Authors: Mary Gibson
‘That’s broke me dream!’ she said.
Milly hoped it was a short dream; she didn’t have time for one of Elsie’s sagas. Sometimes Milly thought she made them up as she went along.
‘What was it about?’ she asked dutifully.
‘I dreamed you brought a bloody great big meat pudding into the kitchen, dumped it on the table and then started cutting into it, and guess what, when you opened it up, instead of steak and kidney there was a tiny little baby inside, all covered in gravy!’
Milly’s heart lurched. She tried to laugh off the dream, as usual, but her face muscles refused to move. How could Elsie possibly know? She’d only just confirmed it herself. But again, Polly Witch was two steps ahead, for Milly was most certainly in the pudding club, and if she hadn’t been so terrified she might have laughed at the accuracy of Elsie’s dream. But her immobile features were not lost on her sister and Elsie moved slowly over to where she stood.
‘I didn’t know what me dream meant until now. Oh, Mill, when are you going to tell Mum?’
‘Tell me what?’ Her mother had dashed in, and was quickly unbuttoning her coat. ‘You let that pan run dry?’ she asked accusingly, and Milly wished more than anything that her guilty secret was about something so mundane.
Milly nudged Elsie, and she slipped out of the room, unnoticed by her mother. Balling her hands into fists, Millie tried to quell her sickening fear. This was her mother, yet she felt more scared than if it had been the old man. Sometimes it was easier to take a beating than to disappoint someone you loved.
‘Mum, you’d better sit down.’
As Milly broke the news to her, Mrs Colman sat at the table, white-faced.
‘We’ll have to tell the old man,’ she said, smoothing the tablecloth over and over with the palm of her hand. ‘He’ll have to know sooner or later.’
Milly felt sick. ‘Can’t it be later?’ She wilted under Mrs Colman’s disappointed stare. She could swear there were extra worry lines on her mother’s face since she’d told her.
‘Didn’t I warn you about that Pat?’ her mother said. ‘Didn’t I tell you about going up the field with him? I told you not to bring no trouble home to my door. What did you think I meant?’
Her voice broke and Milly looked away, not wanting to meet her mother’s eye. She was more ashamed of letting her down than of any moral lapse, though she knew there would be plenty ready to point that out.
‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ was all she managed.
‘Well, he’ll have to marry you, though if it’s born in June, they’ll all know it’s a hoppin’ baby anyway.’
Milly shook her head. ‘Pat’s not marrying me. He says I should get rid of the baby.’ Her lip trembled at that and though she’d told herself she wasn’t going to cry, she did now.
As soon as she’d been sure herself, she’d written to Pat in prison. His reply shouldn’t have shocked her, but it did. He knew a man, he’d said, who could do it; he’d send her the money. She wondered if he’d suggested the same thing to the girl from Rotherhithe. Her vanity had convinced her that Pat loved her, and she’d even resigned herself to marrying him. But he’d referred to the baby as ‘it’, a problem, not a tiny being who would forever be intertwined with her, whether born into the world or not.
Her mother crossed herself. ‘
Jesus
, Mary and Joseph, don’t say such a wicked thing, you’ll go straight to hell.’
‘Not much different from here then,’ Milly muttered. A burning smell reached her as the saucepan began to spit and crackle. ‘The pan’s boiling dry,’ she said, and went to top it up with more boiling water.
As the steam rose, Milly imagined herself sitting in the old tin tub, hot water scalding her body, with a bottle of gin in hand. She’d often heard the other jam girls talking about such ‘home remedies’, and perhaps in her desperation she might have tried something like that, but the cold butchery Pat had in mind was something that filled her with dread. Perhaps she should just tell the old man and get it over with; she’d let him knock her to kingdom come and do the job for her. She groaned; she didn’t know what she wanted.
‘Do I have to tell him tonight? I’m meant to be going to the Settlement.’
Her mother looked at her sharply. ‘Your Settlement days are over, love, a baby’s a full-time job. You’ll have no time for clubs. You’ve made your bed, you’ll have to lie in it.’
She couldn’t bear her mother’s muted disappointment. Her father’s rage, when it came, might well be easier to counter. She was about to throw on her coat and make her escape, when the door opened and he walked in.
‘What’s she doing here?’ he addressed her mother.
