Family of Women

by Annie Murray

  ‘You might as well read it out to everyone,’ Bessie ordered.

  Dear Mom and everyone,

  Thought it was time I dropped you a line to show you how I’m getting along. I have had a few parts lately and this is the best – running every night this month and I’m fit to drop! All going very well and I might be heading for wedding bells soon. I’ll keep you posted.

  Love to Violet, and Marigold and Charlie and Clarence. I’ll drop by and see you all one day.

  Rosina. xx

  Violet looked up through her tears and to her surprise saw that Marigold’s eyes had filled up as well. It was the first time she had seen her sister display any real emotion in a long time.

  ‘Oh, Mari – It’s so nice to hear from our Rosy again, isn’t it? If only she’d come back. I don’t half miss her!’

  Marigold nodded and blew her nose.

  ‘Little madam – if I saw her again I’d have a thing or two to say.’ Bessie banged the frying pan down hard on the hob. Her body seemed to vibrate with fury.

  It was maddening, of course, like Rosina always was, not giving a proper address and hardly saying anything. But she looked so pretty, so successful, and Violet ached to see her again and hear all about her life. Her own seemed suddenly so very drab and unadventurous in comparison. But Rosina wouldn’t tell them where she was living or in which theatre she was playing. Was she so afraid of them coming to find her? Why? What had they done? And that hurt and made her feel rejected and angry.

  ‘You’d think she could have let us know her address, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Let me see it again!’ Linda almost snatched the picture from her. Her eyes seemed to drink in the sight of Rosina, but she was confused. ‘Who’s that lady?’

  ‘Our auntie, stupid,’ Joyce said.

  Bessie shrugged angrily. ‘Give it here, Linda. We’ll put it away. She obviously don’t want anything to do with the likes of us any more. Thinks she’s far too good for us.’

  But Violet noticed that she did not put the picture back in the envelope. Instead she propped it back behind the jug so you could just see Rosina peeping out from behind it, full of dark mischief.

  ‘It’s time I shook myself up a bit,’ Violet decided, after they got home that night.

  All evening, Joyce and Linda had been agog for stories about their mysterious auntie Rosina, whom neither of them could remember. As they walked home, feeling their way along in the darkness, Linda said, ‘Is it dark where Auntie Rosina is?’

  ‘Yes, I s’pect so,’ Violet said absently. ‘She’s only down London.’

  Yet the question didn’t seem such a silly one. London, and Rosina’s life, were another world to her altogether, one where she could imagine that the sun shone all the time.

  Once she’d got the girls to bed, she sat downstairs, the windows blacked out. She felt restless and turned on the wireless. It was Thursday, ITMA day, and she distracted herself laughing at the antics of Colonel Chinstrap, Mrs Mopp and Sophie Tuckshop. But when the show was over her unquiet feelings had grown rather than quietened. She clicked the wireless off and sat there, hearing the tick of the clock and the murmuring of the McEvoys next door. She thought about Rosina, all her impatient, bounding energy.

  ‘Oh, Rosina,’ she whispered, ‘you’re the end, you really are.’

  The sense of exasperation with her sister was still strong, but mixed with the powerful desire to see her was a deep longing of her own. Hadn’t she once wanted more from life? How had she spent these years? Having her girls, it was true, but running round after Harry, appeasing his every mood, trying to keep him and his love. Had she anything left now of herself?

  I’m only twenty-six, she found herself thinking. That’s not that old. And Harry’s gone. What’s going to happen to my life? Am I just going to go to work and come back and sit here like this now, night after night? The war could go on for ever!

  Turning the light off, she went upstairs and in the dark pulled back the curtain. There was not much to see except darkness and the even denser black of houses picked out by the thin moonlight. She slid the window up and stood shivering in the cold air, elbows on the sill.

  What is there out there? she wondered, her thoughts wheeling like a bird. Beyond Aston, and Birmingham, way beyond to the sea, to other countries, other sights. She had never seen any of them, and knew she probably never would, but tonight she wanted to fly out over the rooftops, to spread herself into something, anything different and bigger. She stood there for a long time, the cold air stinging her face.

