Jam and Roses

by Mary Gibson

  ‘You’re not going back!’ Milly was engaged in a tussle with Mrs Colman, who insisted on returning to Arnold’s Place the morning after the flood.

  ‘What else am I going to do? Sit here and let me home go all mouldy?’ Her mother was already putting on her coat. ‘Amy!’ she called upstairs. ‘Ain’t you up yet?’

  Amy was exhausted after her ordeal during the flood, which had involved carting every one of her mother’s few possessions up to the bedrooms. As the water level rose in Arnold’s Place, surging up the passage and eventually pouring through the front window, she’d waded back and forth to the scullery, retrieving as much food as she could.

  ‘Oh, let her have a rest, Mum. You should too, just for today.’

  ‘Amy! Stop sweatin’ in the bed, get up and fetch the bundle!’ Mrs Colman shouted up the stairs.

  Milly heard protests from upstairs, but eventually Amy appeared. The bundle proved to be a pair of curtains, containing most of their wardrobe, together with the penny policies and the framed photos of their brothers and the three sisters.

  ‘I had to save the photos, couldn’t leave me boys and me set of jugs behind!’ her mother said, carefully cleaning the bespattered glass with her coat sleeve.

  ‘I hate that bleedin’ photo. Look at the state of me, dress all tucked up! You should have let Milly shorten it,’ Amy said to her mother, quickly pushing the photo back into the bundle.

  Ignoring her daughter’s jibe, Mrs Colman picked up her bag.

  ‘We’ll help you clean the house up. Just sleep here for a few days,’ Milly pleaded.

  ‘No, it’s my home. It might not be much, but I want to go home, thanks, love.’

  So, in the end, Elsie was left looking after the children, while Milly went with them to Arnold’s Place. They spent the day sweeping out vile-smelling green mud, scraping it from walls and scrubbing cupboards with carbolic soap. The lino had to be thrown away, but eventually some semblance of normality was restored. Still it was obvious, by the end of the day, that the downstairs would take a long time to dry out and her mother and Amy would have to live upstairs until it did. Elsie and Bob couldn’t possibly stay there, and though it wasn’t a prospect she relished, Milly realized that, when he found out, Bertie would immediately offer them a home at Storks Road. She’d been hoping for a chance to get to know her sister again, and it seemed she would be getting her wish sooner than she’d expected.

  Over the next few months Milly’s predictions proved true, and neither Elsie nor her new husband were able to find work. Even with Milly’s influence at Southwell’s, her sister wasn’t taken on, and although Elsie was convinced it was because of the stigma of Stonefield, Milly knew better. Tom Pelton had told her the girl simply wasn’t strong enough for long hours in the boiling or picking rooms. He’d suggested it would be cruel to take her on, when he knew she couldn’t cope, though Milly suspected economic necessity played its part along with compassion as he simply couldn’t afford to take on dead weight. With machines increasingly taking over jam processing, even topping and tailing was now automated, so those girls who were taken on had to be built like workhorses.

  Fragile Elsie would never make a jam girl, and it was Milly who finally hit upon the idea of something else she could do. For though Stonefield had robbed her of much, it had given her three things: a husband, a love of gardening and an ability to sew. True, it had been mostly flat sewing, but her hours in the asylum laundry had included making aprons and overalls, as well as sewing sheets and pillowcases.

  ‘What about helping me and Amy in the Common Thread?’ she asked Elsie one day in early March, when the girl had exhausted every factory in Bermondsey in her search. Up until now Elsie had shown no interest in her sisters’ enterprise, other than to be grateful that it bolstered Milly’s income enough for her and Bob to live rent-free at Storks Road.

  ‘I know sewing’s not your cup of tea, but...’ Milly began, half expecting Elsie to pull a face at an activity she found boring, and to turn her down flat.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ Elsie said, in an instant. ‘Poor Bob hates not paying his way.’

