Family of Women (13 page)

He sounded apprehensive, as if only now was it sinking in what he had done.

She turned to him, wiping her face. The girls were watching in silence and she didn’t want to upset them.

‘Oh God, Harry – why d’you have to go? I need you here – I can’t do all this on my own. How’m I ever going to manage?’

‘You’ll manage.’ He kissed the top of her head. ‘You’re my missis – and you’re much stronger than you think.’

He left a few days later, for basic training. The night before he went, they lay together in their room with the leaking roof. It was raining and the drops fell with a metallic ‘plink’ into the pail underneath.

They made love with a tenderness that had been missing for a long time. She lay resting on his strong, stocky body afterwards, her cheek resting on the V of black, wiry hair on his chest. He curved his arm round her and laid his hand on her head.

‘Wait for me, won’t you?’ he said quietly, and she could hear that he was frightened, although he wanted to go. Frightened of what was facing him, and that everything would have changed by the time he came back. ‘I’ll be able to think of you – in this house, the girls and everything.’

She reached up and kissed his cheek, her tears coming again. If only it was always like this – this closeness between them. For the first time in such a long time she could feel she loved him, and had a glimpse of a kind of heaven that she had always longed for. Why did it have to be snatched away now?

‘I don’t want you to go!’

‘I’m no good to you.’

She raised her head. ‘What d’you mean? Course you are!’

‘Nah. Look at my old man. I’ll be no better, in the long run.’

Whatever she said, that he wasn’t like that, it seemed to make no difference and when he spoke like tin herhat his eyes were very sad.

He left very early the next day, when the girls were still in bed. Before he opened the door he took her in his arms once again and looked down at her.

‘I just have to go. Don’t really know why. But I love you. I do.’

Violet stood at the door in the dawn light, with her coat over her nightdress, and watched him walk away, past the run-down houses of the streets he had so long wanted to escape.

I’m all on my own
was all Violet could think, for days. She felt desolate and frightened. What on earth am I going to do?

Out of habit, she did what she had always done. She turned to Bessie. There was no Josephine, no husband. Bessie was already looking after the girls, as well as Gladys and Charlie’s two boys. It felt easier to go back to being Bessie’s girl than try to do anything else for herself.

Every morning she was up early, pulling back the blackout curtains in the hope of some light to get ready by, though winter was coming fast now. She got Joyce ready for school and took both of them along Summer Lane to her mom’s. Bessie made sure Joyce got to school all right and had Linda for the day. It gave Violet a soft feeling inside, seeing them playing in the yard with Colin and Norman, where she’d played out not so long ago herself. Somehow it made her feel safe, as if amid all the destruction there was something that wouldn’t ever change.

‘Give me your ration-book,’ Bessie said, soon a
fter Harry left. ‘No point in us both making tea, is there? Waste of gas. We’ll all have it together.’

Violet hesitated for a moment. Wasn’t this just what she had wanted to escape from? From Bessie being in charge of everything? But it was so much easier, and nice not to go home to an empty house and know no one else was going to walk in through the door that night. Charlie and Gladys took the boys every night and went home for their tea, but Violet stayed and ate with Bessie and Clarence and Marigold and the girls. Even Clarence was working more now, in munitions, and was full of importance about it.

So Violet did as Bessie told her. The more she stayed away from home, the more she could forget how alone she was.

In December they all went to the flicks together and saw the Pathé news about how the Japanese had bombed America at Pearl Harbor. It had been all everyone talked about at Vicars for the past days.

‘If we’ve got to fight the bleeding Japs an’ all, there’ll be no end to it,’ Clarence said. He was full of opinions these days.

However, in the Wiles family even the news of the attack on Pearl Harbor faded into insignificance compared with the news received a few days later. Violet had just come in, after trudging along the dark street from work.

‘Look at this –’ Bessie, tight-lipped, went to the mantelpiece and fetched out an envelope.

Violet stared at the looping handwriting. There was something familiar about it. Bessie watched with her arms folded. As Violet turned the envelope round, something fell out. She gasped at the photograph which lay on the table. There, after a silence of almost five years: Rosina.

‘Is that Rosy?’ she cried excitedly. ‘Oh, my goodness, look at her! She looks like Jessie Matthews!’

Joyce and Linda ran up, attracted by the excitement, and they all pored over the picture. Rosina was dressed in a white hat with a black feather in the band, the brim upturned at the front, and a white dress bordered with black at the neck. Lacy white gloves reached almost to her elbows. Her dark hair was bobbed level with her chin and her eyebrows had been plucked to thin, elegant lines. She looked at once provocative and sweet.

‘Who’s that?’ Joyce demanded.

‘That’s your auntie Rosina,’ Violet said, staring at the picture, still hardly believing it. ‘It is her, isn’t it? I mean you can see it is, only I can hardly believe . . . Oh, my word, look at her!’ She felt a sudden surge of longing for her little sister. Marigold also stood beside them, quietly looking.

‘It’s her, all right,’ Bessie said. Her voice was full of bitterness. Rosina had long escaped her control. Yet look at her! Violet thought. There she was, so beautiful and obviously making a go of it.

Joyce was pulling a letter from the envelope.

‘Read it, Nana – read it to us!’

For a moment Violet saw a hunted expression cross her mother’s bullish features.

‘I ain’t reading it!’ The aggression was back.

‘Can’t you read, Nana?’ Joyce laughed.

There was a terrible silence.

‘Get your mother to read it. I can’t be bothered with it.’ And Bessie turned her back and busied herself by the range as if she couldn’t care less.

‘Give it here, Joycie. Ooh – ’ Violet raised the blue paper to her nose. ‘This paper smells nice!’

‘Perfume.’ Bessie tutted. ‘Just like that one to drench her paper in perfume.’

There was only part of an address at the top. It just said, ‘Clapham, London.’

‘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 Marigolddre

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 wiret="ck in awiret="ckless 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. &lsquoghtaper t asquoghtap;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.

‘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.