Birmingham Rose

by Annie Murray

She read the letters again, and then climbed back up to the deck with them in her hand. The ship was travelling at a steady speed now, and she stood looking out over the water with the rush of the cold wind against her cheeks. Standing by the rail, she thought of the first time she had seen Diana in her bedroom at the vicarage. Her beautiful, curly-haired, generous friend who had accepted her immediately and without hesitation. And of that last time, her blue eyes hurt and questioning, on New Street Station. And she remembered for a moment Diana’s face that day when she saw the strong man in his chains struggling to loose himself inside the heavy sack. She closed her eyes against the pain of it, hoping fervently that Diana’s death had been instant, that she had not lingered there, trapped and suffocating in the railway carriage.

  She wanted to open her mouth and scream and scream into the wind. Instead she tore the letters into tiny cream and blue pieces. When she opened her hands the wind whisked the light fragments away instantly towards the stern of the ship.

  ‘They’ve taken the ropes down between the quarters,’ an excited voice announced at the door of Rose’s cabin. ‘Now we’ll see some fun!’

  They were a week into the voyage and until this point the male and female troops had been kept firmly apart. The ropes across the passages separating the two were guarded at night, and fraternizing was strictly forbidden.

  Now everything suddenly became more relaxed. The sky was a pale, clear blue and, though not hot, the sun was shining and it was a great deal warmer than it had been in England. The sea had turned a rich green-blue, its surface ruffled by a strong breeze. Conditions for the voyage so far had been perfect. Now they were allowed the run of the ship, and romances started to blossom in every nook and cranny. Promises were made, weddings planned, and it all felt like a fantastic holiday reprieve after the dark winter of war they had left behind.

  But of course the war was never far away.

  ‘I wonder where we’re going,’ Gwen kept saying as she and Rose paced restlessly up and down that morning. They spent most of their time on the ship together.

  ‘I think it’s Australia,’ Rose said. ‘I mean they’ve given us all that lightweight uniform, haven’t they? Must be somewhere hot, wherever it is.’

  ‘It could be quite a number of places, couldn’t it?’ Gwen said, staring rather absently out over the endless water. ‘But it’s awfully unsettling not knowing.’

  They were to find out sooner than they realized. Just as Gwen, screwing up her blue eyes, had said to Rose, ‘I say – it’s not my imagination, is it? That is land over there?’ an order came that they were all to assemble on the deck where Rose and Gwen were already standing.

  When the three hundred women were standing smartly to attention in the bright sunlight, their new Company Sergeant Major Marjorie Keaton told them she had an important announcement to make. She was a tall, thin, pleasant-faced woman with large teeth that made her look as if she was permanently on the verge of smiling.

  ‘Some of you may already have noticed that we’re sailing pretty close to land,’ she shouted, trying to make her voice carry as far as possible. ‘I am now authorized to tell you where we are to be posted. Later today we shall pass through the Straits of Gibraltar – between the coast of Spain and the north coast of Africa,’ she explained carefully to those whose geography was not what it might be. Three hundred pairs of eyes gazed at her intently.

  ‘We shall then enter the Mediterranean. From there, if conditions stay as they are, it will take us approximately six days to reach our destination. The ship will dock at Naples. The orders for our company are that we staff the new Allied Forces Headquarters which have been transferred to Caserta, seventeen miles to the north of Naples.’ They all saw her smile. ‘Evidently our work is to be housed in a royal palace. That’ll make a change for some of us, won’t it?’

  A wave of appreciative murmurs and laughs passed through the crowd.

  Then CSM Keaton’s face grew solemn again. ‘Enjoy the rest of the voyage,’ she said. ‘There will be a great deal of work to do when we arrive. Every effort will be needed in order to help the progress of our forces northwards.’

  The women’s assembly broke up, all chattering excitedly as they moved off to different parts of the ship.

  ‘So much for Australia!’ Gwen teased.

  ‘Italy?’ Rose seemed completely bemused by the news. ‘We’re really going to be living in Italy? I hardly know a thing about the place. Doesn’t seem real, does it?’