  Bob had found that Bermondsey had very little use for gardeners. In a borough of thirteen hundred acres, the only open space to speak of was Southwark Park, and it had a full complement of groundsmen already. He’d managed to get some odd jobs in the local churchyards, but even though he was willing to do anything, so were a thousand other unemployed men. Even if Milly sometimes questioned his sanity in marrying Elsie, Bob, it turned out, was a thoughtful young man, who insisted his dole money go into the common kitty, which fed and housed the family at Arnold’s Place as well as Storks Road. Though he had no obligation to them, he’d immediately made himself one of the family. He was as different from his brother Freddie as chalk from cheese, but in one respect they were identical – they both had the same generous heart.

  Bob and Bertie now went out together every morning, either to Butler’s Wharf, hoping to be called on, or following leads for any odd jobs that might crop up. But as far as Milly was concerned, Bob earned every bit of his keep, for since his arrival, Bertie’s spirits seemed to have lifted. Perhaps it was just that he wanted to buoy up Bob who, never having been out of work, suffered great humiliation at his first visit to the labour exchange. But she suspected it was easier for Bertie, now that he was not the only male in the household unable to provide for the family. Having company might have diluted her husband’s sense of failure, but Milly worried for him still. It was almost two years since Bertie had been in full-time work and she wished that, with her fabled strength of hand, she could simply wrest him from the grip of this monster that the newspapers were beginning to call ‘the Great Depression’.

  Milly spent her evenings teaching Elsie how to sew the simple shift dresses that were still fashionable. With their unfussy, straight lines they were easy enough to make, and if there was a collar or a bit of fringing required, Milly added them afterwards. The two sisters would go to the Settlement together and Florence Green let them use the machines for buttonholing and fancy stitching. Her sister was a docile pupil, hemming and tucking exactly as she was instructed, but without the enthusiasm she showed when working with Bob in the Storks Road garden, for Bob had turned half of it into a vegetable plot. Milly hoped that as she and Elsie sewed together and lived together, or as Elsie helped with her children, there might at least be some thawing between them. But her sister, though polite and grateful, stayed distant and Milly remained, she knew, completely unforgiven.

  It was a fact she couldn’t escape. It faced her at the breakfast table, it faced her as they did the laundry together, snapping the sheets tight, holding each end and folding them concertina-like till they met in the middle, when, inches from her sister’s face, Milly could still get no answering look from Elsie, who was as cold as the day she’d returned with the flood.

  It was a day they had been waiting for. After the winter deluge and a damp spring, the reluctant summer arrived in a flush of sweltering days and thick humid nights. In the boiling room at Southwell’s, the heat, always intense, now threatened to melt Milly into a cloud of strawberry-flavoured steam. When Saturday afternoon came, determined not to spend a moment longer indoors, she hurried back to Arnold’s Place, dodging her way down shaded alleys and across sun-slatted courts, assailed by the concentrated scent of humanity oozing from close-packed, overheated streets. She needed air, and the nearest place to find it was by the river. Though much of this stretch of the Thames was hidden behind blank warehouse walls, there were secret stairs and alleyways, down which the locals could find a clear stretch of water, a shingle beach and a vaulted sky, entirely innocent of slate and brick. Now, as she collided with some boys chasing each other to Horsleydown river stairs, she knew she wasn’t alone in the desire for a cooling breeze off the Thames. Every house in Arnold’s Place had windows and street doors open and, outside, most women sat on chairs, chatting to neighbours across the narrow alley or watching their children play m
arbles or alley gobs on the hot paving stones.

  A musty smell hit her as she entered the dim passage of her mother’s house. Even though five months had passed since the flood, the walls were still damp. Sunlight striped the new lino that Milly had bought for the passage and she made sure she left the street door wide open, to let in the drying warmth of the day.

  ‘Anyone at home?’ she called to the seemingly empty house.

  ‘We’re in the backyard,’ her mother called.

  It was a fenced-in, airless square of cobbles, which seemed to cut the sky above it into a cube. A foot of earth down one side, which her mother named the ‘mould’, was dotted with self-sewn love-in-a-mist and Welsh poppies, the blue and yellow splashes brightening an otherwise workaday patch, dedicated to the outside lavatory, the big old mangle and the oval tin bath. This last object, which was usually hanging on the fence, had been taken down and now Jimmy was sitting at one end of it, with Marie at the other, while Elsie and Amy took turns pouring jugs of water over them, each dousing bringing forth excited squeals for more. Her mother sat on a kitchen chair, seemingly unconcerned that her slippered feet were being periodically soaked as water spilled over the edge of the bath. Sun bounced hotly off the wet cobbles, painting them with liquid gold.

