Jam and Roses

by Mary Gibson

  ‘Here, Mum, I’ll do it,’ Milly offered. Taking the needle carefully from her mother’s hand, she decided to broach her plan. ‘What if I just go hopping for a week?’

  Her mother began shaking her head.

  ‘Mum, just listen a minute. Southwell’s will let me have a week off unpaid, and what if I promise Dad I can make more picking than I’ll get in wages?’

  ‘Twelve bob? You’ll have to pick ten hours a day to do that!’

  ‘No, I won’t, don’t forget what I do all day! My fingers are twice as quick as yours. I’ll do it easily!’ Her mother must know it was true; everything Milly did was swift and deft. Often when they sat sewing in the evening she would catch Mrs Colman watching her. ‘It’s a wonder you don’t stab yourself, the speed you go at!’ her mother would say.

  ‘So, Mum, will you ask him?’

  Mrs Colman shifted in her seat and Milly felt a blush rising to her cheeks, feeling cowardly for asking her mother to do it. But if she suggested it herself, he would never listen.

  Her mother considered for a long moment, while Milly’s blush deepened. She was praying silently her mother would agree.

  ‘I’m not promising nothing, so don’t get your hopes up. But all right, I’ll ask him.’

  Milly dropped the darning, and flung her arms round her mother, squeezing her tightly. ‘Thanks, Mum,’ she said, kissing her on the cheek.

  ‘That’s all right, darlin’, I know how you love it down hopping.’

  Sitting her rangy body on her mother’s lap, she hooked her long legs over the arm of the chair. Milly rested her head against her mother’s as she had when she was small.

  ‘Get off me now, you’re squashing me half to death, yer great lump.’ Her mother shoved her off, but not before planting a kiss on her cheek.

  Milly suffered a whole week of gnawing anxiety, while her mother waited to pick her moment. It wasn’t until the hopping box was full to bursting and the day for the family’s departure to Kent had arrived that Mrs Colman found the courage to speak to the old man. It was Saturday afternoon, pay day, when her father felt rich, with his suit out of the pawnshop and a pocket full of change for his bet and beer. They were all sitting round the kitchen table after their dinner of mutton stew, one of the old man’s favourites. Milly gave her mother a meaningful look and a small nod towards her father. The old man didn’t approve of talking at the dinner table and propped a little bamboo cane by his plate, to keep his children in order. She and Amy had long ago learned to keep their thoughts to themselves at family meals. Elsie’s knuckles, however, were permanently bruised, as a sharp rap from the cane regularly failed to halt her unruly thoughts from tumbling out. Milly’s mother took a deep breath, and her cough broke the silence.

  ‘Me and the kids’ll be going tonight then.’

  The old man grunted, ‘Well, make sure you’re quiet, I don’t want you waking me up at two in the morning.’

  Milly thought it highly unlikely that anything would wake him after his Saturday night pot full, and anyway, the family knew the drill so well, it was like a military operation. They’d be out of bed just after midnight, last-minute items packed into the hopping box and the girls bundled up in layers of clothing. They would creep out of the house, in time to catch the four o’clock ‘hopping special’ train from London Bridge. The old man never usually stirred.

  ‘I was thinking it’d be good if Milly could come for a week, though, it would do me a turn, helping with the kids,’ her mother said lightly.

  Clever Mum, Milly thought, don’t for an instant let him know how much I want to go. Her father said nothing. His thick, leather-tanned fingers rolled the cane back and forth across the table.

  ‘I’ve already told you, woman,’ he barked, ‘she can’t go, we need her wages!’

  Milly jumped. ‘But I’m the best picker down there. I can earn more than twelve bob, easy!’ she blurted out.

  The old man’s coal-dark eyes lit with a slow burning ember, then suddenly the cane flashed in the air, whipping down across her hand. Stifling her cry as pain shot up her arm, she stuffed her hand under her armpit. The two younger girls sat stock-still and her mother shook her head imperceptibly. The fight was over as far as her mother was concerned, but for Milly it was only just beginning.

