Authors: Mary Gibson
September 1924
Bertie was adamant that she should go. It was surgery night at the Bermondsey Settlement, when philanthropic lawyers, doctors and councillors would come and give free advice to anyone who turned up between the hours of seven and ten.
‘You’ve got to take it further, Milly, and your best hope is with Francis Beaumont. I know you thought he was too young, but just because he’s a volunteer doesn’t mean he’s second-rate. He’s in top chambers at Lincoln’s Inn. You shouldn’t go by appearances.’
Milly sighed. Perhaps he was right and she had been too harsh on the young man. ‘Well, perhaps nothing would have got through to that judge. I tell you, Bertie, he’d already made up his mind about what sort of family we were. And that’s what sticks in my gullet, to think he condemned my mother as unfit –
my
mother!’
Bertie pushed his chair back from the table. In the two months they had been living in the same household he had, she noticed, found ways to stem the flow of some of her more vehement emotions. He was not one to be swept along by anybody, and he quickly brought her back to the subject in hand.
‘Ask Florence to go in with you. She might be able to give Beaumont a better idea of the family situation. After all, he only had one night to prepare. And Florence thinks highly of him...’
And from some of the looks Francis Beaumont had given Miss Green, Milly thought, the feeling was mutual, so if Bertie did have any ideas where the woman was concerned, he’d better get a move on and do something about it. But all she said was ‘
Florence?
’ Then smiling mischievously at his blush, she felt immediately guilty when he said, ‘I’ll stay in and look after the boy.’
‘But it’s your lecture night!’
‘Oh, I can miss this one, it’s Councillor Stevens on the new dustcarts.’ He paused. ‘I expect it’ll be a load of old rubbish.’ And he lifted his eyebrow in anticipation of her laughter. That was the unexpected thing about Bertie – however silly the joke, he could always make her laugh.
Back up in her room, Milly dressed carefully. She wanted to give a better impression to Francis Beaumont than she had on that heart-wrenching morning in court. She’d been too distraught to care about what she wore then and she must have looked a wild woman. But now, realizing that her family, as well as Elsie, was being judged, she was determined to show Mr Beaumont that they were respectable. She took out her best outfit, a low-waisted, coffee-coloured dress, with a cream collar and pearly buttons down the front. She’d bought the material from her favourite stall in East Lane, the end of a bolt, which most people could have made only a cushion cover from. But she made her own patterns from old brown paper, and had a knack of eking out the last square inch of material. The buttons had come from a pair of long gloves picked up at the Old Clo’. She loved the way the soft pleats of the skirt allowed her shapely legs all the freedom they needed for that long stride of hers. And when she had the impulse to break into a sprint, she knew she wouldn’t be hobbled by a too-tight skirt. But tonight there would be no sprinting; she would be ladylike. She slipped on her low-heeled, strapped shoes and tucked her dark waves beneath a cream, close-fitting hat.
‘What do you think?’ she asked Bertie, offering herself to view. ‘Could Mr Beaumont mistake me for a lady?’
Bertie sucked on his pipe and for a moment she thought she’d made a mistake in her choice.
‘Should I change it for something plainer?’
‘Strike me dumb, no! You look lovely, Milly, every bit a lady, I should say, though you don’t need to dress up to prove that to anyone,’ he said emphatically, beginning to pick at his pipe.
She smiled uncertainly. Was that just a meaningless compliment? But no, as she set off for the Settlement, she decided that Bertie was simply a very kind man, one who was never blinded by the judgements of the world. Where others would only see a common factory girl with a bastard child, he could look at Milly Colman, and really see a lady.
But after half an hour with Miss Green and Francis Beaumont, Milly realized that she would need more than a smart outfit and a smattering of hope to get Elsie’s conviction overturned.
‘What if I could pay? You know, for a full-time lawyer?’ she ended by asking.
Mr Beaumont shifted uneasily in his seat and glanced at Miss Green, who’d readily agreed to accompany Milly. The surgery was held in a small music room and they sat at a folding table, squeezed between an upright piano and a line of music stands. Chairs had been stacked against one wall and propped in a corner stood a cello. This was the room where Elsie had learned the quaint old folk songs of wandering country lasses, of springtime and harvest, and Milly understood for the first time why Elsie loved them. It was for the same reason she herself loved hopping – both provided an escape to a gentler world, softer on the eye and heart than Bermondsey’s grimy brick and smoke.
