When the Gods Were Human (Book 1)

I Wouldn't Say I Was A Thief

She wasn't so much a criminal as she was simply a thief, but that was her charm. A character straight out of a Dickens novel in her tattered clothing she ran through the streets of poverty and the working class with a few shillings in her pocket and an angry civilian hot on her trail. Dirt and soot caked and stained the worn materials of her clothes making her look nothing less than a child of the workhouses in England. Like all people whose lives we follow, an introduction is required: her name was Rosie. While she couldn't spell her surname--'Rosenthal'--the name 'Rosie' always had to do for the few who bothered to ask. If she didn't have a name, they believed it was easier to treat her as a stray and not as the child she actually was.

Clarification is always best when certain factors about a person are hidden in the shadows, shielded away from the light either by silence or by agenda. In Rosie's case, it was purely by mystery. She didn't know anybody in Liverpool simply because she wasn't from there. If we go a little further up the map of England, Blackpool will be situated not very far from the edge of Liverpool at all. This town named Blackpool was where Rosie was born and raised. Unlike so many children she saw playing on the filthy streets of Liverpool, Rosie never had the fortune to be raised by her parents. At the age of five-and-a-half, Rosie was told by Sister Angelica her parents had died in a car accident. She was found sleeping on the floor in the backseat, still breathing and blissfully unaware. Sister Angelica clarified to Rosie she was only a year and a half at the time--barely a toddler and barely able to remember anything at all. That was fair, Rosie thought. She was so young at the time how would she be able to remember anything about her parents?

Why and how she suddenly found herself stealing for board money and eating every two days, well, clarification is required for that also. Though Rosie couldn't remember anything about her parents, she could remember the orphanage she grew up in all too vividly. Rosie loathed its medieval architecture and values, but most of all she hated the nuns who practised these values. Gliding through the lengthy wallpapered hallways in black and white--very much the thought structure for each of the wives of the Lord--were the Sisters of Saint Valentine's Orphanage for Girls of Misfortune. Rosie's memories of the nuns were painted in black and white as there had been no life or colour in the orphanage.

Every one of the girls was woken on the dot at four in the morning, bathed, fed, then would spend four hours in the classroom and then another four hours completing chores. The supreme ruler of this organisation was Sister Mary Joan: an elderly woman with a straight back, and a permanent frown formed by the wrinkles in her forehead; and the thin lips rarely ever pulled into a smile. If it was, it was more often than not a sardonic smile. Something sinister seemed to brew inside of Sister Mary Joan--something each of the girls felt like tiny, slippery wet eels swimming through the veins.

Inside Rosie's mind, covered by a thick head of black hair but reflected through her coal black eyes, it had been the nuns who drove her to the dirty streets of Liverpool with the money from the offering box stuffed into her coat pockets. What nobody except the nuns and the other orphaned girls knew was the final straw for Rosie was when she had thrown a small bread roll in Helen King's face. Her discipline wasn't the usual twelve minutes before God confessing her sins of unkindness to the wooden carving of a crucified Jesus hung high on the altar's wall. It was to stand on a chair in the foyer and suffer true isolation by being ignored. "Not a word to her, girls," Sister Mary Joan would command. "She has brought this on herself; now she must answer to God."

But in Liverpool... the city was as far as she managed by train, arriving to be greeted by the true image of the war's aftermath. Not only was the city in black and white but in shades of greys, as well; Liverpool had been sucked of any colour in its architecture and streets. How fortunate the colourful people who lived in its streets had retained their sense of humour--the only thing giving life to the city as they tediously worked themselves to rebuild what Hitler destroyed. She had never seen such a starker contrast to Blackpool; memories she had of the rides, the games, and the weekends she spent running across the wooden docks made the difference all the more obvious.