Birmingham Rose

by Annie Murray

  ‘So,’ she said. ‘How did you get this job then?’

  Alfie looked at her with a rather sheepish expression on his pale face. ‘It was just – well, a bloke Eddie knows.’

  Rose rolled her eyes upwards. ‘Might’ve known he must’ve had something to do with it.’

  ‘Look, he’s all right. I keep telling you.’ Alfie forked his last mouthful of potato into his mouth. ‘He’s on the level, honest he is. He just has the contacts, that’s all.’

  ‘Alfie,’ Rose said emphatically, ‘Eddie is as on the level as Dr Crippen. He’s a horrible bloke. Why did you have to pal up with him of all people?’

  Alfie looked across the table at his wife’s thin, tired face. A little frown line was beginning to form between her dark eyebrows. He loved Rose, proudly and loyally, and knew that he always would. But he couldn’t hide from himself the fact that she’d changed, that his affection for her was stronger than hers for him. He could live with that, provided she was there for him. What was harder was this sharpness, the way she was so critical of people. She hadn’t been like that before the war. Tart as an acid drop now.

  ‘If I get this job, money and all, I don’t s’pose you’ll want to moan about that, will you?’ he said, sarcastically.

  Rose looked at him in silence, refusing to be drawn. ‘If you want the job, then you’ll do it. Not up to me, is it?’

  ‘No,’ Alfie agreed. ‘It isn’t.’

  As she was pouring the boiling water into the teapot after their meal, Rose heard a hasty tap on the glass of the back door. She opened it into the dusk, the air still warm.

  Grace was standing on the step, her hand still raised to knock. ‘There’s trouble,’ she said grimly. ‘It’s George. He’s been arrested.’

  Rose gasped. ‘What the hell for?’

  ‘There was a big job last week. One of the warehouses over Bordesley way. They had parts in there for one of the bigger firms. I don’t know if it was the Austin or what. But it was done over. They shifted a whole load of stuff and one of the blokes had a gun on him. George was in on it.’

  ‘No!’ Rose protested. ‘He wouldn’t. Even George wouldn’t go that far, surely.’

  ‘Oh wake up, Rose,’ Grace snapped. ‘George is as crooked as a bent half-crown – has been for years. I always hoped the army’d straighten him out, but he’s come back even worse. Since he’s been with that spiv Ronnie Grables he’s turned professional. He’ll have been in on it, no two ways.’

  Rose banged the teapot down hard on the wooden surface. ‘Silly little sod,’ she said. ‘What the bloody hell’s the matter with him?’

  As they carried the tea through she said to Alfie, ‘I suppose you heard all that?’

  ‘All right, Gracie? Yes, I heard. It don’t surprise me. He’s been heading that way for a long time I reckon.’

  ‘Did they come round to the house to pick him up?’ Rose asked as they all sat in front of their cups.

  Grace shook her head. ‘No, thank God. They found him with Ronnie somewhere.’ She was silent for a moment. ‘Anyway, it’ll be the magistrates next week, and then we’ll see, won’t we?’

  Rose sighed. ‘He was such a nice little kid.’

  Grace shrugged. ‘Weren’t we all?’

  The war had changed Grace in a number of ways. Though still only twenty-four, the skin stretched over her bony face looked aged, with the kind of lifeless greyness Rose had noticed in most of the people who had stayed in the city during the war. The sweetness which had marked her out in her teens had turned sour. Perhaps we’ll just be bitter now, Rose thought, for the rest of our lives, over what we’ve lost. And as for George, his own bitterness, his damage, had begun even earlier in the war.

  Alfie pushed back his chair. ‘I’ll just go and have a walk in the garden before the light’s all gone.’

  Rose smiled gratefully at him, knowing he was leaving them alone for a talk.

  The two sisters sat on despondently at the table.

  ‘If he goes to prison,’ Rose said, ‘we’ll have lost him, sort of, won’t we?’

  Grace looked dispassionately at her. ‘We lost him years ago.’

  ‘But he’s our brother. We can’t just turn away from him for all he’s done. We’ve got to stand by him.’

