Rosie (7 page)

The book was the same one Heather had given Rosie on her first day here. It was falling apart now, the pages loose and odd ones missing. They both knew almost all the stories by heart. Each time Rosie read it to Alan she was reminded sharply of Heather.

Three years ago when she left, the bright spark which had always burned in her father went too. To everyone else he seemed the same, but Rosie knew he was sad, blaming himself for everything. She didn’t know then how to tell him she understood how he felt. She still didn’t know, for Cole was an intimidating man, hard, unpredictable and usually totally uncommunicative. Yet despite that Rosie knew there was a tender place inside him for she’d seen glimpses of it many times. He loved her too, in his own way, and he was proud of her. The only way she knew how to help him then, and now, was to look after him and the boys as best she could. At least that way he wouldn’t bring yet another woman to the house. He didn’t have much luck with women.

From that night of the Harvest Home in 1945 when Florrie Langford had informed her Seth and Norman were only her half-brothers, and later on when she’d found Heather had joined her father in his bed, Rosie had gone out of her way to find out about her family history.

It hadn’t been easy. People were too scared of Cole to gossip to her. But along with being nosy, Rosie was also persistent, and bit by bit she pieced it all together.

Ethel Parker, Seth and Norman’s mother, was reputed to have been the beauty of the county with long dark hair and sultry eyes. Her father who was a farmer somewhere out beyond Glastonbury had thrown her out when she became pregnant by Cole, and she came to live at May Cottage with him and his parents. They got married just before Seth was born in 1927. In 1934 Ethel vanished, leaving her boys, then seven and six, with their father. Legend had it that she ran off with a Welsh travelling salesman.

By the time Ruby Blackwell arrived in answer to an advertisement for a housekeeper in the autumn of 1936, the boys were running wild and out of control. By all accounts she did her best to be a mother to them, and bring order into a chaotic house, but within a year Rosie was born.

Rosie wished she could remember more about her mother; it seemed awful not to have strong visual pictures in her head of someone so important. But all the images she had from her early childhood were just cloudy fragments, a striped blouse, auburn fluffy hair, a small nervous woman who, when she wasn’t cooking and cleaning, sat in a chair by the stove knitting.

Yet she could recall in great detail the day her mother vanished, even though she was only six. She had gone to play with Janice Mirrel after school, and it was tipping down with rain. Mrs Mirrel got very cross in the evening when Ruby didn’t turn up to collect Rosie, she kept muttering something about ‘taking advantage’. Seth turned up eventually to collect her, which in itself was a very unusual event; he was sixteen then, he’d come on his bike and was soaked to the skin. Rosie overheard him explaining to Mrs Mirrel that he’d only just got back from working in Bridgwater to find the house empty and Ruby still out.

Rosie rode home on the crossbar of Seth’s bike and it was very scary because it was so dark and wet. At home the stove was out, and Seth told her to go to bed straight away before her father got back.

Cole and Norman must have come home late that same night because they were downstairs when she woke the next morning. Cole said her mother must have gone up to London to see a relative and she’d be back in a few days.

But of course Ruby had never come back, and eventually Cole said he thought she must have been killed in an air raid.

Until then the war hadn’t really affected Rosie personally. For as long as she could remember, the sounds of planes roaring overhead, grown-ups talking about rationing, evacuees, clothing coupons and being called up had just been a part of life, the same as it was for every other child of her age. Sometimes she was jarred into realizing that elsewhere there were some very bad things happening because adults’ eyes filled with tears when they spoke of deaths in air raids or soldiers being killed. But her father wasn’t away fighting like many of her schoolfriends’ fathers, and even when a stick of bombs was dropped on the moors near Burtle, no one was hurt.

When her father said her mother had been killed in an air raid, war became suddenly very real, not some distant threat. She couldn’t understand why her mother should be singled out to die, when every other mother she knew was still safe at home.

The two years between her mother’s death and Heather’s arrival were blurred. Rosie remembered being on her own a great deal, but nothing more. It seemed to her that her bank of memories only really started with Heather. Certainly in September of 1945 they were all happy ones.

