Our house seems terribly quiet when I get home. I don’t want to start thinking, to sink into myself, so I hurry to fetch Dorrie’s envelope from upstairs and settle down on the sofa with it. I find myself feeling nervous. I would never have put Dorrie down as someone who would find the time to write. It’s like discovering a hidden side of her.
I had pushed the papers she gave me into my chest of drawers upstairs, under some T-shirts. The Manila envelope, with Dorrie’s typed address crossed out, is old and soft with wear. I draw out the sheaf of cheap bits of paper folded inside and flick through them. The sheets are all lined, of varying sizes, and one side of each is covered in Dorrie’s childlike copperplate, in blue ink.
ROSES WITH THORNS by Doreen Mary Stefani, I read on the front page. The words are underlined, rather like a school writing exercise.
I’ve decided to write down some memories from my life which most of my family don’t know.
I frown. ‘My family don’t know.’ What does Dorrie mean – that she has never taken the time to tell her children about her own childhood? That wouldn’t be so surprising. She was left a widow with two small children so there could not have been much time for leisure or for looking back. Judging by the steadiness of the writing and the yellow tinge to the paper, she must have started on it some time ago and written bit by bit, when the mood took her.
I ease off my ankle boots and tuck myself up on the sofa, pulling my jumper down over my jeans to keep my legs warm.
It’s my own walk down Memory Lane and I suppose they might find something in it interesting one day. I’ve called it Roses with Thorns because my life has had some very happy times so often cut short and there were always thorns along the way, however much the flowers smelt sweet.
I’ve come to realize the only way through is to try and snip off the thorns and smell the blooms and be kind where you can, don’t get too caught up in yourself. I don’t have any great philosophy of life apart from that, even after all these years.
Already, reading the words of this younger Dorrie, tears start to blur my vision. It’s as if what happened in the yoga class two weeks ago has taken the stopper off my feelings. Since then I feel in danger of crying at any time – in the supermarket, at odd moments walking down the street, late at night . . . I draw the heels of my hands across my eyes to clear my sight.
I was born in 1929 near the middle of Birmingham, city of a thousand trades as they called it and certainly it was humming with industry. It was a big, hard-working, mucky old place, but we had our grand parts and some are still standing, for all the bombs and bulldozers have done their best to flatten it – the Council House and Art Gallery with its tea rooms. The old library is long gone though. It was all musty and dark in there then and you had to whisper, not like today.
There’s not many left now remember our old city as it used to be when it wasn’t smothered in concrete and neighbourhoods where we all knew everyone’s names ‘up our end’ even if we didn’t see eye to eye. The streets were lit by gas lamps and a man came round every night to light them. There was yards of little houses – slums they seem to have decided to call them now – almost up to the Council House itself, before Joseph Chamberlain came along and redesigned it all. That was even before my time. Course Hitler did his bit to destroy us, but we stood proud even with bricks and bombs falling all about us. He failed in the end being a bully, they always do. It was bulldozers did the rest in the name of progress though some would say it had to come.
Our house would seem a very poor thing now, on a cobbled street, another house behind it facing on to the yard at the back. 2/18 we were, two back of eighteen. Truth to tell, they were half houses, built back to back, a bug-ridden row of damp, cramped hovels all holding each other up. There was one room downstairs with a scullery at the back and we all lived and died in that room. There was two bedrooms upstairs, a brass bedstead in each – Mom and Dad in one and us kids all together in the other. Our door opened direct on to Fazeley Street from the front room, no inside toilet or hot water or all the comforts taken for granted in this modern world. There were some roses – like my Aunt Beattie, our mother’s sister, who was the saviour of all of us – but there were plenty of thorns from the start, cold and hunger being just two of them.
I’m wandering. The floor of the front room was of brick and we bodged rugs to cover it – old strips of material, the best colours we could find, threaded through a bit of sacking. There were a few sticks of furniture and the iron range where our mother did all the cooking and kept her pots and pans. It was the only thing kept us warm. The hearth was always the heart of a house in those days as we all had to huddle up together. I wonder if it’s not central heating that’s broken up families.
There was no water in the house – we went out with a pail along the entry to the pump in the yard. That was always a job for us kids. Many’s the time I’ve staggered along between the houses with a full bucket banging my legs and my shoes filling with water. My legs would be all bruises from the metal pail, not to mention my brothers kicking me in bed. The yard was where the lavatories were as well, shared with the neighbours. No running water or that sort of fine living – they were dry-pan lavs and not nice in the summer. And if you took too long in there someone’d come banging on the door. Nothing was clean and safe like now. If the water was dirty for some reason, whole yards and streets would go down with diarrhoea.
Our mom didn’t have much of a start. Ethel Parsons was her married name, but she was born Ethel Timmins, in a house off a yard in Milk Street, Deritend, Birmingham in 1913. In all her life she only moved a stone’s throw away.
