Authors: Mary Gibson
Milly leaned over and whispered in her mother’s ear. ‘A new dress
and
sheet music? Where d’you get that sort of money?’ Her mother shot her a puzzled look, then shushed her. Elsie was about to start. She gave a nod to the pianist, who launched into ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’. It was a favourite of Elsie’s and she looked confident, her dreamy eyes gazing into the far distance as she began the yearning verse:
‘I’m dreaming dreams, I’m scheming schemes,
I’m building castles high. They’re born anew,
Their days are few, just like a sweet butterfly.
And as the daylight is dawning,
They come again in the morning.’
But as she came to the end of the verse, Milly saw Elsie glance nervously at the pianist. She almost missed the cue for the chorus and while Milly was aware that her own palms had begun to sweat, a sheen was now clearly visible on Elsie’s brow as she swallowed hard and began the chorus.
‘I’m forever blowing bubbles, Pretty bubbles in the air,
They fly so high, nearly reach the sky,
Then like my dreams, they fade and die.’
Now Milly could feel her mother shifting in her seat. ‘Gawd,
Jesus
, Mary and Joseph, he’s playing it too high!’ Mrs Colman hissed.
Now Milly understood what was wrong. Elsie had never sung with sheet music – she’d always pitched the song lower to suit her own contralto voice, invariably reaching the top note effortlessly. But now as it approached, in this unknown register, it was a much more daunting prospect. ‘
Fortune’s always hiding
,’ she ploughed gamely on, ‘
I’ve looked everywhere
,
I’m forever blowing bubbles
...’ As the high note was upon her, poor Elsie looked despairingly at her mother’s reassuring face. From the front row where they sat, Mrs Colman was mouthing ‘You can do it!’ But it was obvious to Milly that her sister certainly could
not
do it. ‘
Pretty bubbles...
’ Milly could see disaster fast approaching and knew of only one way to avert it. She jumped to her feet and in the strong soprano that she’d inherited from their mother, she belted out the high note without fault, lingering over the last phrase ‘...
in the air!
’ Holding it for the longest time, she covered her sister’s faltering, cracked voice with her own. It brought the house down. The applause was tumultuous and the crowd stamped their feet and bellowed for more as Mrs Colman, wrapped in her old brown woollen coat and squashed black hat, stood up to join her two daughters. The threesome sang together, all the way to the end, when Milly and her mother sat down, letting Elsie take the bows.
Elsie’s idol, the locally beloved music hall performer, Matty Gilbie, was the judge of the competition, which explained to Milly why Elsie had so wanted to be wearing a new dress. The elegant young singer, after handing out the first three prizes, announced a special award for the artist with the best supporting act. And although Elsie hadn’t won the competition, she certainly looked happy enough as Matty Gilbie called her up on to the stage to receive her consolation prize. While her sister stood there curtseying, Milly had to admit that perhaps Elsie had proved Bertie right. If life gives you what you expect, then why not expect the best?
Milly waited for her outside the Star with her mother and Amy, but when Elsie emerged from the stage door, all her smiles for Matty Gilbie had faded and she met Milly with a scowl.
‘Trust you to steal me bloody thunder!’ She grabbed Amy by the arm and swept past Milly, with her chin tilted defiantly.
‘And there I was thinking I’d done her a favour!’ Milly said to her mother.
‘Well, shit’s yer thanks, love.’ Mrs Colman summed up her feelings exactly.
She linked arms with her mother as they made their way through the happy Saturday afternoon crowd and turned the corner of Abbey Street, back into Arnold’s Place.
‘What did you have to pawn to get her that dress and the sheet music?’ Milly asked.
‘Pawn? Nothing. I thought you’d given her the money?’ said Mrs Colman, giving her a puzzled look. Milly shook her head. ‘She asked me for it, Mum, but where would I get money for a dress like that?’
‘Well, if she never got it from you, then where the bloody hell
did
she get it?’
On the following Monday, Milly dropped off Jimmy at Arnold’s Place before work, as usual. She left him outside, tucked up asleep in his pram, and went into a house that looked as if a steam train had ploughed through it. She stood at the door, immobile, unable to take in the devastation. She forced her feet to move, picking her way over kitchen chairs, reduced to kindling. Her skirt caught against the upended kitchen table and her feet crunched on the shattered remains of a glass gas lampshade as she walked to the sideboard. Both sideboard doors had been ripped off, and all her mother’s ill-assorted china plates and cups had been pulled out and smashed into pieces around it.
