Family of Women

by Annie Murray

  ‘Is she all right? Tell me she’s all right!’

  Violet gasped out her anxiety, now the final pangs of childbirth were over at last. Her gaze seemed to bore into the midwife, and Bessie, who had been present all through the birth.

  ‘As healthy a babby as I’ve seen come into the world,’ Mrs Barker said soothingly, tying the umbilical cord so she could cut it. ‘Don’t you fret, dear. You’ve had a bad time, I know, but she’s your reward. A beautiful daughter for you – look!’

  ‘She’s a little peach,’ Bessie said.

  It was one of those rare times when gentler emotion broke through Bessie’s usual bullying tones. She held up the baby, swathed in a piece of towelling, and through the blur of her own tears Violet saw a squashed, startled face, mouth beginning to open and roar. She was delicate-looking, and pale. Violet had an immediate sense of kinship with her. She’s like me, she thought, startled. I know her. This, and the realization that at last she had managed to deliver a robust child, made her sob with relief and happiness.

  ‘Let me hold her!’

  ‘Let Mrs B. finish you off first,’ Bessie said, cradling the baby in her arms. She put her face close to the little one’s, crooning to it. Even though Mom was being nice, Violet found herself brimming with rage at the sight of Bessie’s huge, bulldog frame wrapping itself round her baby. All those babies Mom had held – four of her own and all those orphaned brats – and now she wanted to take hers as well! She couldn’t stand seeing her looking into her baby’s face like that as if she was the mother, taking over everything!

  ‘Give her to me now – or I’ll never let you hold her again – she’s mine!’ Violet was shrieking, tears rolling down her cheeks. She was still tightly clasping the end of the towel, hooked over the bedstead, which she’d gripped to help get through the pains.

  ‘There’s no call to carry on like that,’ Mrs Barker said. ‘Your mother’s only helping.’

  ‘You don’t know what she’s like!’ Violet hardly knew what she was saying. She just felt powerless, at their mercy. ‘I want my babby!’

  ‘Here she is,’ Bessie said. ‘Pull yourself together, girl – no call for all that.’

  She deposited the little girl in Violet’s arms. Violet grew calmer and gazed at her. She had such a sweet, fine face, and when she unwrapped her from the towel, her body looked in good proportion.

  ‘Let her feed from yer tit,’ Bessie suggested, leaning over and pulling Violet’s old shift away to reveal her breast, her huge frame blocking out almost all the light from the window. She went as if to latch the baby on.

  ‘I can do it,’ Violet snapped, pulling away.

  ‘Suit yourself.’ Bessie drew back, hands on her hips.

  Unlike the last time, when Bobby had not had the strength even to begin feeding, the little girl latched on and began to suck.

  ‘There you go,’ Bessie said, sinking on to the chair.

  The baby’s suckling seemed to reach right through Violet. Her innards contracted so strongly that she gasped.

  ‘It doesn’t half hurt!’

  ‘You’ll soon get used to it,’ Mrs Barker said calmly, wringing out a rag over the white pudding basin. Bloody water ran from it over her workworn fingers.

  ‘I want Harry to see her.’

  ‘Bull’s gone off at Mount’s,’ Bessie said. The ‘bulls’ or factory sirens had gone off one after another to signal the end of a shift. ‘He’ll be in soon. Time we all had a cuppa tea – more than time.’

  ‘Joyce,’ Violet whispered to the child as she suckled. ‘My little babby. I’m going to call you Joyce.’

  By the time Harry walked in, Mrs Barker had been paid and departed, and Violet was sitting up in bed with tea and biscuits on the chair beside her. She had Joyce cradled on one arm, would hardly let go of her for a second. Although the baby had had a good feed for one so young, Violet kept looking anxiously down at her, checking to make sure she was still breathing.

  ‘You want to put her down for a bit and drink your tea,’ Bessie said. She dwarfed the chair she was sitting on.

  ‘No!’ It was almost a snarl. ‘No one’s taking her off me.’ Tears ran down her face and fell on Joyce’s forehead. ‘This time, I’m looking after her.’

  Bessie heaped sugar into her tea. She liked three big spoonfuls. ‘You’ll have to put her down some time, bab,’ she said complacently.

