Birmingham Rose (13 page)

The children started spitting on the ground and chanting,

Catch your collar, never swaller

In case you catch a fever;

Not for you, not for me,

And not for any of my family.

Rose stood tearless and in silence. She thought of all the times as a child that she had joined in the superstitious rhyming. And what good had it done her? Every step the horse took seemed to tear her further apart.

Suddenly she heard Marj’s voice in her ear. ‘It’s all for the best you know, Rose,’ she said in a knowing whisper, as if imparting a morsel of gossip. ‘You’ll get over it soon enough. And who really wants a babby at your age? Now you can get back on with your life, can’t you?’

Marj would not easily forget the look of bitter hatred that her young sister turned on her that morning, or the adult hardness that she suddenly saw in her brown eyes.

A very thin, subdued Rose Lucas went back to her charring job at the Dog and Partridge. She could easily fit back into all her old clothes, although she felt like an impostor wearing them.

She started work at nine in the morning, walking into the smell of stale beer and smoke. When she got home she helped Dora, handing over all her meagre wages. She shopped and cooked, gave a hand with George and Harry and, as she had continued to do since Joseph died, she helped to feed the twins. They were the main comfort in her life. Her body was still poised to do all the things for which nature had prepared it. At least she could sleep next to Billy or Susan, cuddling up to them, and hold and feed them.

‘She’s lost her spirit, Mom,’ Grace said one day. ‘She could get herself a better job again now. She don’t want to be charring all her life. I mean I knew I was going into service, but our Rose always had her eye on something better, didn’t she?’

Dora sighed. ‘It’s early days yet,’ she said. ‘Give her time.’

Grace tried getting through to Rose, but never felt she got very far.

‘I’m earning a wage, aren’t I?’ Rose would say woodenly. ‘What more’s anyone s’posed to want? What’s the use of having dreams of doing something else? It’ll only bring trouble.’

And in her head a voice kept saying: I’m not worth it. I’m cheap and dirty. I’m a slum kid with a dead bastard baby.

Grace looked at her reproachfully. ‘You’re still cleverer than me,’ she said. ‘You could do better for yourself.’

Rose just shrugged.

As autumn came round again, Alfie appeared once more in Catherine Street. He’d tried going out with other girls, but none of them could erase the image in his mind of the dark, vivacious girl he’d seen the autumn before walking to work. He had to speak with her, and he decided to give her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she had another sister and it was her he thought he’d glimpsed looking out of the upper window that day?

He came on a grey Saturday afternoon, with rusty leaves whirling along the pavement.

This time it was George who saw him and came running into the house as Alfie approached, slamming the door behind him. ‘It’s that Alfie again – the bloke that’s after Rose.’

Rose automatically fled to the stairs.

‘Mom,’ Grace said. ‘Ask him in. He seems a good bloke, I reckon. I’ll go up and talk her round.’

She found Rose sitting nervously on the bed. ‘What’re you doing hiding up here?’ Grace demanded.

‘Well, I can’t let him see me, can I?’ Rose replied with nervous irritation.

‘Why not? You’re not expecting any more are you? If you straighten yourself out a bit and put a decent frock on you’d look a picture again. He’s all right that Alfie. So why keep yourself hidden away? If I had him following me around I’d jump at the chance. You could do a lot worse.’

Rose sat thinking for a moment. Grace’s last words had hit home. What was she really hiding for now? Waiting for a prince to come along? Grace was right. She could do worse, and she wasn’t likely to do any better.

‘Tell him I’ll be down in a minute.’

Grace gave a little skip and ran smiling downstairs. She found Dora handing Alfie a cup of tea. He was talking rather bashfully to her.

A few moments passed before Alfie finally saw the thin, beautiful girl he remembered emerging slowly, almost reluctantly, from the stairs. She’d brushed out her hair and pinned it back loosely so that it waved softly round her face, and she had on a cream dress of Diana’s with a pattern of navy dots on it and a swinging skirt.

She came towards him and gave him a rather stiff smile. ‘Hello Alfie,’ she said.

