A Girl Called Rosie

by Anne Doughty

  ‘Then you must. I know things haven’t been easy for you. I’m sure there are good things ahead but you mustn’t be shy about going after them.’

  She slowed down, swung left into the farmyard and did a neat manoeuvre to leave the car pointing outwards.

  ‘You won’t mind if I don’t come in, Rosie, will you? I never was a favourite with either your mother or your dear Uncle Joe,’ she explained, leaning over and kissing her cheek. ‘Write to me when you can spare the time. I’m back in Sloane Square for the foreseeable future. Berlin was just one of Simon’s assignments and he’ll be back himself in another two weeks.’

  Rosie picked up her case from the back seat.

  ‘Good luck and give my love to your dear da.’

  Rosie had not been expecting a welcome when she returned home and so she wasn’t disappointed. Apart from a kettle boiling its head off on the stove, there was no sign of life as she walked through the open door. The kitchen was empty, dim and muggy with the warmth of the day and the steam from the kettle. She put her suitcase down and moved the kettle back from the heat.

  She looked around, noted the general untidiness and the accumulated layer of dust and crumbs under the table. A couple of large bluebottles buzzed in the bucket where scraps for the hens were kept, the lid having fallen off and not been replaced. She guessed there might well be two weeks’ washing awaiting her out in the wash house. There was nothing to be done except change her clothes and pick up where she had left off.

  Some time later, going down to the orchard to hang out the first instalment of working shirts and dungarees, she met her mother coming towards her carrying a bucket of eggs in each hand.

  ‘That brown hen is laying away again,’ she said shortly, barely pausing in her step as Rosie lowered her heavy basket of wet washing to the ground. ‘I’ll hafta get Dolly to look for her nest when she comes back from Loneys. She’s a great han’ at finding nests,’ she added, continuing on her way, speaking to herself as much as to Rosie.

  She pegged out the first of her brothers’ shirts and looked up at the bright sky, the white clouds streaming out of the west, the sun warm on her damp hands. The breeze was brisk. She thought of Mrs Love and the garden at Rathdrum and smiled to herself. Her washing might well be dry by now.

  ‘Hallo, Rosie. Are ye back?’

  Rosie turned hastily to see a tall, ungainly figure standing behind her, looking her up and down.

  Their closest neighbour on the uphill side of the farm, Maisie Jackson, was one of the few people in the immediate vicinity Rosie actively disliked. The rolled up magazine Maisie held in her hand indicated she was on her way to visit her mother, the disorder of her lank, straggling hair a sign she’d now taken to using the hole in the hedge the children had made as a shortcut between the orchard and the Jackson’s overgrown back garden.

  ‘Shure ye’ve had a time of it this last while. I’m shure yer granny was glad to have you and her so fond of you, but what’ll she do now, the poor woman?’

  Maisie’s daily bread was gossip. She stood now, her face a study in sympathy, her large, cowlike eyes wide with concern, her mouth twisted in distress. Now thirty-five, the eldest of her large family at work, the younger ones left to amuse themselves, Maisie had recently become one of her mother’s closest cronies.

  ‘I really don’t know,’ said Rosie, shaking her head.

  ‘I’m sure ye’ve had a time of it, Rosie dear, and you with your own future to think of. D’ye think you’ll like it at Castledillon?’

  For a moment, Rosie couldn’t think what she could possibly mean. Then she remembered her father had warned her about her mother’s plan for getting her out of the house by sending her into service.

  ‘I haven’t heard any more about it,’ she replied warily, trying to stick as near to the truth as possible.

  ‘Maybe you should have a rest before ye look for a wee job, Rosie. What does that nice-lookin’ woman who brought you home in her motor think? Is she the one that’s a ladyship or is it the other one?’

  ‘They both are,’ said Rosie, not seeing how to avoid the question. ‘Auntie Hannah is a countess and Auntie Sarah is now Lady Hadleigh.’

