Rosie Read online

  ‘I expect you wish you had a sister?’ Thomas said.

  Rosie sighed as if in agreement.

  ‘What are your brothers’ names, and how old are they?’

  ‘Seth’s twenty-five, Norman’s twenty-three and Alan’s five.’

  Thomas raised one eyebrow. ‘So Alan was born while Heather was here?’ He thought Mrs Lovell must have got hold of the wrong end of the stick, saying Cole Parker was a widower.

  ‘Well, of course he was, she had him.’

  Thomas stared at Rosie. ‘You what?’

  ‘Clean your ears out,’ she said cheekily. ‘I said of course she was here. She had him! Alan is Heather’s little ‘un.’

  Thomas’s stomach seemed to plummet to the floor like a runaway lift in a movie. He wanted to ask her to repeat what she’d said again, but yet he knew he’d heard it right. He could no more imagine his little sister having a child of her own than he could imagine her flying a plane or going to a royal garden party. If she’d left the child here and skipped off it was no wonder Cole Parker wouldn’t want to talk about her.

  ‘So Heather married your father?’

  Rosie looked at him with an expression somewhere between amusement and bafflement. ‘Marry Dad? Not likely.’

  ‘Then she married one of your brothers?’ It occurred to him that the eldest son must be around the same age as Heather.

  ‘She didn’t marry no one, not while she was here.’

  His stomach plummeted further. Heather getting herself into trouble wasn’t something Thomas had ever considered. The girl he’d carried in his mind all these years had been just a schoolgirl, not unlike the girl in front of him now. It wasn’t right to fire questions of an intimate nature at her, he knew, but he had no choice.

  ‘So who was Alan’s father? Do you know?’

  ‘Dad, of course,’ Rosie said.

  There was absolutely no trace of embarrassment on her young face. It was as if she was unaware of the normal social pressure to have babies in wedlock. Before Thomas could ask her anything more, the whistle of the kettle blasted out and Rosie was off into the kitchen leaving him shell-shocked. He was an uncle!

  ‘Rosie, why didn’t Heather take Alan with her when she left?’ Thomas asked when she came back with two thick china mugs of tea. ‘Didn’t she care about him?’

  ‘Of course she cared.’ Rosie’s voice was indignant. ‘I don’t suppose she had anywhere to take him to, and she knew I’d look after him right enough.’

  ‘Where is Alan now?’

  ‘At school,’ she replied, looking at him as if she considered that a daft question. ‘And you’d better drink your tea and go. I’ve got the ironing to do and a pie to make.’

  Thomas drank his tea. He felt Rosie was telling the truth, at least as far as not knowing where Heather had gone. He decided he would ask questions elsewhere, sleep on the problem and decide what to do about it in the morning.

  ‘Did Heather ever tell you about me?’ he asked her as he got up to leave.

  Rosie nodded. She was shifting from one foot to the other impatiently, but the look she gave him was curiously gentle.

  ‘She said you were clever and that you looked after her when she was little.’

  Thomas sighed. ‘One more question before I go. Did you like Heather?’

  He didn’t really know why he asked this, yet it seemed all-important to him.

  To his surprise and consternation Rosie’s eyes welled with tears.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said quickly, afraid he may have asked one question too many. ‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.’

  ‘I don’t mind telling you,’ she replied in a small, shaky voice. ‘I loved her and I had all the best times I remember with her.’

  A lump came up in Thomas’s throat and he reached out and squeezed the girl’s small hand. Whatever had happened here, if the child had loved Heather, it was almost certain Heather had loved her back. That made him and Rosie allies, and as such he knew he would have to honour his promise that he would keep their meeting secret.

  But it made Heather’s disappearance all the more odd. He wasn’t going to leave Somerset until he knew more.

  At eight that evening, Rosie sat by her bedroom window and allowed herself to think about Heather for the first time in months.

  It was still very warm, the pink sky promising another hot day again tomorrow. She never tired of the view of the moors from her window; she saw it as her extended garden. A heron was standing as still as a statue on the edge of the ditch just beyond the orchard, and a few moments ago she had glimpsed a flash of turquoise which she knew was a kingfisher. Later as dusk fell, an owl would come to perch on the washing-line post as usual, waiting for his supper when mice came out to nibble at the chicken feed.