  ‘No,’ Grace said. ‘He ain’t our brother. Say what you like, but it’s his choosing. We’ve all done our best. I stood by him for years while you were off in the army and I’ve had enough of it. He’s made his choice in life and he can go to hell his own way.’

  Rose was startled. Was this Grace, idealistic, sweet Grace? ‘Well what choices are you going to make then?’ she challenged her.

  ‘I’m going to train to be a nurse if they’ll have me. A proper one. If I’m going to have to work for the rest of my life then I might as well do a job worth doing.’

  ‘Does that mean you’ll be living in, at the hospital?’

  ‘How else am I going to get out? Dad can take care of himself when he needs to. You got out – everyone else has, one way or another. Why shouldn’t I?’

  ‘No—’ Rose held her hands up as if to protect herself from this onslaught of resentment. ‘You’ve got me wrong. I’m not getting at you. I think you’re right. I’ve always felt bad that you’ve been the one left taking all the flak. I think it’s just the right thing for you. In fact I . . .’ Suddenly all the frustration of her own life bubbled up. ‘I wish I could get a job. I wish I could get out and do anything except being stuck here all day long. Hilda just screams and I can’t get anything else done. And Alfie—’ She bit back the words. She could not let the truth out, even if they both knew it. Alfie bores me. I have no feelings for him. I should never have married someone so dull and calm, so kind, so limited . . .

  Grace watched her sister with anger and disgust written plain on her face, as if she had sucked all the angry, guilty thoughts out of Rose’s mind.

  ‘You’re a silly cow, d’you know that? Never satisfied, are you? Always have to be off wanting something else than what you’ve got. D’you know what I’d give to have a kind husband and a home of my own and a babby daughter? You can’t see yourself for looking, Rose, and if you don’t pull yourself together and act a bit more like a proper wife you’re going to lose what you have got!’

  Thirty

  Grace had not heard that Joe was dead until weeks after the war ended. A letter arrived one morning on thin, crackly blue air-mail paper from a neighbour in Peoria, Illinois, who had been drafted at the same time as Joe. Only then, once he was back in mid-western America late in the summer of 1945, had he thought to write. Grace’s hopes of a reunion with the only man she had ever given her heart to were cut to nothing.

  It had happened only shortly before Rose arrived home to find what was left of her family still in Catherine Street, shrunken by loss and grief. She felt that she added nothing to it except her own restlessness, her own loss and mourning.

  Since she had been one of the first group, with Gwen, to be posted at Caserta, she was also among the first batch to be sent home. Those final three months, before they began their journey across Europe, should have been the sweetest in Italy. The atmosphere had become more relaxed, and there was more opportunity for ‘jangling off’ on excursions all round the area. For Rose and many others there was a poignant sense of making the most of the warmth and the languorous beauty of the country before the goodbyes began and they all had to head back into new, possibly more difficult lives.

  When Rose went for the last time to Il Rifugio, steeling herself to say goodbye to Margherita and Francesco, she found the place depleted. Apart from the one great absence in the house which made it so painful to her, Henry was gone too. He had hot-footed it out of Naples as soon as the war was over.

  ‘I’m sorry our home has come to be such a sad place for you,’ Margherita told her. ‘Please don’t forget us. You have been a very good friend – to me especially.’

  On the very few occasions that she had seen them since May, Rose co
uld never hold herself back from asking, ‘Have you heard from him? Have you seen him?’

  ‘Not a word,’ Francesco told her each time. ‘Truly. If we had I would tell you straight away. You must understand. They have to adjust to a new way, their lives are so disciplined . . .’

  She had still been unable to believe it completely; to accept that he would not change his mind as he had done so often before; that he could transfer such feelings of passion into a way of life that she could not begin to understand. Some time before she left, she still hoped he would come back to her.

  ‘I wish I could be angry with Falcone,’ she said to Margherita.

  ‘It’s true he treated you badly,’ her friend said. ‘Though he did not mean harm, I’m sure.’ Margherita always tried to be fair on the motives of others. ‘But no one could blame you for being angry.’

