The Women of Lilac Street

by Annie Murray

  She hugged her arms round her thin body and sobs shook her. Soon the pillow was wet with tears. For the first time in her young life she knew, really knew, what it was to be a woman. He wasn’t having to suffer any of this. He had gone off without a care. His life would go on just the same. None of what happened with Jack Draper had been quite what she told Mom. The way she had flirted with him, sneaking out to meet him while he wooed her with his charm. Oh, she’d enjoyed her power as a woman then, all right, had been drunk on it. Until that night. She hadn’t lied to Mom, not exactly. Jack had turned into someone else, someone terrifying and cruel who came at her out of the darkness, dragging her down near the railway, forcing and hurting her. Even after she’d staggered home in her torn clothes, she hadn’t stopped shaking for hours. She’d asked for it, he said. ‘You want it – you’ve made me do it,’ he kept saying and it hurt so much, this thing she had imagined was being in love.

  She hadn’t known that was how babies were started. At first she thought something she’d eaten had disagreed with her. And now the idea of the baby was terrifying, yet she still didn’t know what was to happen. Something involving muffled screams behind doors, blood, pain. None of it seemed real. It was something much older ladies did, nothing to do with her . . .

  She saw her life stretching ahead of her, chained to this screaming brat, her young life snatched from her. There’d be no fun, no anything. She’d never be able to get married now or have a normal life.

  ‘It’s all your fault, Jack Draper,’ she raged. ‘No one’ll want me,’ she sobbed. ‘Why can’t I get rid of it – this thing? I just want everything back how it was before!’

  Seeing her mother’s fearsome face in her mind, Dolly curled up even tighter, pulling the covers almost over her head. Mom was adamant – she had to have the baby, there was to be no arguing. She boiled with rage and resentment. I hate her, she mouthed. Hate her, hate her . . . Her face contorted at the thought of those terrible smelling salts, like daggers up her nose. That was Mom – you never knew with her. One minute she was harsh and cruel, the next, soft, sentimental, comforting. Dolly knew Phyllis would always fight for all of them and what they needed, like a tiger. And though she raged against it, the hardest thing for Dolly to admit was that she couldn’t manage now without her mother – or her sisters. She was back here whether she liked it or not.

  ‘I don’t want to be a woman!’ she cried to herself wretchedly. ‘I don’t want any of it! Just let it all stop!’

  Six

  Sunday. Lie-in morning. Downstairs, Dad was coughing again.

  Aggie could hear the rain being blown in rattling gusts against the attic window. A dripping sound had started in the corner near the window as well. Aggie thought all the others were asleep, but then there came movements from behind the curtain followed by the sound of a jet of another kind of liquid streaming into the bucket. She rolled her eyes in the darkness, trying to guess which of her brothers it was. Silas, by the clumsy sound of things. At least now he was six he didn’t kick the bucket over all the time. A whiff of it reached her. Soon it went quiet again.

  All the Green children slept in the attic, the girls in a three-quarter-sized bed at the window end, the boys on a straw-stuffed mattress at the other with a curtain between. Until recently Aggie and Ann, who was now eight, had luxuriated, just two of them in the bed, until Mom decided it was high time May stopped sleeping down with them and she had arrived in the attic as well.

  At this moment, May’s warm head was nuzzled into Aggie’s left armpit and Ann, a funny, twitchy little thing, was arranged in her usual fashion on her front with her knees bent under her and her bottom sticking up. Which was all very well but she thumped about and let a lot of cold air under the bedclothes and Aggie had to cling to them to keep them over her.

  Lily Southgate didn’t have anyone else crashing about in her bed, Aggie thought. Lily had a neat little bed with white sheets and a pink counterpane that Rose had made, not the ragbag of bits of blanket and coats that had somehow to be patchworked into one piece to cover them all. And she had such nice brown leather shoes and pretty clothes. Aggie felt no rancour towards Lily, although she envied her. She was a sweet child and looked up to Aggie as a ‘big girl’.

  Behind the dark blue curtain were the two boys: John, ten and still small for his age, and Silas.

