Authors: Mary Gibson
Arriving home exhausted and elated, she tipped out her takings on to the kitchen table. She was astounded. She’d earned almost a month’s wages in a single day. She could pay back the loan on the stall, cover her materials and still come out with the equivalent of a fortnight’s wages. She counted the money again, putting it into piles for rent and food and some to help out her mother, but as she swept the coins from the table into her housekeeping tin, they rang hollow in the empty house. If only Bertie were here to celebrate with her.
September 1926
–1927
The motor bus left the wide bowl of south London and chugged to the top of Shooters Hill. Behind lay the smog-filled basin and the silvered Thames, snaking down to the sea; ahead, wide streets, open skies and neat suburban houses with their bay fronts and red-tiled roofs. Milly was seated on the top deck, so as they reached the brow of the hill, she could see the Kentish plain dropping away before them. They were heading towards a band of hazy pewter light, sweeping the far horizon. There, where the Thames widened to its sluggish estuary, was Stonefield, its gloomy gables rising out of the low-lying marshland bordering the Thames. There was still a long way to go and Milly was already feeling sick with the jolting of the bus. Her nervousness at seeing Elsie again didn’t help. It was only Elsie, for God’s sake, yet she felt intimidated at the prospect of facing her own sister, a girl whose only crime was to dream too much and think too little.
Milly checked her bag. There were things visitors were allowed to bring and her mother had given her some moisturizer, a second from Atkinson’s, though the price of it still made her head swim. But Elsie’s skin was cracking in the dry atmosphere of the place and her mother had insisted she must have it. Milly knew that any spare money Mrs Colman possessed had all gone on treats for Elsie over the past two years, and she didn’t begrudge her sister. She’d also brought photographs of Jimmy, and Marie at a few months old, for it saddened her that Elsie had never met her niece, considering how fond she’d become of Jimmy. Milly sat back, giving in to the jolting, contemplating the world of leafy privilege they were passing through. From her perch, she could see the expanse of Danson Park, guessing it must be four times the size of Southwark Park. She wondered how many of the well-wrapped families, out for a Sunday walk round the lake, realized how lucky they were. To be surrounded by such open, tree-filled space was just a dream in Bermondsey where, in the whole of the borough, there was only a single park. Of course they didn’t know how lucky they were – not many people did.
When they finally turned into Stonefield’s drive, she was feeling stiff and woolly-headed from her long confinement and grateful to escape the stuffy bus. She followed the other visitors as they crunched across gravel towards Stonefield’s cheerless entrance. The bus had been running late, so the inmates were already seated at their numbered tables in the recreation hall. Milly’s arrival, obscured in the surge of late visitors, was unseen by her sister, and she was able to observe Elsie. Her sister was sitting, hands folded, gazing up at the gallery windows; she looked like a nun. Milly was alarmed at her appearance. Elsie had matured – she was now a young woman, but a far cry from the woman she might have been, had she stayed in Bermondsey. Obviously she’d never acquired a taste for the food at Stonefield, for she was extremely thin, with her long neck accentuated by the bony face and sharp chin, and her long hair drawn back tight as a skullcap.
As Milly pulled out a chair, it scraped on tiles and Elsie turned, her face hardening with disapproval.
‘Where’s Mother?’ she asked, and Milly noticed that her accent had changed. Less cockney, she had picked up the more refined vowels of the attendants and nurses who were her daily companions. It didn’t sound like her sister; didn’t look like her sister. For a moment, Milly was tongue-tied. The hubbub around them was overwhelming. Interspersed with normal chatter were inarticulate cries and whoops, expressions of excitement or frustration. A young girl on the next table kept up a particularly distracting rhythmic clapping.
‘Mum’s down hopping,’ Milly said finally.
‘Oh, of course. I forgot.’
‘Forgot! How could you forget?’
But Milly saw, suddenly, that this wasn’t one of Elsie games, where she pretended to be more ignorant than she actually was, just to enrage Milly. No, the girl had actually forgotten something that had once been the highlight of her year.
Milly hastily delved into her bag and handed over her gifts, the moisturizer and her offering of a bar of Fry’s Five Boys chocolate. Elsie regarded them impassively as Milly pushed them across the table.
‘I brought you some of your favourite chocolate. The cream’s from Mum. She said your skin’s cracking.’