  ‘I’m not, though,’ Rose said flatly. ‘I just feel . . .’ She searched round for the right word and settled for the simplest: ‘Triste.’ Sad. A deep, deep sadness which never seemed to leave her, which Gwen and the others attributed to her ‘failed’ relationship with Tony.

  ‘What will you do, Margherita?’ Rose asked. ‘Will you stay here?’

  ‘Of course.’ Margherita looked as calm and steady as ever. ‘And perhaps now the war is over we can persuade the Church to give us some proper backing. After all, there is no British army for us to live off now.’

  ‘Well, God help you,’ Rose said, without irony.

  The two women stood with their arms round each other for a long time before Rose left. Magdalena and Assunta and Francesco all came and embraced her, Assunta with tears running down her kindly, cock-eyed face. When Rose handed back her key and heard the wooden door slam behind her for the last time, she held in her hands a beautiful, poignant present from Francesco: the copy of his favourite French song that they had listened to so often, ‘J’attendrai – le jour et la nuit j’attendrai toujours – I will wait . . .’

  The journey to England took them several days on trains with hard, slatted wooden seats. Rose and Gwen travelled together, exclaiming when at last they saw the Channel and the white cliffs of Dover, which they seemed to have left a whole lifetime ago, and at how lush and neat and altogether more cosy the English landscape looked than anything they had seen during their years away.

  ‘I say – it all looks bigger, doesn’t it?’ Gwen exclaimed as they gazed out at the Kentish orchards, and the elder and hawthorn along the railway tracks. ‘I suppose we did leave in the middle of winter, but even so, everything seems to have shot up.’

  Rose nodded silently. She felt disorientated and strange, as if returning to another foreign country, not her own. The feeling took quite some time to wear off.

  Once she and Gwen had been to the army clearing house and were released from the ATS, they said their farewells in central London before catching trains for their different parts of the country.

  ‘You’d better write!’ Gwen said.

  Rose nodded. ‘Of course.’ She had already made Tony the same promise.

  On her journey out of Euston in a hot, smoke-filled railway carriage bound for the Midlands, she pulled from her bag the letter each of them had been given from the Senior Controller of the ATS.

  ‘As you say goodbye to service life,’ it began, ‘I am writing to thank you in the name of the Auxiliary Territorial Service for the loyal and devoted service you have given to your King and Country.’

  Rose looked up for a moment, glancing at the drab outskirts of north London which were beginning to give way to countryside. The man in the seat next to her glanced curiously at her letter.

  ‘You will be called upon,’ she read, ‘to make further efforts in the service of your country, and I know that you will make them with the same generosity which has always marked the work of the ATS. Goodbye and the best of luck.’

  The train was crowded and a number of those on board were men and women obviously as freshly demobbed as she was. But even amid the hum of conversation and jokes and scraping of matches to light cigarettes, she felt a kind of solitude descend upon her. The letter made the army seem official and impersonal again. There was a sense of it all falling away from her, the experiences of the past four years beginning to recede, dream-like. Now she needed to reshape herself, though how, as yet, she didn’t know. She thought of Gwen heading towards her mother’s home to wait until Bill was released. What would her reception be? And her own? How would it feel to walk into Court 11, Catherine Street, again?

  Birmingham came as a shock to her. Although she had been there during the worst of the bombing, the city had somehow reformed itself in her mind while she was away. She had tended to remember it still complete, with the Market Hall standing and the rows of terraced houses undamaged. But now she saw afresh the jagged gaps which the war had left in the city: the bombsites between the houses, a few levelled off, but many still with rubble in place. Young lads took them over as playgrounds, still plundering shrapnel, and thistles and purple fireweed pushed up between the timbers and bricks.

  As she stepped in her solid service shoes across the dirty blue bricks of Court 11, she was struck for the first time by just how small were the houses in which thousands like her had spent their years growing up. She put her hand up automatically to knock at the door, forgetting for a moment that this was where she now belonged. This was life now and she had nothing else. She was home.

  Only Sid was in. He was sitting at the old table, a paper open in front of him. He looked up as she opened the door, seeing for a moment a beautiful, neatly dressed stranger in khaki, her hair still arranged carefully under the ATS cap as if she was afraid to take it off.

