Family of Women

by Annie Murray

  ‘Your daughter?’

  She stood up. ‘Yours, as well.’

  ‘All right, baby?’ Eva greeted her. ‘Coming in for a drink of tea, or something stronger? She is fine, fine – she is playing cards.’

  ‘Thanks, Eva, but I can’t tonight. I’ve got a visitor and I need to pop back with her.’

  ‘OK then. Carol! Your mother’s here!’

  Carol liked being at Eva’s.

  ‘She’s teaching me Polish,’ she had told Violet some time ago. ‘I asked her. She said, “Why you want to learn Polish? No one speaks Polish except in Poland.” But I said I wanted to.’

  Violet had taken one look at some written Polish, which seemed to be all consonants and no vowels, and said, ‘Oh, my word. I don’t think I could do that.’

  Eva said Carol had a good ear, and they parted from each other with a kiss and words in Polish.

  ‘See you tomorrow,’ Violet said. ‘Sorry to rush off.’

  ‘Why didn’t you stay?’ Carol said crossly. ‘You normally do.’

  ‘There’s someone at home – an old friend from the war,’ Violet said. ‘I just wanted you to see him, that’s all.’

  ‘Oh,’ Carol said, indifferently. ‘Mom, when are we going to get a television?’

  ‘When we can afford it.’ Violet pushed open the front door.

  Roy was standing in the back room and she could see he was nervous.

  ‘Carol, this is Roy – we saw him at the garden party, d’you remember?’

  Carol nodded, though she didn’t seem very sure.

  ‘I’m going up to my room. Isn’t Linda back?’

  ‘No – she’ll be in any minute.’

  She looked at Roy as Carol’s feet were heard on the stairs. They smiled ruefully at each other.

  ‘I s’pose I’d better be off,’ he said.

  She took him to the door, and as he was leaving he turned, as if about to say something more, then obviously thought the better of it.

  ‘We might see you at one of the other parties,’ she said. Then added, ‘You can come again, if you want.’

  Roy looked at her, and his eyes seemed full of sadness.

  ‘Don’t know if I should really. But thanks, anyway.’

  Chapter Eighty-Six

  Bessie lay drifting in and out of sleep, as she did most days now.

  It was not a calm sleep but restless and full of memories. Sometimes they were of happier moments, of her marriage, when she felt light and lifted out of the prison of her body. When these visions faded she came back to the hard pillow under her head – her ears were sore now, chafed from lying there so long – and the burn of the mattress against her lower back. Sometimes when she was awake she lifted her good arm and peered at the hand which rose up in front of her face, wondering whose it was, that puffy thing with its cracked, yellow nails. How had she found her way into this old crone’s body? Would someone come along and say a spell and let her out?

  Faces came and went, Marigold’s mostly. That it should come to this – being looked after by that sly, boozing half-wit! Violet came sometimes and asked questions. Was she all right? How was she feeling? Couldn’t the girl see she couldn’t answer? No bloody brains – never did have. Even that girl – one of the grandchildren – Linda, was it? Miss Hoity-Toity with her book learning. She’d been once or twice. Must be summat wrong if that lot were making an appearance . . . She would lie stewing in her thoughts until the dreamy, trance-like state came again.

  There was one that was a real treat. If only it was like a machine, like one of those televisions and she could choose what to think about, she’d turn that on any time . . . 1911, best year of her life. She’d had her job at the HP sauce factory then, one long whiff of vinegar, a big company, regular wages, and that was where she’d met Jack. They’d courted for a year, but it was ‘let’s get married’ from the word go. Both nineteen they were, full of it. Worshipped her, he did, all their marriage – seven years when she was queen in her own house, with a man to feed and bed with and the babbies coming. And that day replayed in her mind. There she was, her hair long then, blue-black as a raven’s and her still slender then, but strong as an ox. She was a sturdy mare, Jack said.

  ‘I’ve had to be, you cheeky bugger,’ she’d tell him.

  ‘Well, you’re my mare now . . .’

