Rose, the one-eyed doll. She had a soft, stuffed body made of cloth. She had plastic limbs and plastic face. How big was Rose? Oh, perhaps a foot long, end to end, from the top of her wiry, mouse-meets-auburn synthetic hair to the tips of her grubby fat plastic toes. She is long gone, but her sweater is here. A doll’s jumper. At the back of the drawer of the old kitchen table I still use as my desk. Here I am, more than 30 years after I knitted it – and as I pull the little sweater from the back of the long shallow drawer of this old deal table, the Lower Ormeau of the late 1980s comes with it as if newsreel.
Here is the little sweater as bright as my girl against the grim and gritty streets. Stab, stab, in through the bunny-hole. Alleys. Red-brick terraces. Stab, stab, round the big tree. Stab stab. River. Stab. Stab. Streetlights. Stab, stab – a carousel of hard-wired images like photographic slides. Stab, stab and the images click and spool, click-clicking in one after the other, needles, yarn, click-click.
No-one knew quite where it was that Rose appeared from. I don’t know where it is she has gone. Poor dirty old Rose with the baldy patches in her hair; hair my daughter cropped with plastic scissors from the Early Learning Centre, “Look mummy, Rose was to the hairdressers.” Snip. Snip.
I’d knitted a cardigan for my girl and Rose got clothes knitted from leftovers and rag ends, cast offs. Here is the little sweater stuffed at the back of the long shallow drawer, when I am looking for something else. The wool is pilling. Nine bands of colours, four rows per band; navy, a brash tulip yellow, cerise, teal, purple, teal, cerise, tulip, navy. Two rows of each colour, per short stumpy sleeve. It is a simple square blocky shape with a wide boat-neck. Knit a row. Purl a row. Toddler days.
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I know this dolly Rose is same as us, because she only has one eye, same as Nanny, cos she’s only got one eye too.
She’d poke her finger into the gap in the doll’s eyeball, then tilt her backwards so the plastic eyelids would clop closed.
Hush little baby, don’t say a word, Daddy’s gonna buy you a mocking bird. Rose is sleeping mummy. Shhsssh.
I’d sat up long into the night to finish the jumper and trousers for Rose; I wasn’t sleeping anyway. My little girl had wandered and came downstairs to look for me. Now the doll had clothes to cover up her dirty body. To make her look cared for and cared about.
Mummy, Rose is beautiful. Rose has same as me.
After that when my daughter took Rose places, the doll looked cared for too. Rose in a toy pink baby-buggy, Rose in bed, Rose in a little red chair at a little red play table. Rose in a backpack going to the childminder. Rose dragged by one-hand along the footpath the two hundred yards between the childminder’s house and our house – down Hatfield Street, past Renee’s shop, past the playschool and two other houses, to our house. Our house. A house facing the river and beyond the river, ‘across the embankment’, where we never went. And the Ormeau Park, to which we also never went. Our world was smaller than it looked, smaller than we could see.
Those days. The sun rose behind the trees. All autumn, all that winter of 1987 that is what I remember – the sun rising, red, pink, gold, rosy. Cobalt skies too. The orange sheen of streetlights reflecting on the river. Breast-feeding my infant daughter, no curtains on the upstairs bedroom window, dressing and undressing in the dark, propping myself up with pillows at my back, and entering that dream-space of breast-feeding an infant, watching the sun come up. Bed was a mattress on pallets. The cradle was hand-made, carved from wood, and on loan.
We moved into that house 10 days before she was born. A platoon of various members of family descended to clean it. There were dead mice in a bedroom on a carpet so filthy and dusty people had to leave the room repeatedly so the dust settled, before it could be removed. There was cat crap and puppy crap under the bath. There were more dead mice in the hot-press. And in the attic, dead mice there too. It could have been worse of course – live mice would have been worse. Of course.
Eventually the house smelled of bleach.
