble.’

  Nanna was perched on the edge of the sagging horsehair sofa, ‘keeping out of the road’ – which meant out from under the feet of her daughter Jen, Aggie’s mother, who was not in the most reasonable of moods.

  Aggie’s grandmother, Freda Adams, was dressed, as usual, in black from head to foot. She sat ramrod straight, her right arm holding up her walking stick, the other massaging her sore hip, wincing now and again. The cold in the room didn’t help. Some people had nice front parlours, kept for best. Theirs was an overspill room with only the old sofa in it. The fireplace held no comfort, just a pile of cold ash. But Nanna seemed to be able to sit endlessly waiting, as if her whole life had been made of patience.

  It was Saturday. Aggie’s two brothers and her other sister had all been sent out to play, out of the way, but May, the youngest, had a cold and Mom had kept Aggie, the eldest, in to help.

  As well as spying, Aggie was waiting for Mrs Southgate to come out of her house two doors down, to go to the shops, and she never went anywhere without Lily. Lily was four, a year older than May, and sometimes at the weekend, Mrs Southgate would let Aggie bring May into her house, or for a special treat they’d go out for a little walk to Small Heath Park where the girls could play and listen to the band.

  But instead of Rose Southgate, something else caught her eye. Two little lads, about seven and eight, were sneaking down the road with some string and a look of mischief on their faces.

  ‘Look at them two,’ Aggie said to May. She hoicked May further up on her hip, then rested one of her feet on the other, trying to warm them. ‘Ooh, they’d better not be going to Mrs Taylor’s – bet they are!’

  Aggie could see what the boys were up to. They were going to tie string to someone’s knocker and probably the one next door as well and sneak round into the entry to pull the string.

  ‘What’s going on out there?’ Nanna asked.

  Pointing for May, Aggie said, ‘Look, see – the knocker’ll go bang and there won’t be no one there.’ May watched with wide eyes. ‘They’re going to Mrs Taylor’s,’ she told her grandmother.

  ‘Ooh,’ Nanna said, sucking air in through her remaining teeth with a look of mischief. ‘There’ll be fireworks.’ She looked at Aggie, po-faced, then winked.

  Aggie wished they lived over the other side, so that she could see Mrs Taylor come cursing to her door. Even though Phyllis Taylor was an upright, religious woman who sailed around with an air of being above everyone else, when provoked enough she would drop her lah-di-dah voice and swear like a trooper and that was all part of the fun.

  A moment later though, before there was any hope of the knock-knock trick, Aggie saw Mrs Taylor herself come storming along the street in one of her hats.

  ‘Aggie!’ Jen Green erupted into the room, sleeves rolled, apron on. ‘Why d’you ’ave to make me call you a dozen times? As if I haven’t got enough on my plate with him,’ she jerked her head towards the floor above, ‘in bed again.’ She shot her mother a look which implied without much doubt that she was part of what was on her plate as well.

  ‘What’s got into you, wench? What’re you gawping at?’

  She came over, about to administer a slap, but seeing Aggie’s intent gaze, she was drawn to the window.

  ‘Ooh, my – look at that! What’s up with Her Majesty?’

  Jen Green was a short, plump woman with the vivid red hair which her mother, Freda Adams, had once had and which had been inherited by some of her children. She wore it scraped back into a half-made bun from which bits were escaping. Today her face had an especially sallow, sickly look. Though she was in her mid-thirties she looked older, worn out by hard work and poverty. But her permanent air of being put upon was counteracted by the girlish, upturned angle of her nose, which made her appear more cheerful than she felt a lot of the time, with a sick husband, a mother and five children to look after.

  Aggie could smell her mother’s sweat mixed with rough washing soap as she leaned over her. Jen absen
t-mindedly reached round and stroked May’s head and Aggie watched with jealous hunger. When was Mom ever nice to her like that? All she got was being ordered around.

  ‘What’s going on then?’ Nanna asked again, never one to be left out.

  ‘Ooh – that one looks as if she’s lost a pound and found threepence!’ Jen’s breath steamed the glass. ‘And oh, my –’ She giggled. ‘Look at that hat!’

  Mrs Taylor was striding away along the street. She was a huge, swarthy-faced, handsome woman, built altogether on a grand scale and today seeming to hold herself even more loomingly than usual. She was given to extravagant dress. She had on her usual bottle-green coat and a wide-brimmed hat, its brim positively bristling with fruit and feathers all round. And there was a bursting, storm-cloud look to her.