  She’d walked up to the altar in the prettiest lacy blouse, high collar, and a deep blue skirt. No father to give her away, no Mom. Her older half-sisters had scarpered by then and Mary’d died when she was fifteen. With that wheezing chest she’d never been built to last. There was only Clarence, sixteen and somehow old-mannish even then, to act as family and walk her up the aisle. And Jack stood there to greet her, beaming. This all played through her mind again like a beautiful, haunting piece of music, the spray of orange blossom she was carrying, the lace at her neck and her shoes, the smartest pair she’d ever had, in navy leather, and Jack’s adoring smile. And then later, their first night. She’d saved herself for after the wedding. Not that it was her first time with a man . . . But those thoughts weren’t for this dream, this lovely memory. Shut that out, right out of all memory, back with all the other bad times, the dirt . . . And she was back in Jack’s arms, her man, her prize, with his lean, strong body and gruff, older-man ways even before he was twenty. He never cared that she couldn’t read or write.

  ‘That ain’t no use to me,’ he once teased her, running his hand along her thick thigh. ‘There’re other things much more important!’

  God, he’d enjoyed her body – he’d revelled in it! He’d come home from work for weeks after they were married so hungry for her he’d let his tea go cold to have her first. And to crown it all, her first pregnancy had yielded two babbies! The midwife spotted it once she got big.

  ‘You’ve got more than one in there, Bessie, I’d stake my life on it . . .’

  ‘That’s ’cause you’re so flaming greedy,’ she told Jack.

  It all played in her mind, all those early days in Joseph Street, the little room with the range, their chairs close to the fire at night, the big brass bed she was lying in now – no, they bought that later on, but never mind. Then the babbies, Charlie and Marigold, twins safely delivered, wasn’t she a miracle! Then Violet and Rosina, until there was a family, the house bursting at the seams . . . But of course before Rosina was born, Jack was dead. All those men killed out there in France and he gets Spanish flu. She sat that day she gave birth to Rosina and wept and wept. What a pretty one she was, right from the start, and just like Jack – and he’d never see her. She was no queen any more: her king had gone. All the bliss of the memories seeped away and once again she was back in the lumpy bed. Why did nothing good ever last? Everything was always spoilt. Always. And she was filled with hurt and bitterness, as if she might burst with it.

  There was a beam of light in the room, dazzling as she opened her eyes. Was it summer? Christmas, wasn’t it, nearly, and cold? Where was Marigold? She wanted something, a cup of tea . . . And then she was gone again, slipping away into a doze.

  This time it was different. Not these memories, no, for God’s sake no! But there was no way out, as there had been no way out then. She was trapped in her vision of the past . . .

  The accident happened in 1899, two days after Bessie turned seven.

  April, what should have been the last days of the board school term, except that Bessie hardly ever went to school. She was Mom’s skivvy. And she knew as soon as she came downstairs that her father hadn’t come home again.

  ‘You’re not going nowhere!’ her mother screamed at her. She was kneeling, sweeping ash out of the range, a grimy nightcap over her fading hair, which was scraped back severely from a face haggard from childbearing and disappointment. Her belly was heavy with the weight of another child, due any day now.

  Bessie waited, in her ragged dress. It was brown and too short for her. Mary, her ten-year-old sister, sat hunched forwards on a stool by the door, each breath a wheezing agony.<
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  ‘I don’t know where that bastard is! No tea in the house, no milk, barely a crust.’ Her mother reached out for the old coal pail. ‘Nothing but a handful of slack and the cellar’s scraped bare! You’ll have to go and ask Mrs Preston if ’er’ll borrow us some again . . . And go and get Agnes before she bawls the bloody house down and wakes William.’

  Bessie climbed barefoot up the twisting staircase. She was a scrawny child with a wide face and thick black hair. Her mother only ever had eyes for William. At last, after seven girls, six surviving, the longed-for son had arrived.

  The stair treads were bare, but so well worn that they were not splintery. The house was one of Birmingham’s thousands of back-to-backs, one room downstairs, two up and an attic, and they were on the yard side, down an entry from the front houses on the street. The houses were crushed in round the vast array of factories and workshops, poorly built, no water, little air, overcrowded. If it rained hard they flooded, sometimes right up through the cellar to the ground floor, and water dripped in through the roof and left tide marks all down the walls, and the battle against infestations of bed bugs, roaches and mice was endless.

