Birmingham Rose
NNIE
M
URRAY
Birmingham Rose
PAN BOOKS
PART ONE
BIRMINGHAM
1931–1940
June 1931
‘Look at this Ronald!’
Catherine leaned closer to the window. Water was streaming off the glass outside. It was the height of the storm, the heaviest Birmingham had seen for twenty years.
‘How dreadful – we must do something for her!’
There was silence from the other side of the room. The only noise came from the rain, a constant solid sound as if there were not individual drops but a torrent poured from some great vat in the sky.
Catherine, still holding the spoon she had been using for the tea, tapped it against the window. Ronald, who had been sighing over the latest unemployment figures in
The Times
, finally flung down his newspaper in irritation.
‘
Look
,’ she insisted. ‘That poor little girl.’
Across the street a tiny figure huddled low against the garden wall of a house. Petals of mock orange and yellow roses lay in a sodden covering over the ground. She was squatting sideways, pressed hard against the bricks as if blown there helplessly like a moth by the strength of the wind and beating rain. The arm closest to the wall was stretched out straight as if to stop her from toppling over; her left arm clutched something white close to her body.
‘Poor little mite,’ Catherine said. ‘She can only be about six. Well, she can’t stay out there in this. I’m going to fetch her.’ Without stopping for a coat or hat she ran through the darkened hall and unlocked the front door.
‘Do you think you should?’ Her husband followed her. ‘You could catch a chill. And the wind’s quite dreadful.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous Ronald. What is the matter with you?’
The door she was opening was flung out of her hand as she spoke and she had to push all her weight on it to clip it shut. She ran down the short path, steadying herself against the wind. In seconds her white blouse was soaked and clinging, her pink flesh showing through.
From the sitting-room window Ronald Harper-Watt watched with a mixture of pride and exasperation as his impetuous wife ran down the path. Oh Catherine, he thought. Here I am always sitting thinking about doing things and you just get on and do them.
Out in the road the only sounds were the uneven roar of the wind, the swish of the rain and water gurgling along the cobbled gutters. Catherine saw a chimney pot hurled down from one of the nearby houses.
Heavens, she thought, there’ll be roofs off next.
She expected to find the girl tearful and distressed. Not wanting to spend time comforting her and getting even more drenched, she lifted her up by the waist and twisted her round into her arms.
‘Come on – I’ll look after you little one,’ she said. ‘Let’s go and get into the dry, shall we?’
While she was mainly concentrating on getting back into the house, and taking in as she went the fact that the guttering at one end of the vicarage was wobbling precariously, Catherine was conscious that two dark and quite tearless eyes were watching her face intently. She bent forward, holding the skinny child close to her, and reached the shelter of the front hall gasping. Her light brown hair with blond lights in it had been teased out of its pins by the exhilarating wind and rain and was uncoiling down her back.
Her straight green skirt and the girl’s thin cotton dress and bloomers dripped on to the patterned tiles in the hall. Catherine stood smiling at the little girl who had, it seemed, been blown to their door. The child stood staring back with a penetrating, solemn gaze.
‘Ronald?’ Catherine called out.
To her amazement he was already half-way down the stairs with large white towels. ‘The guttering’s coming down,’ she told him.
Catherine took the girl’s free hand as she was still holding tightly on to the white thing with the other. ‘Come on, let’s get those clothes off you and get you dry. One of my girls is a bit older than you so I’ll find you something you can wear. Now, what’s that you’ve got under your arm?’
The child held out the object which turned out to be an enamel dish. Her brown eyes were taking in everything hungrily from under her sodden black fringe. Her hair seemed to be cropped in a rough pudding-basin shape round her head.
‘What’s your name, my dear?’ Catherine asked her as they climbed the stairs.
‘Rose – ma’am,’ she added. She was looking at the deep red staircarpet in wonder.
‘And where do you live, Rose?’
‘Number five, court eleven, Catherine Street,’ she gabbled out.
‘Catherine? Well, you won’t have any problem remembering my name – it’s the same as your street.’ She called over the banisters to her husband: ‘Catherine Street. That’s a way from here isn’t it?’
‘The only Catherine Street I can think of is about two or three miles away. It’s in the Birch Street area. Not this parish, certainly. Probably St Joseph’s.’ One of the slum parishes, he thought. I wonder why she’s strayed away from home – a runaway perhaps? Again he felt a sense of hopelessness overcome him. Recently it seemed that Catherine had a far greater instinct for dealing with people than he did, he who had once felt this was his gift.
As they crossed the landing upstairs the sound of children’s voices could be heard chanting loudly in one of the bedrooms: ‘Rain, rain, go away, come again another day!’
‘Now Rose, what are you doing this far from home?’ Catherine asked as she knelt rubbing the little body with her towel. The child’s skin, spotted with bug bites, seemed to cover only jutting bones. Rose reminded her of a tiny kitten or a newborn foal, all bony knees and staring eyes.
‘Been to me sister’s,’ Rose said. ‘She’s expecting, so Mom gave me the custard and raspberry leaves to take over. It’s our Marj’s first babby you see.’
‘I see,’ Catherine said doubtfully. ‘So your sister – Marj – does she live here in Moseley?’
‘Oh no! She lives up Sparkbrook with her husband Fred. Mom says the babby’s coming in November. And she says if she takes the raspberry tea it’ll stop her coming on so bad with the pains.’
