The Women of Lilac Street

by Annie Murray

  She smiled and then, realizing this was no help, let out a little laugh. ‘No one’s ever said that before.’

  ‘Well, it’s time they did.’ He squeezed her hand. ‘Thank you – so much.’

  They agreed that he should come again next week, at the same time. He took out his wallet and gave her a card.

  ‘This is where I live. It’s not too far. Let me know if it’s no good, in the end.’

  He hesitated as if he did not want to go out into the darkness. But then she realized that dark or light was all the same to him.

  ‘Goodbye,’ she said softly.

  He turned, raising his hat. ‘Till next time.’

  Rose closed the door softly. For a moment she closed her eyes, bathed in happiness.

  Twenty-Four

  She had closed her eyes in such a way once before, behind the back door of Professor Mount’s house after Harry came back and she had agreed to marry him.

  Standing at her own door now, picturing Arthur King feeling his way along the street to his house, Rose remembered that day. She stood for a moment, recalling it, then heard Lily’s voice behind her.

  ‘Is the man coming back?’

  Rose turned, trying to look casual, with a slight smile.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know dear, really. Now – we need to get you a bite to eat.’

  As she sat with Lily in the kitchen her thoughts wandered. Was I in love with Harry? Or was I so desperate for a way out that I’d have married anyone? Or was it just that he had seemed so keen on her that she mistook her own feelings? But she had thought she loved him, back then. She had had no idea.

  During the two and a half years that Harry was away, she only heard from him twice. He sent a card quite soon after he arrived in France. Then, in 1918, when she had almost given up hope he wrote again. ‘Thinking of you,’ it said. Not much more. But it gave her such hope. He was alive! And if he was thinking of her that must mean something. The war had felt like a lid closing everything in, making it unable to change or move. She felt completely stuck. But there were other reasons why she stayed where she was.

  Professor and Mrs Mount had one son, Ernest Mount, who Rose had only ever seen once. Ernest had come to the house in 1916 when he had also joined up. He arrived in an officer’s uniform, tall, not especially handsome and stand-offish even with his parents. He was more of his mother’s build than his father’s, solid and pink about the face, with thin brown hair. He looked through Rose as if she wasn’t there. He clearly did not have much time for his father, called him ‘Pa’ breezily and did not stay long. He was a man of the world, was the message he gave off and when Rose was in the room he talked a lot about money and shares. He seemed to get on a little better with his mother and sat beside her couch.

  ‘You want to get yourself some decent servants,’ Rose heard him say as she was disappearing out of the room after bringing them all tea. ‘That girl’s a looker all right but she’s barely out of the classroom. I can pay if you like – get some good staff on board.’

  Rose did not hear the Mounts’ reply, but nothing happened so they must have quietly ignored him. In any case, he was off to France.

  More and more she became like a daughter to them and having seen Ernest she felt sorry for them. How had this rather unworldly pair managed to produce such a son?

  Mrs Mount passed the time by doing sewing and embroidery, but could only do so with Rose’s help, so Rose spent a lot of time with her, watching. Sometimes she sent Rose up to Moseley village to seek out more embroidery silks in lovely rich colours.

  One day, Mrs Mount said, ‘Show me your hands, my dear. That’s right – don’t be shy – come a bit closer.’

  Rose stood in front of her, holding out her hands and embarrassed at how chapped they looked, the nails bitten down to the quicks.

  ‘Hard-working little hands,’ Mrs Mount observed. ‘We must get you some Pond’s cream for those.’ She turned Rose’s hands over and back. ‘But they are rather fine – nice delicate fingers. I think it’s time I started teaching you to sew.’

  ‘I can sew a little bit, ma’am,’ Rose said. ‘Darning and mending.’

  ‘Ah – but that’s bread and butter. What about the cream of sewing? Would you like to learn to do this?’ She held up the frame with her good hand.

  Rose nodded eagerly. And so her learning began, an education more valuable than she could ever have realized at the time. Mrs Mount began teaching her basic stitches – chain stitch, herringbone, blanket. Rose made a little sampler and Mrs Mount was impressed.