  That night she didn’t sleep. As her sisters’ breathed and snored beside her in untroubled slumber, Milly lay awake, watching the moon move slowly across the sky. At two o’clock the door to their bedroom creaked open and her mother crept over to the bed.

  ‘I’m sorry, love, once he’s made up his mind...’

  ‘Don’t worry, Mum, you did your best.’ Her mother had taken hold of the damaged hand, and Milly winced. She hoped he hadn’t cracked any finger bones, for her work depended on her nimble fingers. She eased herself out of bed, nipping across the freezing lino, to pull on her stockings and clothes. She’d promised her mother she’d help get the box and her sisters to London Bridge. If she couldn’t go herself, she’d still have the thrill of the excited crowds as they jostled along the platform, jamming themselves and all their chattels into the too few carriages. She helped Amy get her things together, but the child was sleepy and truculant, and as Milly brushed her hair the younger girl squealed. ‘You’re hurting me.’

  Milly tapped her on the head with the brush. ‘Shhh! You’ll wake him up, then you’ll be staying behind with me! Do you want that?’

  Amy shook her head and followed meekly as Milly led her sisters gingerly down the creaking staircase to the kitchen, where their mother had a single candle burning. Bundled into their coats, they left quietly, Milly carefully closing the front door behind them. Their mother took Amy’s hand and Elsie followed with a bundle of clothes under her arm, while Milly trundled the hopping box through the silent, moon-streaked streets, past Dockhead to London Bridge.

  Once in Tooley Street, they joined scores of other families making the same pilgrimage. It seemed as if all the women and children of Bermondsey were being spirited away by some pied piper of the hop fields. The station was boiling with families milling about, trying to keep together, desperate not to lose either children or luggage.

  ‘Elsie, where’s Elsie gone?’ Their mother’s eyes searched the jostling crowd. Milly, tall enough to see above the surrounding heads, spotted her sister standing before a poster advertising a seaside holiday in Ramsgate. Three beautiful young women in flowing summer dresses, with wide-brimmed hats and parasols, were perched frivolously on the promenade railing. Elsie was staring intently. Milly elbowed her way through the crush and caught her by the arm. ‘What are you doing? Do you want to get left behind?’

  ‘Milly, look, perhaps they’re sisters, don’t they look like us a bit? Wouldn’t it be lovely to go to the seaside, instead of down hopping?’ Her unfathomable, almond-shaped grey eyes stared up at the poster. Milly couldn’t tell if she was being deliberately provocative. The beautiful girls in their expensive dresses didn’t look anything like the ‘set of jugs’ from Arnold’s Place.

  ‘Don’t be so ungrateful, you’re lucky to be going at all! Just think of me staying home with him.’

  Elsie grimaced and shuddered, as Milly hauled her back to her mother. Soon the smell of the stoking boiler and the shrill hoot of the train whistle pierced their goodbyes. Milly hoisted the hopping box up into the carriage, kissed her mother and waved as the train moved out with a final, mournful hoot. She stood on the smoke-wreathed platform till the last of the train’s trail of steam had completely disappeared. Then, heavy with a sudden loneliness, she turned her feet towards the house in Arnold’s Place, which, without her mother or her sisters, could never be called home.

  4

  Home Comforts

  September 1923

  ‘Where’s the soap?’ The old man’s growled question wasn’t entirely unexpected, but still it made Milly jump. She was in the kitchen, frying sausages on the range, and pretended not to hear him.

  ‘Where’s the soddin’ soap?’ he bellow
ed again from the scullery.

  Her father had come home from work and gone straight to the sink to scrub himself clean, as he usually did. She’d carried in the required kettle of water, making sure it was tepid rather than boiling hot as he normally liked it. Then she left him to it, while she cooked his tea. She’d hidden the soap earlier.

  ‘Comes to something a man can’t get a wash in his own house!’ She heard him banging around in the cupboard beneath the sink. She could imagine him, braces hanging down, long-john sleeves rolled up.

  ‘What have you done with the soap? For chrissake, gel, can’t you even make sure we’ve got a bit o’ soap?’ His voice was getting louder; she wasn’t sure how long to leave it.

