Authors: Mary Gibson
The first opportunity to see Barrel came that evening when she went to pick up the children from her mother. At fourteen, he was a messenger boy at the docks. Though he still hung about beneath the gas lamp in Arnold’s Place, now his companions were other working boys. Milly came upon them, smoking and exchanging football news, but as soon as she called to him, Barrel flicked away the cigarette. He was dressed in a man’s waistcoat and jacket, but his face beneath the flat cap was still boyishly plump, his voice still penetrating.
‘Oi, Mill!’ he boomed back. ‘Speak o’ the devil.’
After her talk with Barrel she hurried to her mother’s, finding her on the doorstep saying goodbye to one of the Irish priests from Dockhead Church. He nodded to Milly and smiled.
‘G’night to you, Milly, see if you can’t have a word with your sister now and get her to behave!’
As the priest left them, her mother turned a worried face to Milly. ‘Our Amy’s been hoppin’ the wag, the little cow. I’ll tan her hide when she gets in!’
Milly knew Amy’s behaviour at school hadn’t improved. As she’d grown older, she’d just become more brazen, though Milly hadn’t realized she’d abandoned school altogether. But her mother’s threats were empty. There was only one person in their family capable of tanning Amy’s hide, and that particular leather dresser was mercifully absent from their lives now.
‘Don’t talk rubbish, Mum, you wouldn’t touch a hair on her head, not your little baby!’
Milly laughed, and followed her mother into the house in search of her own children. Jimmy was sitting under the kitchen table banging on a saucepan and, hearing her voice, he emerged wearing the pan on his head.
‘I’m a soldier!’ he announced, banging the top of the saucepan with a wooden spoon he’d been using for a gun. He ran to greet her, the pan falling down over his eyes. She made a fuss of his new helmet while her mother went upstairs to bring down the sleeping Marie. Milly cuddled Jimmy on her knee, listening to his chatter. She never tired of his exuberant delight at her return home from work every evening. When her mother handed her Marie, Jimmy slipped down and returned to his camp under the table.
‘Oh, have you been good for your nanny?’ she asked her daughter, who flapped her arms up and down as though she might fly away with excitement.
‘Anyway, Mum, you shouldn’t worry about our Amy,’ Milly said, returning to their conversation. ‘She’ll be going to work in a couple of months, and you’re never going to turn her into a scholar now!’
‘I know, but it’s a right show up having the Father come round here, telling me my child’s a truant, and what’s more he tells me she’s been going to the soup kitchen of a morning! Anybody’d think I didn’t feed her.’ Mrs Colman sat down, arms crossed over her pinafore. Milly was about to make light of the whole thing when she saw real distress on her mother’s face. With trembling lips, Mrs Colman went on. ‘The disgrace of it, we don’t need charity! Wait till she gets in here, just wait.’ And Mrs Colman looked as though she might burst into tears.
‘Mum, don’t get upset, no one will think any the worse of you. There wouldn’t be soup kitchens if people didn’t need them.’
‘I know, love, but I feel such a drain on you, and the fact is when Amy goes out to work, then as God’s my judge, I’m going too. I’ll come cleaning with you, I will, and don’t you try to talk me out of it!’
Milly wasn’t going to argue. If the idea could keep the tears from her mother’s eyes, then she would go along with it.
‘Well, who knows what tomorrow will bring? As Bertie’s always saying to me.’
‘No luck?’ This was the minimalist conversation being repeated in families all over Bermondsey these days, and no one mistook the question as being about a bet on the horses. Milly shook her head and her mother shook hers.
‘And you’re the poor old fucking donkey that carries the lot of us, gawd forgive me.’
Her mother was crossing herself when Amy burst into the kitchen. Her thatch of fair hair had been bobbed and Milly noticed the dress she wore, an Elsie cast-off, now fitted her perfectly. But her sister’s appearance was less unruly than it had been even a few months ago, and the perpetual scabs on her knees from knocking about the streets with Barrel had disappeared. With such a growth spurt, no wonder the girl was hungry.
‘What’s that interfering old prat of a priest been saying about me?’ she stormed.
‘God forgive you, talking like that about the Father!’