‘Miss Colman?’ She hadn’t heard a word Francis Beaumont was saying. She pulled her gaze away from the cello. ‘I’m afraid the fees are ridiculously high, Miss Colman. I doubt they would be within your means.’
‘But if I
could
find a way to make some extra money, would it make any difference if we got a proper... I mean a full-time lawyer?’
He shuffled some court papers and sighed. She noticed blue shadows beneath his eyes; tonight he looked older. ‘I don’t think I should give you false hope about your sister, Miss Colman. You’re welcome to hire someone and I could give you the name of a senior partner, but I fear you’d be wasting your money.’
‘So I’ve got to sit by while my sister’s stuck in an asylum, for God knows how long, and the old man – my father – can knock us all black and blue and never get had up for it? It don’t seem fair to me.’ She stood up, smoothing down the coffee-coloured dress and holding out a hand.
‘I’m grateful for your help, Mr Beaumont, thank you.’
‘I’m sorry I couldn’t do more,’ the young man said, and she saw him already pulling out papers for his next visitor.
Florence Green walked her out. The queue outside the music room had grown since she’d arrived, and each face seemed to reflect her own feeling of powerless resignation. She hoped they felt better than she did after their interviews, for Milly had felt hope drain so completely from her that now she felt weak, as though water ran through her veins instead of blood. She fixed a smile on her face and began to thank Florence Green, when the older woman suddenly hugged her.
‘Don’t be too downhearted, Milly. There’s always hope, there is!’
They had reached the outside stone steps, and a dribble of people hurried past them, late arrivals for Councillor Stevens’ lecture on new refuse practices in the borough. She knew Miss Green meant well, but even with all her experience of working in Bermondsey, what did she really know of being trapped by poverty in a life without choices, without power, without influence? She
chose
to live here; Milly and her family had no such choice.
She shook her head. ‘Nothing changes. If I’d walked in there with a thousand pounds, would he’ve told me there was no hope? Look at it!’
Her voice trembled with emotion as she flung a hand in the direction of the surrounding streets, some of the worst hovels in Bermondsey, huddled, vermin-infested courts and crumbling back-to-backs, with families of nine or ten living in one room. Light was locked out by hulking warehouses on one side and a mass of rooftops on the other. Its life-sapping, oppressive leaching of her spirit made her lightheaded, and suddenly she found her legs giving way beneath her.
Florence Green caught her before she slumped to the floor and, supporting her down the steps, led her to the back of the building where a little garden had been planted. They sat together on a wooden bench, as evening bleached the riverside sky to duck-egg blue and rose pink. Sounds of boys drilling in the exercise yard came to them on the wind.
‘Breathe, Milly, breathe deeply,’ Florence said, an encouraging hand on her back. ‘You’ve had a hard time of it over the past year. It’s no wonder you feel the strain of this, but it’s not all on your shoulders, you know?’
Milly lifted her eyes enquiringly to Miss Green’s.
‘Sometimes the answer comes, from out of the blue.’ Florence lifted her eyes to the pale green sky, just beginning to glow with gold. ‘We don’t deserve it, we may not have even worked for it, but sometimes, out of the blue, the answer to our prayers comes.’
Milly had never thought Miss Green a beautiful woman. She was too sad for beauty; too many tears for the dead fiancé lying in a Belgian grave had washed the glow from her cheeks. But tonight she looked beautiful.
‘Francis wouldn’t tell you this, but he is probably the best lawyer you could ever get, even if you
had
a thousand pounds. He’s brilliant, Milly, absolutely brilliant.’
When Milly ventured a look into the woman’s eyes, she realized that Bertie’s hopes were all for nothing. Francis Beaumont had obviously been the answer to Florence Green’s prayers, if not her own.
‘Well, if the best the law can offer can’t get Elsie out, then I suppose I’ll have to rely on the Lord God himself. Better get down to Dockhead Church and say a few Hail Marys. That should please me mother!’ Milly managed a smile, thinking of Mrs Colman’s dogged faith and her determined belief that one day Milly would turn into the good Catholic she’d always wanted her daughter to be.