  ‘You’re a natural, my dear. You’ve such good control of the needle and a fine eye. I believe you have a flair for colour too. That’s lovely work.’

  Rose blushed with pleasure, and soon, as the days and weeks passed, they moved on to more elaborate stitches: threaded running stitch, lazy daisy, French knots. She made a little tea cloth with flowers embroidered at each corner. She was in love with the process of decorating the pristine white cloth. It felt like spring coming, colourful flowers breaking out everywhere. Mrs Mount kindly supplied her with some materials but she took to spending some of her wages on silks as well.

  By the time a year had passed after Harry left, Mrs Mount said, ‘You know, Rose, I shouldn’t be surprised if you could sell your work – it really is quite something.’

  And that was how it began: the little gift shop in Moseley she had found agreed to buy one of her cloths to try out and sell it on. Soon they were asking for more. She had an independent way of earning her own money, which, she realized, was what Mrs Mount had perhaps hoped all along.

  But that year, 1917, two things happened. A letter arrived from one of Ernest Mount’s fellow officers. He had been in the Tank Corps and was killed at Cambrai. The two of them were overwhelmed with grief, and Professor Mount always said afterwards, ‘That was the end of my Hester.’

  Quite soon after, just before Christmas, Rose was in the kitchen clearing up the dinner plates one day when she heard a cry from the front of the house. She knew it was the Professor and he sounded very distressed. As she rushed along the hall the door of their room opened. The Professor, wild-eyed and utterly distraught, reached out and grabbed Rose’s arm.

  ‘Hester – my girl – oh, look at her!’

  Filled with dread Rose approached the couch. She could already see the strange way in which Mrs Mount was lying, somehow both slack and contorted at once. She lay slouched to one side, her white cap askew, staring dumbly up at them.

  ‘Hester!’ Professor Mount seized her hand, stroking it. ‘Don’t go, my dear, oh, do be all right, please don’t leave me!’

  It wrung Rose’s heart to hear him and she was full of panic, not knowing what to do.

  ‘Run for the doctor – Belle Walk, you remember, don’t you?’

  But by the time Rose had run back saying that the doctor was on his way, Mrs Mount had already slipped away. The Professor was sitting beside her, still holding her hand and reminiscing gently about when they were young together. His little face looked so sunken and bereft that Rose’s tears came, and then he began to weep too and they sat together crying until the doctor arrived and officially pronounced Hester Mount dead.

  After the funeral, Professor Mount said quaveringly to Rose, ‘You won’t leave me as well, will you, Rosie?’

  All she could do was promise that she would stay.

  After Mrs Mount’s death, Rose was left alone with Professor Mount because Mrs Plummer, the cook, said it was ridiculous her being here working for such a small number of people and that Rose had learned everything that was needed; she was off to earn more money in another household.

  So for that year Rose was Professor Mount’s sole companion. He seldom had visitors. He was kind, she was paid well and treated decently. He gave her extra money of the little he had to buy embroidery materials – ‘I like to see you doing that, my dear. It’s homely and makes me think a bit that Hester is still with us’ – and with Hester gone, the work was not very deman
ding.

  But she was an eighteen-year-old girl and he a man in his late seventies. She saw scarcely anyone else except for occasional visits to Bessie, who now had five children and in a vague, overworked way was pleased to see her. Rose felt more and more lonely, stifled and desperate. Sometimes she would stand in her room looking out at the sky over the back of the house.

  Am I always going to be here? she wondered. There were so few men now after the carnage of the war. There didn’t seem to be anything to look forward to, just more drudgery and the sad words of an old man talking to her about his wife. How was she ever going to meet anyone else like this, stuck in the house? The days seemed to crawl by. Sometimes she wept with desperation and longing for more of a life.