  There were two kinds of child in the Green family: ‘gingers’ and ‘brownies’ as they called them, each taking unambiguously after one or other parent. As a family they looked like two contrasting packs of cards shuffled together. The gingers – ‘like Mom’ – had all come in a run – Aggie, John and Ann – until Silas and May arrived, all dark curls and liquid brown eyes, looking as if they were quite unrelated to the others and, Aggie often thought, able to get away with murder because of those pleading eyes.

  She was just drifting back to sleep when the coughing started again. Mom said Dad was down with bronchitis and it was taking him a long time to get better.

  Then came another sound, more coughing, retching. After a time, her mother’s voice, riding on a groan, came distinctly through the floor.

  ‘Oh – what’ve you gone and done to me, Tommy Green? I might as well go and throw myself in the cut.’

  Aggie’s heart started to pound at Mom’s terrible words. She remembered before May was born – a long time before, it had seemed at the time – Mom had been sick day after day. And after, she’d declared, ‘If I have to go through that again I’ll do away with myself!’ She didn’t mean the children to hear, but sometimes they did.

  What did this mean? If Mom had ‘caught’ as she called it, what might happen? Dad said something back but she couldn’t hear what and it set him off coughing again.

  Aggie lay suddenly cold and full of dread.

  May started squirming. Her eyes opened. Aggie’s heart sank. There’d be no peace now, but at least it took her mind off her grim thoughts.

  Tommy Green, even when in good health, was a small, wiry man who had the melting brown eyes inherited by his two youngest children and a winning, face-crinkling grin. This grin and his kind heart had won Jenny Adams’s affection as they grew up together in Balsall Heath – only a few streets away. They had fallen in love in their teens.

  Tommy had always suffered with his health. By the time war was declared in 1914, Tommy and Jen had Aggie, a year old, and Tommy had tried to do his bit and take the King’s shilling. He was turned down – on grounds of being a family man, but even more on being too small of stature, weak chested and unfit for service.

  In one way he was in luck. Tommy’s father had been a ‘white’ cooper, who ran his own business, with a barrow, mending barrels and maiding tubs for washing by replacing the iron hoops holding them together. Although Tommy was his third son, Ollie Green, having seen that with his weak chest he would be the one least able to hold down a job for another employer, trained him up in his own line of work. When he was fit, Tommy went out with his barrow and tools, and worked hard. But the work was patchy. He couldn’t be sure of earning every day. To make ends meet, most days Jen cooked dinners for the workers in local factories and workshops which were too small to have a canteen. They could come and collect a plateful to stoke them up for the day. Most mornings saw the house full of the steam of cabbage and potatoes cooking, and pots of stew. When there was no school – and sometimes when there was – Aggie was expected to pitch in and help. Now Nanna had come to live with them, she helped most of the time instead and the two of them chatted and squabbled their way through the work.

  Later the rain stopped, but the road was dotted with shiny puddles. Jen sent the boys outside.

  ‘And don’t go getting soaked!’ she shouted after them.

  Jen was hand washing more clothes – Aggie’s and Ann’s this time – and issuing orders: ‘Take yer father up a cuppa tea – and yer nan!’

  Aggie was wearing Mom’s scratchy old grey coat that trailed on the floor and Ann was wrapped in a blanket, to keep warm until t
heir clothes were dry again. The coat only had two buttons left and Aggie did them up to cover her modesty, but as she went upstairs in her bare feet, she had to try very hard not to trip over the coat’s hem and spill the two cups of tea she was carrying. She put them down on the top step to open her grandmother’s door and took one cup to put on the chair by Freda Adams’s bed. The room was bracingly cold. Nanna always slept with the window open. It kept the germs at bay, she said.

  The old lady’s eyes snapped open, then narrowed humorously. ‘Oi, oi,’ she said. ‘I can see yer.’

  ‘Brought you some tea, Nanna,’ Aggie said, smiling.

  ‘What it is to have servants.’ Freda winced with pain as she moved to sit up. ‘Ooh, my blasted rotten old joints. Just leave it there, bab – I’ll take my time getting up.’

  Aggie went out and took the other cup to her father. The door squeaked as she opened it and she went into the sour-smelling room. She didn’t know if he had heard. His body looked so thin and small under the blankets, his old coat on the top. Aggie was full of dread. It made her feel bad seeing him like this. She wanted him to get up and be the lively, humorous dad he’d always been. She’d always been close to her dad – she found him easier and funnier than Mom.

