Authors: Mary Gibson
‘How’ve you been?’ he asked.
He was grinning beerily at her and she searched his face in the firelight, for any trace of the venom she’d last seen written there, but she saw nothing other than a seemingly tipsy benevolence.
‘I’m all right, Pat, still at Southwell’s,’ she said politely, wondering what he was up to.
‘The boy’s getting on...’ He paused, sipping from a bottle of beer. ‘And I see you’ve got another nipper.’
She nodded. ‘A girl. Jimmy loves her.’
He looked at her for a long moment. ‘How’s it working out with Hughes?’ He jerked his head towards the huts, his smile fading.
‘He’s good to Jimmy,’ she said carefully. It was the only information she felt comfortable giving Pat.
‘Pole-pulling’s a bit of a comedown. Still out of work then?’
‘Him and a thousand others.’
‘Me too.’
‘What happened to the job at Freddie’s? I thought I saw you in his lorry.’
‘Just doing him a favour, bringing down the blokes. Didn’t you hear? I did another six weeks inside. Nothing much, just receiving.’
She hadn’t heard, but didn’t respond.
‘Freddie had to let me go. Can’t blame him, there’s hundreds queuing up for one job. I didn’t expect him to hold it open. Anyway, there’s other ways I can get money.’ He hunkered down, lowering his voice. ‘Went to see me bank manager last week. Tower Bridge Road.’
‘Tower Bridge Road? That was you?’ He nodded proudly in answer to her unspoken question and dug a wad of money out of his inside pocket.
A chill ran through her. She’d read in the
South London Press
about an armed raid at that branch.
‘Pat, someone got hurt!’
‘Shouldn’t have tried to be a hero then, should he?’ He shrugged. ‘Anyway, I’m flush at the moment, and with Hughes out of work, if that boy needs anything, you let me know.’
She froze at the suggestion. She wouldn’t let his money anywhere near Jimmy.
‘Pat, don’t start all that again. He doesn’t need anything... I’m earning enough.’ He had to know this wasn’t true and she added quickly. ‘I make a bit, selling clothes too.’ She began to get up. ‘I’d better go and find Bertie.’
‘I hear he’s working you like a fucking donkey!’ A sneer replaced his smile, as he flicked the banknotes in front of her face. ‘See this? I could use it to make your life easy... or hard.’ He stuffed the money back into his pocket. ‘Well, you run back to Bertie.’ He got up abruptly. ‘You’ve made your choice.’
Whatever Pat’s motives were, she had a cold certainty that the welfare of her family was not uppermost in his mind. She stood up and walked away. She, who had never shied away from a fight, felt unnerved and frightened by his offer. He had seen their poverty as a way back into her life, and if she once opened that door, she was terrified that Bertie would walk out of it.
Milly made sure they kept out of Pat’s way for the rest of that weekend, robbing him of any opportunity to wave taunting wads of money under Bertie’s nose. But at least Bertie was lucky enough to be taken on as a pole-puller. He wrote to Milly after his first week, describing his early tumbles as he joined the other pole-pullers stalking the length of the hop field on unsteady stilts, unhooking bines from the strings. He gave her the details he knew she would love, the swoosh of the bines as they fell, the sharp smell rising as the pickers gathered them up and the songs echoing round as soon as they began stripping the hops. He sounded more light-hearted than he had for weeks, and she was convinced that the fresh air would do more for his recovery than any medicine.
For the tail end of summer and into early autumn Milly lived an almost solitary life. Pat had made no more trips down to the hop fields and she was glad that Bertie and the children had the chance to spend untroubled days in the country, but still she had to fight the unease that had dogged her ever since her encounter with Pat. His veiled threats had given her life an unpredictable edge, which was hard to ignore, especially when she bumped into him around Dockhead, and he would pass her without acknowledgement, deliberately staring through her. She became almost grateful for the distraction of all her jobs.
Early mornings, she kept her head bent low, hands flying across those stone stairs and tiled floors in the dawn light. Then after her windblown walk back over London Bridge, she spent the rest of the day boiling along with blackberry jam, as it bubbled away in steam-heated copper cauldrons. Her current job in the boiling room was to tip the swivel-mounted pans of simmering jam into copper-lined trolleys, ready for transporting to the filling room. She soon got used to being drenched in sweat from morning till night, and by the time she left work her arms were speckled with burns from scalding jam. In the evenings she sewed relentlessly, sometimes visited by Kitty.