Finally, she found her voice. ‘Mum!’ she called tentatively, then with fear grabbing her throat, she shouted, ‘Mum, where are you?’
From behind the upended table came a whimper. Milly looked over it, to discover her mother cowering there, with hair dishevelled and wearing a torn, dirty pinafore. In her lap she cradled protectively her set of willow-pattern china jugs, which she had somehow managed to save from the surrounding destruction. She looked as though she hadn’t been to bed or changed since Milly had last seen her.
‘What’s happened?’ Milly asked, dry-mouthed, kicking away broken plates to kneel beside her mother.
‘Oh, we’ve had murders, I don’t know how he hasn’t killed her,’ her mother said hoarsely. She handed each of the jugs to Milly, with trembling hands. ‘Here, put ’em safe.’ And Milly did as she was told, finding an unbroken shelf on the sideboard.
‘Killed who, Mum?’ She guessed this was the old man’s handiwork, but who had been the target?
‘Don’t you go and do anything like last time! You’ve got a baby to think about now.’
As if in answer to Milly’s question, Amy crept in from the scullery, dressed, after a fashion, for school, with a pale unwashed face, a bruise ripening on her cheek and hair sticking out at all angles.
‘What did you do to upset him?’ Milly asked her sister. But Ellen Colman shook her head. ‘It’s not her.’ Her mother’s shoulders began to shake and, swallowing her sobs, her garbled words began to tumble out all at once.
‘He’s dragged Elsie down Tower Bridge nick, this morning. Oh, Milly, I can’t let them put her away, you know what she’s like. They’ll make mincemeat of her in one of them places.’
‘What place? Mum, slow down and tell me what’s happened.’ She took hold of her mother’s hands, trying to focus her own mind as much as her mother’s.
But Mrs Colman buried her head in her hands and began rocking back and forth. ‘Oh, me poor baby, Mill, she’s never been fitted for this world, has she? With her silly games and her grottos, don’t seem fair she was born in a place like this.’
And her mother, so rarely angry, so perpetually stoical, picked up one of her broken china plates and smashed it into a hundred more pieces on the cold hearth. Milly put her arms round Mrs Colman’s heaving shoulders and held her while she cried, as if Milly were the mother and she the child.
Eventually Milly coaxed the story from her. On Sunday evening when the old man rolled in from the pub, he’d attempted in vain to light the gas lamp. When he’d gone to investigate why the gas had run out, he’d found the meter empty and the lock broken. Dragging the family one by one from their beds to find the culprit, he’d proceeded to bounce each of them round the kitchen until eventually Elsie broke down and admitted her crime.
‘He kept us up all night, Mill, making us watch him smash the place up. Then this morning, he’s done no more than marched her out the house and up the station. Oh, me poor Elsie, what am I going to do?’
Milly couldn’t believe that Elsie had the necessary criminal mind even to contemplate such a thing as robbing the gas meter. She
could
credit that she’d have no thought for the consequences, however.
‘Mum, are you
sure
it was Elsie did it?’ She took her mother by the shoulders and looked meaningfully in Amy’s direction.
‘She’s admitted it. Blamed you, in fact! Said when you wouldn’t give her the money, she decided to nick it.’
Milly felt a surge of anger at Elsie, but she still couldn’t see her having the cunning to carry out the crime.
‘Did you tell her to do it?’ She shot an accusing look at Amy, whose face crumpled.
‘Why are you always trying to blame me? All I did was tell her Barrel showed me how to get money out of the meter.’
‘And you told her how to do it?’
Amy nodded, shamefaced. ‘I didn’t think she’d be stupid enough to do it, though!’
It all made more sense, now that Amy’s anarchic mind was in the mix, but of course, with her usual quicksilver survival instinct, she’d escaped the punishment, or at least most of it, the bruise on her face a testament to her loss of immunity at the hands of the old man.
‘Oh, Elsie, Elsie...’ Milly addressed her absent sister. ‘Mum, if I’d had the money, I would’ve given it to her!’ she said, feeling guilt’s stealthy hand grip her heart.
And her mother said, ‘Of course you would have.’
By this time Amy was crying as much as her mother, then Jimmy, perhaps sensing the distress coming from inside the house, joined his wailing to theirs.