‘It’s not the only thing cracking in here.’ Elsie’s mouth twisted into a smile and Milly wanted to run out of the place. She swallowed hard.
‘I’ve got a photograph of Jimmy and Marie... Want to see?’
Elsie’s hands slowly unclasped and her bony fingers gripped the edge of the table. She stretched out her hand and, with silent relief, Milly handed her the photograph.
‘Oh, she’s beautiful.’ The stone-like planes of Elsie’s face softened and her upright posture relaxed as she leaned forward for a closer look. ‘Jimmy’s getting so big.’ She looked up sharply. ‘Have I really been here that long?’
Milly nodded. ‘But me and Bertie went to see Francis Beaumont again.’
Elsie pushed the photograph back to her. ‘Don’t talk to me about him.’
‘No, listen, he says when you’re eighteen they’ll have to reconsider, and he thinks they’re bound to let you out then.’
‘Eighteen! This place’ll have killed me by then.’ She stood up abruptly. ‘I haven’t got the patience. None of you understand what it’s like in here. I might as well forget the lot of you, there’s people been mouldering away in here for twenty years, Milly! Nobody gets out.’
Milly reached out, catching at the sleeve of the sack-like frock. ‘You can’t forget us and the kids. We’re your family and do you think we forget you?’
‘Yes, I think you do,’ Elsie said, sitting down again because, Milly guessed, the alternative of returning to her dormitory was even worse. ‘If you remembered me, you would have come to see me before now.’
Again she lifted her gaze to the high window in the gallery above. Milly thought she knew why.
She
would have wanted to look at the sky too, if she were locked in here every day. Perhaps it gave her sister the illusion of freedom.
‘I know it’s been hard for you in here, Elsie, but I’ve had a baby to look after and Mum must have told you about Bertie being so ill... I nearly lost him.’
‘She told me, and I did pray for him, Milly.’
‘Thanks, love, no good being a caddywack and not calling in the favours, is it?’
This brought a small laugh from Elsie and made Milly wish she’d made herself visit before now. Perhaps if she’d come, Elsie would still be more herself instead of this strange, straight-backed, rigid pale thing. But her sister’s face tightened again in an instant.
‘I like Bertie, but whatever excuses you make, you’re not telling me you didn’t have one spare day when you could come and see me.’ She shook her head. ‘I’ll never forgive you for that, Milly, never.’
And she pushed back her chair, picked up the cream and walked, in an unhurried, almost stately, manner out of the hall. She left the chocolate sitting on the table.
Why did she leave the chocolate?
Milly asked herself. She would have bit my hand off for it before. It hurt her more than she’d ever admit, to think Elsie would rather deny herself her favourite treat than take it from Milly’s hand. For some reason, that was the one thing that stayed with her all the way home on the bus. It was the one thing that convinced her that Elsie really never would forgive her.
The New Year of 1927 came roaring in with gales that blew tiles off roofs in Storks Road and rattled broken catchments in Arnold’s Place. Bertie was on the dole. His money from pole-pulling at the hop farm had helped them through Christmas, as had Milly’s profit from her sales at the Old Clo’, but with rent hikes and price rises, whatever money they made seemed to buy less and less. Bertie had resisted the dole, until one bitter day, with shoes flapping like Charlie Chaplin’s tramp, he was finally too ashamed to go out of doors.
Milly went to the St Olave’s Board of Guardians and was given a second-hand pair of boots. She felt apologetic as she handed them over – they were brown, and as labourers only ever wore black, brown boots were instantly obvious as hand-me-downs.
‘It’s all right, Bertie, love, I’ll put black boot polish on them. No one’ll know the difference,’ she soothed as she gave them to him, worried about his wounded pride.
‘Don’t be daft, Milly, there’s nothing wrong with brown boots!’ he argued.
‘They may be all right in Dulwich, but they’ll make your life a bleedin’ misery if you go to the docks in brown boots! Haven’t you ever heard of “Brown boots, no dinner”?’
He hadn’t, but she wouldn’t have the kids of Arnold’s Place plaguing him with the familiar catcall, and she knew he’d be given no peace if he wore the boots as they were.