  ‘Oh, isn’t that just lovely, Rosie?’ said Maisie, pressing her hands together in an exaggerated gesture of felicity. ‘I’m sure you must be thrilled to be able to speak to people like that. Maybe one of them will give you a job and you could marry some sir or lord yourself. An’ you could sit all day doin’ nothing, like they do.’

  The thought of either of her aunts sitting all day doing nothing was so ludicrous she couldn’t think what to say, so she bent quickly to the ground, picked up her father’s dungarees and stretched up to pin them on the line.

  ‘Ach, here dear, let me do that,’ Maisie said quickly, laying down her magazine on the grass. ‘Sure I’m taller than you an’ better able for it. I’m sure you’d far rather be readin’ one of them books of yours than doing the washin’,’ she went on with the sort of laugh that she used to encourage confidence.

  ‘Miss Wilson says you’re a very clever girl, so I’m told,’ Maisie went on, twisting her head to see how this piece of information would be received.

  ‘There are lots of people much cleverer than I am who can’t get a job these days, Mrs Jackson. Emily was one, for example. All my brothers and sisters are clever,’ she said, trying her best to keep her irritation to herself.

  ‘Yes, indeed they are. I often say that to your mother. What a clever family she has and what a credit they are to her. But not all of them as clever as you, Rosie,’ she said coyly. ‘No wonder your granny looks after you and buys you nice dresses. Though maybe she won’t be able to do that any more. Wouldn’t that be terrible sad after the good time you’ve had?’

  Rosie handed her a clothes peg, then another. After the dungarees, there were only a couple of pairs of underpants left at the bottom of the basket.

  ‘Bereavement is such a terrible thing,’ Rosie said suddenly, turning to Maisie as she handed her the next garment. ‘You really have no idea what is happening or what people are going to do. Haven’t you noticed that yourself, Mrs Jackson, with all the people you’ve gone to help at times like that? They just don’t know what is happening,’ she said sadly.

  ‘Ach, indeed yer right. You never spoke a truer word,’ Maisie agreed, as she pinned up the last garment and prepared to hoist the whole load on the clothes pole.

  Rosie made up her mind she’d been patient long enough and given Maisie no obvious cause for complaint.

  ‘I must get on, Mrs Jackson,’ she said with a smile she certainly didn’t feel. ‘This is only the first lot, there’s quite a bit more steeping in the wash-house and I’m sure Ma’s expecting you.’

  ‘Aye indeed she is, for she’s not just herself at the moment. She’s very concerned about your Uncle Joe, him not being well and your Da inta the bargain, with this business at his work and all the responsibility fallin’ on him. I’m sure he’s told you all about it,’ she added, as they walked back through the orchard and into the farmyard.

  Rosie nodded and said nothing, though a stab of anxiety came upon her at the mention of her father. Whatever was going on at work and whether it was good news or bad, he would tell her in his own good time. The last person she wanted to hear such news from was Maisie Jackson.

  She turned aside at the wash-house door with a cheery goodbye she certainly didn’t mean and stepped over to the window to watch Maisie walk on across the yard.

  ‘Thon Maisie has a desperit roving eye,’ Emily had said, one day when they’d been at home and she’d arrived to visit.

  At the time, she’d protested, saying she couldn’t imagine anyone more unlikely to have any success with a roving eye, Maisie’s unfortunate looks being exceeded only by her unfortunate manner. What Emily had really meant, however, was perfectly demonstrated as Maisie crossed the yard.

  Backwards and forwards her eyes moved as she looked everything up and down. She studied the surface of
the yard, the paintwork round the windows, the floor brush left outside to dry, the summer flowers in half barrels on either side of the door. Nothing escaped her eagle eye.

  With a sudden pang of anxiety Rosie wondered if Maisie had seen something in her own looks she might not be aware of herself, something she’d much rather not have reported to her mother in Maisie’s terms. Her clothes could hardly attract attention as they were only her ordinary everyday working things. Her hair was no different from usual, simply pulled back and tied, not even with a new piece of ribbon that could be noticed and commented upon.