The old man persisted in the fiction that she lived elsewhere. They rarely saw each other in the house, and, in her imagination, he had grown much larger and more forbidding. But now, his actual, beery presence steeled Milly. It was time to gather in the Kentish hop harvest; like it or not, a hopping baby was on the way and she would have to face the consequences of her own stupidity. She let the coat slip from her shoulders.
‘I live here!’ she said defiantly. ‘And what’s more I pay rent and board for the pleasure of sneaking about in me own home.’
‘I said,’ he spun round, swaying, ‘what’s
she
doing in my house?’ Suddenly his foot slipped from under him, his bloodshot eyes widened and, grasping for a handhold, he crashed back into the range, toppling the panful of scalding water down his trousers. He screamed.
Milly leaped to shield her mother, who had been spattered with boiling water too, and now sat frozen in shock. The old man rolled on the floor, grabbing his burned leg, howling loud enough to bring the two younger girls running down from the bedroom.
Milly sped past them into the scullery, ‘Out me way, you two!’ She filled a jug with cold water, dipped a cloth in it and rushed back. Swiftly wrapping her mother’s arm in the wet cloth, she doused the old man’s leg with water. It pooled around her feet and as her mother still hadn’t moved, Milly bent to help the old man up.
‘Get off me!’ He flailed his arms at her, as though she were the devil who’d sent him to a burning hell, instead of his own flesh and blood. She flung the enamel jug at him. ‘Suit yourself, you ungrateful bastard. I’m only trying to help!’
Grabbing her coat, she fled out into the street, knowing that whatever happened now, she would never bring a baby into this house. She ran to the end of Arnold’s Place, weaving her way through back alleys and courts towards the river – her haven. She passed Southwell’s jetty where she used to meet Pat, but that was the last place she wanted to go. She ran along Bermondsey Wall, between high warehouses, beneath gantries, glimpsing the river between the dark wings of cranes, eventually coming to the Fountain river stairs. She clattered down them two at a time, slipping on their coating of slimy green algae. Teetering to a halt on the very last step, she took a gulping breath of musty riverine air.
The tide was out. Olive-green sludge, studded with stones, spread out before her, but she dare not step on to the river mud here, where its sluggish-looking water masked a treacherous current that could turn in an instant and sweep her away. She scanned the river. To her left, the fortress-like turrets of Tower Bridge were visible, and all the way from the bridge to where she stood, strings of unmanned tethered barges bobbed and banged each other. The occasional tug chugged against the tide, but at this time in the evening the river traffic was beginning to diminish. Only when she knew she was completely alone did she let out a long, despairing howl.
‘Oh, Milly, what have you done! It’s all ruined!’
She screamed at the swooping gulls till she was hoarse, and raved at the deep, indifferent Thames. Mourning her life, which had only just begun, yet which already felt wasted. So often the wide, calm river had been enough to absorb her youthful rages, but this time there was no comfort in its slow-moving waters. On Tower Bridge, she could see the early evening traffic trundling across its outstretched arms and the tiny, unheeding pedestrians hurrying back home for their untroubled teas. She wished herself to be any one of that anonymous crowd. Dusk was draping a gentle, violet gauze between the solid towers of the bridge, and the top walkway stood out, a black filigree. A good place for a suicide, so they said, and for a moment, Milly’s pain at the loss of her future seemed to call out for some equally drastic remedy. She sat down on the damp step, breathing in the musk of the ooze below her. Leaning her head on her arms, she wept.
When all her tears had been spent, and the cold damp had reached her bones, she stood up, brushed off the back of her coat and wrapped her arms tightly around herself. She wiped her face with her sleeve. Nobody was coming to save her, least of all Pat Donovan. The only person who could help her was herself. Perhaps the river had done its work after all, for as she started to walk slowly back towards the Bermondsey Settlement in Farncombe Street, she felt a grim calm enfold her, and she knew what she must do.
It was too early for the sewing circle, but people were already going into the Settlement building. It was a soot-stained Victorian Gothic mansion with two wings and a central tower, at the base of which was the pointed-arched entrance. Oriel windows protruded from its grimy facade and clusters of elongated, brick chimneys twisted into the smoky air. The interior had the polished, studious calm of a Cambridge College, with wood-panelled lecture rooms and a carpeted music room. There was a gym and a courtyard where, when she was younger, Milly had joined in the hearty drills, designed to strengthen rickety bones.