  Violet stared at her with narrowed eyes. What do you know? she thought. You never lost any of yours. Just keep your hands off mine. She was startled by the violence of her feelings.

  They heard Harry come in then, unaware of the surprise waiting for him. ‘Anyone home?’

  ‘Yes, son,’ Bessie called, grinning. ‘You’d better come up!’

  Violet heard him running up the stairs two at a time. She glowed with excitement. She’d done it, at last, the thing a woman was supposed to do!

  In the moment he came into the room, she saw he was afraid of what he might find, and her heart went out to him, seeing how worried he’d been, even though he hardly showed it.

  ‘You’ve got a little wench,’ Bessie announced.

  Violet looked up at him as he came bashfully to the bedside. She felt proud, yet vulnerable, needing his approval.

  ‘Look –’ Gently she pulled back the covers and showed him the crumpled baby, sleeping so trustingly with her mouth close to Violet’s nipple. ‘I thought we’d call her Joyce.’

  Harry leaned forward, his face intent, and very tenderly stroked the tiny creature’s cheek with his finger.

  ‘She all right?’ He looked anxiously at her. His son had died in his arms and he was afraid.

  ‘Just had a good feed,’ Bessie said in the background, as Violet nodded, her eyes filling with tears again. ‘Looks right as rain.’

  ‘Joyce,’ he said in wonder, and she heard the catch in his voice.

  Part Two

  1941–3

  Chapter Nineteen

  1941

  Joyce was five now.

  She was a thin, rather fractious child with slightly squinting grey eyes, rather like her mother in looks, with blonde, wispy hair. Soon after she was born, Bessie suggested that she look after her. At first Violet had resisted. But Harry said Violet would have to go back to work: they needed the money. Of course it made perfect sense for Bessie to look after her. Joyce would be there with her nanny and her auntie Marigold – what could be better?

  So Violet handed Joyce over to Bessie and went back to Vicars.

  ‘I’ll be going back to work,’ she said to Harry. ‘I know I’ve got to – even if I’d rather stop at home and look after Joycie myself. But I won’t stay a week longer in this flaming dump of a house. We’ve got to move.’

  So now they were living only a couple of roads away from Bessie, so Violet could pop round and pick up Joyce as soon as Vicars was out. They rented another two-up two-down terrace which was not, like all the houses round there, in very good repair either, but it was a step up from the wreck of a house they had first lived in. Violet made it as nice as she could, gradually turning it into a home. She bought a remnant of pretty royal blue velvet to drape over the mantel, and Harry found a battered old dresser for them to arrange their crocks on. Violet loved that, seeing her few plates all shining and propped up in a row, the cups hanging from hooks. And Marigold came round more often now they were just round the corner and, when they first got there, she sat bodging a new peg rug for the house.

  Marigold didn’t have much to say, but she took to Joyce, and Violet was glad to be able to give her somewhere else to go for a bit instead of being forever at home under Bessie’s thumb. She would stand and rock Joyce in her arms when she was a baby for as long as it took to get her to sleep. Marigold had reached a point in her life now where she never seemed to change. She looked roughly the same, always, with lank, shoulder-length hair, dressed in one of a couple of capacious dresses, one navy, one dark green. She never seemed to get any older or to do anything different, and lived
at the beck and call of everyone else. Tucked in her pocket was always a tatty collection of paper with scraps of songs written down in her slow, looping hand. Always love songs: ‘Apple Blossom Time’, ‘Somewhere in France with You’. Her favourite song was ‘South of the Border’.

  ‘Henry Hall made the record at the Hippodrome,’ she would say solemnly. ‘It’s lovely, that is.’

  The only times she smiled, it was usually at one of the children, but it wasn’t a lively vivacious smile, more a vague uptilt of her lips, accompanied, in her eyes, by a dreamy look of affection.

  ‘Thank goodness you’re here,’ Violet said to her at times, when she was most exhausted. ‘I don’t know how I’d manage.’