So Bertie wore his ‘black’ boots to sign on for the dole and continued his fruitless tramping for jobs. In the past he had been lucky enough to get called on at Hay’s or Butler’s Wharf, for half a day’s work, trundling barrow loads of butter, bacon or tea from ship to warehouse. But now he began to be turned away day after day. Days turned into weeks of unemployment and Milly could see it was wearing him down.
As the year progressed and the economic recession deepened, smaller factories all over Bermondsey went to the wall. The dole queue outside the labour office grew longer and soup kitchens sprang up at every mission and church. Now was the year when Milly began to doubt that things could ever get better for them. She noticed that the women standing at doors with their children began to have a hollow look, their chatter seemed less light-hearted, their expressions less outgoing. But still there was a generosity of heart that could not be squashed by want. The collectors from the Labour Institute still came round for the miners’ fund, even though they’d long ago been starved back to work. But they were much worse off than before the strike and still needed help to pay for basic food and medicines. She’d read in the local Labour Party newspaper, which Bertie sometimes brought home, that Bermondsey people had sent over £7,000 to the South Wales miners. Even her mother, who had little enough to live on and despised the strike, gave what she could.
One evening, after another fruitless day waiting at the call-on gates, Bertie came home looking more defeated than she’d ever seen him. ‘I just don’t understand it,’ he said. ‘There’s men older than me, there’s strips of boys, there’s even known shirkers, all being called on, except me!’
‘Well, you know what it’s like, the call-on foreman’s always got his favourites.’
‘I know, love.’ Bertie pulled off his boots, and Milly noticed the scuffs, where brown showed through the black polish. ‘But if I didn’t know better I’d say I’m being singled out for some reason. Even the other fellers have noticed. God knows what I’ve done to upset him, but that foreman doesn’t even look my way, let alone chuck me a ticket now and then.’
Milly went to put her arms round him as he slumped forward over his boots. As a grocer, he’d been used to buying and selling all the foodstuffs coming out of London’s Larder and, though he never complained, she could see that life on the dole was sapping him.
The next day she made a trip to Arnold’s Place, carrying a small bundle. The time had finally come when she needed the services of Mrs Carney. She knocked hesitantly on her front door, which, before she could change her mind, was opened by the squat old woman, wearing her black pork-pie hat even at home.
‘Milly! Got a bundle for me?’ she asked cheerily. ‘It’s a wonder you ain’t been before, you do marvellous!’
Milly stepped over the bundles destined for the pawnbroker, piled up in the passage, each one carefully labelled with the family’s name and the amount of the pledge.
‘Not so marvellous today, Mrs Carney.’
Mrs Carney’s bright, button eyes lit up. ‘Oh? Trouble at home, love? Come in, kittle’s on.’
As the old lady slurped at her tea, Milly explained why she’d come.
‘Don’t get no luck, does he, your feller?’ She cocked her head, as though calculating a set of pawn tickets. ‘An’ it’s a bleedin’ shame that foreman’s took against him.’
So it was true, Bertie was being singled out. Fountainhead of all gossip, rumours, and occasionally even the truth, Mrs Carney was the one person who might have answers to Milly’s questions, and though they would be common knowledge in Arnold’s Place by this evening, Milly decided to risk it.
‘But why? What’s he done wrong?’ Milly asked, sitting forward, ready for the pearl to drop from the old lady’s toothless mouth.
The woman put a finger to her nose. ‘I won’t be certain, but that tubby bleeder with the loud gate, whas’is name?’
‘Barrel?’
‘Yuss, ’im. He told Rosie Rockle, it’s been goin’ on for months!’
‘What?’
Mrs Carney looked at her pityingly, for her ignorance, and enunciated her words very carefully.
‘
Someone’s
been spreading rumours your Bertie’s a tea leaf, that he’s been lifting stuff off the docks.
Someone’s
been taking a bung, to put it about to the call-on foreman.’
‘And that’s why he’s been giving Bertie no work?’
‘I won’t be certain, but... yuss!’ Mrs Carney’s little hat wobbled on her head as she nodded vigorously.
‘Do you know who’s behind it?’
The little hat wobbled from side to side. ‘No, but whoever it is, he wants shootin’. He does.’
Mrs Carney eased herself up with an audible cracking of joints and began putting on the long black coat that she wore in all weathers. ‘Got to get me bundles off now, love, but you go and talk to that Barrel. I b’lieve he knows.’