‘All right, the pair of you, turn off the water taps!’ Milly ordered, realizing that she would have to start thinking clearly. ‘It’ll be all right. We’ll just have to make sure the police know it was a mistake. Amy, go and fetch Jimmy for me and, Mum, you’d better sweep up all this broken china.’
Her mother heaved herself up from the floor and shook her insubstantial frame, glad to be upbraided. ‘You’re right, love. No good crying over spilt milk, is it. You get yourself off, or you’ll be late for work.’
‘It’s all right, I’ve got five minutes,’ Milly said more gently.
After settling Jimmy and brushing Amy’s hair, she promised her mother she’d be back at dinner time to sort everything out. But, as she raced to clock in on time at Southwell’s, she realized she hadn’t a clue how she would manage to save Elsie from the jaws of this particular trap.
All morning she was distracted, several times splashing herself with boiling jam and once nearly tipping a whole cauldron full over the feet of the forelady, who sent Milly to do jar washing as punishment. When the dinner-time hooter sounded, she bolted like a horse from the stall and almost ran past her mother, waiting outside the gates with Jimmy.
‘She’s not come home and neither has he.’ Anxiety scoured Ellen Colman’s face, and she licked cracked, dry lips. She had obviously been chafing all morning, and Milly wished now she’d simply abandoned work and gone to the police station first thing. She stroked her mother’s hand as it gripped the pram handle.
‘You’ll make yourself ill worrying. Come on, I’ll take the afternoon off, just let me go and tell Tom Pelton, then we’ll get her home, all right?’
‘Thanks, love, I don’t think I could stand to wait another hour.’
But in fact they had to wait much longer than an hour. The reception desk at Tower Bridge police station was busy, and there was a long queue to see the desk sergeant who, when they arrived, was interviewing a broken-toothed, bald-headed man, loudly declaring his innocence. They joined the back of the queue, but Jimmy was restive, struggling in her arms, catching her anxiety. The sergeant, noticing Milly trying to pacify her hungry, crying baby, interrupted the bald man.
‘Young lady, why don’t you take the baby into that empty interview room?’ He indicated a door to the right of the desk. ‘It’ll be a while before I can get to you.’
So while Mrs Colman kept their place, Milly fed Jimmy in the clinical, airless interview room. It contained nothing more than a table and two chairs. Only a meagre light filtered in through the high barred window. As Jimmy nestled against her breast, Milly looked around, wondering if Elsie had been interviewed here. How frightened she must have been. Even at fourteen, she was still such a child. Milly tried not to think about the old man. What he’d done to Elsie had rekindled that old, slow burning hatred and if she allowed it to take over, she might very well end up in a cell beside her sister, on a far worse charge. As Jimmy suckled steadily, his dark almond-shaped eyes were like twin anchors, preventing her from whirling off in a torrent of anger which, deadly as a Thames current, threatened to suck her under.
‘That’s right, me little darlin’,’ she addressed him softly, ‘you’ll keep me out of trouble, won’t you?’
She rejoined her mother and eventually they reached the front of the queue, where Milly explained, as calmly as she could, that they had come to take home her sister Elsie.
‘There’s been a mistake, and me dad’s jumped the gun. She didn’t rob the gas meter, did she, Mum?’
Her mother stepped hastily forward and in the voice she reserved for priests and policemen, backed Milly up. ‘I should like to say, my daughter is innocent as the day is long, Sergeant, as her father well knows!’ But, as she warmed to her subject, her mother’s true voice betrayed her. ‘Honestly, she ain’t got a bad bone in ’er body, ’as she, Mill?’
And Milly nodded vigorously.
The sergeant looked at Milly, not unkindly; she
was
holding Jimmy after all. But his look was too tinged with pity for her liking, and Milly grew uneasy as he avoided her mother’s gaze, and addressed her instead.
‘Yes, madam, I know the girl in question.’ He looked down at his pad and coughed. ‘’Fact I was at the desk when she was brought in by her father. But I’ll have to ask one of the detectives to speak to you about it, miss. I can’t just let her go.’ Dropping his voice, he added, ‘Though having seen her father... if it were up to me... well, I’ll see what I can do.’
He got up and disappeared down the corridor. Mrs Colman was fidgeting at Milly’s side. ‘What’s he mean, he can’t let her go? You said if we explained we could get her out?’