The palette of colours in that house were variations on a theme of brown, cream, magnolia – the kitchen, the floors, the stairs, doors, the ambience. The bedroom had three different kinds of wall-paper – fragments of more recent paper had been fitted haphazardly around the previous family’s furniture. With their furniture gone the deeper past of the house was visible – more layers of aged floral wallpaper. When the wallpaper was gone, the old plaster came away with it, revealing dust, wooden lathes and across the thinnest separation of lathes, a shallow cavity, and plaster board between our neighbours and ourselves. We could hear them. They could hear us, presumably. Bare light bulbs, bare floorboards, no curtains, but, eventually, the house was clean and we had a roof over our heads. Our own roof, over our own heads. I was twenty-three.
***
Feed, puke, ‘top and tail, ‘pace the floors, baby in a sling. A bokey-okey towel over my shoulder. Dance. Sing.
I danced with her, singing along to Ella Fitzgerald, Tom Waits, Van Morrison, Paul Simon, Fats Waller, Cole Porter. I danced from exhaustion, to beyond it – her eyes were always trained on me, gazing, gazing, gazing. If I stopped moving, she would begin colicky cries I couldn’t bear, so I kept dancing.
There were soldiers on patrol outside our house. I watched, sickened, outraged and passive, as a fresh-faced British soldier crouched on one knee and let the small boys of the neighbourhood view their world, their own streets, through the sight of his gun.
‘Baby-Face’ the little shit, and his spidey wee mates, charmed by a squaddie. The spidey wee mates who spat on our window and smeared the spit and crud all over the glass before running away – laughing spitefully to humiliate, alienate and shame. G’wan ya little bastards. Baby-Face and his coterie of feral friends bound within a handful of streets, between the river and the Ormeau Road, the bridge we didn’t cross. They were gangsters in training – here missis, look, someone’s broke yer back windee. Just lettin’ ye know like, in case joyriders come and take yer car and nick it on ye. Know what I mean like? Am doin’ ye a favour missis’
Kids still played football in the street and swung on ropes in circles on the lampposts, threw bricks. The biggest dimension of life, in any direction, was the sky. A buzzard lit on the path outside my window with a rat it had caught. Buzzards nested in the Gasworks. Rats lived by the river, and sometimes rats lived in the houses or were breakin’ & entrin [sic].
I lay awake at night, listening as cars screeched through the area. I listened to the radio in the mornings – ‘the car was later found abandoned in Hatfield Street…’. I kept the lights off and ghosted round my house in the dark in the night, listening to the boots of people running in the alleyways. There were shots and breaking glass. There were children crying in the night across the shadows, amplified in some way, by the desolation of the neon lights against the cobalt and indigo of the dark – a fitting sound for the murk of coal smoke that hung low in the dampness that hovered over the river.
There was always laundry hanging about – a melancholic trail between the bedrooms upstairs and the kitchen downstairs, clean promises, soon soiled, a chore that was never ended. A clothes horse laden with babywear and towels and bedlinen, in the living room – the warmest part of the house to dry. Clean and dry laundry on its way up the stairs. Soiled stuff – puked on, shat on, peed on, leaked on, migrating towards the washing machine and the kitchen.
Our house had door-lock so flimsy the door blew open with any stiff breeze, with a sharp kick, or with a slim arm through the letterbox. There were notes through the letterbox from paramilitaries, oh, you know……..kind of warning notes of the consequences of ‘anti-social’ behaviour – subtext = your antisocial behaviour (petty theft, car crime, etc) will be dealt with by our more deadly/more sadistic, even more anti-social behaviour, (punishment beatings/ knee-capping/ assassinations in back alleys) so don’t fuck with us. Or else.
Knitting. I was alone with the baby so often and in the house so much when I wasn’t working, that I focused all the limits and containment of my hours into short hypnotic sharp stabs with the needles, my shoulders hunching into stiffness; stab the bunny hole(s)/ big tree(s). I was fast at knitting, and relentless; the effect was mind numbing, and I needed that. We lived the same day over and over again, or so it seemed. And time passed anyway.