Heather had moved permanently into Cole’s room the day after the Harvest Home and everything was wonderful for a whole year. Cole stayed home a great deal of the time and the cottage rang with laughter as he repapered the bedrooms and Heather made new pretty curtains. Even when Seth came home on leave from the army he couldn’t manage to spoil things, or even influence Norman against Heather.

But as Heather’s belly swelled with her expected baby, that autumn things began to go wrong. Maybe it was because for the first time ever Cole was finding it hard to make money. Perhaps it was partly because he dreaded Norman going off on his National Service too, leaving him without any male assistance. But it certainly seemed that Cole was suddenly resentful of the burden of another expected child.

He had begun to find fault with everything. He started to disappear off to the pub the moment he’d eaten his evening meal and sometimes he didn’t come home at all. Before long Rosie was often woken late at night by her father shouting and furniture being overturned. She would hear Heather crying and she knew Cole had slapped her.

It was those noises which brought back vague memories of similar fights between her own mother and her father, and Rosie became very frightened. Heather had seemed to change overnight; she became pale and listless and although her belly was huge, her face, arms and legs were very thin. She always seemed to be tired, sometimes sinking into a chair at midday and unable to get up again, and her situation wasn’t helped by heavy snow falls in January of 1947 which made all her chores, like the washing, so much more difficult. Rosie did her best to help her, but she found it hard to pump the water. Turning the handle of the mangle outside, in temperatures that were below freezing, was beyond her.

The snow continued. That winter was the coldest on record and animals were freezing to death in the fields. Rosie remembered seeing Heather trying to dig a path in the heavy drifts to get to the coal shed and falling down with exhaustion before she’d even managed to fill a bucket. There were many times when there was no fire and little to eat because the local shops could get no provisions, and Rosie scooped up snow to melt over the oil lamp because the pump was frozen up.

Heather went into labour in February and it lasted for two long days. The road to the village was blocked with deep drifts of snow, and even if Cole had attempted to get a doctor for her, it was doubtful he could have got through in his car. All Rosie knew of childbirth was watching lambs being born, but even though she partly believed her father when he said Heather was making a fuss about nothing, it didn’t seem right to her that he let her go on and on with that terrible screaming and just stayed downstairs, drinking cider and ignoring her. It was she who finally got help; she trudged through the snow to the vicarage which had a telephone and the midwife arrived a couple of hours later on a tractor.

‘Let’s hope the little bastard is born dead,’ Cole mumbled before he finally passed out in his chair. ‘What do I want with any more kids?’

There had been times in the last couple of years when Rosie had thought of her father’s horrifyingly callous words that night and almost wished Alan hadn’t survived either, because it seemed his birth was the moment everything went finally and irreparably wrong. But Rosie had only been ten then; a baby was like a dolly and she loved Alan from the first moment she held him in her arms.

Cole never took to Alan. It didn’t help that he was small and sickly, crying almost continuously, and that the bitter winter went on and on. But Cole studiously ignored him, and ignored Heather too for that matter, unless he was picking a fight with her. She couldn’t do anything to please him. When the hens refused to lay, it was Heather’s fault. If the stove went out it was because she hadn’t laid it properly. Then in the autumn of 1947, Seth returned from his National Service and added to Heather’s problems with his wet beds, drunkenness and surly behaviour.

Perhaps it was a premonition that Heather would run away too that turned Rosie into a little mother. Once she asked Heather if she would take her and Alan if she left, but the girl just looked blankly at her.

‘ ’Ow can I go?’ she said, her eyes filling with tears. ‘I ain’t got nowhere to go to, Rosie, and I sure as ‘ell ain’t got no money.’

Alan was one, Rosie eleven when her feelings of dislike for her older brothers turned to hatred. She was sent home from school early one afternoon in February because snow was expected. Walking in the back door she found baby Alan screaming his head off in his pram, yet even above that noise she heard something else from upstairs. A banging, thumping sound that chilled her, and before she lifted Alan from the pram she crept up the stairs to investigate.