  Agnes, snotty-nosed and hungry, was sitting up in the big, deep drawer in Mom and Dad’s room where she slept. She was nearly a year old.

  ‘Oh, shurrup, will you?’ Bessie said, hoiking her out. The back of her clothes was all wet, as was the bedding. William, who was three, was still asleep in the double bed which took up most of the room, one tiny hand a fist in front of his face, his hair brown and smooth. Mom’s little angel. With Agnes on her hip, Bessie thumped downstairs again.

  ‘Oh, bloody shut up, will you!’ their mother snarled at them both from the grate.

  The older girls had already left for work. Bessie’s mother, Ethel, had been married to a man who’d deserted her, leaving her with three daughters. In desperation she set up house with Thomas Harris, who wasn’t her husband at all though she called herself Harris for the look of it. With Harris she’d had four more daughters, one buried soon after birth, and William. Harris was a carter, a charmer and a boozer who drank away not only any money he managed, intermittently, to earn, but also the factory wages of Ada and Rachel, the two oldest girls by Harry Marston, who were sixteen and fourteen.

  Bessie spent most of the day out in the yard, doing as she was told and minding the babbies. That was always her job, looking after everyone else. When Ada and Rachel got in from work they did nothing but boss her around. That was her life, skivvy to Mom, maid of all work to her elder sisters and mother to all the younger ones. There were other children out there, playing around mothers who were taking their turn doing their washing, steam from the heated copper billowing out through the brewhouse door, chats and quarrels over the mangle. By midday the sun got round and shed some warming light into the dank atmosphere, drying out the blue bricks, the washing strung on lines.

  Throughout the morning she heard her mom’s voice inside, raised in bitter complaint. Ethel, exhausted and heavy with the next child, fell asleep in the afternoon, face pasty white against her black dress. There was still no sign of her ‘husband’. Bessie heard the other women’s gossip about Mom, how she was ‘at the end of her tether’ and would soon be ‘on the Parish’, and their opinion about her father, none of which was complimentary. No family on the yard had more quarrels about where the next meal was coming from.

  ‘No use to anyone that one . . . Er’d be better off on her own . . .’

  When the older children came home from school, two of the raggedy lads played with William. Bessie was bored, and relieved to have him taken off her hands. She and some other girls were in a corner, beyond the brewhouse, with a handful of pebbles, playing ‘jacks’. They often sat there, out of the way, and it was in the lee of the wall where the stink of the gasworks wasn’t so bad.

  ‘We’re going down Sheppard’s,’ two of the boys said to Bessie. ‘Willie can come with us.’

  ‘Awright,’ Bessie said indifferently. Mom let William go with them to the shop. They might buy him a stick of liquorice to keep him quiet and she was fed up with him. The girls went back to their game. Mary sat near them, very upright against the wall, lips tinged with blue. She was having a bad day, but they were too used to it to feel much pity for her, her rasping breaths as much the background to their game as was the sound of trains, chuffing along, or their brakes shrieking a few streets away.

  But then the shouting started. One of the lads came tearing along the entry in his bare feet as if his hair was on fire. His face was smeared with smuts and he looked frightened out of his wits.

  ‘Quick! Quick! It’s Willie . . . He’s . . .’

  ‘What?’ Bessie felt as if her heart was a stone.

  ‘He got on the railway. We daint see ’im, honest! And we daint know where he’d gone. And a train came . . .’ The boy, who was eleven years old, began sobbing, his face twisting with distress. ‘We never saw it – ’

  Ethel was beside them, pushing Bessie out of the way.

  ‘What’re you saying?’ Seizing hold of the boy’s scrawny shoulders she screamed into his face. ‘What’re you saying? Where’s William? Where’s my boy?’

  Bessie knew then that she’d heard it, the moment he meant, when the train screeched to a stop . . . She already understood that William was dead.

  A policeman came to the house and told them they could not bring William’s body home. Not possible, he said. They wouldn’t want to see. Not the way it was. Neighbours came and went. The girls tried to comfort their mother but she pushed them away.

  ‘You’re no good!’ she howled. ‘I want my boy – my beautiful little boy! You – ’ She clawed at Bessie. ‘You were s’posed to be looking after him. If it wasn’t for you he’d be here in my arms!’