The place was as much a missionary endeavour as any of those in darkest Africa, and the Colmans, though Catholic, were, like many other poor Bermondsey families, not too proud to benefit from the free doctors, free meals or country outings provided by the Wesleyans. But for Milly, the main attraction had always been an indefinable sense of possibilities, not glimpsed anywhere else along Bermondsey Wall. At the Settlement, she was allowed to make a garment, simply because it was beautiful. Elsie could sing harmless country airs of harvests and hedgerows, just for the sheer fun of it, and each May Day, Amy could whirl round a maypole as if Bermondsey still had a village green. Yet on this particular cold January evening, as she approached the Settlement, that sense of possibilities had deserted Milly entirely.
She mounted the steps with head down, lost in her own thoughts, and therefore didn’t see the man just in front of her. He pulled open the door, stepped back, and collided with her. Apologizing, he turned, raising his brown trilby hat to her. She saw recognition spark in his blue eyes and he raised an eyebrow.
‘Milly? From Arnold’s Place?’
Seeing him out of context had confused her, but now she realized it was Hughes the grocer’s nephew. Usually she saw only the top half of him, wrapped in his white grocer’s apron. Tonight he was dressed smartly in a brown tweed suit and polished brogues.
‘Yes, that’s right.’ She smiled. ‘Sorry, I was in a world of my own. I don’t think I’ve seen you here before.’
He opened the door to let her through. ‘Haven’t you? I’ve been coming to lectures here ever since Uncle Alf put me in charge of the Dockhead shop. Actually, I’ve seen you here a few times, girls’ club, isn’t it?’
Milly gave him a non-committal nod. ‘Sewing.’
She really didn’t remember seeing him here, perhaps because their paths had only crossed when she’d turned up blind drunk and insensible. Suddenly she felt hot with embarrassment at the thought of him witnessing her in that state. She stood in the doorway, aware of his quizzical eyes upon her, unable to tell if he was judging her or laughing at her. She blushed.
‘Well, don’t let me keep you from your sewing. Give my regards to your mother.’
He strode off towards the lecture hall, brown brogues clicking on the parquet flooring. She stood for a moment, with a feeling that she had been let off, and walked thoughtfully towards the sewing room.
She was the first to arrive. Kitty wasn’t coming as she was helping her mother to nurse Percy. ‘Spoiling him rotten, she is,’ Kitty had said, though Milly knew that she was the worst offender when it came to indulging her little brother.
Milly went to the cupboard, where their sewing materials were kept, and pulled out her latest project. It was a rather grown-up-looking shift dress for Elsie, who, at thirteen, had finally been persuaded by Milly to abandon the childish frilled pinafores and ribbons she favoured.
Miss Florence Green glided noiselessly into the sewing room.
‘You’re the early bird!’ she announced and, startled, Milly dropped Elsie’s half-finished dress, along with assorted bits of material. Miss Green helped her gather them up, and they spread them out on the central work table. Milly thanked her, letting out an unconscious sigh.
‘Whatever’s the matter, Milly? You don’t seem your normal cheerful self.’
It was now or never, and Milly couldn’t afford to be proud. ‘Truth is, Miss Green, I came early so I could have a word with you, before the others got here. Only... I might not be able to come to the club for much longer.’
‘Oh, Milly, why not? I thought you loved sewing!’ She sounded genuinely disappointed.
‘I do, I do, there’s nothing I like better, but... well, I might be... getting married.’ Milly was ashamed of her own cowardice.
Florence Green smiled. ‘Well, that’s not a problem, Milly!’ She put her arm round Milly. ‘You’ll just have to join the mothers’ meeting!’
‘I never said anything about being a mother!’ Perhaps Milly’s protestation was too vehement, for comprehension suddenly dawned on Miss Green’s mild features.
‘Oh, my dear girl, this is not like you, not like you at all!’
Miserably, Milly picked up an oddment of material, wiping away a solitary tear. Not like her at all? No, she’d always been so proud of her ability to take care of herself, hadn’t she? Strong enough to fight off any man, yet weak enough to be swayed by one tender kiss. She was as much a fool as any other girl who got herself into trouble, and she hated the look in Miss Green’s eyes that confirmed it.
‘Is it Pat Donovan you’re going to marry?’ Miss Green asked gently. She sat down next to Milly and took her hand.