Rosie by Lesley Pearse Page A

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 forehead. ‘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