  Jen leaned closer to the window as Mrs Taylor receded along the street.

  ‘Don’t pull that curtain out too far, Aggie – she’ll see us. Blimey, she looks like one of them tanks. No one’d better get in her way – she’ll flatten ’em!’

  Craning their necks, they watched until Phyllis Taylor’s fearsome figure had disappeared past the Mission Hall at the end and out of sight.

  ‘I wonder what’s eating her?’ Jen said, moving back from the window. ‘Anyway, miss – the washing . . .’

  ‘P’r’aps it’s ’cause Dolly’s come home,’ Aggie interrupted.

  Jen turned, frowning. ‘What – Dolly Taylor? How d’you know?’

  ‘I saw her, this morning, in the road with her hat on and a bundle. She never saw me – she was all sort of bent over.’

  ‘I s’pect it was the next one up you saw – Rachel,’ Nanna said. ‘You’d be hard pushed to tell ’em apart.’

  ‘No,’ Aggie insisted. ‘It were Dolly, I know it was.’

  ‘Well, there you are,’ Jen said, digesting this gossip with relish. ‘She’s supposedly in service with some Mrs Lah-di-Dah or other – out Sutton way I think it was. I wonder what that one’s doing back so soon.’

  ‘She might be paying a visit, mightn’t she?’ Aggie suggested, lowering May to the floor, despite her squeaks of protest. ‘No, get down, May – you’re doing my back in.’

  ‘She might,’ her mother said with the tart air of someone who knows better. ‘And she might not. Now come and get these bits of clothes out for me before it flaming well rains.’

  The Terraces were the better end of the street. They were cramped two-up two-down little houses, but most of them had attics and since a couple of years back, they also had a tap inside. After the back-to-back houses Jen had grown up in, with only one room on the ground floor and a shared tap out in the yard, they seemed like luxury. Many of them housed business workshops as well as domestic life: a silver-mirror maker, a brush manufacturer, a barber and a coal merchant just to name a few, as well as Price’s fried fish shop next to the Mission Hall, sending its mouth-watering fishy, vinegary smells along the street. Opposite Price’s was the all-purpose huckster’s shop run by Dorrie Davis, the queen of gossip. At the other end, towards Larches Street, the buildings came out in a rash of back-to-back houses arranged around courts, like the Mansions at the very bottom, where Aggie’s friend Babs Skinner lived.

  Lilac Street was a crowded, sooty-faced, workaday place, the houses full and the streets teeming with children. One thing it was, without a doubt, was full of life.

  Two

  Phyllis Taylor had to get out of the house.

  Had to, or she’d have knocked Dolly’s block off. Knocked her from here into next week.

  The girl had turned up before they’d even finished breakfast, the four of them round the table, her older three children, all of them neatly dressed and heading off to their jobs: Charles at a successful printer’s works, which among other things printed Christian tracts, Susanna to the draper’s in town and Rachel to Mrs Dunne for whom she worked as an assistant milliner. In struts Dolly, no hint of a warning, carrying a bundle and with that look on her. So damn pretty, her Dolly, with her sultry eyes – and that figure. Of all her girls she reminded Phyllis most of herself at the same age – reminded her far too much, in fact. But today Dolly’s face was pale and sweaty as a summer cheese. As soon as she’d staggered through to the back room she fell on to a chair and pushed her head down between her knees.

  ‘What in heaven’s name’re you doing here?’ Susanna demanded. She’d been about to get up and ready herself for work.

  Charles had had his Bible open at the table and he closed it with a thud, as if to protect it from infection. Rachel, eighteen and the next up in age from Dolly, just stared, horrified.

  ‘Oh, Mom!’ Dolly burst out. ‘Oh – I don’t feel well!’ And she fled out to the privy.

  They all gaped at the empty chair.

  ‘Go on, all of you – out,’ Phyllis commanded the others ominously. ‘I’ll get to the bottom of this.’

  And the others, as they normally did – even Rachel – obeyed without question.

  Dolly came back in, wincing at the sour taste in her mouth. She poured herself a cup of tea and sat cradling it in front of her, her hands mauve with cold. She had dried her tears now but she kept her eyes cast down.