Catherine smiled at this grown-up knowledge, thinking of the patched, infantile dress lying on the floor beside them.
‘So you’re going to be a little aunt then?’
‘Yes. And Marj wants me to sleep over her place sometimes after the babby’s born. I’m not sure I want to though, ’cos it’ll be blarting half the night and our Marj is bad-tempered enough as it is.’
Struck by the amount of talking this little person suddenly seemed capable of, Catherine asked her how old she was.
‘Nine. Ten next January,’ she replied promptly.
‘You’re nine?’ Catherine managed to prevent herself from speaking the rest of her astonishment – how small you are, you poor child, how undernourished – and just said, ‘Gracious, you’re the same age as my Diana.’
She pulled one of her daughter’s old dresses over Rose’s dark head, wondering whether the child had lice, though she couldn’t see any obvious signs of them. The frock hung limply on her, well down below her knees.
‘Will that do you?’
Rose nodded solemnly.
‘Now, you just stay there a minute and you can meet my children.’
Rose was left standing in the high-ceilinged room. Without moving her feet she looked up and round, twisting her body to see the soft, comfortable-looking bed with its eiderdown well plumped up, the black and white wooden rocking horse in one corner, the shelf full of books on the top of which stood small china ornaments, hedgehogs, squirrels and cats. What caught Rose’s eye particularly in all this splendour was a large black elephant, the top of its head and ears decorated with tiny pieces of mirror glass and beads. She was still staring at it when she heard Catherine say, ‘Rose? This is Diana, and these two are William and Judith.’
A girl with light brown curls bouncing round her cheeks ran into the room and then stopped and stared at her. Outside the door, held back by their mother, Rose had a brief glimpse of an older boy who had the same broad face and grey eyes as his father, and a little girl with dark brown hair down her back who was trying hard to see into the room.
For a moment Diana stood staring at Rose, and Rose gazed back at her, looking at the pretty cotton print dress and white cardigan the girl had on. Then Diana said, ‘You’re not really nine are you? You’re too small.’
‘I am,’ Rose said. ‘And me brother Sam’s ten, and me sister Grace is eight, and me brother—’
‘Goodness, how many brothers and sisters have you got?’ Diana wanted to know.
‘Er . . .’ Rose thought for a moment. ‘There’s Albert and Marj – but they’re off married so they don’t live at me mom’s any more. And then there’s Sam, and me and Grace and George. And me mom’s expecting. So’s me sister Marj.’
‘Gosh,’ Diana said. ‘Well I suppose you can’t help being small. Come on, I’ll show you my room.’
‘Where d’you get that elephant?’ Rose asked, going over to it. She thought it was one of the loveliest things she’d ever seen.
‘Daddy brought it back from India,’ Diana said. ‘Here . . .’ She pulled out some books from the shelves. ‘Come and sit on the bed and I’ll show you these.’ Rose obediently sat down, one hand stroking the soft bed-covers. ‘Now, let’s have a look at these. I’m going to be a teacher when I grow up. What are you going to be?’
‘I dunno.’ Rose had never once thought about it. ‘Where’s India?’
‘It’s . . .’ Diana ran to the bookshelf again and came back holding a tiny globe on a stand, which swivelled around when she touched it. ‘There. And England’s here. Daddy’s a vicar, in case you didn’t know. He worked with a missionary in Madras, before he met Mummy. India’s part of the British Empire.’
Rose wasn’t sure what a missionary was. ‘Do they have elephants like that then?’
‘They have real elephants and tigers and snakes. Daddy brought back lots of things. Here, if you want an elephant, I’ve got a little one.’ She jumped off the bed, opened a couple of drawers, rummaged around and came back with a smaller elephant, about two inches high.
‘I’m afraid some of the bits of glass have got lost. But you can have it – there.’
Rose looked at her, her eyes stretched wide in amazement. ‘Won’t your dad belt you for giving it away? You could pawn that.’
Diana laughed. ‘We don’t go to the pawn shop. That’s only for poor people. Are you very poor?’
This was another thing Rose had not thought about before. Most people in Catherine Street seemed to live like her mom and dad. She knew there were houses where rich people lived because her mom used to go charring for them. Otherwise the only people everyone talked about were the king and queen. Grace was forever on about them.
‘I dunno,’ she said again. ‘Are you very rich?’
‘Not very, I don’t think. But Mummy’s daddy has a lot of money. Daddy gets a bit cross about it sometimes but I don’t know why because it means we can have a lot more things. Anyway, they won’t mind about the elephant. You keep it.’
Catherine called them down for tea a few minutes later and as they went Rose said, ‘What’s your other name? Isn’t your mom called Mrs Something?’
‘It’s Harper-Watt. But just call her Catherine – she’ll laugh otherwise. She’s like that.’
Rose sat in the big front sitting room with the family, drinking tea and eating sponge cake with strawberry jam inside and gazing round her. On either side of the fireplace, where there was a vase of dried flowers standing in the grate because it was summer, were rows and rows of books. They were arranged on shelves reaching almost to the ceiling and they had grey, red and brown spines with faded gold lettering. There were never any books in Rose’s house. Everyone thought reading anything except the
Gazette
or the
Sports Argus
was a bit barmy unless you had to do it. But Rose liked reading at school and her favourite teacher, Miss Whiteley, said she was coming on a treat.