Our neighbour had an Alsatian dog in her tiny back yard. It barked day and night and she shouted at it, day and night, ‘get-inna-bed’. We also began shouting at it too. Sometimes that worked, and it would shut up because we’d shouted to tell it to stop barking. In the three years I lived in that house, I only ever saw that dog once.
****
Eight house moves, two daughters, two marriages, three dogs, three cats, one divorce, nine jobs and a redundancy, further on. Rose the dirty old doll, is long since disappeared. The little sweater was also worn by a teddy, somewhere along the timeline, but it is also gone.
Here is the desk. Here is me. It was our dining table then. Desk and dining table. The old deal table. Three planks make up the top of it, scored with woodworm tracks, knots, watermarks, burn marks, ink stains. It is a few inches too low to work at comfortably, but I do it anyway, as I have done, off and on down the years.
On my daughter’s 32nd birthday, I moved a sofa and rearranged the entire furniture in my living room, so I could get to sit at this table again. It was in the bay window of the living room – a place for a vase of flowers, a lamp; filling space behind a sofa, present, but otherwise not visible. I have another desk – a modern one in a study, beside a window, with a proper angle-poise lamp and a computer, with a printer adjacent… but it was so cluttered with reminders of unfinished business I needed away from it. I wanted… something.
The doll’s sweater was in the drawer, along with a bag of old coins and bank notes from different countries of the world, a box of staples, memorial cards of my father and grandmother, an aunt. Things gathered, surviving house moves and long periods in storage. Pencils, numerous pens, erasers, sharpeners, bulldog clips, old redundant credit cards, matches, tealights. Things I found in the street – a toy centurion’s helmet, a dinky yellow lorry, the slim plastic limb of a Barbie, a green plectrum with the imprint of a dachshund. And there, stuffed at the back of the drawer the stripey sweater I’d knit for Rose.
I had begun to write a diary to my daughter when I was pregnant.
1987. Little Baby Bunting a man is killed walking down the street by a bomb exploding in the litter bin outside a toy shop/ Daddy’s gone a-hunting and will be shot dead drinking tea in a hotel/ to buy a wee rabbit skin/ knifed while watching TV in his house. He was a Protestant, but the perpetrators thought he was Catholic/ to wrap the Baby Bunting in/ shot dead while putting out his dustbin. This Little Piggy stayed at home/ bathing her children, shot nine times, in her bathroom, in front of them. This Little Piggy cried, wee wee wee wee all the way home/ abducted while sleeping in his bed Roll Over, Roll Over/ to be dumped, dead, on the border/ Hickory, Dickory Dock/ a woman and her son waving good-bye the mouse ran up the clock/ at the front door. Humpty Dumpty / had a heart attack and died after a bombing, Row Row Row Your Boat shot in the head/ The wheels on the bus go / Incy Wincey Spider climbing up the / Ten Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed/ Ten Green Bottles/ and Four Green and Speckled Frogs/ A Lady Went to London on a Pretty Foal/ In through the bunny-hole, round the big tree/ Miss Molly had a Dolly who was sick-sick-sick, so she called for the Doctor to be quick, quick, quick.
Just one month’s murders. I brought a child into this. Hush – a-bye
I sang nursery rhymes /Hush -a- bye baby
I knitted clothes for dolls /On the tree top
I fed my infant daughter /When the wind blows
I stopped writing the diary / the cradle will rock
I stopped / when the bough breaks
I went to work /the cradle will fall
the island town of Enniskillen eleven dead
I was angry and powerless and sad. I was afraid / and down will come
I was sorry, " I am so sorry……. I am so, so, sorry…….’’ /baby
I made a home. And I re-made home, again and again and again. / cradle, and all.
Casting off. Stitch, stitch.
Stab. Stab.
Maria McManus is a poet originally from Co Fermanagh