The long line of children standing in pairs snaked along from the gates of the railway station and curved around the wall outside. They stood in almost eerie silence as the teachers counted and recounted them to make sure there was no one missing. In one hand they each clutched a bag of the most basic belongings; round every neck was tied a piece of string to which a large luggage label had been tied bearing its owner’s name. The children waited to be loaded on to the carriages which would take them to places which few of them had even dreamed of. Many of them had scarcely travelled any distance from the streets where they had grown up.

Rose stood near George, anxiously watching his tight-lipped, mutinous face. She was glad that Alfie stood reassuringly beside her. He was seeing off his younger brother and sister, Tom and Bessie, both still at school.

‘Some of them think it’s just a spree,’ he said. ‘Look at their faces.’

‘Not George,’ Rose said. ‘He’s played hell over being sent off. It’s a good job they only announced it yesterday.’

The van had come round the day before, the big rectangular loudspeakers like wide, merciless mouths crackling out the announcement. All children of school age were to be evacuated to places of safety, away from the centres most likely to be bombed, when – and it now seemed to be when and not just if – war broke out.

Immediately the mothers in the court banded together for mutual advice and support, on what would ordinarily have been a beautiful late summer day.

‘Not the kids!’ Dora cried. ‘They can’t split up families like that. How do we know where they’re sending them? We’ll never have a wink of sleep worrying.’

‘What if Adolf Hitler starts throwing bombs down on us?’ Mabel demanded grimly, leaning her meaty arm up against the brewhouse wall. ‘Then you’d be bad with worrying about them all being killed in their beds. It’s for the best, you know.’

‘There’s not going to be bombs, surely?’ Gladys asked, puckering up her face in concern.

‘Don’t kid yourself,’ Mabel said. ‘What about Czechoslovakia last year?’

‘And now they’re after Poland,’ Mabel went on. ‘Things ain’t going to get any better I don’t reckon, so you might just as well get used to the idea.’

The rest of that day the families could think of nothing else. For the first time in years Dora turned to her husband for advice when he came in. ‘What’re we going to do?’

‘Asking me are you, all of a sudden?’ he said sourly, swinging his good arm back and forth to relieve the muscles after supporting himself on the crutch. ‘If they say send them, then do it. They’re best well out of it.’ He sat down heavily. ‘We should’ve finished them off properly the first time round, when we had the bloody chance.’

‘I’m NOT GOING!’ George shouted.

Sid took off his cap and flung it over on to the table. ‘If we say you’re going then you’ll go!’

‘What about Harry?’ Dora said. She turned to put the kettle on, trying to steady herself. ‘I can’t send him away – or the twins. Not that young.’

‘Couldn’t Edna have Harry for a bit?’ Rose suggested. ‘After all, most of hers are grown up and gone now. We’ll club together for some money for the fare.’

Dora’s sister in Alcester seemed, out of the few choices, the most reassuring one. Dora got Rose to write to her straight away.

‘But the twins stay with me,’ Dora said. ‘And that’s that.’

They’d got George ready the next morning. He soon realized there was no point in arguing. Dora tidied him up to go down to the school, tugging his collar straight and giving his face a wipe.

‘Go on,’ she said to him, rather roughly, to stop herself blarting there on the step. ‘Don’t give anyone any lip and make sure you write and tell us how you’re getting on.’

As soon as he was out of the court, walking with bravado beside Rose, Dora sank down at the table, laid her head on it and wept.

Now George stood at the station in front of the two Meredith kids, all with their little paper parcels of ‘iron rations’: a small can of corned beef, a packet of biscuits, a pound of sugar, a tin of evaporated milk, a quarter of tea and – George’s eyes had lit up for the only time that day – a half-pound block of Cadbury’s chocolate.

‘Still warm from the factory,’ one of the teachers joked.

As the kids piled into the railway carriages, Rose tried to give George a goodbye hug, but he pushed her away with his wiry arms. ‘Don’t go getting all soppy, Rose.’

And Rose, like her mom, held back her tears until they’d waved goodbye to the children, all crowded up by the windows of the train, some looking excited, others forlorn and bewildered. The train gave a loud shriek and puffed out of the station, the smoke and smuts rising in clouds to the wide arching roof. Rose waved her hanky at the little dot she thought was George until the train was out of sight, and then used it to wipe her eyes.

