Family of Women (9 page)

‘No – he can’t have! You’re lying to me!’ she screamed. She leapt up and ran downstairs to find him for herself.

Mrs Barker was down there and she turned. It was too late to hide the tiny form, lying on the table, wrapped in a piece of sheet.

‘I’m sorry.’ Mrs Barker shook her head. ‘You poor young thing.’

They named him Bobby.

He was buried from Bessie’s house, carried on the hearse of an old man who had died in Summer Lane.

Violet walked behind with Harry, and her mom and sisters and Charlie and Gladys. The day was grey and cold as stone, and Violet felt as if her heart was being torn out as she saw the hearse and the black horses with their plumes begin to move off along the row of mean, soot-grimed houses towards Witton Cemetery, carrying her little boy in the tiny white coffin.

They had had to cajole her out of the house that morning. She’d been staying over at Mom’s, just for that one night. She didn’t want to be with Harry – she wanted her sisters, her childhood. Harry had gone to his mother too.

Violet barely slept, lying in the old three-quarter-size bed beside Rosina. Charlie had left home, and Clarence had been very poorly over the winter with his chest and had taken to sleeping downstairs by the range. So Marigold slept in the attic and Rosina had made the room her own, with her postcards of her screen heroines, Lillian Gish and Jessie Matthews in their finery stuck to the wall above her head.

‘I want my picture taken like that,’ she said to Violet when they went up. ‘With fur collars and feather boas and lace and silk . . .’ She hugged herself at the thought.

‘I’ve missed you, Rosy,’ Violet said, miserably. ‘You hardly ever come round and see me.’

‘Well, you’re married, aren’t you?’ She sat down with a bounce on the bed. ‘What d’you want me for?’

It’s lonely being married
, she wanted to say, but didn’t want to admit it.

‘You could still come. Harry’s not there all the time.’

‘I meant to – only . . .’ Rosina rolled her eyes. ‘I’ve been busy.’

Violet smiled. Rosina seemed older than her years. She was a proper handful, bad-tempered and lippy, and although Violet sometimes admired her for it, she’d felt she didn’t know her any more, or even like her, sometimes. But as they’d got into bed last night in the candlelight, Rosina stood between the two beds, her beautiful long hair loose over her shoulders, and said timidly, ‘Shall I get in with you, Vi? Like we used to?’

Violet nodded, eyes filling with tears. She shifted over as Rosina blew out the candle and her slim, curving body snuggled up close to Violet. It was a comfort.

‘I don’t know what to say to you,’ Rosina said, and Violet could hear that she was close to tears. ‘I don’t know what it’s like. But it’s so sad.’

‘I want him.’ Violet let go then and wept, wretchedly. ‘My little boy! I just want to hold him . . .’

‘Oh, Vi!’ Rosina was sobbing too, and Violet remembered then how sweet she could be. Knowing her sister felt some of the pain with her was a comfort. And as she grew calmer, another thought came which had been returning to her all week as she had lain at home, aching with grief. It was the memory of that evening when Marigold found out that her mother had taken her baby and given it to the orphanage. At the time, and since, she had blocked out Marigold’s great, unearthly howl of anguish. She had not understood, not then. But now she could hear it in her head. And she could feel it for herself.

‘Let go of me a tick – I need to get up,’ she said to Rosina.

‘You gunna be sick?’

‘No . . . I want to see Mari.’

She lit the candle and padded up the attic stairs to Charlie’s old room. It had not changed much, still plain white and bare except for the bed and a chair. She could see Marigold’s lumpen shape curled on her side in bed. Marigold hadn’t said anything to her about little Bobby. She’d just silently got on with all the household tasks that were forever expected of her while everyone fussed round Violet, even Bessie, who had shown real grief over the loss of her grandson. Bessie had just taken over, and made a great to-do to the neighbours about poor Vi and all she was having to do for her.

Violet looked down at her sister, lying there with her eyes closed. No one had made any fuss about her baby going.

‘Mari?’ she whispered.

Marigold heaved herself resentfully on to her back and opened her eyes. Her face looked like a white, square box, framed with black hair.

Violet perched on the edge of the bed, which dipped severely in the middle. Marigold stared blankly back at her with her flinty eyes, as if she was still asleep, but with her eyes open. Tears ran down Violet’s face again.

