Birmingham Rose Read online

  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 w
ith 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.

  ‘Was Marj all right then?’ she asked. ‘Did you make sure she’s taking the raspberry leaf? Which reminds me . . .’ Dora got up and went to the kettle to prepare her own dose of the brew. Rose thought it smelt horrible, all sour. But Dora had an almost religious faith in herbs and drank it through every pregnancy.

  She didn’t tell Dora that Marj had said in her most petulant voice, ‘She needn’t think I’m drinking this muck,’ and had thrown the leaves out straight away.

  ‘She’s showing a lot,’ Rose said. ‘She says she’s already sick of carrying that belly around.’

  ‘Huh,’ Dora said. ‘She’s only just bloomin’ started. Wait till she’s at it with a crowd of other babbies running round her. Then she’ll find out what it’s all about.’

  As soon as they’d eaten their bread with a scraping of jam and Sid had shuffled off across the yard to the Catherine Arms, Dora rounded on Rose. ‘Right,’ she said, emptying the pile of tiny silver safety pins on to the worn American cloth. ‘Where’ve you been all afternoon? Where d’you get that dress from? And where’s my bowl?’

  ‘It’s upstairs.’ In her hurry she’d left it on the bed with her dress. ‘I’ll get it.’ She stood up to go to the stairs.

  ‘Oh no you don’t.’ Dora grabbed her arm. ‘Sit down. Come on, let’s hear it. You go off with a bowl of custard and come swanning back in a new dress. What’s been going on?’

  Rose sat down again. ‘I had a soaking,’ she explained. ‘Right to the skin. And the wind was so strong I nearly went flat on my face. You saw what it were like! This lady saw me from her house and took me in to dry out. She put the dress on me and she said I could keep it.’

  ‘What lady? Where’ve you been wandering off to this time?’ Dora tapped her finger hard on the table. ‘Where was this house? Up Sparkbrook?’

  ‘It might’ve been Sparkbrook,’ Rose said, reluctant to give away even the vaguest details. ‘Or it might’ve been a bit further out.’

  ‘And you don’t know where of course?’

  ‘I was ever so wet,’ Rose said, staring hard at the pins on the table.

  Dora couldn’t help smiling at her daughter, knowing she wasn’t going to get the full story. ‘You’re the bleedin’ end sometimes, Rose, you really are,’ she said. ‘Come on – get cracking on these or we’ll be here all night.’

  They sat pushing the thin wire of the pins through their cards. Dora was still feeling sick, even having eaten the small amount of food. She looked across at Rose’s dark hair, the same wavy black as her father’s, bent over the pile of pins next to Grace, whose hair was a lighter brown, more like Dora’s own.

  Her pregnancy with Rose had been the third after the war. First there had been the twins – remembering now sent a sharp twisting pain through her. They were born too early. The little mites, only the size of kittens, had barely snuffled their way into life before dying within hours of each other: two boys, Sid and Percy. Next there’d been Sam, a huge, healthy baby who she’d thought would split her right apart as his head forced out of her.

  And then Rose. All her babies had been born at home except Rose. Always was a wanderer, Dora thought.

  She had been working in that big house in Sparkhill. Albert and Marjorie were ten and eight then and at school so she had to leave Sam with a neighbour.

  That morning as she set out to walk to work the sky was low and grey over the rooftops and the ground coated with frost. It looked as if it was going to snow and Dora pulled her coat round her belly as well as she could. She’d felt very down in the mouth that morning, which made her think the baby wouldn’t come for a few days yet. Usually, right at the end she felt a mysterious surge of energy and well-being, even when she was quite run down in herself.

  Maybe I just can’t feel lively any more, she thought. Too many things have happened to us. P’raps I’m just too old.

  At twenty-eight sometimes she felt aged and slow, as if everything had been torn and sucked out of her. Today the lower part of her body felt taut and heavy as she walked.