  He stirred as she put the tea down on the chair by him and started to raise himself on one arm. First his matted hair appeared, then his ravaged face.

  ‘’Ello, Aggs,’ he said, but then got stuck with coughing. He spat up into a bit of rag then laid it aside, looking exhausted. But he managed to force a smile on to his face.

  ‘Cough it up, kid,’ he rasped. ‘It might be a gold watch.’

  Aggie smiled. She felt shy of Dad now he was so sick. It put him at a distance from them.

  ‘I brung yer some tea,’ she said.

  ‘Thanks, our kid.’ He reached for it and she hurried round to hand it to him. Every time she moved a cold draught wafted over her bare body under the coat. She gave him the tea but after a couple of sips he had to lie down again, exhausted.

  ‘Can I sit with you, Dad?’ Aggie asked.

  She wanted to snuggle up beside him and keep him warm, but she felt a bit too old to do that and she also felt funny without her clothes on.

  Dad was shaking his head. ‘Best go down, bab, and keep away from me. You don’t want what yer old man’s got, that you don’t.’

  Reluctantly she turned to go. At the door she looked back at him, hoping he would change his mind, but his sallow face was already sunken into blankness again and his eyes were closed. Sadly, she shut the door.

  Jen was sitting at the table, the bits of clothes drying by the range, and Ann was on the chair across from her. Ann had bobbed red hair, a little paler than Aggie’s, and a freckly face. She was often in a world of her own and now she sat, her face twitching every now and then, and tapping a teaspoon on a saucer to make ‘music’.

  ‘You can pack that in for a start,’ Jen said. ‘It’s going right through me.’ This was followed by a sharp sigh.

  Aggie looked at her mother’s pasty face and wondered how she’d know if Mom was about to ‘do herself in’. What did that mean exactly? Was it like Mrs Pate down the road, who’d drunk something bad and never recovered? They said it burned all her insides. Aggie had pictured them smouldering, like the fire. But she knew what the cut was, all right, the murky canal water, and the thought of it made her shudder. She wanted to ask Mom – ‘You won’t, will yer? Don’t leave us. Promise me?’ – but didn’t dare.

  ‘Ooo-hoo!’ There was a tap at the back door. ‘Jen – it’s me!’

  ‘Come in, Dulce – it’s open,’ Mom said listlessly.

  Dulcie Skinner, Babs’s mom and Jen’s best friend, popped her head round the back door. Babs looked very like her; both were skinny, long faced, brown haired and toothy, so that they looked forever cheerful. Babs was the only girl among seven children and Dulcie was run ragged, but she always seemed to ride it all.

  ‘I’ve sent ’em out to play in the road,’ she said with a grin. Her lanky figure came into the room and she plonked herself down at the table. ‘They’ll all be soaked to the skin but at least it’s got ’em out from under my feet. Thought I’d pop in and see you, bab. How’re you keeping? Oooh, dear!’ She laughed. ‘I only ’ave to look at yer!’

  ‘Don’t flaming ask,’ Jen said with a groan. ‘I’ve been heaving my guts up all morning.’

  ‘Oooh,’ Dulcie said again, but still smiling. She put her mouth closer to Jen’s ear. ‘So . . . When’s it due, d’yer think?’

  Jen looked at her daughters all round with their ears flapping.

  ‘Go on, you lot – leave us in peace for a bit.’

  As Aggie left the room, she heard Dulcie say in a low voice, ‘So have you had the doctor in for him yet?’ She heard her mother give a troubled sigh before saying anything.

  Aggie took May’s hand and led her into the cold front room. Ann followed in her dreamy way, still playing some game of her own with a teaspoon that she was talking to earnestly. All of them were barefoot and soon they were shivering.

  ‘Come on, May – we’re going to have a look out.’ She didn’t say anything to May about actual spying. May was too little. She went to her post behind the nets, picking May up so she could see. Peering out, she was soon rewarded by the sight of Mrs Southgate and Lily crossing over the road on their way to St Paul’s Church. Lily had on her lovely brown shoes. May pointed.

  ‘Yes – it’s Lily, May. I wish we could go to her house again, don’t you? But Mom’ll want us to go to Sunday school so she and our dad can have a nap.’