  Bessie lay in bed that night with her sisters. Their father had still not come home.

  ‘I want William,’ Sarah sobbed. She was only four.

  Bessie wanted him too.

  Distantly, from the railway, they heard the whistle of a train, like the wail of an unquiet soul, and the panting noise it made building up speed. ‘You’re no good . . .’ it chugged out, ‘you’re no good . . .’

  Within the week the house was full of the cries of her mother in her labour pains. Bessie’s job was to keep the other children out of the way. Their dad was home that evening when Mom at last gave birth to a tiny boy. She announced that she was going to call him Clarence.

  Thomas Harris looked at the tiny, screaming form with no emotion.

  ‘Ah well, there yer go – got another lad now, Ethel – tek the place of the other one.’

  Ethel glowered up at him. ‘Nothing can take William’s place.’

  Bessie stared at the round, contorted face of Clarence, pressed against the blue-veined pillow of his mother’s breast. She felt something untangle in her, a rush of relief that God had sent them another boy instead of William. It felt as if she was being given a second chance. She knew what she had to do now. With all her might she had to look after the babbies, and above all, she had to look after Clarence. Clarence was clean and new. That was what she must do. Then everything would be all right.

  By the time she was eleven Bessie was left as mother and mainstay of the family. Thomas Harris was long gone. Ada, her oldest half-sister, was married, and Rachel came and went, didn’t care for anything or anyone. Bessie was mother to Sarah, Agnes and Clarence, and to Susan, whom Mom had popped out, spawned by him. Arthur Seth Gibbins, his full name. It said so in the paper. One of the neighbours read it out to her after his trial.

  ‘We’re well rid of him now, Bessie. He’s a madman. They’ll lock him up and throw away the key.’ He’d cut a woman’s throat.

  He might as well have cut Mom’s throat. Did it for herself in the end, after Susan was born. Mom drank poison and left them all, and Susan only three months old.

  It was by the grace of God he committed a murder or he would have been back, doing what he did to her that time. And s
he was there now, eleven years old, trapped under him on Mom’s bed with Susan crying downstairs and his stink and him hurting her. He left her bleeding and she had to take an old blouse of Mom’s and put it between her legs, lying curled up on her side, legs clamped together until it stopped. He had a beard with snuff trapped in it and sludgy grey eyes and ever after she never went near a man who wasn’t cleanshaven. And while he was doing it to her his eyes were blind but it was her that felt invisible.

  She was trying to get out of this vision of the past, but it paraded everything in front of her. Mom, that morning when she found her dead on the bed, body bent back, eyes and mouth open as if she’d had a terrible shock, her skirt rucked up, showing her white legs.

  ‘Mom – Mom!’ She had shaken and shaken her and then Clarence had come in. He stared and backed away, down the stairs again. She found him later in the brewhouse, curled up in the corner, his thumb in his mouth, and he was four then.

  She woke, whimpering.

  The sunlight was gone now and the room felt cool and grey. Her body was so heavy, like a mountain strapped to a bed, gross, impossibly big. She lay full of loathing and anger. Where was that blasted Marigold when you needed her? She couldn’t even get up and sit on the po’ by herself and she wanted that cup of tea. She wanted to kick and scream, like a helpless child.

  It wasn’t long before she heard footsteps on the stairs, Marigold’s slow, cow-like tread.

  Come on, come on, you great fat stupid trollop! Get yourself up here and give me my bloody tea. What’s taking you so long?

  There was a pause, and she heard Marigold catching her breath at the top of the stairs.

  Bessie let out a shout of impatience which emerged only as a slurred groan.

  Then Marigold hove into view, her square face appearing over the bedclothes. And no tea! She hadn’t even bothered to bring up the tea! Was that the hard stuff she could smell on her again – going about stinking like a distillery. Filthy stinking trollop . . .

  Marigold stood, caught in her mother’s glare of loathing. She looked down at her, hands on her broad hips, covered by her pond-green sack of a skirt. Her face was expressionless as it so often was, but there was a hardness in her eyes which even Bessie could see. God, what’s got into her . . . Help! Help me!