  She was often worn out. Joyce had been hard work. She didn’t sleep well and cried a lot, but even though it was a struggle, Violet loved the fact that she had a daughter. She could take her to see Josephine, who was soon expecting again, and little Lizzie liked being the bossy older one. And the days revolved round work and Joyce’s baby needs and her mom. She had to surrender to Bessie. She knew best, Violet realized, what with all those babies she’d reared. And it was the easiest thing. Family mattered more now she had her own child, and it made her feel safe and reassured knowing there was Mom to go to, with Marigold to wheel Joyce out in the old pram every afternoon. And Harry seemed happy enough being a father. He didn’t go on about Australia. Not any more. Soon after Joyce was born he came home looking excited.

  ‘You know our bit we had put away? Well, I don’t reckon we’ll be needing it, so I’ve spent a bit of it.’

  He’d bought a Norton motorcycle. Violet could see from his face how delighted he was.

  ‘Just like a kid with a toy,’ she said to Jo Snell. ‘I couldn’t be cross with him. I never wanted to go to Australia anyway. It’s too blooming far away. What would I do in Australia without you, eh?’

  When Joyce was sixteen months old, Violet took her round to the Snells one Saturday afternoon, full of excitement. She knew Jo would be there with her mom and Lizzie, as they always called in on Saturdays. The Snells’ house was a home from home. Jo was heavy out front with another baby. As they sat drinking tea in their cosy back room, Violet said, ‘Eh, Jo – I’ve got summat to tell you. I’ve another on the way as well.’

  Josephine grinned, laying a hand on her swollen stomach.

  ‘Must be out of our flaming heads, mustn’t we?’

  Linda was born in March 1938, in the small hours of a bitterly cold night. Once again Mrs Barker was in attendance, but Bessie was not there. It was so cold, they laid a bed for her downstairs and kept the range going all night. Just as things were really getting going, the meter ran out and Harry had to go down and feed it with pennies. Violet always remembered those moments, the room suddenly drenched in darkness with only a dim glow from the range, and herself isolated in the pains of labour. Somehow it made her feel strong. A few moments later they re-lit the gas mantles and everything was back to normal, though she felt she had travelled to another world.

  ‘This one’s not like Joyce!’ Mrs Barker exclaimed as Violet, groaning, pushed the baby out. ‘It’s got black hair!’

  The child was a round-faced, black-haired little girl with Harry’s stamp all over her and, as she grew older, dancing brown eyes, just like his.

  ‘She looks like Rosina,’ Bessie observed when she saw her the next day. ‘She were just like that, born.’

  Then her face hardened, lips twisting. For a moment she forgot that she didn’t mention Rosina’s name. Not any more.

  She gave a bitter sigh. ‘Wherever she is.’

  Chapter Twenty

  A few days before her eighteenth birthday in 1936, Rosina ran away from home.

  They didn’t hear from her for months after, but everyone was sure she had gone to London. She went so suddenly that she didn’t even take her film pictures – Jessie Matthews and the others. Bessie ripped them off the wall in fury.

  ‘She needn’t think she’s coming back here when her pockets are empty. Selfish little bitch, taking off without a word! Never gives a thought to anyone else – always been the same! Well, I wash my hands of her – she’s no daughter of mine any more.’

  Her rage simmered endlessly. She’d lost control of Rosina. It had been coming for years – Rosina’s lippiness, her lack of fear of her mother, unlike the others.

  No one had ever crossed Bessie like this before. Before her own mother had died at her own hand, she’d begged Bessie to take special care of Clarence, her precious boy. Apart from two years in France, Clarence had been with her ever since, content to be under the thumb, it seemed, rather than making a life for himself.

  ‘He was never the same any road – not after the trenches,’ Bessie always said. He did little jobs for a bit, then just as suddenly stopped and sat at home.

  And she had her other three children well in her control still, circling round her like planets round the sun. But Rosina had had the temerity to break off and go spinning away on a path of her own choice and without a hint of warning. Nothing had prepared Bessie for Rosina’s spirit, and the older she grew the more rebellious she became.

  Violet knew Rosy had become a handful but she was too caught up in her own problems during those years to see how it was going. Rosina stayed away from home more and more, haunting the streets round the theatres – the Hippodrome and Alex in town – hungry to catch a glimpse of theatre people and life.