  She went down the Ladypool Road, where the smell of fresh bread mingled with the usual road smell of horse manure. People were just coming out on to the streets to walk to work or give shop windows a polish. A delivery boy from the baker’s shop whisked past on his bicycle, pushing down hard with his legs on the pedals.

  Even now, five years after Sid had come home, she could feel tears suddenly in her eyes at the sight of a young man doing so carelessly all the things her husband was no longer capable of. It reminded her with a deep ache of the whole young man, full of dreams of what he was going to achieve, whom she had kissed goodbye and cried for early in 1915.

  Sid had not come back to the home he left before the war. Instead he had returned to find his wife living in one of the courts of back-to-back houses which sprawled in a ring round the centre of Birmingham. He came back to a woman who had struggled to keep herself and her children on whatever the shortages of the war would allow, who had worked in factories churning out munitions to fuel the war and who had, with hardly a break, been working in factories ever since. He had watched her age, get thinner, lose her teeth. She snapped more and swore more and her laughter – once loud, generous laughter – came harder now and more rarely.

  That change of address on Dora’s letters had not prepared Sid Lucas for the losses he had to face on every side when he came home – of not only his limbs, but his livelihood, his dignity and of the way he and Dora had been together before. Before.

  Sometimes, when she was at her lowest, when Sid had been silent for days or sweated and sobbed in her arms at night, she wondered if it wouldn’t have been better if the mud and water of Passchendaele hadn’t buried him completely instead of leaving her with half a person.

  Work that morning turned out to be even heavier than usual. Dora did all the routine dusting and polishing with Mrs Stubbs, the elderly woman who worked mornings there.

  Then Mrs Stubbs said, ‘Right, I’d best go and do that silver she’s on about in the pantry. You can go out and shake the rugs.’

  Dora looked at Mrs Stubbs’ plain, rather stupid face and wondered whether she was being spiteful. She decided she was just thoughtless, but the advanced state of Dora’s pregnancy should have been obvious to anyone.

  ‘Couldn’t we do them together?’ she suggested.

  ‘I’ll come and give you a hand if it gets too much for you,’ Mrs Stubbs said serenely and limped off to polish the silver.

  Dora dragged the two large rugs through the hall to the bricked area out behind the house which faced on to a large garden. It was beautiful in the summer. The brewhouse was tucked in at right angles to one end of the building and she and Mrs Stubbs he
ated the water for the wash there each Monday. The bread oven was in there too, so it was often a warm place to be. Dora was glad that the small building jutting out protected her from the main stab of the cold wind.

  She picked up one end of the first rug, unrolled it and started to shake so it rippled heavily along the blue bricks of the terrace, giving off great wafts of dust. Dora’s arms immediately felt exhausted, as if the carpet was made of lead. She rested between the vigorous shakes, her heart thumping harder and harder. She grew hot and faint.

  The pains began suddenly and very strongly. After the first couple of harsh, breathtaking contractions she stood bending forward, her hands pressing on her knees, taking in gasps of air.

  My God, she thought. How’m I ever going to get back? I’ve got to get home!

  It felt so urgent, so far advanced, that she knew already that she’d never make it back – not on foot.

  She waited for a lull and then stepped over to the brewhouse. It was a bit warmer inside and rather dark. There was nothing to sit on except the scrubbed quarry tiles. Dora squatted down with her back to the stone sink. It was very quiet apart from the faint scratch of winter jasmine and rose thorns against the window. Dora knew she should get help, that she needed a midwife, but between the contractions she had no strength and couldn’t raise the energy to move again.

  ‘Please God,’ she prayed. ‘Don’t let anything be wrong with this babby – not with me all on my own. Just help me – please, please!’

  She loosened her clothes and took off her bloomers. They were wet like her legs and the back of her dress, where the warm force of her waters breaking had soaked her. A couple of times she had to pull herself up to vomit into the greyish yellow basin. Her face was shiny with sweat.

  ‘God,’ she cried, the words coming out hoarsely. ‘Oh God, God!’