  And then, in 1919 as the winter began to melt away and snowdrops appeared in the grass, he returned. As before he came to the back door, a rap of knuckles that took her by surprise. When she opened it, she did not recognize him at first. She saw a solidly built man, dark haired, much older looking than the boy she remembered. There was a thin scar on his face now, at the top of his left cheek, aslant beneath his eye. He was wearing a heavy, military-looking coat. Rose stared, trying to make sense of this.

  ‘Rosie? It’s me.’

  He didn’t smile, in fact he looked rather stern, forbidding almost. She took in that he had a long face, a pronounced chin and jaw. She hadn’t remembered him quite like that. He was very much a man now, not a boy.

  ‘Harry?’

  Everything was crashing round her body, her blood, breath, everything, punching with shock, with excitement.

  ‘You waited for me then?’

  ‘Are you really back?’ she asked stupidly. ‘Truly?’

  He grinned then and held out his arms. ‘What’s it look like?’

  But they knew each other so little. After that first embrace she didn’t know what to say, except for, ‘Well – d’you want a cup of tea?’

  Within a month he had asked her to marry him and she accepted. She was radiant, excited. A new life – a real life, not living in the shadows here!

  Professor Mount was shocked and upset at first. ‘D’you mean you’ll be leaving me after all, Rosie?’ Then trying to be less selfish he was pleased for them, then put in his offer.

  ‘How would it be if you took the first floor as your married quarters? Then you’d still have work and somewhere to live, as well as a husband?’

  By the time they married, in May 1919, Rose’s brother Peter, who had survived the war, had emigrated to Australia. Bessie and her children were the only relatives on her side when they got married in St Agnes church in Moseley. Harry’s mom and dad came, and his brother. Though Rose had always got along all right with Harry’s dad, she and his mother never took to one another. Rose found Mrs Southgate senior a jealous, suspicious-minded woman and kept out of her way as much as possible.

  The rooms they were to have upstairs in Professor Mount’s house were already furnished and there was not much they had to do except get them ready. There was even the bed, long abandoned by the Professor and his wife when she became ill. He still liked to sleep in the back sitting room – he didn’t have to bother with stairs and it made him feel close to Hester, he said.

  Looking back, the wedding night and what followed had been a disaster. Rose had chosen at the time to tell herself it was all shyness and ignorance on her part. But she knew now that it had been something much deeper. She and Harry really barely knew one another and she had not given the realities of their physical relationship much thought.

  She had managed to hold him off until the wedding night, even though he had tried hard to persuade her.

  ‘Look, come on, Rosie – I’m desperate for yer. We’re all but married, ain’t we? I’ve waited long enough!’

  ‘But I want to save it,’ she’d said, barely even knowing what they were talking about. She imagined kisses and something warm and dreamy, not the peculiar, moist, embarrassing reality that it was.

  Before they’d even got up to their room that night, he was at her on the stairs, hands fumbling for her breasts, then up her skirt.

  ‘Don’t!’ she hissed, shocked. ‘He’ll hear us.’

  ‘No ’e won’t, deaf old bugger. Come on, Rosie, let’s have yer!’

  They had two candles in the big main bedroom that the Professor had bequeathed them. Harry had been taken aback by the room, which although old and faded was grander than any other room he’d ever slept in. But now it was not the room he was interested in. He wanted Rose naked and ready and he started to fling off his own clothes.

  That was her first shock. It was not just the obvious strange reality of maleness, Harry’s hungry manhood stiff and ready – which in itself was surprise enough. It was the sense of revulsion she felt towards him in general. In the candlelight she took in his neck which had become thick and bullish, the dark hairs on his arms and chest and at his groin, his thick arms and thighs; even the way his hair was cut round his neck and forehead felt alien. She just wanted to run away and never come back.

  ‘No . . .’ She started to back towards the door. She was half undressed, still in her under-slip and stockings.

  He took no notice. He came up to her, the smell of sweat on him overpowering, his body all hardness, his arms, chest, cock against her. It was no good struggling. They were married and he was entitled, and too aroused to hear her. He rubbed his hands over her breasts, hard, his eyes rolling back so that he looked as if he was in a trance.