  She poked her head into the scullery.

  ‘No soap? Oh, Mrs Knight come to borrow some. I’ll run and get it back. Tea’s on the table.’

  She lifted her coat from the peg in the passage and slipped out. She intended to be gone a while. Let him stew. She knew he would never eat until he’d scrubbed his hands. Let his dinner get cold. She couldn’t be held to blame for his fastidiousness.

  She’d been waging her own little war for almost three weeks now, ever since her mother and sisters had gone to Kent. It had occurred to her that she might as well make him regret his decision to keep her at home, and if she was persistent and brave enough, she might make his life so uncomfortable that he’d be forced to change his mind. She cooked him inedible meals, let the fire die down and hid the poker, made sure his long johns were left damp and his shirts unironed. One evening when he was late for the pub he’d grabbed the flat iron from the fire himself, brandishing the red-hot metal in her face. For a moment she feared he might brain her, but instead he’d spat on it and started smoothing his best shirt himself.

  ‘What’s that mother of yours thinking of, not teaching you how to use a flat iron! You’re worse than useless, yer dozy mare.’

  And this evening, she hoped the disappearing soap might tip him over the edge, perhaps even force him to concede that life would be much more pleasant without her around. With a small surge of satisfaction, she felt the bar of soap nestling inside her coat pocket. She decided to walk to Bermondsey Wall and back. By then he should have left for the pub and the inevitable consequences of her defiance would at least be postponed. Strolling to the end of Arnold’s Place, she turned back past the Swan and Sugarloaf and down the stiflingly narrow Hickman’s Folly, towards the river.

  It had been one of those balmy September days that could have been high summer; pure hopping weather, she’d thought wistfully, every time she’d looked out of the high factory windows. Now, as she approached Bermondsey Wall, the narrow streets threading their way towards the river ended, here and there, in breaches between high-walled warehouses. Suddenly she saw the Thames. At least here was some space and a view of the sky.

  By the time she reached the river wall, it felt as though she were struggling for breath. These last weeks with the old man had felt like a prison sentence and she longed to break out, to find some air. She went to the small wooden jetty, protruding between the wharves. Walking to the end of it, she leaned against the sturdy wooden railing, silvered with age. She had felt its sharp edge pressing into her back as Pat pinned her there, with the moonlit river behind her. Why, she wondered, did she submit to those kisses, which so often left her unmoved? Perhaps it had to do with that hollow pit of loneliness inside her, which had deepened since her mother and sisters had left. She didn’t want to hurt Pat, but there was something she was meant to be feeling, which she was not. If she ever managed to join them down hopping, perhaps she would try to forget about Pat and let him drift away as softly as the tide now running beneath her feet. She scanned the green sweep of river, all the while taking great gulping breaths of sharp air. Downstream, towards Greenwich, she watched as huge, billowy white clouds sailed like floating ships above the water. Upstream was the long V-shaped inlet of St Saviour’s Dock, after which Dockhead was named. Milly had learned in her history class that once, long ago, this whole stretch of riverside had been home to the Folly Gardens, a pleasant place on the banks of the Thames where fashionable city dwellers from across the water could exchange the stink of the city for sweet air and cooling river breezes. But that distant past was not in evidence now. The Folly had seen too much wretched life for that, and Milly thought it was unlikely ever to be a garden again.

  The tooting of a lorry horn jolted her back to the present.

  ‘Does your mother know you’re out?’

  ‘Pat!’ She jerked round to see him, with that familiar cheeky smile, half leaning out of the cab window, and hoped he hadn’t noticed her blushing at this interruption of her secret disloyal musings about him.

  ‘Me mother’s down hopping, as well you know!’ she called back.

  ‘How’s the old man today?’

  She shook her head, turning back to the river.

  ‘No wonder you’re looking sorry for yourself.’ He jumped down from the cab and came to join her on the jetty. He had always been a stocky young man but now, as he leaned his muscular arms next to hers on the wooden railing of the jetty, it was obvious how the lorry driving was filling out his physique. When Pat wasn’t moonlighting, his daytime job was to deliver to and from Butler’s Wharf. He had a small lorry yard nearby in Shad Thames and was a familiar sight making deliveries around Dockhead.