  Milly was greeted with a wet embrace from Jimmy and an indifferent splash from Marie, who at two years old was taking over from her brother in stretching Milly’s patience. Now four, Jimmy had returned to a state of grace. His untroubled eyes seemed always to be observing the world closely, and his observations had turned him into a mimic. He could make them laugh with impressions of Father Mallone holding forth from the pulpit and he had learned to ape Amy’s version of the Black Bottom dance, which she practised endlessly in the kitchen. Always a pretty baby, now his head of fair hair and broad smile drew answering smiles from strangers in the street.

  ‘Anyone fancy coming to the river with me this afternoon? If I don’t get some air I’m going to faint.’ She flopped on to her mother’s lap in mock exhaustion.

  ‘Gawd, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, get off me, yer great lump!’

  ‘Yer great lump!’ Jimmy mimicked.

  Her mother said she preferred to stay at home and Amy was going out with friends, but Elsie seemed anxious to escape the confines of the backyard, so after their dinner, they set off with the children for the jetty at the end of Southwell’s Wharf. When they arrived the river was low, leaving exposed a narrow band of muddy foreshore, studded with mossy stones, broken bricks and pebbles of ground glass, which tinkled like bells beneath long rippling waves that moved in with the tide. The wooden struts of the jetty dripped with strands of emerald-green algae, and long loops of iron chains clanked with every passing boat.

  ‘Ohhh, that’s a lovely cool breeze!’ Milly smiled, narrowing her eyes against the glare off the water. Her gaze followed the chains to a group of covered barges, moored six deep, which formed a floating platform reaching far out into the river.

  ‘Can I paddle?’ Jimmy asked, his hand wriggling to escape Milly’s firm grasp.

  ‘No, we’ve got Marie in the pram,’ Milly said.

  But seeing his disappointed face and unable to refuse him anything, Elsie said quickly, ‘Oh, let him. I’ll take the pram on the jetty.’

  As Elsie walked to the end of the wooden pier, Milly helped Jimmy descend the slippery river stairs to the little patch of uncovered muddy sand. She stood just out of reach of the small curling waves, watching while Jimmy happily splashed, barefooted, up and down the foreshore. In the shade of the river wall, where the sun never reached, there was a damp chill, at odds with the bright blue sky and Milly, after ten minutes in its shadow, stepped out into the sun again.

  ‘Come on, Jimmy, let’s go up on to the jetty, eh?’

  Jimmy ran away, splashing and giggling, till she caught up with him and swept him up on to her shoulders.

  ‘Gee up, donkey!’ he said, patting her head.

  Once back on the jetty, she and Elsie sat with their legs swinging over the edge, watching a group of boys running across the covered holds of the barges, leaping from one vessel to the next. When they reached the furthest barge, they stripped to their underpants, if they had any, or went naked if not. Then, throwing their white-limbed bodies off the barge in careless fluid dives, they disappeared for alarmingly long periods, only to re-emerge far off, like sleek-headed seals. Then they clambered back on to the deck, pausing only to flick their wet hair in arcing sprays before diving back in.

  ‘What are they doing?’ Jimmy asked. He was lying flat on his stomach, staring intently at the group of boys. Milly held his ankle and prepared to give him the lesson all riverside children received and habitually ignored.

  ‘They’re jumping the barges. But they’re being naughty boys, because it’s dangerous and you must never ever do that, hear me?’

  ‘They’re naughty.’

  ‘They are.’

  ‘What are they doing now?’ he asked.

  Finally tiring of their game, several of the boys had moved to the back of a barge, where they’d uncovered the stored cargo of coconuts. With whoops of joy the boys each pulled out a netting bag of coconuts, and holding them close to their chests launched themselves, one by one, off the back of the barge. The buoyancy of the coconuts created ready-made rafts on which they floated downstream to the next group of barges.

  ‘The little buggers are floating on the coconuts!’ Milly said to Elsie.

