Annie Murray, author
Birmingham Rose
An exceptional first novel… Chronicle
For Rose Lucas, a spirited, intelligent girl, born into a large family in the slums of pre-War Birmingham, life is limited and hard. But through her friendship with Diana, daughter of a vicar from middle-class Moseley, she learns to aspire to a different and better existence and vows never to become a child-bearing drudge like her mother.
However, life seldom follows the way of dreams. After a childhood marked by tragedy, she eventually finds and loses the love for which she has striven so hard. From Italy, to where she has travelled with the ATS during the Second World War, she is forced to return to Birmingham and an unhappy marriage, her hopes and illusions shattered.
Finally, after further struggles she leaves the beloved city of her childhood as it rises from the ashes of its bombed devastation. For the powerful spirit of Rose will not be defeated…
The vivid and lyrical first novel by an author whose passion shines through her moving and heart-warming saga.
Writing the book
This was my first Birmingham book and when I began researching it I was very much starting from the beginning. Many older people in Birmingham had vivid memories of living in the ‘back-to-back’ houses round the centre of the city. Inevitably some memories were warm ones, of neighbourly care, of doors never being locked and happy times. Others remembered poverty and harshness. By the early 1990s when I started these neighbourhoods had disappeared almost without trace. Fortunately now the few remaining houses next to the Hippodrome Theatre have been restored. But I wanted to write about those cramped homes and crowded neighbourhoods, about what might be treasured but why someone might also long to escape.
At that time I was very limited in where I could go myself because of having young children, so I drew on what I knew. My father was a soldier in Italy in World War II and I had been there many times I managed to go to the south of Italy for three days, to Naples and to the palace at Caserta, which was the army HQ down there... Travelling and finding the story developing as I did so was a wonderful experience. And so when I got home, I finished writing Rose’s story with all its joys and sorrows. It is still one of my favourites.