  ‘Ain’t you going down at all this year?’ he asked, offering her a cigarette.

  She shook her head. ‘Not for the want of trying. I’ve been making his life a misery this week. But he’s not budging,’ she said, pulling a face.

  ‘I’m going down meself at the weekend,’ he said, drawing deeply. ‘Taking a few of the husbands down in the lorry. Why don’t you come with us?’

  ‘What, in the lorry with the men?’

  ‘You’ll be in the cab with me. You won’t come to no harm!’ He laughed and flicked ash into the fast-flowing tide below.

  Many working husbands visited their wives in the hop fields at weekends, but the journey there usually turned into a drunken beano.

  ‘I’m not worried about that, I can take care of myself!’ Milly pulled herself up to her full height. At seventeen she was already a little taller than Pat, and lugging around seven-pound jam jars had given her arm muscles a docker would envy. Sometimes she found her strong frame an embarrassment and now, suddenly self-conscious, she wrapped her arms tightly around herself.

  ‘Thanks for the offer, Pat, but I’d have to work on the old man, and you know what he’s like.’

  Pat chuckled. ‘Oh, I know! There’s a good reason why Wilf pissed off at sixteen to join the army!’ Her youngest brother had volunteered during the last year of the war, lying about his age, but Pat had no such patriotic tendencies. Instead he’d stayed home and done pretty well from his black-market dealings. He threw his cigarette end into the river. ‘I expect he’ll drive you out too, one of these days.’

  He squeezed her shoulder sympathetically, giving her a quick kiss on the cheek, before jumping back up into the lorry. ‘Just let me know before the weekend. We’re leaving Saturday morning, meet outside the Swan at eight.’

  ‘Thanks, Pat, I’ll let you know.’

  When the lorry was out of sight she turned for home and smiled. Pat’s offer of a lift had given her a glimmer of hope. She’d been wishing for wings to fly away, but if escape came in the form of Pat’s lorry instead, who was she to argue? Perhaps Pat wouldn’t be drifting away from her on the tide after all.

  Back in Arnold’s Place, the old man was gone and the sausages were congealing on the plate. She inspected them gingerly. She was hungry herself, but even her normally healthy appetite couldn’t face them; she’d burned them black. They went into the dustbin and she went up to bed to wait for the old man to come home, hoping that when he did roll in, he’d be too drunk to drag her out of bed for the hiding she knew would be coming. When the front door finally opened and he stumbled upstairs, she was gratified to
hear him tumble all the way back down again.

  ‘Good, hope you break your bloody neck!’ she muttered silently and turned over.

  Next morning, she made sure she was up and out of the house before him, but he caught her that evening as she walked through the door. His fist hit the side of her head, spinning her round across the kitchen before she even had time to register his presence. He must have been waiting behind the kitchen door. Normally she was home first and if she’d had some warning at least she could have run, but now he had her.

  She tumbled over one of the chairs and now lay sprawled in front of the fire, face down on the rag rug. She felt his boot in her side, lifting her over on to her back. He leaned over her, his face red with rage, poker in hand. She rubbed the side of her head. She might have taken this without complaint if her mother had been home because it was always her mother who ultimately paid the price for any rebellion on Milly’s part. But now some demon of defiance rose up.

  ‘I see you found the poker.’ She grimaced. She had hidden it in the scullery, knowing how addicted he was to his ritual of poking and prodding at the fire when he came in. Nothing annoyed him more than not being able to find the poker.

  ‘Think you’re effin’ clever, think I don’t know what you’re trying to do?’ he said, swiping the iron down towards her. But before it could smash into her ribs, she shot out a hand, twisting the poker from his grasp. Jumping to her feet, still dizzy from the blow to her head, she tried to judge which way to run. He stood facing her, his taut frame trembling with anger. She was as tall as him now and somehow that realization gave her the strength to stand her ground. She pushed him even further.

  ‘Southwell’s said I can have next week off—’