  He looked blankly at her for a moment.

  ‘Rose?’

  He pulled himself up, then waited at a loss as she closed the door and came in to stand the other side of the table, putting her bag down on its newspaper surface.

  ‘All right are you?’ he said eventually.

  Rose could tell he was finding it difficult to think of anything to say, and she was faced with the same problem. She felt tears slide into her eyes. Nothing had changed, although everything had. Sid’s face looked thinner, haggard and unshaven.

  ‘You still at the BSA, Dad?’ she asked finally, looking for a point of contact.

  He shook his head, and she saw how many grey hairs there were among the black. He was fifty-four and he looked an old man.

  ‘They let me go,’ he said. ‘Back to making bikes now the war’s over.’

  ‘Oh. I’m sorry,’ she said.

  Sid shrugged and then frowned, his pallid skin wrinkling as if he was trying to remember something. ‘Where’ve you come from then?’

  ‘Italy. Near Naples.’

  Sid nodded slowly, bemused. ‘Have a good journey then, did you?’

  Rose knew at that moment that it would be quite pointless trying to talk to anyone at home about her years out of England. It was too far away, too removed from their own experience.

  She nodded. ‘Got cheap tickets on the train – cut rate if you’ve just been demobbed.’

  She looked around. So far as she could remember, the room was exactly the same as when she had left, almost eerily so.

  ‘Where’s Grace?’ she asked.

  ‘Up Willett’s. She’s got a job. On the bedsteads like.’

  After a moment he said, ‘Fancy making us a cuppa tea?’

  And that was that. His sole interest in her war.

  The distance was there with Grace too, though the two of them embraced and laughed and looked at each other with tearful eyes when she came in from work. Rose was shocked by Grace’s thin, careworn appearance. She felt there ought to be years’ worth of things to say, that they should be making up for lost time, yet no one could think what to say.

  ‘How are the twins?’ Rose asked eagerly when the two of them were peeling and cutting up vegetables together late that afternoon. ‘Have you seen them?’

  ‘Oh, they’re ful
l of the joys,’ Grace said. ‘And Harry. All at school near Edna’s. To tell you the truth, she can’t bear the thought of parting with them. I asked her if she wanted to send them back here now it’s all over. But as she says, they’ve been there nearly all their lives.’

  ‘I’ll have to go over,’ Rose said. More people, she felt, who would be lost to her.

  As the days and weeks passed after her homecoming, Rose fast began to resent the narrowness of the life she had been thrown back into, and her own lack of independence. How restless she felt! How could she ever settle down to this drab existence of rationing and dreariness after her time in Italy?

  It was ‘Where’ve you been? Make sure you’re in by ten. Who’ve you been with?’ From Sid, from Grace. Not that she went out much anyway. But Grace had got into the habit of questioning her as if she was her mother. She had completely taken over the role of woman of the house.

  Everything seemed shrunken and oppressive. Even the clothes Rose had left behind when she joined up no longer fitted her new, rounder figure. Number five was like a doll’s house, while Rose felt like a giant who had been out striding across the world. Why couldn’t they realize that after these four years she was now an adult who could run her life without being questioned all the time?

  Once more, when there were important considerations like the family’s mourning for Sam and Grace’s personal grief over Joe, Rose found herself cast in the role of the restless, selfish one, always looking over the wall for fresher, greener grass.

  After a month at home she found herself a job as a delivery driver for Snell’s grocery store in Balsall Heath. Of course it had none of the excitement of her Italian driving, but at least it got her out and about and brought another wage into the house.

  She would never forget her sister’s face that day. Usually when Rose reached the house after Grace she found her sister’s skinny form bustling round, tidying, handwashing, the evening meal already in hand.

  Opening the door, Rose thought for a few seconds that there was no one in. She put down the few groceries she had bought on the way home – Typhoo and milk and Rinso. A ray of late afternoon autumn sunshine had managed to reach its way through the normally dark court windows and lay in a bright slanting shape on the tabletop. Rose was already adjusting her mind to doing the evening meal herself when she saw her sister sitting there, to her right, the horsehair chair swivelled towards the window which looked over the court.