‘I never said anything – at the time – about your little babby. It was terrible for you . . . I didn’t know – not till now . . .’ She trailed off.

Marigold’s eyes narrowed for a second, into what seemed such a vicious expression that Violet’s tears stopped. She was chilled. But then Marigold opened her eyes again and Violet wondered if it had been the uncertain light, that she’d imagined it.

‘S’all right,’ Marigold said stolidly, then added matter-of-factly, ‘Your babby died.’

‘Yes.’ The tears soon came again. ‘He was so tiny . . .’

‘Poor babby.’ The words held no expression. There was a long silence. Violet wasn’
t sure what she had expected. When had it ever been easy to communicate with Marigold? She had wanted to say she understood about the baby, but hadn’t she also wanted something back?

Marigold turned over again. ‘I’m tired.’

‘All right.’ Violet got up and the bedsprings creaked slightly. ‘Night, Mari.’

There was no reply.

After Bobby, Violet had two miscarriages, the second very shortly after she knew she was expecting. It broke something in her for a time.

‘I’ll never be able to have a babby. There’s something the matter with me!’ she sobbed to Bessie, to whom she went for comfort while the griping pains still signalled the quenching of that little flame of hope that had been lit with her third pregnancy. When her body let her down again, expelling vivid red clots, it mocked her hopes so cruelly. And it was made worse by the fact that Gladys and Charlie had finally had a little boy, Norman, last year, and Josephine had married her sweetheart Percy and had a daughter with a beautiful mop of curly black hair, called Lizzie. Violet felt left behind as a wretched failure, a nobody.

She became nervy and couldn’t seem to make the simplest decisions, and in her anger and sense of failure she took it out on Harry. All the things which she had put up with before, even smiled at – the way he was unpredictable and she couldn’t rely on him being there, his wild, sparky energy, his refusal to be tied down – all seemed aggravating and hurtful. Now it all just felt as if he didn’t care about her. He was either out with his mates or at his wretched mother’s house.

‘I don’t know why you bothered g sw bonbsp;

‘Well, I’m here now, aren’t I?’ Often he’d come up and squeeze her round the waist, trying to win her round with teasing and kisses.

But these days she’d lost her sense of humour.

‘Oh, get off – you needn’t think you can get round me like that. Why don’t you try coming home on time for once?’

She became a thin ghost of herself. All she could think of doing was to run home to her mom, like a child, lost in herself. She started smoking. It soothed her.

And the house was in a terrible state. The roof leaked badly over the little back bedroom and the cellar flooded, so when they went to feed the gas meter they sometimes had to wade thigh deep through sooty water. All that paint which Harry had applied so eagerly to the walls was soon discoloured and began flaking off, and the place stank of damp and mice. Violet was forever battling with infestations of bugs, but the mice were the worst. There was a constant need to place mousetraps in the scullery, and all the food like flour and sugar had to be kept in tins.

‘Oh, why can’t we move somewhere else, instead of festering in this bloody dump?’ she would moan to Harry as she had to clean out the scullery yet again to get rid of the mouse droppings.

‘We’re all right,’ he kept saying. ‘Only a year or two now, and we’ll be off . . . No point in paying more rent than we have to.’

He always seemed able to keep his spirits up, full of money-making schemes to boost their savings. His pal Goosey’s dad drove a truck, and on a trip up to Stoke-on-Trent got hold of a whole load of damaged crocks. Harry and Goosey bought the job lot off him and set up with a barrow until they’d got shot of them at knock-down prices. They barely made any profit but it seemed to keep Harry happy. Christmas of 1935 Violet remembered as the ‘snake’ year. Harry learned from another pal how to make colourful snakes and dragons to sell as little toys. They were made out of strips of painted paper, cleverly folded back and forth again and again and attached to an empty cotton reel. When you released them and unfolded them they ran undulating along the ground, propelled by the cotton reel. For weeks the table downstairs was covered in newspaper and cheap glue and paint and Harry was begging cotton reels off the women at Vicars.

‘What you up to, Harry?’ they asked.

‘Going to Australia!’ he told them, chirpily. They humoured him.

‘Oh yes, and I’m flying to the moon, darlin’!’

‘You building your own aeroplane?’

Violet wondered if Harry really believed they would go. Sometimes she thought he just needed a dream to hold on to. As for her own dreams, she had none except one. A child of her own.