  Still, she knew well enough we can’t always see ourselves. Sometimes in the months before her accident, she’d replied to her mother as coolly and as reasonably as she could and yet her mother had flown into a rage, shouted at her and roundly abused her for ‘being sarcastic’.

  She wondered if her mother used phrases she’d heard without knowing exactly what they meant, so ‘sarcastic’ appeared to mean no more than that she was being rude, or cheeky, or guilty of ‘answering back’.

  It was hard to tell what her mother could possibly have seen that created this anger. The words themselves, the tone and the manner of their using, were the only clue she had, but no dictionary would help her towards understanding what she really meant.

  She pounded the saturated dungarees vigorously and rubbed the bits stained with grease or motor oil or grass with slivers of Sunlight soap. Hot water would help, but she was reluctant to go over to the house to boil kettles with Maisie in residence by the stove. She rinsed and mangled three more pairs, one each for Charlie, Sammy and Bobby. They made the clothes basket so heavy to lift, she decided to go back down to the line with them before she added anything more.

  The sun was high and dazzled her eyes as she lowered the clothes pole. The wet dungarees blew against her face and caught at her hair as she reached up with the first pair and held them one-handed to put in the first pegs. She stepped aside and wiped her cheek with the back of her wrist and reached up again with the next pair. From somewhere nearby a blackbird sang, indifferent to the flap of the long line of clothes or the rattle of a passing train.

  She hung up the third pair, lifted the clothesline on the pole, saw the breeze catch them and inflate them so that they looked like three headless figures. As she lowered the clothes pole back into its socket, they showered her with drops of water. She moved back quickly, laughing at herself for not jumping back quickly enough. She wiped her face again on her arm, a handful of pegs still in her hand, her eyes half-closed against the bright light.

  ‘It could be worse,’ she whispered to herself. ‘It could be worse.’

  This was not how she wanted to spend her life, but here and now, at this time, it was a beginning. She thought of her grandfather and the story he liked to tell about ‘the fortieth horseshoe’. Day after day in the forge, doing the same things, you had to look for the good things, the wee things, the happy things to set against the boredom of the endless repetition. He said you could always find something, but you had to look.

  She thought of two girls, both called Bridget, one in Kerry and one in Banbridge, each in a skimpy black dress with a little white apron. She had a lot more to make her happy than either of them. Running the house, cooking and cleaning and keeping an eye on the two youngest was hard work, but if her mother continued to ignore her, left her the freedom to get on with her work in her own way, she could cope.

  Suddenly she remembered the afternoon in the strawberry field the day the news came of her grandfather’s sudden collapse, those happy hours when she’d picked fruit and sat on the dry earth looking at leaves and flowers and the view out over the valley beyond. She’d been so content. So unwilling to move or even to speak. There could be times like that in the long days ahead, hours when she could sit in the orchard after the work was done, walk up the lane to see Lizzie, or slip into the barn with a book or her paintbox.

  It was up to her to make the best of what she had out of the freedom she could create inside her head, the small pleasures she could contrive, reading and writing letters, or enjoying the company of Emily and Sammy and her father.

  Beyond the orchard and the farmyard, beyond the lane that led up to the village and the shops in Richhill, there was a larger world. Twice she had stepped into that world, once in joy when she went to Kerry and once in sadness when she’d shared the loss of her dear Granda. But having once ventured into the world, she now knew there were possibilities out there she might never have been able to imagine had she not done so.

  She picked up her basket and made her way slowly back along the path to the gate into the farmyard. For the moment, this was where she had to be, but it would not always be so. She had no idea what might lie ahead of her, but whenever things got really difficult she would have to remind herself that there was a different world out there. That some day her life might change as sharply as it had changed twice in the last two months. And when the moment came, as Aunt Sarah had said, she had to seize it and move on.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Autumn lingered that year of 1924. Even in late October, when frost dusted the long grass in the early morning, the afternoons were still often warm and sunny. Rosie made good use of them, taking her sketchbook out into the orchard or up the lane. Sometimes she walked as far as Cannon Hill and climbed the steep slope to the obelisk, a point from which she could look out over the familiar countryside to the mountains beyond Lough Neagh and the pale, misty shadows even further away which were sometimes cloud and sometimes the mountains of Donegal.