‘Pray, yes, do that, Milly, but don’t forget to dream. You told me to look at all this.’ And again the woman lifted her eyes, this time taking in the soot-encrusted walls and endless roofs that surrounded the Settlement. ‘But soon this whole place could be a garden!’
Milly snorted. ‘Soon? What, when God lets Adam and Eve back into Paradise?’
‘Sooner than you think, if our Dr Salter’s dream comes true,’ she said, more serious now. ‘He wants to sweep all this away and build cottages, with gardens for everyone!’
The image captured Milly’s imagination. The saintly doctor was campaigning for re-election as their Member of Parliament and his vision for a beautiful Bermondsey was beginning to take hold. For a moment she tried to imagine flowers where there were filthy courtyards, and trees breathing green amongst the surrounding factory chimneys. The image hovered like a mirage and then was gone.
‘Our Elsie is a dreamer,’ she said finally, ‘and look where it’s got her.’
She left Florence Green sitting in the little garden, but all its brave daisies kindling like yellow flames in the setting sun now seemed to Milly like fool’s gold, hopeless cases. How on earth could they breathe in this soot-laden air? If she didn’t get to the river soon, she felt that she too might die from lack of oxygen. Her breath was tight in her chest as she walked towards Fountain Stairs; she hadn’t been there since the night Bertie found her. She hesitated, but couldn’t stop there. Turning the other way, she walked towards Dockhead instead, thinking she might go to the jetty near Southwell’s, but again memories of trysts with Pat barred her. She decided to go to see her mother in Arnold’s Place. Immediately she heard her mother’s voice, ‘misery loves company’, but nevertheless she set off briskly, stretching her legs against the soft pleats of her dress. And though she’d vowed not to run tonight, she broke into a slow lope, taking the back way along Bermondsey Wall, beneath cranes and loading bays, edging deeper into the canyon of purple shadows between warehouses, until, finally emerging near Dockhead, she slowed to a more sedate walk.
Arnold’s Place was full of life, in the evening warmth. Women sat outside their houses on kitchen chairs, chatting to neighbours across the narrow paving, feeding their babies, calling out to the children playing round the gas lamp outside Mrs Knight’s to keep their noise down and being ignored. As Milly approached, she realized she’d been spotted. Amy, playing in the crowd, animated, unaware, was obviously the leader of the little troop and was giving her orders, pushing her index finger into Barrel’s chest.
‘You’re it! Everybody, run out!’ But she was stopped by another girl, who pointed to Milly.
‘It’s your sister.’ Milly heard her audible whisper. ‘She looks like that film star Clara Bow, but taller!’ The girls in the group turned their admiring eyes on Milly, who was suddenly aware that, at eighteen, she must seem to them like a grown-up woman. But even with a baby of her own, she seldom felt grown-up.
‘My old man says she looks like a slut,’ Amy said matter-of-factly. ‘Come on, run out!’
And they were off, scattering like a hunted tribe, hiding from Barrel, whose task would be to find each one before they could return ‘home’ to the old tin can placed on the pavement beneath the gas lamp. Milly remembered playing the game herself not so many years ago; ‘Tin tan tobbernopple, one two three, I see Amy coming to me!’ If Barrel could intercept the others with those words, while furiously banging the tin on the ground, he would have ‘captured’ them, and if they reached the tin before he’d finished, then they had ‘vanquished’ him. It was a game that could last for hours, sometimes a whole day. Amy wheeled past, pretending not to see her, but Milly grabbed the girl’s arm.
‘Is the old man home?’
Amy snatched her arm away. ‘Nah, he’s out on the piss.’ And she shot away like a whirlwind, leading with her chin as she always did when running, eager for the next moment, mind on nothing but the game, seemingly oblivious of the family tragedy playing out in the little house opposite.
Milly walked into the passage. Their front door wasn’t locked – there was nothing worth stealing and whatever of value the house might once have held, the old man had either smashed or drunk away in the pub.
‘Mum? It’s only me!’ She walked in to find her mother leaning over the hopping box. Milly could see she was emptying it. The new paraffin lamp donated by Bertie was standing on the floor, and she was now wrestling out some old enamel plates.
‘Hello, love. Oh, don’t you look beautiful!’ Mrs Colman eased herself up, a soft grunt escaping her lips as she straightened her back. ‘Here, take these for me, I’ve got no china left. He’s smashed the bleedin’ lot.’