  A dangerous silence stretched across the table. Rage flickered in Phyllis like a pilot light about to erupt into flames. There were her three good-looking, respectable children and here was Dolly, the little bint. After all the chances she’d had of a decent start, she had flown in the face of all her mother’s wishes and advice and gone into service. Service of all things! Jobs were terribly hard to come by, it was true. The men who’d come back from the war wanted their jobs back and there weren’t enough to go round. Some of them were reduced to begging on the street. The trick, she had advised the girls, was to take on women’s work – hats and clothes – the sort of thing a man wouldn’t want.

  But when had her youngest ever listened to her advice? Thought she knew everything, that one. ‘What I want is to get away from you,’ Dolly had raged. But she’d stopped raging now, the stupid, wicked girl – oh, yes! Phyllis knew what was coming. Just at that moment she wanted to reach over and slap Dolly’s pert little face.

  At last, in a strangled voice she said, ‘Well, madam – what’ve you got to say for yourself?’

  Dolly raised her dark eyes. ‘She told on me – that mean, spiteful little bitch!’ she burst out, more tears running down her cheeks. ‘I hate her!’

  Phyllis was thrown by this. ‘What d’you mean?’

  Dolly gave a sharp, angry sigh, dashing away the tears with the back of her hand. ‘That Lizzie, the tweeny who slept in the same room as me. She was spying on me! She heard me being—’

  ‘You’re expecting, aren’t you? You’ve got a bun in the oven, a bastard baby, you filthy little hussy!’

  The words roared out of Phyllis’s mouth before Dolly could even finish.

  The two of them stared at each other then, their eyes stretched wide by the terrible truth that had been spoken. For a few seconds Dolly met her mother’s gaze defiantly, then she crumpled, head in her hands.

  ‘What’m I going to do? She’s given me my notice and no references. Oh, Lord, I’m sorry, Mom – it wasn’t my fault . . . What’s going to become of me?’

  It was then, looking at her daughter’s thin, heaving shoulders, that Phyllis knew she had to leave the house. She seized her coat and hat and yanked the door open, storming along the road, before she had even managed to master her expression or the enraged pounding of her feet on the pavement. She tried to slow down. Stop making an exhibition of yourself. All the nosey parkers round here would be prying, asking questions, out to drag her down . . .

  But it was almost impossible to contain her bursting fury. Here they were, getting somewhere in the world, with Susanna promised to that nice David boy and Charles training to be a lay preacher. And here was Dolly, about to disgrace them all. She had to do anything, anything at this moment except be in the same room as that reckless, wayward, stupid girl of hers. Otherwise she’d
most likely take the poker to her and give her the hiding of her life.

  Jen Green, Aggie’s mother, dragged herself up the stairs, pulling on the rail Tommy had fixed to the wall. She stopped halfway up, feeling sick and faint. Reaching the top at last, she could already hear her husband’s coughing from behind their bedroom door.

  When she went in, he was curled up on his side, as if trying to get warm. She felt her innards clutch at the sight of him. All she could see was a tuft of his dark hair which was getting quite long, and this tiny, almost childlike figure under the blanket. She kept trying to tell herself he had a dose of his bronchitis, that he was not getting thinner by the day, that this was nothing unusual. He’d always been sickly, boy and man, but he’d always bounced back. She kept telling him they ought to get the doctor, but he was adamant – no doctors.

  Hearing her, he turned his head, then painfully rolled over. He gathered his face into a grin. In a rasping whisper he said, ‘Hello, kid.’

  ‘D’you want a cuppa tea?’ she asked, sounding irritable when she meant to be tender but somehow it came out wrong. She felt so anyhow herself today and she knew, with terrible foreboding, just why she was feeling sick.

  ‘Ar – that’d be nice,’ he said.

  ‘You’d better eat summat.’ For a moment she perched wearily on the side of the bed.

  Tommy moved his hand dismissively. He had no appetite.

  ‘Just a piece of bread – just summat,’ she argued. ‘You’ve got to get yourself stronger.’

  Tommy sighed. ‘All right, wench. If you say so.’

  ‘I do,’ she said, more softly now. She wanted to crawl into bed with him, to hold him tight, to sleep. But there was far too much to be done.

  ‘Feeling any better?’ she asked.

  Tommy swallowed. ‘Course – course I am. I was just thinking about old Bob Stevens. Dunno why.’

  Jen smiled. Bob had been a childhood friend of theirs. His family lived next to Tommy’s in one of the back-to-back courts in Balsall Heath. Jen had grown up in an almost identical house further along the street. Both of them were full of pride that they had managed to move up into a proper terrace. They worked hard to pay the rent, but it was worth it for not just a front door but a back as well and more rooms to call their own.