  Aggie’s breath steamed the window. She drew a face to keep May happy and May started blowing and scribbling on the glass as well.

  Soon after, the door directly across the road opened. Aggie watched carefully, forgetting May’s weight dragging on her hip. She saw Mrs Best pushing Mr Best out in his wheelchair. Her thin frame had to lean hard on the chair to manoeuvre it over the step. The sight made Aggie’s heart clench, then thump fast with the horror of it. Mr Best’s face was a deadly white and his head was thrown back at an odd angle, as if he was struggling to breathe. His eyes were half open. He was well wrapped up with a blanket tucked round his knees. He looked very poorly. Aggie hated to think he was inside that house, day after day. Mrs Best leaned on the chair and they made their way slowly along the road. For a moment Aggie felt like crying. It would almost be better not to see him at all.

  Seven

  Aggie wanted to like Sunday school but, in truth, she didn’t, even though Babs and her brothers went and it might have been fun. But fun it was not. She didn’t like the musty smell of the church hall and they were always on about the Bible and Jesus. She found herself bored to squirming point and the only good thing about it was the drink of milk and the biscuit they were given in the middle. Ann quite liked it because you could win prizes and, with her good memory, she had done so once or twice. Babs was good at drawing pictures and could manage shepherds and camels when she put her mind to it. Aggie never won anything because her attention drifted. She desperately wanted to escape it. She had much more exciting plans.

  Before dinner, she managed to get John on his own. They sat on the stairs, whispering.

  ‘I don’t want to go – do you?’

  John, a skinny wraith, with pale skin and knobbly knees, was as red headed as Aggie, and he was made especially striking by having thick blond eyelashes. He looked up at her from under them.

  ‘But Mom’ll make us.’ He slumped down with a sigh of one beyond his years at the thought of the crushing boredom of the afternoon to follow.

  ‘But if we promised,’ Aggie persuaded, ‘just you and me. If we stay upstairs and we promise to be really quiet, our mom might let us. My clothes ain’t dry, any road.’ Jen had sent her out to the backyard to mangle the clothes and they were hanging by the range but Aggie’s brown skirt was thick and took a long time to dry.

  John looked doubtfully at her. ‘Nah – bet she won’t.’<
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  ‘I’ll beg her,’ Aggie said passionately. She would really have preferred to carry out her plans with Babs, but Babs would never be let off taking her younger brothers to Sunday school, so John would have to do.

  At first Mom was up in arms. ‘I’m not having you all under my feet all afternoon. I need a lie-down and your dad needs some peace . . .’

  ‘But the others can go – Ann likes it there, and May ’cause they let her do a picture but me and John don’t like it – and you said when you were little you never liked it neither . . .’

  ‘I’m not having Ann taking May by herself—’

  ‘I’ll take ’em!’ Aggie had a sudden inspiration. ‘And I’ll go and get them but just let me and John stay in. You won’t know we’re here. We’ll stay up the top and we’ll be as quiet as mice – please, Mom!’

  Jen Green, who was only just getting over her morning queasiness and trying to cook the family’s dinner, was bowled over by the force of her daughter. She wiped steam and sweat from her forehead with the back of her arm, then made a dismissive gesture.

  ‘All right – just this once. Just so long as we don’t know you’re there!’

  ‘Yer little heathen,’ Nanny Adams observed teasingly, as Aggie panted up the stairs.

  She had walked Ann, Silas and May to St Agatha’s on the Stratford Road and having safely ushered them inside, she tore home again in the cold as fast as her legs would carry her.

  Aggie stood in the doorway of her grandmother’s room. Freda Adams had only come to live with the family a couple of years back, to save on rent and help out, and it was the first time in her life that she was not living off a yard. The children had all been put in the attic together to accommodate her in this tiny upstairs room. There was only just space for a bed and a wooden chair, and in the corner, by the window, was a small wooden chest in which Nanna kept her few possessions. On the wall hung her wedding photograph to Granddad Sid, who’d been dead a good while now. Aggie liked Nanna’s room. It smelt of lavender and mothballs and of what Nanna called her ‘mother’s ruin’ – the warming liquor she made sure of having in her little hip flask that she liked to take sips from.