  ‘Get on the bed . . .’

  He reached under her slip and pulled down her bloomers. She had to help so that he didn’t tear everything, all the pretty clothes on which she had embroidered her initials so carefully in curling white letters – as if he would notice such a thing!

  As he moved her to the bed and pushed her back, a cold terror seized her. Babies – this was how you made babies, wasn’t it? And oh, God, she didn’t want that – not what happened to Mom. Her mind was racing as he forced himself up inside her like a broom handle, something hard and foreign invading her body, and he wasn’t looking at her, he was carried away with himself.

  Rose let out whimpers of pain as he thrust urgently into her. She screwed her eyes tightly shut. I don’t want this, she thought, deep in herself. Never ever, not with him, and not if it means babies. She felt no desire, hardly knew what desire was.

  And so began the long battle of their marriage.

  But now – when she thought of Arthur King . . . Even the thought of him made her feel fluttery and breathless. And when he was actually there – the tenderness, the longing to touch and be touched was like nothing she had known before. She was possessed by it, so that she could hardly look at Harry or think of anything else.

  Now, she had discovered desire.

  Twenty-Five

  It was still the school holidays and Freda Adams had come into her own.

  She’d gathered her grandchildren round her when Aggie got back from Sawyer and Hewlett’s and given them their marching orders. And a few days later she made another announcement.

  ‘Once you lot are off to school, I’m going to work. I’ve talked them into putting me back on a press at Sawyer and Hewlett’s. Mr Martin didn’t believe I could do it, but once I’m set in position it’ll be second nature. I could turn out them fasteners with my eyes shut.’

  Aggie watched her grandmother, amazed. Nanna, going back to work in the factory! But there was no arguing. Nor with her orders about who was going to do everything round the house.

  ‘It ain’t just going to be Aggie,’ she said. ‘Not on her own – it’s too much for her. You others are going to have to help, ’specially you, John, and not think it’s above you to turn a mangle or sweep up.’

  She dispensed orders about who was to do what. John was looking rather put out.

  ‘It ain’t no good putting on that long face, lad. You’re the man of the house now and you do what needs to be done, like it or not.’

  John scowled, looking dow
n at his feet. But they were grateful. Their father’s absence seemed to echo round the house. Nanna somehow put things in order.

  ‘Right – now you listen to me, all of yer. Things are hard at the moment, what with your father in the infirmary and none of us knowing how long he’ll be there for. And your mother’s poorly. You’re a good bunch of kids and now you’ve got to rally round. I’ll be here till school starts again, but while there ain’t no school, you can put your backs into it. You girls – your job’s carding. Aggie’s collected the things from the factory and the more we do, the merrier. Aggie, Ann, you can get started – and John, you could have a go . . .’

  ‘Sewing!’ John turned pink in the face with outrage. ‘I ain’t doing that – that’s girls’ stuff and anyhow, I don’t know what to do . . .’ He got to his feet as if he was going to run off.

  ‘All right,’ Nanna said, unable to suppress a smile at the sight of him, her skinny, ginger-topped grandson in his baggy shorts, fit to burst with indignation. ‘Well, you can find summat else to bring in a bob or two.’

  John racked his brains for all his money-making schemes.

  ‘I’ll get some horse muck – and jam jars . . .’ Pennies could be earned by collecting horse muck off the road and selling it to people with gardens, and by taking empty jars back to the shops. ‘And fag ends!’ he added as final inspiration.

  ‘Well, that’s a start . . .’

  ‘And Silas can help and I could get our Dad’s barrow and take the stuff to Auntie’s . . .’

  John had collected his father’s barrow and it was stored out the back. It would have been ideal for collecting neighbours’ bundles to take for pawn every week and be paid for his troubles. But there was a problem.

  ‘Ooh, I don’t think you’d better start on that,’ Freda said. ‘Old Edna Hawkins has been at it for years – she’ll be after you with the poker if you start working on her patch. You stick to your other schemes, John. And Aggie –’