  Living here on the Levels had taught her how precarious the balance of nature was, and how dependent every single living thing was on the chain of life. If the men didn’t clear the rhynes and ditches of weeds, the fields became flooded in the winter, drowning the livestock, destroying crops of vegetables and the fruit trees. She supposed that was why so many of the people here were tough and brutish like her father and brothers. They had to be, to survive.

  She thought that Thomas Farley must be equally tough and single-minded to have survived that prison camp. She’d read about them and she knew how many men had died in them. Such a strong-willed man wouldn’t go back to London until he had discovered every last thing about his sister’s time here. That made Rosie feel very uneasy. There was an awful lot she hadn’t told him, and maybe she should have curbed her nosy streak for once and stayed hidden.

  Yet deep down she wasn’t sorry she’d spoken to him, not even if it stirred up some trouble. Heather had told her so many stories about her brother, so it was lovely to discover he hadn’t died in the war. Maybe if Thomas could find Heather he’d also help her to take Alan away from here. That would be so good for Alan, and it might also mean Rosie could get a proper job.

  Miss Tillingham, her teacher, had been very disappointed when Cole made her leave school as soon as she was fifteen. She said it was a wicked waste of a fine brain for her to stay at home just to be a housekeeper for her father and brothers. But even Miss Tillingham wasn’t brave enough to express her views directly to Cole Parker. Everyone knew he considered it unnecessary for girls to have anything more than a rudimentary education.

  But Rosie hadn’t quite given up on learning. She always had the wireless on while she worked in the kitchen and she read every newspaper and magazine she could get her hands on. While most girls of her age could only cite King George’s death back in February as the major news of the year, Rosie knew about the ins and outs of the Korean war, the spy scandal with Burgess and Maclean, and even the Mau Mau out in Kenya. One day she intended to be something more than a housekeeper.

  ‘Rosie!’ A high-pitched shriek from Alan startled her.

  ‘What is it?’ she called back, already halfway across her room towards his room next door to hers.

  ‘I can’t get to sleep,’ he bleated.

  Rosie squeezed past her two older brothers’ single beds towards Alan. There was little space in this room. Alan’s camp bed was squashed up against the window, and its position showed what little regard the men of this household had for its youngest member.

  Seth and Norman had grown into carbon copies of their father in the course of the last few years. Their respective two-year stints in the army and the hard manual work of hauling heavy loads of scrap metal had built up their muscles, and they drank and fought like Cole did too. Until such time as Alan showed signs of becoming a thug like them, and took an interest in handling guns, hunting and snaring, Rosie didn’t think they’d ever find a kind word for their little brother. While Cole was merely indifferent to his youngest child and mostly ignored him, the boys actively despised him.

  ‘You should go to sleep,’ she said, sitting on Seth’s bed and leaning over to stroke her little brother’s forehea
d. ‘You’ve got school in the morning.’

  Earlier as she was putting Alan to bed, she’d been tempted to tell him about his Uncle Thomas calling here, just so he’d know there was someone in this world aside from her who was interested in him. But Rosie knew better than to risk telling him something he might blurt out accidentally.

  She looked at her brother now, searching for a resemblance to Thomas, but she couldn’t see one. Alan was a pallid, sickly looking boy with large, sad brown eyes and pale ginger hair. Thomas had sad brown eyes too but that was the only real similarity. In fact Thomas had put her in mind of Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind. A sort of lean, aristocratic, intelligent face, so very different from the ruddy, coarse-featured men around these parts. She thought she remembered Heather saying he was five years older than her, so that would make him about thirty.

  ‘I could sleep if I was in your bed,’ Alan said, his big mournful eyes pleading with her.

  ‘Now you know what Dad would say to that,’ Rosie said gently. Cole had stopped Alan sharing her bed and room a few months back, part of a new regime intended to toughen the little boy up. Rosie always obeyed her father – to do otherwise would be foolhardy – but in this case she had been tempted again and again to disobey him because she knew her older brothers used every possible opportunity to frighten, ridicule and hurt Alan. Trying to get him off to sleep long before they got home from the pub wasn’t a certain way of protecting him from his brothers’ viciousness, but it went a long way towards avoiding it. ‘I’ll read you a story, that’ll make you sleepy.’

  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 a
nd 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.