Authors: Mary Gibson
Her voice suddenly broke and she bowed her head over the pot. ‘What with
him
always at me and my boys gone, all gone...’ Ellen Colman took in a shuddering breath and Milly was at her side, drawing her mother’s heaving shoulders into her strong embrace. ‘Oh, it’d be different if the boys were here,’ Mrs Colman moaned hoarsely.
Milly squeezed her tighter and gazed over her head at the photograph of the three sisters, ranged like a set of jugs. It had its mirror image at the opposite end of the mantelpiece, with a photo of three little boys in an almost identical pose – her brothers Charlie and Jimmy, now lying dead in Belgian graves, and lastly Wilf, still soldiering under a baking African sun. None of them would be coming home again. Perhaps her mother was right. If only her brothers had been in the house, the old man’s reign of terror might have been curbed, yet she doubted it. Wilf
could
have stayed home after the war but he’d run from his bullying father, and however much her mother might hope for his return, he was as dead to them as Charlie and Jimmy.
As Ellen Colman tried to stifle her sobs, Milly saw that Elsie and Amy were staring at her, motionless as crouching statues now, looking up from the floor with anxious faces, all trace of their argument vanished.
‘Don’t cry, Mum,’ was all she said. ‘The boys ain’t coming back, but you’ve got me, I’ll sort the old man out, I can fight as good as any man!’
Her mother straightened up, rubbed at her face, then put a hand, still wet with her own tears, against Milly’s cheek. Suddenly she smiled. ‘Kill ’em an’ eat ’em, you would... that’s my Milly.’
August–September 1923
A dank mist hung heavy over Arnold’s Place as Milly left the house and began walking towards the river. She was on the early shift at Southwell’s, only a ten-minute walk away, on the riverside by Bermondsey Wall, which was a blessing on such a chilly morning. She pulled her coat closely around her, surely summer wasn’t over already? If only the letter would come. Every year it was the same. The neighbours would stand at their doors, calling out to each other, ‘Had your letter yet?’ The letter from the farmer meant five precious weeks in the real countryside, away from the roofs and chimneys that blocked out all but a pitiful patch of the Bermondsey sky. She couldn’t wait to breathe fresh air instead of choking smoke from dozens of factory chimneys. She longed for that first sharp scent of acid green hops as she stripped them from the bines. She didn’t even mind her fingers turning black; it wasn’t much different from the purple or red they were normally stained, from sorting fruits at the factory. The greatest blessing of all, though, was having a break from the old man; he stayed at home, working and drinking. But it wasn’t every year your family was chosen to go to the hop fields, sometimes the harvest was poor and the farmer didn’t need so many pickers. And this year their letter hadn’t arrived.
Turning into Jacob Street, she joined a stream of other women and girls heading towards the factory gates. Two tall chimneys with
Southwell’s
painted on them were already spewing smoke into the pink-tinged sky, and a low rumble, like thunder beneath her feet, came from the great steam engines in the factory basement, which heated the boiling pans and drove the machine belts. Milly would be working in the picking room today. She sniffed to see which fruit had already been started. Blackcurrants! Her fingers would be stained deep purple by the end of the day.
The yard was surrounded by four six-storey buildings. Two were warehouses, the others housed the picking, boiling, filling and finishing rooms. Beyond the buildings she glimpsed the river, where the factory’s own wharf was jammed with lighters and barges delivering sugar and fruit or being loaded with stone jars of the factory’s preserves. Southwell’s didn’t just make jam. There was marmalade in the Seville orange season, candied peel and pickles, and even Christmas puddings.
‘Mind yer back!’ a stores man shouted at her. Looking up quickly, she saw a trolley loaded with sugar sacks trundling towards her on one of the tracks that criss-crossed the yard. Leaping over the rails, she side-stepped into the path of another trolley, full of stone jam jars, coming from the opposite direction.
‘Oi, Milly, wakey, wakey!’ Two young men, working above her at a first-floor loading bay, shouted a warning. Dodging the second trolley, she waved up at them gratefully.
‘You coming to the Folly for a drink tonight?’ One of the boys, a drinking pal of Pat’s, leaned further out of the loading bay.