  In the Lozells Road was a photographer’s business by the name of Juggins. Rosina had heard that Alfred Juggins and his son were the official photographers for the Theatre Royal in Aston, and that actors and celebrities often frequented the place to have their portraits taken. Rosina took to hanging around the shop with some of her friends and occasionally came home radiant, full of the fact that she’d seen one of the names, great or small of the acting profession, going into the shop.

  ‘Charlie Chaplin’s been in there, when he was young!’

  After she disappeared, they managed to prise out of one of the other girls the fact that Rosina had begun a passionate romance with a young actor called Michael Albie, whom she had met near Juggins photographer’s. Albie was entranced by Rosina’s pretty looks and vivacious personality, as well as her passionate ambition to be part of the life of theatre herself. Now, for all any of them knew, she had gone to London to be with Albie.

  ‘She’ll end up on the streets with a brat in her belly and nowhere to sleep but the gutter,’ Bessie decreed, with vengeful satisfaction.

  It wasn’t until four months later that Rosina sent a postcard from London, light-hearted in tone, to say that she was well and happy and not to worry. There was no address on it and she did not say what she was doing.

  Bessie peered at the card, turning it over and over. It was a photograph of Buckingham Palace.

  ‘I s’pose she thinks she’s going to be living in there next.’

  Violet was just relieved to hear that Rosina was all right. Running off like that felt such a daring, impossible thing to do! She could no more imagine doing that herself – even as far as London – than she could going to Australia. But Rosy had always had a spark in her. Violet felt hurt that she had not confided in her, and she missed Rosy and longed to be able to see her. But Rosina obviously didn’t want to be reached.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The war changed their lives.

  Gas masks sat in their boxes by the door, houses were blacked out and the windows taped against blast. Air-raid shelters went up and all sorts of regulations came into force. The evenings seemed long and dark, shut in the houses, and Bessie and Clarence bought a wireless.

  Groups of young men disappeared into the forces, but Vicars had gone over to making ammunition and Harry’s and the others’ jobs were reserved occupations. They sat out what came to be known as the ‘phoney war’. It was when the raids started in the autumn of 1940, with all their fear and cruelty and destruction, that the war came up close. It was with them in the long, slee
pless nights, the terrible drone of the planes overhead, thin searchlights sketching like pencils across the sky over the city, in the evil glow of fire, and mornings of dust and rubble and the stink of gas.

  From August 1940 Birmingham was under frequent attack and you never knew, when dawn broke after a raid, what familiar landmark would have disappeared next. The Bull Ring was blitzed at the end of August, the Market Hall, loved by so many people as a place to meet and shop, which had seemed so permanent a part of life, was smashed to pieces. It felt as if nothing could ever be the same again. And it was this time of death and fear which started to change Violet’s life.

  She had settled to a small, safe existence which revolved round these few streets, with all the familiarity of their blackened bricks, smoking chimney stacks and neighbourhood characters. Life consisted of her job, her daughters and husband, and her mom.

  Linda was very different from Joyce. Soft and rounded, with a sweet, fleshy face and thick black hair, she was as quiet and serious as Joyce was jumpy and jealous and easily put out. Linda had a solemn, penetrating gaze. As a toddler she would stand in front of her mother, quite close to her, and just gaze at her.

  ‘What’re you looking at?’ Violet would joke, trying to make her crack her face. ‘Lost your tongue? Ooh, she’s making me feel quite queer staring like that! Stop it, pet! I wonder what she’s thinking?’

  If she was thinking anything she usually didn’t have the chance to do it for much longer, as Joyce, agitated at being left out, would come up and pinch her or provoke her in some other way and make her cry.

  The girls spent a lot of time with Bessie. When there were daytime raids, Violet fretted at work, in the basement of Vicars which they used as a shelter. She knew her mom took the girls under the stairs. Bessie wasn’t going slumming it in any public shelter. Violet and Harry’s house had a bigger coal cellar than Bessie’s, so they cleaned it out and Violet went down there with the girls when it got bad. There wasn’t room for all of them so Harry stayed under the stairs. It was miserable and cold in the cellar and the ceiling was very low. Violet hated it. All you wanted after that was a nice cup of tea to perk you up and sometimes the water was cut off!