  The image of Rosina in her finery stayed peeping out from behind Bessie’s jug. Violet saw it there every day when she had tea with the girls. It seemed to haunt her.

  That was when she started really to take notice of the recruitment drive for more women to staff the factories.

  ‘Conscription for wenches now, it says ’ere,’ Clarence read from the paper one evening. He showed the paper to Bessie, who looked up from her knitting to run an eye idly over the page.

  ‘You read it – I’ve got my hands full.’

  The government were conscripting women between the ages of twenty and thirty for war work.

  ‘Ere – that’s you, Vi,’ she said.

  ‘I’m already doing war work.’ Violet was wiping semolina off Linda’s hands.

  ‘It says unmarried women, any road,’ Clarence said. ‘They ought to be doing their bit.’ Though only forty-six, he was already stooped and full of ponderous statements.

  ‘What about Marigold?’ Violet said. It seemed odd no one had thought of it before.

  Marigold was bent over one of her scraps of paper. The song sheets, Violet called them. Her puffy face looked across at them as if roused from a deep sleep.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  But Bessie was already dismissing it. ‘Don’t talk daft. What use would she be? They don’t want the retarded ones.’

  ‘She could do summat,’ Clarence said. ‘They take all sorts now.’

  But Bessie wasn’t listening.

  ‘If you take my advice, you’ll go in search of better wages, Violet,’ Clarence said, eyes still on the paper. ‘At one of them bigger firms. Dunlop pay better’n what you’re getting.’

  Within days, three people had talked to her about the big works at Witton, not far away, where Kynoch’s, the ICI factory, were recruiting munitions workers. And there was a smaller firm not far from Kynoch’s called Midwinters, looking to recruit women to train. It felt like a sign. She had to do something to make life different. And Vicars had never been the same without Josephine. Every day there was a reminder of what she had lost.

  By the next week she had handed in her notice at Vicars, despite the protests of Mr Riddle, and been taken on at Midwinters.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  ‘Right, then – I’m the lucky so-and-so who’s been given the job of training you lot.’

  The man was tall and gangling, with a comical, thick-lipped face. He rolled his eyes in theatrical despair, looking over the six women before him, and added chirpily, ‘What a shower. Old Adolf’d be shaking in his shoes at the sight of you lot.’

  Of course they all giggled, and this provoked more eye-rolling and a contemptuous waggling of his head.

  ‘Saints alive. Bunch of girls. I’m Gilbert Cook. You can call me Bert – just so long as that’s the only thing you call me!’

  They were standing in the yard at the back of Midwinters, and not far away from them were two tanks in varying stages of assembly. All of them kept blowing on their hands in the freezing cold, though Gilbert Cook seemed oblivious to the arctic temperature and didn’t offer any sympathy. They were all kitted out in scratchy brown boiler-suits, including Gilbert, who was so tall that the trousers dangled comically round his shins. Violet felt drab and lumpish in this get-up.

  She eyed the other women. The one nearest to her was so skinny and frail she looked as if she’d snap, and had red hair and scared rabbit eyes. One was big and sullen-looking, with t
hick black hair and mannish hands that looked as if she might break your neck without much provocation. The third one had pretty chestnut hair and seemed rather posh and confident and the other two . . . Violet had blinked the first time she looked at them. They must be identical twins! Both small and mousy and very young-looking, with thin brown hair and exactly the same pale, squinting faces.

  Violet’s heart sank. She was shy at making friends and none of this lot looked very promising.

  Gilbert was telling them that the main works were over in Washwood Heath, making tanks – Cromwells, Valentines, Tetrarchs . . .

  ‘. . . but we get to finish some of ’em off. So – it now befalls me to drum into you lucky lot, the rudiments of welding . . . Come on – inside. I s’pose we’ll have to start somewhere.’

  As they turned, almost rigid with cold, to go back inside the works, to Violet’s surprise the red-haired girl came up to her and, nodding mischievously at Bert’s swinging trouser legs, murmured, ‘D’you think our wee man’s expecting a flood?’