  That afternoon, the ship slowly negotiated the Straits of Gibraltar. People lined the rails of the decks pointing out the famous Rock, monkeys and all. And there were constant cat-calls from the men to the ATS on board: ‘Come over here!’ ‘Give us a kiss girls!’ ‘Go on – get your knees brown!’

  As soon as they were through the straits they all noticed a number of small boats peeling off from the Spanish coast and homing in on the Donata Castle before she had a chance to pick up speed again. As they drew in closer everyone leaned over the rails to watch, and started cheering and whistling when they realized what was going on. In the painted boats dark Spanish men stood up unsteadily, their legs braced against the sea’s movement.

  ‘Stockings!’ they shouted up in accents which sounded strange to English ears. ‘You buy stockings – silk, nylon – very good?’

  Silver coins, half-crowns and shillings, started to rain down from the Donata Castle. The Spaniards passed up the stockings on long thin poles. There were squeals of excitement from some of the ATS on board as the goods were examined for their colour, length and lack of holes.

  ‘Here – let me treat you to a pair, may I?’

  Rose and Gwen turned to find out who the rather smarmy voice belonged to. A strongly built, red-haired fellow was standing behind them smiling. Openly he looked the two of them over and targeted Rose as the more obvious looker of the two with those sultry dark eyes.

  ‘Let me buy you some of the merchandise they’re offering?’

  Rose returned his stare quite indifferently and said abruptly, ‘No thanks.’ She turned back to watch the noisy, hectic scene on the water below.

  The man smiled knowingly at Gwen and winked at her. ‘Well, what about you?’

  Gwen, flattered by the attention and rather embarrassed by Rose’s lack of grace, nodded, smiling and blushing.

  ‘My name’s Brian by the way,’ the young man said. He pushed between them and called out, ‘I say – over here!’

  One of the vivid blue and red boats sped over on the bright water, the boatman rowing eagerly.

  Brian tossed a half-crown down and the boatman reached up, trying to snatch it from the air. When he’d passed the nylons up on the pole he made off again at high speed.

  ‘Well, that is kind of you,’ Gwen said, beaming at him.

  She held up the stockings to admire them, and Rose turned to watch. She saw Gwen’s smile drop into an expression of horror and embarrassment. The stockings only had one foot between them.

  Brian grabbed hold of the one and a half nylon legs he had just bought, shouting, ‘Of all the damned cheek! Come back here, you thieving, cheating . . .’

  He disappeared along the deck yelling helplessly down at the boatmen between everyone else’s shoulders. If he had been listening, he would have heard Rose’s unrestrained cackles of laughter.

  Gwen, one hand clapped over her mouth, started to giggle too.

  ‘Oh – his face!’ Rose cried, straightening up and wiping her eyes. ‘I’ll never forget it as long as I live!’

  When they had stopped laughing, Gwen said to Rose, ‘You don’t like men very much, do you?’

  ‘Oh – some of them are all right.’ Rose’s black eyebrows pulled into a slight frown. ‘I just can’t stand the ones who think they can buy a favour before they even know your flaming name.’

  Rose sensed they were approaching land even before she was out of bed. It was only five-thirty in the morning, but she found she was completely awake, her heart pounding, and she kne
w she would get no more sleep.

  When she’d dressed, very quietly so as not to disturb the other three in the cabin, she went outside into the bright, chilly morning.

  There it was, nearer even than she had expected. The curve of the bay was blurred as yet, so that she could not make out any clear details. She could only form an impression of the brightness of it, the buildings near the top of the slice of land must be dazzling white. She stared, quite mesmerized, as the Donata Castle inched nearer and nearer.

  There were only a couple of other people out on the deck at that hour. She noticed a young private standing not far away, staring with fascinated attention in the same direction as herself. She was struck by the concentrated look of interest on his face as he gazed towards the land, unaware of her watching him. She saw that his short hair, just showing round the edges of his army beret, was very light brown, almost blond. He was slim, not especially muscular in build, and he stood gracefully resting his weight on one foot as he leaned on the rail.