Milly wondered who’d told Amy she’d been rumbled, and she admired her sister’s strategy. It was always best to go on the offensive with her mother; it confused her somehow. She was a woman who lived by as many of the Church’s rules as humanly possible, including some the Church couldn’t stake claim to, like not putting new shoes on the table or throwing spilled salt over her shoulder. Her nature simply didn’t understand rebellion, so when Amy denied her wrongdoing as Milly thought she undoubtedly would, then her mother would be stumped. Her imagination didn’t run to anarchy.
‘He’s said you’ve been hoppin’ the wag, and going to the soup kitchen!’
‘Who told him that? It’s that lying cow of a nun Sister Mary Paul, she’s always got it in for me. If you must know, I’ve been helping Sister Clare out in the little ones’ class!’
Mrs Colman tucked in her chin. ‘Hmm.’ She pondered, while Amy stared unflinchingly at her.
‘Go up the school and ask Sister Clare, she’ll tell you. She’s the only bleedin’ one there that knows how to tell the truth.’
Milly suspected that her sister was bluffing, but it was impossible to tell from the outraged look on her face.
‘And what about the soup kitchen?’
‘What’s wrong with that? I’ve been getting soup on the way to school. I’ve not been half-inchin’ it, have I? It’s free!
And
I’ve been going up the Methodist Central Hall of a dinner time, for another load!’
Amy smiled, failing to see that this was an even worse sin than the truanting in her mother’s eyes.
‘Well, may I never move from this spot, if I ever thought a daughter of mine would go begging for a bowl of soup. You’re not to go there no more!’
Amy clenched both fists and leaned forward, speaking slowly as though her mother was an idiot.
‘Well, I’ll promise not to go there any more the day you don’t send me out starvin’ ’ungry of a morning!’ She spun round. ‘I’m going out for me tea, they do a lovely oxtail over at Arthur’s Mission.’
She slammed the kitchen door behind her and Mrs Colman began to cry, Milly suspected more out of frustration than hurt, then Marie joined in, and Jimmy poked his head out from under the table. He had pulled the saucepan tight down over his ears and now emerged as though from a bomb shelter.
‘Mummy, Jimmy want to go home!’
Milly did too.
After reassuring her mother and soothing Marie, she set off for Stork’s Road, looking forward to the peace of her own home. When she arrived, Bertie was already back. Sitting in his chair by the dimly glowing fire, he looked up at her as she came in, with Marie in the crook of her arm and holding Jimmy’s hand. She noticed there were two Seville oranges on the kitchen table. He smiled. ‘Ah, there’s my beautiful girl, you’re late!’
‘Oh, there was a to-do with Amy.’
Bertie got up to help her with the children. ‘What’s she done now?’
‘Hoppin’ the wag and going to the soup kitchens, and Mum thought the soup kitchen was the worst of it!’
‘Well, it’s not something we’d want for our two, is it?’ he said, lifting Jimmy for a kiss. ‘Think how she must feel, living off charity.’ He looked down at his black boots.
‘Oh, don’t look so glum. Everyone’s in the same boat,’ she said briskly.
‘But don’t you see how guilty we feel, Milly? All of us, not just your mother. We’re all sponging off you!’
He put Jimmy down and reached out for an orange. ‘Here, this is all I’ve got to show for a day hanging about at the docks, two oranges! A boy with a barrow load tossed them my way while I was waiting for the call on. I didn’t earn a penny today.’
He sat back down. ‘Oh, Milly, this is not what I wanted for you.’ He rubbed his forehead. She lay Marie down on a blanket next to Jimmy and, exhausted as she was from her own day at the factory, she went to comfort him, putting her arms round him.
‘It’s all right, Bertie, you know, it’s easier for the likes of me. I’ve been brought up to work hard, I don’t expect anything else. I’m not one of your Dulwich ladies. Tough as old boots, me!’ She tried to make him laugh, but the familiar whimsical look refused to be conjured.
‘That’s tosh and you know it. There was a time you had dreams of being something different than a jam girl; it’s just you had to ditch them earlier than most.’
He was looking down at Jimmy, who was trying to interest Marie in her rattle. Milly didn’t like this bitterness; it wasn’t like him. She wished she could explain to Bertie just why his luck at the docks had been so bad of late, but it was something she would rather he never knew. For Barrel had told her it was Pat Donovan’s doing, but the boy had also assured her he knew a way to stop him. He had asked her only to be patient. She straightened up.
‘The oranges will come in handy. I’ll take one to Mum’s tomorrow.’