  Violet giggled. She’d have liked to think of something clever to say in reply but nothing came to mind. The girl had a strong accent.

  ‘We could sew a bit of gold braid round the bottom for him!’ The red-haired girl was wearing bright red lipstick which clashed with her hair but the overall effect was very cheerful. ‘I’m Muriel, by the way. Who’re you?’

  ‘Violet.’

  ‘Well – nice to meet you, Violet.’

  The girl’s blue eyes were full of real friendliness. Violet immediately felt better.

  They spent the next weeks being trained in the art of welding.

  From the beginning the women seemed to fall into pairs. The twins, who were twenty-one but looked fourteen and had never been parted at any stage in their lives, were called Maureen and Doreen and seemed, as Bert put it, to be ‘flaming welded together’ themselves. Joan, the posh one, was from Sutton Coldfield, and she worked with the big girl, May. And Violet and Muriel worked together from the start. Muriel was from Ayr.

  ‘My mother died last year,’ Muriel told Violet the first day as they stood in the canteen at Midwinters, nursing mugs of tea with frozen hands. ‘It’s not been the same back home. I did nae want to leave my sister, but then they conscripted the both of us anyways. She’s gone into the army, so I thought well, that’s that then. I’ll be on my way.’

  ‘What about your dad?’ Violet asked.

  ‘Och no – ’ Muriel said grimly. ‘I was nae staying home wi’ that miserable old sod. And I was only working in the tobacconist’s – it was just a wee little job so I could be near my mum. Not much for the war effort that. I would have trained up there, but they did nae like Catholics.’

  Violet was overcome with admiration. Here was she, after being spurred on from a distance by Rosina, thinking she was making a break in her life, and she’d only gone up the road. Muriel had come hundreds of miles – and she looked such a fragile little thing!

  ‘Have you got somewhere to live?’

  ‘Aye – with a lady along the way. I only got here yesterday so I don’t know what it’ll be like.’ She shrugged. ‘Who d’you live with?’

  ‘Just my girls – my old man’s in the army.’

  ‘You’re lucky then.’ Muriel’s lipstick lips parted in a grin to show a line of uneven teeth. ‘And you’re bonny too – some people have all the luck!’

  The two of them quickly became friends, thrown together by the work. Both of them soon became adept at welding. Muriel had little, nimble fingers and was given intricate jobs if there were any.

  ‘It’s no different from decorating cakes when you come down to it,’ she said. ‘My mother used to do them to sell – she taught me.’

  ‘If you say so,’ Bert said resignedly. He had quickly come to be know as ‘Bert the Flirt’, because despite his quaint manner he certainly had an eye for the girls. And despite the fact she was the only married woman among the group, he had a special fancy for Violet, the prettiest of them. He seemed to spend more time hovering around her, overseeing their work, than anyone else.

  ‘Why d’you nae go and see how the doormice are getting on?’ Muriel asked sometimes when Bert was once more lurking round them. ‘They’ve got a lot more to learn than we have.’ The ‘doormice’ was her name for Maureen and Doreen, who did scuttle about like two little rodents.

  ‘Exactly so – it’s a pleasure to watch you ladies work,’ Bert said ingratiatingly.

  ‘More like it’s a pleasure to stare at your backside in those gorgeous slacks!’ Muriel muttered to Violet, and both of them got the giggles.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever worn anything that makes me feel less gorgeous. And what with this on an’ all . . .’ She pulled her welding mask down over her face with a mock seductive air. Joan, the posh girl, wouldn’t wear her mask at all and insisted on having a hand-held one, so as not to spoil her permanent wave.

  Violet was at first puzzled, then slightly flattered by Bert’s attention. He was an odd bloke, she thought, and she wasn’t interested in him, but it had been a long time since Harry had paid her any compliments. She started paying more attention to her appearance, despite her jokes to Muriel about the welding masks. Since Harry left she hadn’t bothered with make-up, but now she put on a touch of lipstick and powder again.

  ‘You look pretty, Mom,’ Joyce told her one day as they were getting ready in the morning. ‘You’ve got quite a nice face really.’

  Violet laughed, and heard a light-heartedness in herself that she had barely ever known before.

