Rose

My name is Rose. I am seventeen years old. My mother was a nun. She was also my hero. When my mother was alive, I had no desire to know anything about my life. Everything I needed existed within her. She held my world together and gave me the only solid piece of love I ever experienced.

Now that my mother is gone, I can do nothing but search. I went to her old home, the place where she was born. I tended her garden. I spent time with the church minister who knew her, and I began to make sense of my life. This is my story.

I was born during the war. Well, the war had finished, but who knew that the fighting continued? My birth mother was seventeen, and my father was twenty. He lied about his age to fight for the country he loved, and that country destroyed him. He was one of the ‘lucky ones’ who came home, but on most days I think they both secretly wished he hadn’t.

At night, my father would dream. He thought he was back in the war. He fought with my mother in his sleep and he hurt her. He was bathed in sweat and he was sorry. During the day he drank. He fought with my mother and he beat her. This time he was not bathed in sweat, but he was still sorry.

When I was eight weeks old, I was crying. My tummy hurt and I was hungry. My mum was lying on the floor and wouldn’t get up. In her hand was an empty bottle of pills. When my father found her, he flew into a rage. “I risked my life to save you, to save this whole country and this is how you repay me?!” He hit my mother in her unconscious state, and when I cried, he hit me. Again and again. When he realised what he had done, he threw my limp and now silent body into a rose bush, in front of the vicarage, and shot himself in the head with his service revolver.

Nice.