Read Birmingham Rose for Free Online

eyes. ‘I’m on again tomorrow night. Some of us have to work, you know,’ she finished, rather spitefully.
    He always took rebuffs badly. ‘That’s right – and I’m no bloody good for nothing, am I?’ he shouted, sitting up again. ‘Your bleeding cripple of a husband. That’s what everyone says about me, ain’t it?’
    ‘I didn’t say that – just don’t keep on. Get into bed and let me sleep.’
    ‘Open your eyes.’ His voice was still loud and full of hurt and anger. ‘At least open your bloody eyes, woman!’
    Dora dragged her eyes open and half sat up. She pulled back the covers and patted the bed. ‘Just come and lie down, Sid, please.’
    Sid could feel the great dark surge which sometimes forced its way through him, a violence of anger and despair which he could not put into words. He ached to spend himself in his wife, to feel her body moving under him.
    ‘Dora, please. Do it for me tonight.’
    ‘NO!’ Dora shouted.
    Then Rose heard her mother’s screams as he hit her twice, three times, giving her the bruised cheek and cut lip which would be there for all to see in the morning.
    ‘You selfish bitch!’ she heard.
    Rose screwed up her eyes tight and pushed her fingers into her ears. But she could still hear the next part – what always came next. The worst part. Her father’s remorse, the sobs which burst from his body alongside her mother’s own crying, and eventually Dora’s voice trying to calm his anguish.
    Rose slipped out of bed and fetched the little elephant from its hiding place. She lay stroking it in the dark.
    ‘Try,’ she said to herself. ‘Try and try and try.’

Four
January 1935

    Dora Lucas was sitting at her table with a cup of mint tea in front of her. Often now, when she had a spare moment she sat, her eyes not fixed on anything, her limbs slack and her mind numb.
    She was forty-one and exhausted, like an old woman, yet she was soon to give birth again. Her belly already felt tight and heavy with the child which nudged insistently under her ribcage so that she had to keep straightening her spine to ease the discomfort.
    Beside her, three-year-old Violet was clattering pebbles on the tiled floor, involved in her game and singing quite tunefully.
    ‘Do it a bit quieter, can’t you?’ Dora snapped at her, without really having intended to. Weariness and irritation seemed to be all she could manage.
    The others would soon be home from school. And Sam – bless him – from work. After the four grimmest and most despairing years of Dora’s life they at last had a regular wage coming into the house. How she would have got by without the neighbours she’d never know – Theresa and Gladys especially. The final humiliation had come when they had been forced to go on the Parish. First there was the gruelling session in front of the board. Dora’s innards turned just thinking about it. She’d remember the cold, gimlet-eyed woman there till her dying day. The board, which executed the Means Test, decided whether she was worthy of their meagre allowance of food and coal.
    Sam, Rose and Grace had become familiar, sad little figures outside factories as far away as Cheapside and Moseley Street, greeting the men who came off shift with persistent cries of ‘Have you got a piece for us?’ They’d run after the men until they handed over any leftover portions of bread from their lunches.
    On Saturday nights they would hang about in Smith- field and the Market Hall until the stallholders were packing up, and then walk home exhausted, carrying a piece of knockdown meat and bags of bruised fruit and veg. Rose would fall asleep with her head full of visions of pyramids of apples and oranges lit by the the naphtha flares which hissed next to the stalls.
    The shame and desperation of those years had nearly finished Dora. When Violet was born she had haemorrhaged so badly that she’d been ill for weeks and had had to give up her night job in the metal stamping factory. They’d