One evening, not long after Bertie had gone to Kent, Kitty came to Storks Road for the final fitting of her wedding dress, which Milly had agreed to make. Afterwards they sat together talking about Kitty’s plans for her impending marriage to Freddie, who had proved a faithful sweetheart. Freddie was doing well for himself – with three lorries now and a legitimate transport business, he no longer had to rely on his dodgy dealings to subsidize his income. Though there were still the odd clandestine sales of various goods under the table at the Folly, Kitty insisted it was more of a hobby these days and that after they were married she would put a curb on them. But for now, his shadier transactions were no embarrassment to Kitty and she talked about them as openly as Milly talked about Bertie’s pole-pulling.
‘It’s all work... of a kind,’ Kitty said. ‘I’m just grateful he hasn’t got Pat Donovan working with him any more. A bit of thieving’s different from what he’s involved in. Freddie says he’s got in with a right hard lot over the Old Kent Road. Have you seen anything of him lately?’
Milly shook her head. ‘Not to speak to, but that’s no loss.’
‘Well, just stay out of his way. Freddie says he’s still going on about Bertie stealing you off him.’
But Milly needed no encouragement. ‘Oh, I’ll stay out of his way all right.’ And eager to change the subject, she asked, ‘Now tell me all about this honeymoon Freddie’s got planned for you!’
But Kitty’s visits were few, taken up as she was with the wedding, and most of Milly’s evenings were spent industriously alone, so that by the end of Bertie’s first fortnight away she’d made enough children’s clothes and dresses to fill a stall at the Old Clo’, if she’d only had the money for one. Instead she would have to sell them a few at a time from the pram in her old way.
When Florence Green asked Milly to come and pass on some of her sewing skills to the younger girls at the sewing circle, Milly jumped at the chance of a night out in the company of others. After the class, hearing of Milly’s solitary state, Florence invited her for supper in her modest upstairs room. It brought back poignant memories for Milly. The last time she’d sat by that spitting gas fire, she’d made the worst choice of her life, to give up her child, but tonight Florence was full of questions about how she and Bertie were managing after the strike.
‘To be honest, I can’t see my Bertie ever getting another job. The pole-pulling only lasts till October, but what he’ll do then I don’t know. I’m doing three jobs as it is. I can’t do no more.’
Florence handed her a slice of bread she’d toasted on the gas fire, and Milly spread it with damson jam. She held up the jar. ‘Hartley’s! That’s treason for a Southwell’s girl!’
Florence laughed. ‘It’s donated. We don’t get a choice,’ she said apologetically.
‘Well, if it had been blackberry, I might have chucked it out the window. I’m boiling in it all day.’
As they ate their toast and jam, Florence pondered. ‘The strike was more of a sacrifice than any of us had imagined. I just wish I could do something for Bertie.’
Florence poured tea into her pretty china cups with the rosebud pattern that Milly had always admired, and seemed to come to a decision. ‘Milly, I may not be able to help Bertie, but I have been thinking about how you might make more of your sewing talents. I know if you could only hire a stall you’d sell many more of your lovely dresses. I’ll speak to the committee – they may be willing to loan you the rent on a stall.’
She looked at Milly as though unsure of her response, but there was only one possible answer. ‘Yes! Thank you!’ Milly stuttered. ‘But are you sure?’
‘Quite sure. We have a fund set aside for this sort of thing and I can’t think of anyone who’d make better use of it than you, Milly.’
Florence always had a slightly reserved air about her, which forbade overt shows of affection, but Milly was so overjoyed, she crossed the short distance between their two chairs and hugged the young woman.
‘You don’t know what this means to me, Florence.’
‘Yes, Milly, I think I do,’ she said, regarding Milly with her intelligent, compassionate eyes.
The following weekend, when she crammed on to the back of Freddie Clark’s lorry with the husbands and the piano, Milly felt light-hearted enough to spend the journey entertaining them all the way down, singing the old Irish songs her mother had taught her. It would be her last visit to Kent that season, for the best day at the Old Clo’ was undoubtedly Saturday, and if she was to repay Florence’s faith in her, as well as the loan of the rent, next Saturday was the day she would have to set up her stall. The reunion with Bertie and the children was joyful, and before she’d even jumped off the lorry, Bertie came galloping over the field to meet her, a beast of burden for Jimmy, bouncing astride his shoulders. Marie astonished her with some remarkably word-like sounds, the most rewarding of which was
Umumy
. Her sister declared it was an attempt at
Amy
, but Milly knew better.