  ‘Little buggers!’ Jimmy said, pretending to leap on to an invisible net of coconuts, but landing with an oomph on the wooden boards instead. Milly pulled him back by his ankle.

  Elsie laughed and Jimmy lay flat again, putting his eye to a gap in the boards.

  ‘I was always jealous of the boys, being able to swim in the river,’ Milly said. For girls, however strong they were, couldn’t strip off like the boys and swim out into the tide. It wasn’t considered decent.

  Milly was convinced she could have been as good a swimmer as any of the boys, given the chance, but she supposed it was too late to learn now. Only Amy had secretly defied the convention in the days when she had played Run Outs with Barrel and Ronnie. Milly knew she’d joined them in their barge-hopping, and swimming too, for there were summer afternoons when she’d come home with wet hair and a bundle of damp underwear beneath her arm. She’d probably got away with it because, by that time, the old man was taking up all her mother’s energy with his tyrannies. Amy had been allowed to run free like a little savage, in a way that Milly and Elsie never had.

  ‘I never wanted to swim in it. It always looked to me like it was waiting to swallow me up,’ Elsie said.

  ‘Probably because of that boy in your class, you know, the one who got sucked under the barge.’

  ‘The nuns put the fear of God in us about it. I didn’t even want to paddle after that.’ Elsie looked dreamily down into the deceptively sluggish, eddying ripples, as the incoming tide rose rapidly up the wooden pilings.

  ‘I always loved the river. It’s the only place round here you can breathe.’ Milly put her head back, enjoying the breeze lifting her hair. She squinted over the water, sunlight crinkling in watery whorls, revealing the hidden currents, and she remembered the time when she would have let the river take her into its cold embrace.

  ‘There was a time I almost did what you tried to do,’ she said suddenly. ‘You went to the cherry tree, and me... I went to the river. Funny we both went to the place we loved best.’

  Elsie stared at her with a look of disbelief. ‘You?’

  Milly nodded. ‘It was soon after I brought Jimmy home and I didn’t know how I was going to live. I just gave up, but my Bertie saved me, same as Bob saved you.’

  Milly wasn’t sure why she had wanted to tell her secret to Elsie now, perhaps because it was the only thing they had in common, and she was tired of the great gulf between them. But now she saw that her sister’s lip trembled and tears had begun to trickle down her cheeks. Milly leaned over and
put her arms round Elsie. This time the sharp-edged body gave in to her embrace and the two sisters clung to each other.

  ‘Oh, Elsie, I’m sorry I let you down.’ She could feel the front of her dress wet with Elsie’s tears, but her sister shook her head.

  ‘You couldn’t have done nothing about it, Mill.’ Elsie looked up and their eyes met. ‘I know that now. I did blame you for a long time, but Bob made me see sense. It was like they locked up my whole family when they sent me in there, and there’s only the old man to blame for that.’

  Milly cupped Elsie’s face with her hands. ‘Well, the old bastard’s gone for good and you’re safe home now.’

  Jimmy had silently squirmed between them and patting Elsie’s cheek said, ‘Don’t cry, Auntie Elsie, old bastard’s gone.’

  They laughed as they wiped away their tears, and Elsie gathered up Jimmy in a tight embrace.

  After sharing her secret, Milly noticed a change in her sister. For the first time in her life, she’d allowed Elsie to see her as weak, and the revelation, far from calling forth her scorn, had resulted in a common bond. Both sisters now knew that they had visited the same dark depths of hopelessness, and both knew that it had taken the love of another to bring each of them back from the brink. Neither could claim to be stronger than the other, and the sense of isolation they’d felt growing up, islands cut off from each other in the sea of fear generated by the old man, began to dissipate, receding just as the floodwaters had earlier that year. For Milly, it felt as if the dove had finally returned with the olive branch in its beak, and that at last Elsie was her sister again.

  And in the long, dark nights of autumn, as they sewed together, they began to share confidences. One evening while making some baby romper suits that had been particularly popular, Elsie put down her needle, with a worried look.

  ‘Milly, don’t jaw me, but I think I’m expecting.’

  ‘Oh, love, I’m so happy for you!’ Milly’s response was unfeigned. ‘But why would I jaw you? The way you are with my kids, I know you’ll make a lovely mum.’