‘Might do if I live that long!’ She hurried on, through the double doors. The truth was that she was tiring of spending her nights drinking at the Folly with Pat. This morning she had a head full of cotton wool and the last thing she felt like was another drinking bout. Bounding up the stone stairs two at a time, in an attempt to shake her sluggishness, she reached the top floor with her head thumping. Once in the vast, high-windowed picking room, she wrapped a coarse, green apron around her and pulled a white hat well down over her head. She hated the hat, it squashed her dark, wavy hair, so that she emerged at the end of the day looking like a wet seal. She made her way through rows of wooden bins and chutes, full of tumbling fruit, till she reached her own picking line where, with a hundred-odd other girls, she would spend the next ten hours sorting through blackcurrants. Her cheerful good morning was echoed back by all the girls within earshot, as a whoosh of steam from the boiler room fired up the de-stalking machine. It chugged into life, belts whirring and blackcurrants flying, their stalks plucked off at lightning speed. The new machine, installed only last year, now did the work a hundred girls would once have done by hand. Blackcurrants tumbled like black pearls down wide wooden chutes as Milly began her day’s work. Standing next to Kitty, she soon got into a rhythm, fingers flying, hands a blur, so that she hardly registered what she was doing as her hands moved automatically, picking and flicking away the bad fruits into a wicker basket beneath the chute. The other part of her mind concentrated on what Kitty was saying.
‘My mum’s got her letter. Your mum got your letter yet?’ Kitty asked.
Milly shook her head. ‘I don’t think it’s coming this year.’
‘Well, I’m not going, what do you want to give up a good job for, just so you can spend weeks on end in a bloody tin hut in the middle of nowhere?’ said Kitty. ‘And the money’s piss poor. I can’t see the attraction meself.’
‘If you had to live with our old man you’d see the attraction.’ Milly pulled a face, making Kitty laugh.
‘Well, you’re doing yerself no favours picking hops, love, are you. That’s what makes the beer that turns him into such a mean bastard!’ Kitty grinned.
‘You’ve got a point there, Kit, but I need to get away for a bit... he’s getting worse, and being on my own with him, well...’
Kitty shot her a look. ‘Sorry, love, you know you’re always welcome to come round to us to get out of his way.’
The Bunclerks’ crowded home in Hickman’s Folly had often been a temporary refuge from her own warring household when she was growing up, but with nine people and only two bedrooms, Kitty’s offer was kind but impractical.
‘Thanks, Kit, but I need to get right away.’
As the noon hooter signalled their release and the clattering machinery belts came to an abrupt silence, Kitty linked arms with her.
‘If only I had the money and could get a place of me own, I’d be off like a shot,’ Milly said as they joined the crowd of women jamming the stairwell.
Kitty laughed abruptly. ‘Do me a favour, you’d
never
leave those sisters of yours!’
She was about to protest, but in the face of Kitty’s knowing look, she held her tongue. Milly’s hard exterior might fool most people, but her friend had known her too long to be taken in.
‘And I’ll tell you another thing for nothing, if you’d only let them see how much you think of them, they’d give you a lot less trouble.’
Milly shook her head. She’d stopped trying to fathom why, when she held a hand out to her sisters, it was usually firmly slapped away. But all she said was, ‘I doubt it, trouble’s their middle names.’
The girls made their way to the dining hall. Always referred to as ‘the mess room’, it was a long, low-ceilinged room, full of wooden benches and tables, where workers who didn’t want to go home for lunch could eat their sandwiches and drink their bottles of cold tea. They found a bench and Kitty returned to the subject of hop-picking. ‘But what if you can’t get your job back this time?’
Milly shrugged. ‘I can always get another factory job.’
And in past years she always had, if not at Southwell’s, then at Hartley’s or Peek Frean’s. She could even go tin bashing at Feaver’s. And though some considered hopping harder work than the factory, for Milly, it was her only holiday and she was determined to take it.
That evening when she returned home she found a large wooden crate half-filling the tiny kitchen. Mounted on four wheels, with two broomstick handles nailed to one end, it was a rough-and-ready handcart. Her mother stood over it, smiling.
‘The hopping box!’ The sight brought a sudden smile to Millie’s face and she threw her arms round her mother. ‘You got the letter!’
‘Yes, love, we’re going to Horsmonden, same farm as last year.’
Milly pulled away, looking puzzled. ‘What’s the matter, you don’t look very pleased about it?’
Normally the packing of the hopping box filled her mother with a rare excitement.