  He turned suddenly and saw Rose watching him. Without smiling or changing his expression, he walked slowly along the deck and stood beside her.

  ‘Incredibly beautiful, isn’t it?’ he said. He had a soft voice, his accent southern, she thought, and quite well spoken.

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ Rose said. She spoke quietly and rather correctly, affected by his serious presence.

  He turned and pointed back to one of the open arms of the bay. ‘That’s Vesuvius,’ he told her, indicating the grey, cone-shaped mountain rising up from the sea. ‘The volcano. Quite spectacular. I hadn’t realized just how near it would be.’

  ‘How did you know about that?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ve done a bit of reading, that’s all. I’ve always been fascinated by volcanoes. I didn’t know we’d end up here of course.’

  For the next hour the two of them stood side by side, almost entirely in silence, watching the lines of Naples slowly grow clearer. The city seemed to tumble down to the sea in layers, made up of a hotch-potch of terraces, with houses and trees stepped at different levels down the cliff. The vivid blue sea lapped at its feet and, above, a few puffs of white cloud were the only marks on the sky.

  The white brilliance gradually turned to more ambiguous greys and yellows. They could see trees, and roads like nail scratches zig-zagging down the steep cliff. Gradually, drawing into the port, the briny sea smell became obscured by the stench of sewage. Any illusion that they were entering a shining, pearl-like city melted away rapidly as the Donata Castle nosed towards the remnants of the heavily bombed port area of Naples.

  Seventeen

  ‘Blimey – what a pong!’

  ‘See Naples and die, smell Naples and you will die. Not far wrong!’

  ‘What the hell must it be like in August?’

  Kit-bags slung on shoulders, they all made their way down the plank walkway from the Donata Castle, a long stream of khaki-coloured movement in the warm air of what was now almost midday in Naples. They walked briskly away from the sea to the trucks which were waiting to transport them to their new billets. Everyone was glad to be back on land.

  Around them the stench suggested a city festering like a corpse left for days in the sun. The Allied bombing of the port area, before the Germans had finally given up the city in September, had wrecked the sewers and cut off the mains water supply. The two hundred thousand already impoverished Neapolitans the bombing had left without homes were camping out where they could among the rubble of bricks and unrecovered bodies. It was a city stinking not only of charred wood and sewage, but also of disease, starvation and death.

  It was early enough in the day for the transport to take them straight to Caserta.

  ‘You ought to be driving us,’ Gwen teased Rose as they climbed up into one of the trucks. Rose didn’t reply.

  ‘By the way, who was that feller I saw you with this morning?’ Gwen chatted on in the back of the truck. ‘He looked awfully nice, I thought.’

  For a moment Rose stared blankly at her. ‘Oh – you mean when we were coming in? I never asked his name.’

  ‘You’re hopeless,’ Gwen told her.

  Rose wasn’t in the mood for talking. She had made sure they had been almost the last to get into the truck so as to be near the back. She didn’t want to miss a single opportunity to take in this new place.

  As the trucks rumbled further into the city, Rose saw people in the streets, some shouting and waving, standing in front of the rubble or the dusty husks of houses. Some were hawking a selection of their possessions on the pavements. Dark-eyed, scrawny children, wearing only the filthiest remnants of clothes, ran after them for a few yards yelling things they couldn’t hear. Faces looked pinched and pallid even under the dark skin. In contrast, the Allied servicemen on the streets, who came from many different countries, looked well fed and full of muscular energy.

  There was little traffic. The Neapolitans had been starved of petrol along with everything else, and the trucks passed only some bony mules pulling carts and a couple of very decrepit old cars with patches riveted on to the tyres.

  There was a lot to take in at once, but one detail which didn’t escape anyone’s notice was that across the entrance to each side street off the main road was strung a wire bearing a bold army sign: ‘OFF LIMITS – OUT OF BOUNDS. VD AREA’.

  ‘That inspires no end of confidence, doesn’t it?’ someone said.

