Read Online Family of Women by Annie Murray - Free Book Online

all, when had either of them taken any notice of anything she did, so why should he care now? Violet felt strong. She was a woman now, still at Vicars, earning as much as eighteen shillings a week on piecework if she worked overtime. And she had Harry, and Harry wanted her.
    Harry’s father was not at the wedding. He had shown his face a couple of times in the early days after the family had finally turned on him, then disappeared. Mrs Martin gradually relaxed, knowing he was not going to come roaring back in through the door, but she was a nervy woman who depended completely on her sons. Violet saw in her all she didn’t want to be herself, and thought the woman demanded too much of Harry.
    ‘When we’re married, are you going to go and spend every evening with your mom?’
    She asked it teasingly. But Harry’s mother was coming to feel like an obstacle in her way, always so tired and pathetic-looking and forever whining to Harry. He seemed to be round there every spare moment. Although she tried not to feel annoyed and jealous, Violet sometimes couldn’t help it.
    She would have liked to live in a different area, get right away from her mother and Harry’s, and from the sad spectre of Marigold. She dreaded seeing Marigold now. She was eighteen going on forty in her frumpy old dresses and with her lank greasy hair. Bessie had taken to having some of the women in the yard – and men if she could get them – round to play cards in the afternoon, holding court at the table, dishing out tea and anything stronger that was going and eating, forever eating. Lardy cakes were her favourite, and bags of sweets, barley sugar and humbugs. Marigold joined in, bracketed in with the middle-aged, one of those buzzing round her queen bee of a mother. She had no friends her oyedn obslaxe wwn age. All she had was her pretty soapbox full of songs, all scrawled on little scraps of paper. Rosina helped her with the spelling, when she could be bothered. For the wedding Marigold had tried to dress up, and there was something even more heartbreaking about the sight of her with her badly cut hair washed and hanging dead straight, and the dress of Bessie’s which had been taken in for her. Like all her clothes, it aged her and made her look shapeless and sexless like a sack of spuds.
    Rosina was causing trouble now. She was thirteen but, Bessie said, very ‘forward’ for her age, always wanting to make her face up and nagging for clothes and wanting to be out and about. She was a precocious little miss, not like Violet. She stood up to her mother and there were frequent rows.
    ‘You can’t get married, Vi!’ she said when she first heard the news. ‘You’ll leave me here on my own!’
    All Violet really wanted was to get as far away from it all as possible.
    But neither of them wanted to leave Vicars. Harry was already twenty and was champing at the bit to be able to get out and follow his dreams. But he couldn’t go. Not yet.
    ‘I want to see our mom all right first. I’ll have to keep working here for now – that’s all there is to it. We’re young yet – there’ll be plenty of time.’
    Of course it made sense not to rent a place too far away. And being in the Summer Lane area meant wasting no money on tram rides to work. All the money they could put away was for Harry’s dream passage to Australia.
    ‘Let’s get the lowest rent we can,’ Harry said. ‘There’s only the two of us. We don’t need much.’
    So they rented a two-up house in Ormond Street, a back-to-back, on the front facing the street, with no attic. There was the downstairs room and scullery and two tiny bedrooms. For water and the toilets they had to go down the entry and into the yard. Violet looked round it, the first day they were allowed in. The place was in bad repair, great cracks up the side wall, cockroaches and silverfish all over the place. It was gloomy and stank of damp and mould.
    ‘Oh, Harry,’ she said dismally. ‘It’s horrible.