  She had set herself the task of sketching or painting all the familiar hedgerow plants and flowers she could find and she was amazed at how many there were she’d never noticed before. One of her favourite places for sketching was the old Quaker graveyard at Money, a name which had nothing to do with shillings and florins. It was simply a corruption of the Irish name, Muney, according to Miss Wilson, which meant a bog. True enough, only a little distance from the graveyard, where many of her mother’s relatives lay buried, there was indeed a stretch of sodden ground with plants she had never seen before and had not yet been able to identify.

  She had no difficulty whatever about going out every afternoon. Sometimes she’d barely finished clearing away the midday meal before some of her mother’s cronies arrived. Had she not already announced she was going out, her mother would immediately come up with a good excuse to ensure her absence. Having observed her mother’s strategies for a few days, Rosie quickly found ways to make it easy for her.

  She and Lizzie went for long walks and shared the story of her growing love for Hugh, a young man whom Rosie could not help but like despite his marked lack of competence in everything he tried to do. Of her own relationship with Patrick Walsh she said little, partly because Lizzie’s delight in her own affair appeared to take up almost all their conversation, but also because Rosie herself found it difficult to decide what would be of the slightest interest to Lizzie or indeed exactly what part Patrick was playing in her life.

  Nevertheless, it was a great comfort to have his letters. True, they were somewhat erratic in their frequency but they were always lengthy when they did come. Together with those from her grandmother, her Aunt Sarah and Bridget O’Shea in Kerry, they gave her something to look forward to.

  Rising now in darkness as the November days grew ever shorter, the water on the washstand yet more icy, the lino beyond the bedside rug like marble under bare feet, she encouraged herself each morning by the thought of what the post might bring, rather than on the endlessly repeating chores, the floor which had to be washed more often once the yard became wet and the orchard and fields muddy, the extra bowls of eggs to clean now that the year’s chickens were mature enough to lay, and the rips and tears in working clothes as hedges were cut down and ditches cleared before the winter.

  She’d tried hard to remember the wisdom of ‘the fortieth horseshoe’ and do all those things Aunt Sarah had encouraged her to do when life g
rows oppressively dull, or difficult. For all her efforts, however, in those first months at home, nothing seemed to give her the pleasure she might have expected from it.

  On a lovely afternoon, she would find some new plant, or have an unexpected success with a sketch or watercolour, yet find it brought no joy. Bound up in her own happiness though she was, even Lizzie commented on how flat she seemed, how often she missed jokes, or didn’t laugh at her lively account of Hugh’s latest misfortune.

  Standing by the stove waiting for the kettle to boil one morning early in December, the breakfast dishes stacked beside the tin basin on the kitchen table, she looked up at the calendar and smiled to herself. Today was Thursday, her favourite day of the week, the day of her regular visit to her former teacher, now her friend. Even though the days were short and there was less and less daylight for walking or sketching she realised how much better she now felt. She was sure it was thanks to Miss Wilson.

  Aunt Sarah had been quite right about going to see her, but she’d delayed for rather a long time, although she’d always liked the older woman. It was October before she finally got round to it and when the time came she’d actually been rather nervous.

  She’d dressed very carefully in ‘granny’s dress’, the one made of soft, blue fabric with its pattern of tiny dark and light blue squares. She’d brushed her hair thoroughly, polished her shoes and made sure she had a clean handkerchief tucked up her sleeve.

  The moment Miss Wilson opened the door, she knew she’d been silly to be anxious, for her greeting was so warm and direct.

  ‘My dear Rose, how delightful to see you. I did appreciate your note. I’m afraid not all my former pupils deploy the courtesies which they embraced while they were under my tutelage. Please, do come in. Mother is with me in the sitting room but I fear she can take little part in conversation. Nevertheless, she must not be excluded. I’m sure you understand.’