‘They’ll be well looked after, you be sure,’ Alfie said. ‘And he’s got Tom and Bessie for company. He’s a tough lad your George. He’ll be all right.’

‘It’s so horrible not knowing what’s going to happen,’ Rose said as they walked out of New Street Station. ‘I know it’s an awful thing to say, but if there’s going to be a war, I wish they’d just get on and get it over.’

‘Some of the lads got their call-up papers today,’ Alfie said.

Rose went quiet. Alfie and Sam were both nineteen and had not yet been called, but the shadow of war, of families being split up even further, hung over all of them.

‘Come on,’ Alfie said. ‘It’s no use getting all down in the mouth. I’ll take you for a cuppa. Lyons or the Kardomah?’

‘Whatever you like,’ Rose said. She always let Alfie make the decisions.

‘The Kardomah then.’

He took her arm and led her along New Street. It was as busy as ever with trams and buses and people shopping or standing at bus stops. But there was a different atmosphere. The news from Europe was on everyone’s lips. Everything felt precious, Rose thought. As if the threat from Germany had made the things they had always known sparkle and shine.

Along the street they could see preparations going on in the offices and shops for blacking out the windows – assistants trying the large black rectangles for size against the panes of glass. And already groups of people were filling sandbags and stacking them against the sides of buildings. They heard the raucous newsvendors’ voices shouting, ‘Germans overrun Poland! Get your
Mail
here!’

‘Blimey,’ Alfie said. ‘He really means it, doesn’t he?’

Rose felt her stomach tighten with a mixture of dread and excitement.

‘I should get back to work,’ she said, as she and Alfie found a table in the Kardomah amid the comforting smells of roasted coffee and warm rolls.

‘They gave you the morning to send off the kids, didn’t they?’ Alfie said. ‘Come on – have a cuppa tea and calm down. The Co-op’ll survive for half a day without you!’ He grinned and, leaning across the table, chucked her lightly under the chin. ‘That’s my girl.’

Rose smiled back dutifully and sipped the tea he’d bought for her.

Alfie sat back in his seat, looking at her. As usual he felt pleased with himself for just being with Rose. Even though he’d been walking out with her for almost two years now he still couldn’t believe his luck, that this beautiful girl wanted to be with him. He’d heard some gossip about her of course, but that was all in the past and he preferred not to know about it. He was going to believe the best of her. And she seemed to have quietened down since he’d first seen her, which was no bad thing. Who wanted a loud mouth on a woman? She was his girl and he was dead chuffed with her.

Alfie himself had filled out over the past two years. His hair was just as unruly above his pale face, but he looked less lanky and more substantial. His shoulders had grown broader and stronger from his heavy work. And the fact that he’d been luckier than many in the trade and had been in work more than out of it had done wonders for his sense of himself. His blue eyes looked directly at people now and he was much less hesitant when he spoke – especially with Rose on his arm. What a picture she was in that red frock she had on! Soon, when he’d maybe managed to save a bit, he planned to make her his wife.

Alfred and Rose Meredith, he thought. That sounded truly grand.

Rose stood preparing butter in the Co-op that afternoon dipping the wooden pats in the jug of cold water and teasing the yellowish lumps into shape. She was partly mesmerized by the movement of her hands and by the rhythmic click and whirr as the money cup shot along its overhead wire to the little cash office at the back of the shop.

‘Come on, Rose, wake up! We need three pound of sugar over here!’ the woman in charge of her called over. ‘I dunno what’s got into that girl today.’

Without speaking, Rose moved over and began to shovel out the sugar into the blue paper bags. Then she went back to sort out the butter and bacon again.

What had got into her was that she had, for the first time since Joseph’s death, begun to allow herself to think properly. It was not something she decided to do; the thoughts just seemed to come upon her, long-buried feelings nudging for her attention.

She had been grateful in one way for the problems in Europe, for the looming war. Since they had waited tensely through the last threat, the crisis in Czechoslovakia the year before, it had all helped to take her mind off her own sorrows. And, she thought, it’s brought me closer to Alfie – hasn’t it?

They had things in common to talk about now, important things. Before he had talked about football or the latest murder trial.