  Most of the comments were adverse.

  ‘Of course, they don’t live, in places like this,’ a voice said close to Rose. ‘They merely exist.’

  Rose turned and saw a fair, milky-skinned face, freckled and healthy-looking. She shouted over the noise of the truck, ‘What part are you from then?’

  ‘Me? Oh – Buckinghamshire,’ the young woman shrilled.

  ‘And you know all about being poor, obviously,’ Rose bawled back at her. Even under those conditions the sarcasm communicated itself quite clearly.

  The young woman looked very taken aback. Rose felt Gwen nudge her hard with her elbow. ‘D’you have to be so damn prickly all the time?’ she yelled in Rose’s ear.

  Her touchiness was part of a more complicated emotion. Almost from the moment she had caught sight of the Italian coastline, and with increasing force since they had docked, she had felt drawn to the place. As she looked out at the old, splendid buildings of central Naples and saw at the same time the plight of its people, a powerful sense of kinship came over her. These hungry, downcast Neapolitans seemed, astonishingly, part of her. She didn’t even know yet whether she liked the place. All she could be sure of, instinctively, was that she was meant to be here.

  As they reached the northern edge of the city Rose caught sight of a huge cemetery which overlooked the Bay of Naples, containing some graves the size of small stone houses. Then they were away on the road north to Caserta. They passed small villages with crumbling tile roofs, fields showing a down of tiny green growth surrounded by fig trees and vines which had fingered across and clung on to the trunks.

  It was slow going. There had been rain in recent days and the road suface was covered with a slippery layer of mud. The journey took over an hour and a half, and on the way they saw several Jeeps overturned in the ditches by the side of the road.

  ‘Goodness, someone needs driving lessons!’ Gwen shouted when they’d passed the third Jeep.

  ‘They’re all American ones!’ Rose called back with a grin. Now out of the city, she was exhilarated by the new countryside, which even in winter looked so much lusher than England, with the dark shape of Vesuvius behind them pushing steam clouds into the sky.

  Caserta was a small town of faded red roofs and cream and yellow paint peeling from the fronts of old buildings. Rose took in the wooden shutters on the windows, the tiny wrought-iron balconies, the slim square tower of a church. But the town itself seemed completely dwarfed in size and significance when they caught sight of the palace. There were gasps of astonishment from those who c
ould see out.

  ‘Is that where we’re going to live?’ Rose asked.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Gwen said. ‘That’s the headquarters, I think, where we’ll work. We’re going to our billets now.’

  It was during their first viewing of the inside of the eighteenth-century palace the next day that they were to discover the full extent of its majesty. The vast central block of rooms was the royal apartments. It was possible to walk through those for a long time without finding a room that looked in the least commonplace. Every floor and doorway was a work of art in different colours and textures of Carrara marble; the ceilings soared above, resplendent with gold and rich-coloured oil paintings and intricate designs of paintwork and stucco. Each room was different, and each magnificently designed. At first the sight was impressive and awe-inspiring. But after walking round for any length of time it cloyed and overwhelmed.

  ‘It’s like hogging a whole plate of cream cakes all at once, isn’t it?’ Gwen commented wearily. ‘Rather indecent really.’

  ‘Out the back’s the best bit,’ Rose agreed. ‘Now that is beautiful.’

  From the back entrance to the palace an enormous landscaped garden extended as far as the eye could make out any detail. A narrow road ran straight through it, thinning to a pencil width as it climbed the tree-covered mountain in the far distance.

  The real glory of the garden lay in the fact that from a far point up the mountain water rushed in cascades over the rocks. The water was channelled into a long line of stone tanks, from where it fell splashing into a green pool. Watching over this stood a semicircle of stone statues. As a recreation ground for the huge number of forces people who were to be living in the area it could not have looked better.

  Their billet, a mile from the palace, had previously been a hospital. It was a stark white building, housing groups of sixteen of them in blocks which each extended off a long central corridor. Rose and Gwen made sure they took beds in the same block, along with the young freckled blonde Rose’d had words with in the truck.