‘I’m pleased.’ Mrs Colman hesitated. ‘But... well, it’s just we’ve got to shift ourselves now, doesn’t give us much time to fill up the hopping box.’
Just then Amy came in from the scullery, carrying a roll of lino almost as tall as herself. She tripped over the rug and Milly dived to catch her just in time.
‘Here, give me that.’ Plucking the lino from Amy’s hands, she transferred it to the box.
Amy scowled. ‘I was doing that!’
‘Don’t start as soon as Milly gets in, she was only trying to help.’ Her mother gave Amy a warning look. ‘Go and see what’s happened to Elsie, she’s probably fallen down the privy!’
Milly peeped into the box, which was already half full. There was a bolt of tough ticking material for making mattresses, some old cooking pots and crockery, a roll of wallpaper and several tins of food.
‘I don’t know what you’re worried about. You’re getting on well!’
The mere sight of the box filled Milly with anticipation. It was tucked away in the backyard all year, a promise of escape. Some women filled it up gradually over the year, but Milly’s mother was too superstitious for that, and always waited for the farmer’s letter to arrive first. The box had to carry everything they’d need for a five- or six-week stay in the wooden hopping hut. Some families stayed in the same hut each year and even took their own furniture, but the old man wouldn’t have that.
‘Oh, Mum, I’ve been dreaming about it all day. I can’t wait!’ said Milly as she took off her coat and set about slicing cold meat for the family’s tea. When Mrs Colman didn’t answer, Milly looked up, but her mother avoided her gaze. ‘Oh, love, I should’ve said something earlier, but I kept thinking he’d change his mind.’
‘What do you mean?’ Milly found she was forgetting to breathe. ‘What’s happened?’
‘You can’t go hopping this year,’ her mother blurted out in a rush. ‘The old man won’t have it. Says you’ve got to stick at Southwell’s.’
‘Can’t go?’ Milly’s throat tightened and she was shocked to find herself on the verge of tears. Even she hadn’t been aware just how much this meant to her. It didn’t help that Elsie and Amy were giggling over the hopping box, impervious to her disappointment.
‘But he’s let me go hopping the last three years and I’ve
always
got another job after. Why can’t I go this year?’
Her mother shook her head. ‘He says our hopping money’s not enough and Southwell’s is too good to give up. He says there won’t always be other jobs to walk into.’
Milly left the meat unsliced. Ashamed of the tears pricking her eyes, she walked to the shelf and took down the smallest blue willow-pattern jug.
‘I’m sorry, love, don’t get upset—’
‘We’ve got no pickle for the meat. I’ll go to Hughes,’ she said, hurrying out before her mother could see the tear trickling down her cheek.
In the street, she brushed it away and set off for the grocer’s, sprinting as fast as her long legs could take her. If only her feet had wings attached and she could fly up above the streets and docks, high over the Thames, eastward over London till she reached the green hop gardens of Kent. But that was stupid thinking, the sort that got Elsie into so much trouble. She slapped to a halt outside Hughes, chest heaving, clutching her ribs where a stitch had caught her suddenly.
She hated going into the grocery, for Hughes was a superior man with a stony face, full of unspoken criticism. She’d known him since childhood, but he never smiled at her. Even the way she asked for jam or pickle seemed to draw a withering look from Hughes. He wasn’t from around Dockhead, but however much he disapproved of the ‘Bermondsey Irish’ who lived there, he didn’t seem to mind taking their money. The Colmans were Bermondsey Irish, Milly’s mother one of the descendants of Irish navvies who’d come over a hundred years earlier to build London’s first railway viaduct. The little Irish community, sometimes just called ‘the caddywacks’, had clustered around St Saviour’s Dock, forming an enclave within Bermondsey. Hughes was definitely not a caddywack and he let you know it.
‘Two penn’orth o’ pickle, please!’ She defiantly banged her mother’s precious jug on to the marble counter before realizing it wasn’t Hughes standing behind it. Instead there was a young man she judged must be in his mid-twenties. She thought there was a resemblance to Hughes, the same fresh colouring, neat ears and nose, but there the likeness ended. He had a pleasant oval face and clear blue eyes, with eyebrows that slanted upwards like little wings. He raised one of these now to comical effect.
‘Someone’s not happy!’ he said, smiling at her.