At seventeen she walked up the road to Fazeley Street to get married, a decision that, she did not trouble to hide from anyone, she regretted for the rest of her life. She was the middle child of seven, Beattie the eldest. Our grandfather worked in a factory somewhere nearby but he didn’t go away to fight in the Great War because of his health, which must have been bad because by the end they were after anything that could move on two legs to send to the front.
They hadn’t been too bad off to begin with but Grandpa’s health went downhill and soon our Grandmother Alice was left a widow, sometime during the Great War. Our mom used to say she could remember spending hours on the floor as a small child, with just a bit of sacking between her and the bricks, helping her mother, Alice, glue matchboxes together. Mom used to say she’d never forget the foul stink of the glue they used, made of boiled old bones.
I see them in my mind’s eye, in one of those cramped, cold rooms with the bugs and silverfish and the damp seeping in, our grandmother at the table with a candle or perhaps an oil lamp once the darkness drew in, the kids round her. Sometimes it was sewing buttons or hooks and eyes on cards to go to the shops, or any other outwork she could get from the factories around, though the matchboxes was the thing our mother seemed to remember. Maybe they were easier for small children’s fingers. They’d be there ’til late at night to notch up enough of them to earn a few coppers. That was how the poor made shift in those days.
But then at the end of the war Alice passed away as well, in 1918, when the scourge of Spanish influenza stalked our neighbourhoods. Our aunt Beattie was left as head of the family, at seventeen, with six others in her charge. The youngest, Lizzie, was three when Grandma Alice died. Poor Auntie Lizzie was to have a tragic life but I must stick to the main story, there are so many byways leading off from it.
I look up from the page for a moment, surfacing. What is it that Dorrie wants me to know? So far it’s just a rather rambling account of her childhood.
So many years have passed since those days in our Old Brum, so many of the family drifted off and never came back – especially the four boys, my mom’s brothers. Uncle Charlie was the only one I knew and he suffered badly with his chest which seemed to run in the family somewhere, or was it just the filth of our beloved city that we had to breathe in day after day? They’re all long gone now, those uncles and aunties, on to another and I hope better place now, shadows of the past.
Aunt Beattie used to say that Ethel, her sister and our mother, was born angry, even before she married my father and her own marriage troubles started. Beatt said even as a child Mom was always discontented and mardy. You’d have thought Beattie would have been the one to have more reason to be angry with life, left like that, a mother to six others. But I remember her as always kindly and of good cheer and she outlived the lot of them. She was the one who helped me later on through all the worst times with Mom, bless her heart.
One day Beattie took it into her head to have her portrait taken and I’ve still got it somewhere. It’s like a postcard. Her hair was long and thick and she wore it swept back but softly, in a bun. She wasn’t a beauty but she had a round, smiling face and to me it was always one of the loveliest I ever saw. I’ll never forget Beatt. She never married, you might say a shame, but I suppose she had had had her fill of children at a young age and she was an angel to me, always. I wish I’d asked her more about how she managed. I can hardly imagine now in that cramped little hovel with no money coming in. She always said she had good neighbours and she went out and collared hard for all her brothers and sisters. There were plenty of factory jobs if you were prepared to knuckle down. And she did outwork as well – buttons and boxes for a jeweller’s and the others helped as they could.
Our mom got married to get away from home. Or maybe she thought she’d escape her own unhappy nature, but of course she took that with her in her little bundle of clothes and brewed up an even worse one once she got there.
Never were two people more mismatched than our parents, Alf and Ethel Parsons. Pa slunk away to the usual hideouts of an unhappy husband – the pub and the bottle. He was never even blessed with a drunkard’s luck. Mom played the role of the miserable nagging wife, turning to the bottle and screaming at her husband. They had us four, me first, closely followed by Eric, then Irene who had terrible asthma, bless her and passed away when she was barely six, then Bert. Apart from that Mom and the Old Man just about managed to ‘cohabit’ as they say these days. That was the best you could say. I wonder now, if our mother and father had met by chance in the street, whether they would have given each other the time of day. All I can say is, easier divorce is one of the best things ever to happen in this country.
Thank heaven for Aunt Beatt, the one source of real love and light in our lives. I bless her for ever.
What are my memories of my mother, in our little house in Deritend?
This sentence ends at the bottom of the page but when I turn to the next it does not seem to continue. I find myself surfacing from the world to which Dorrie has taken me, this old city of cobbled streets and back-to-back houses on yards and factories and workshops at every turn.
‘Oh, God,’ I remind myself. ‘I really must go and get the shopping.’ I’m intent on getting to Sheila’s later.
I have already got through quite a number of the pages. It’s obviously important to Dorrie that I read it. I felt that coming off her, a kind of urgency. And for some reason she wants me to read it, not Ian. Is that just a woman-to-woman thing? It’s hard to tell.
But we are almost out of milk and I really must get something for Ian even if I don’t care all that much about eating – it’s the least I can do, with me not working.
Reluctantly I slide the papers back into the envelope and take it upstairs. Hardly knowing why I am still being secretive, I lift some of the shirts in my drawer and lay it underneath again.