But in spite of her delight, the whole weekend seemed more like a long farewell. The family had all greeted her good news about the stall with congratulations; only Bertie’s response had seemed muted. But that night as they rolled up tightly together on the floor at the far end of the hopping hut, she silenced his protests softly with her lips.
And on the last night, as they sat round the roaring bonfire, some of the husbands called again on Milly for a song. The piano had been de-mounted from the lorry and sat beneath an awning, outside the huts.
‘Come on, Mill, give us an old Irish song!’
Beer and country air had made the hop-pickers maudlin, and with the children dropping off to sleep, curled up like dormice at their feet, Milly stood up in the flickering firelight. ‘Give us “Two Sweethearts”, Harry!’ she called to the pianist, naming one of her mother’s favourites. After singing the verse, about soldiers far from home seated round a campfire, she threw herself into the chorus, looking first at her mother and then at Bertie.
‘One has hair of silvery grey, the other has hair of gold,
One is young and beautiful, the other is bent and old,
These are the two that are dearest to me,
From them I never will part,
For one is my mother, God bless her I love her,
And the other is my sweetheart.’
Towards the end of the chorus she lifted her hands to encourage the others, and all round the campfire voices joined in the sentimental song. Once, Milly glanced round to see her mother wiping her eyes with the corner of her apron and Amy, sitting behind her, exaggeratedly overcome by floods of sham tears.
The next week was as hard as the stone steps she cleaned every morning, her loneliness sharp as her stoning knife. The Storks Road house felt emptier still, now she knew there would be no more weekend interludes in the hop fields. But however alone Milly felt in the world, there was another member of her family she knew must feel lonelier, one she had guiltily avoided thinking about for many months but now was forced to remember. It was time to visit Elsie.
With her mother away, someone had to take on the monthly visit to Stonefield. Milly’s excuses not to visit her sister had been accepted readily enough by her mother. With a new baby, a sick husband and the weight of all the family’s needs on her shoulders, Milly felt she had ample reasons to stay away. Yet secretly she’d been glad of all those excuses. Her visits to her sister had been few and painful, for each time, she’d seen the Elsie she knew fading further away, her sister’s dreamy nature overwritten with a blankness that was impossible to penetrate, and her flashes of fire all dulled. But she couldn’t leave her with no visit at all and she steeled herself to go that Sunday.
But before that she had to face Saturday, her first full market day at the Old Clo’. She got up well before dawn, walking to Tower Bridge Road with her stock of handmade dresses and children’s clothes on the pram. She couldn’t afford to pay a boy to trundle her stall to the market, but the overseer seemed dubious as he gave her the key to the lock-up.
‘You sure you can manage that?’ he said, nodding towards the wheeled stall which she would have to pull the short distance to the market.
‘Me? I’m built like a carthorse!’ she said, demonstrating her muscles.
He left, still looking unconvinced, and she transferred her clothes to the stall, deciding to leave the pram in the lock-up. But when she tugged at the yoke of the stall, it stubbornly refused to budge. Looking round to make sure no one was watching she sat on the floor, put her back to the lock-up wall and shoved with her feet. It was unladylike, but very effective. The wheels started rolling and she had to scurry to grab the yoke before the barrow ran away from her. She yanked it to a halt, then straining forward, pulled the stall slowly to her pitch.
Once there, she hung dresses from the top rails and laid children’s clothes at the front. She also had half a dozen shirts, a risky outlay, but she’d seen them at cost price on her way back from the City and couldn’t resist. Surely there were some men left in Bermondsey who could afford a new shirt? She’d made sure to price them only just above what she’d paid, for she couldn’t afford to have them left on her hands. Soon her voice was hoarse from trying to attract the attention of passing trade and she was sure she’d damaged her back, pulling the stall. After a few hours with not much to show for it, she began to suspect it had all been a waste of effort. But as the day wore on, a few of her faithful customers began to show up, and once a small crowd had formed, it aroused the interest of others in the bustling scrum. Soon she was taking money faster than she could give change and by the afternoon had almost run out of clothes to sell.