  ‘Well – we all have to try and be cheerful,’ she said.

  Bessie took one look at her powder and lipstick and said, ‘You want to go careful, my girl, going out looking like that.’

  Her tone was so condemnatory, so offensive, that Violet immediately felt angry and crushed.

  ‘What d’you mean? It’s only a bit of lipstick!’

  ‘You know what I mean. Going about painted up like a fourpenny rabbit. You want to watch yourself.’

  Once again, Violet thought furiously as she went to get the bus to Witton, there was Mom going out to do her down! Going on as if wearing a bit of make-up made you into the Whore of Babylon! What the hell was the matter with her?

  ‘Ooh, I say!’ Muriel said when they clocked in together. ‘Don’t we look lovely today?’

  ‘Don’t you start,’ Violet snapped. ‘I’ve had my mom keeping on already this morning.’

  ‘What – about your warpaint? But you look gorgeous!’

  The compliment was made with such sincerity that Violet calmed down.

  ‘Sorry. Mom just gets me worked up. She’s such a bully – she has to rule everyone’s life for them. Sometimes I bloody hate her!’

  As she said it, she realized she’d never said that to anyone before – even to herself.

  When she got home on Christmas Eve to find Harry waiting for her, it was a shock. She’d come in from Bessie’s, not too late, but having no idea he was coming. Harry had lit the fire with the few remaining bits of coal and was sitting waiting.

  ‘Dad!’ Joyce and Linda ran to him.

  ‘Hello, Joycie – ’ello, Linda.’ He scooped them up and held them against his chest. ‘Didn’t your mother tell you I was coming?’

  ‘I didn’t know!’ Violet said. It was a shock to see him. It took a minute to adjust, and then she was smiling. ‘So you’re home for Christmas? You never said! I mean I wondered . . .’

  ‘I sent a wire . . .’

  He put the girls down and came over to her, and she found herself pressed against his chest. He smelt of the smoky inside of a railway carriage. And it felt almost as if he was a stranger.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Soon after Christmas, Violet asked Muriel whether she’d like to come to them for Sunday dinner. She was a bit nervous of it as Bessie was often very off-ish with strangers.

  ‘Scottish, did you say?’ Bessie demanded suspiciously, when Violet suggested the idea
to her. ‘I look after my own,’ was one of Bessie’s phrases. Anyone outside her small orbit didn’t count as ‘my own’, and had to go out of their way to prove themselves, especially if they spoke or looked differently from her. Violet knew she’d better keep quiet about Muriel being a Catholic as well.

  ‘She’s nice, Nan,’ Joyce said. ‘She talks funny.’

  In the event, Muriel charmed Bessie with her absolute respectfulness and sense of humour. Bessie said she was ‘all right – once I can make head or tail of a word she’s saying.’ And Joyce and Linda loved her. With Harry gone it soon seemed the obvious thing to ask Muriel to move in as a lodger. Though Muriel put a brave face on it, Violet could tell she was finding it lonely where she was, as the one lodger of an elderly widow.

  ‘I know it’s not such a good neighbourhood as the one you’re in now,’ Violet said, nervous at asking. ‘And I wouldn’t charge you much rent. But if the girls move in with me, there’s a room if you want it.’

  Muriel was delighted. ‘That’d be grand! We can have a laugh – and I’ll help you with your weans. Better than mouldering away where I am night after night, drowning in the smell of mothballs!’

  Those months of 1942 were some of the happiest Violet had ever had. With Muriel in the house, she retrieved her ration-book from Bessie and said that they would now have their tea at home. She picked up Joyce and Linda from Spring Street while Muriel started on the cooking, and they spent cosy evenings together. Bessie sulked about this for a time, but Violet took no notice.

  One of the other girls in the factory called Muriel a ‘rapscallion’. She was always prepared for a laugh and a practical joke, often at the expense of long-suffering Bert. She also had an astonishing range of skills. Soon after discovering that the roof over her room in Violet’s house leaked and she was going to have water dripping loudly into a bucket all night, she said, ‘That’s all right – I can fix it. You got a ladder?’