What she saw was so shocking she almost wet herself, as she shrunk back against the wall on the landing out of sight. The mirror on the wardrobe in her dad’s bedroom reflected back what was going on in there. Twenty-year-old Seth was fully dressed in his dirty work clothes, Heather was on all fours on the bed, her skirt tossed over her back, held there by Seth, his fingers digging into her flesh. He was mounting her from the rear, just like the bull did out in the fields. Seth was grimacing and grunting, Heather was crying, a pitiful heartbroken cry that cut through Rosie like a knife.

Worse still, Norman was standing there beside the bed watching. He was on his National Service then, and had come home on a forty-eight-hour pass the day before, still in uniform. His flies were unbuttoned, he was rubbing himself and urging his older brother to hurry so he could take over.

Rosie had tried hard to blank that memory from her mind, along with the guilt that she didn’t try to do something to stop it. But she’d been so shocked, so appalled that she could do nothing but creep back down the stairs to comfort her screaming baby brother.

She wanted to tell her father, but she was too afraid of what Seth might do to her or Alan in retaliation. She didn’t even dare tell Heather that she had been a witness.

It was only when Heather had run away a year later that Rosie began to suspect her own mother hadn’t been killed in an air raid after all, but had fled for the same reasons as Heather, because she could no longer bear the cruelty of Cole and his boys.

She fully understood why both women had left. She didn’t blame either of them for deserting her, but one thing troubled her deeply. Why did Heather leave Alan behind? Rosie had got home from school to find him still strapped in his pram down in the orchard, screaming fit to bust because he was wet and hungry.

There were good enough reasons to explain why Rosie’s own mother had left her behind. She was six after all and her father’s pet. But Heather knew Cole didn’t love Alan. How could she have left him to the mercy of three men whom she knew to be dangerous and without the slightest interest in his well-being?

Seth had once viciously remarked that Heather was a tart, that she had men in the cottage all the time during the day, and left Alan behind because she’d gone off with a man who didn’t want the kid around. But Rosie never believed it. Heather might have been a little simple, but she had loved her baby.

For a long time after she went Rosie fully expected her to reappear one day to collect Alan when the men were out, but she never did.

So Alan had become, to all intents and purposes, Rosie’s child. Cole paid a couple of shillings a week to someone in the village to mind him while she was at school, he paid for clothes and shoes, albeit begrudgingly. But he took no interest in the small boy and left everything else, including protecting him from the older boys, to Rosie.

Later, downstairs, Rosie laid a blanket on the kitchen table, spread a sheet over it and plugged the iron into the overhanging light. The electricity had only been put in last year and she still thought it was a miracle. It was good to have running water in the kitchen too, but that had been here for two years now, and she’d got used to that. She dampened down her brothers’ shirts and rolled them up tightly while she waited for the iron to get hot, but her mind wandered on to what was going on in the Crown and if Thomas was in there too.

Thomas was in the Crown, tucked into a corner with his second pint of cloudy rough cider. Sam used to talk about this cider all the time in the camp, and although Thomas wasn’t wild about the taste, he felt he owed it to Sam to sup at least three before the night was out.

He’d knocked on the door of the pub earlier in the afternoon after he’d left Rosie and asked if they had a room. Mrs Hilda Colbeck the landlady had been very wary at first. She said she didn’t usually bother with paying guests, unless they would be staying a full week, but she relented when Thomas admitted he couldn’t walk much further. It seemed she had a soft spot for wounded ex-servicemen.

Over a robust dinner of steak and kidney pudding with both Colbecks, Hilda had quizzed him as to why he was in Somerset. Thomas thought it judicious to keep quiet for now about Heather and told them about his friend Sam Gurney and how he’d planned to look around the area before moving on to search for his family in nearby Henton.

With his leg feeling a little easier, and a large dinner inside him, Thomas was now watching and listening to Cole Parker and his sons who’d arrived at about seven-thirty.

He didn’t need to wait for someone to greet them by name to know who the three men were; the moment they swaggered through the door he guessed. All shared the same shiny black hair, dark hooded eyes and swarthy skin. A handsome trio, taller, with wider shoulders than any other man in the bar and a certain dominance that told him they saw themselves as the lords of this particular manor.