And then she found she was expecting again. All through the pregnancy she was frightened, on the alert for it all to hey paintrigakes ango wrong. She could hardly bear to hope for better, in case the next day she started bleeding. And even if she got as far as giving birth to the baby, it might be like Bobby all over again and she would be burying it within a week. Harry did his best to be soothing.

‘It’s all right,’ he’d murmur into her neck as she cried with worry. ‘Don’t worry, Vi.’ And he held her so gently and kindly that she could forgive all the times they quarrelled. But most of the time she was locked into her own cold self and she knew she was gradually driving him away. After all, she knew she wasn’t much of a wife to come home to. If only they could have a baby, things would be better, she just knew it. It would make everything all right.

‘Look at her – she’s a right bonny little thing!’

‘Is she all right? Tell me she’s all right!’

Violet gasped out her anxiety, now the final pangs of childbirth were over at last. Her gaze seemed to bore into the midwife, and Bessie, who had been present all through the birth.

‘As healthy a babby as I’ve seen come into the world,’ Mrs Barker said soothingly, tying the umbilical cord so she could cut it. ‘Don’t you fret, dear. You’ve had a bad time, I know, but she’s your reward. A beautiful daughter for you – look!’

‘She’s a little peach,’ Bessie said.

It was one of those rare times when gentler emotion broke through Bessie’s usual bullying tones. She held up the baby, swathed in a piece of towelling, and through the blur of her own tears Violet saw a squashed, startled face, mouth beginning to open and roar. She was delicate-looking, and pale. Violet had an immediate sense of kinship with her.
She’s like me
, she thought, startled.
I know her
. This, and the realization that at last she had managed to deliver a robust child, made her sob with relief and happiness.

‘Let me hold her!’

‘Let Mrs B. finish you off first,’ Bessie said, cradling the baby in her arms. She put her face close to the little one’s, crooning to it. Even though Mom was being nice, Violet found herself brimming with rage at the sight of Bessie’s huge, bulldog frame wrapping itself round
her
baby. All those babies Mom had held – four of her own and all those orphaned brats – and now she wanted to take hers as well! She couldn’t stand seeing her looking into her baby’s face like that as if she was the mother, taking over everything!

‘Give her to me now – or I’ll never let you hold her again – she’s
mine
!’ Violet was shrieking, tears rolling down her cheeks. She was still tightly clasping the end of the towel, hooked over the bedstead, which she’d gripped to help get through the pains.

‘There’s no call to carry on like that,’ Mrs Barker said. ‘Your mother’s only helping.’

‘You don’t know what she’s like!’ Violet hardly knew what she was saying. She just felt powerless, at their mercy. ‘I want my babby!’

‘Here she is,’ Bessie said. ‘Pull yourself together, girl – no call for all that.’

She deposited the little girl in Violet’s arms. Violet grew calmer and gazed at her. She had such a sweet, fine face, and when she unwrapped her from the towel, her body looked in good proportion.

‘Let her feed from yer tit,’ Bessie suggested, leaning over and pulling Violet’s old shift away to reveal her breast, her huge frame blocking out almost all the light from the window. She went as if to latch the baby on.

‘I can do it,’ Violet snapped, pulling away.

‘Suit yourself.’ Bessie drew back, hands on her hips.

Unlike the last time, when Bobby had not had the strength even to begin feeding, the little girl latched on and began to suck.

‘There you go,’ Bessie said, sinking on to the chair.

The baby’s suckling seemed to reach right through Violet. Her innards contracted so strongly that she gasped.

‘It doesn’t half hurt!’

‘You’ll soon get used to it,’ Mrs Barker said calmly, wringing out a rag over the white pudding basin. Bloody water ran from it over her workworn fingers.

‘I want Harry to see her.’

‘Bull’s gone off at Mount’s,’ Bessie said. The ‘bulls’ or factory sirens had gone off one after another to signal the end of a shift. ‘He’ll be in soon. Time we all had a cuppa tea – more than time.’

‘Joyce,’ Violet whispered to the child as she suckled. ‘My little babby. I’m going to call you Joyce.’

By the time Harry walked in, Mrs Barker had been paid and departed, and Violet was sitting up in bed with tea and biscuits on the chair beside her. She had Joyce cradled on one arm, would hardly let go of her for a second. Although the baby had had a good feed for one so young, Violet kept looking anxiously down at her, checking to make sure she was still breathing.