Not that Milly felt like handling oranges; she spent her days up to her elbows in the bitter fruits. She was sick of the sight of them.
Milly hadn’t repeated last year’s painful visit to Elsie. Her mother reported that she seemed resigned to her life in the asylum and had refused to listen whenever Mrs Colman suggested there might be a chance of her getting out of Stonefield when she reached eighteen. Milly tried to put Elsie out of her mind altogether. She’d once vowed that she would get her sister out of the asylum or die trying, but all her attempts had failed and she blamed herself for not doing more.
It was the beginning of spring when she was forced to think about Elsie again. Milly and Bertie had been invited to Kitty Bunclerk’s wedding. Her friend was apologetic, she would have liked Milly to be bridesmaid, but as she explained, with so many sisters who wanted that honour, there simply wouldn’t have been room enough in the aisle for them all. So instead she asked Milly to be one of her witnesses.
The service was at Dockhead Church, and though Freddie wasn’t a Catholic, he had easily been persuaded on that point. His sister Nellie and her small family sat on one side of the church and the extended Bunclerk clan packed out the other. Milly noticed that the Clark side nervously looked at the Bunclerk side throughout the service for their cues as to standing, sitting and genuflecting. Afterwards in the Folly, where there were drinks and sandwiches for all the guests, there was no such confusion, and both families mingled happily. Freddie looked handsome, with his fair hair neatly swept back, and a new suit showing off his impressive physique. Milly thought he looked more like a film star than a lorry driver, and she was pleased for her friend because Freddie clearly adored Kitty. The only awkwardness in the whole affair was that Pat had been invited too.
She found herself looking away whenever there was any danger that their eyes might meet, and throughout the day he had seemed as careful as she was to avoid any contact. Now she had wedged herself behind a table with Bertie and a few of the jam girls, hoping that, here, she could enjoy the rest of the evening without bumping into him. But it was Bob Clark, Freddie’s brother, who came over to them.
‘Milly, can I have a word?’ He leaned over, a little unsteadily she thought, for he’d obviously counteracted his best man’s nerves with a few pints before and after the ceremony.
Bertie, deep in conversation about the slow retail trade with Peggy Dillon’s butcher, looked at her enquiringly as he moved his chair to let her pass. Bob led her nervously to the side of the bar. Milly knew that Bob still worked at Stonefield and she could only assume there was news of Elsie. The young man pulled anxiously at his tie and carefully put his glass on the bar. His hand, holding the pint glass, was trembling a little, and Milly, suddenly alarmed, imagined the worst.
‘Is it about Elsie? Has she had an accident?’
He put his hand on her arm. ‘No, nothing like that. Honest, there’s nothing to worry about, but... well, I know she gave you the cold shoulder last time you visited, but I just wanted to say, don’t give up on her. She needs her family more than she lets on.’
He seemed so uncomfortable she felt sorry for him, but she was glad too that he seemed to care about her sister’s well-being.
‘Bob, I’ve tried with her. There were good reasons why I couldn’t visit, but she seems harder on me than anyone. She never gives me an inch!’
A small smile played on his face. He wasn’t so robust or handsome as his brother, but he had intelligent, gentle eyes which put her at ease.
‘I don’t want to put you in an awkward position, but...’ He blushed. ‘If you could just stick by her, she’s going to need you, whatever she says now.’
‘Of course I’ll stick by her. She’s my sister after all, and you can tell her that from me, if you like.’
He smiled, thanking her and looking relieved as he went back to join the Clark table. Milly wished it hadn’t been such an ordeal for the shy young man to speak to her. God knows what tales Elsie must have told him about her, but she let herself be comforted by the idea that her sister had a friend in that awful place. She sighed and went looking for Bertie.
Her mother had offered to look after the children, insisting she and Bertie should have a night out enjoying themselves. Milly had been looking forward to having Bertie to herself for once. But when she returned to their table, she found it deserted. Bertie and the butcher had gone to the bar, while Peggy and the other jam girls were dancing to the latest jazz song that Maisie was belting out on the piano. The glass of beer on top of the piano jumped and slopped, and the floorboards of the old pub bounced to the rhythm of the Charleston. Milly sat down at the empty table, watching them with a smile on her face, when a handful of beefy constables came crashing through the old door of the Folly. One constable blew a whistle, while the other lunged across the small dance floor, scattering jam girls and bringing down Pat Donovan in a rugby tackle. Wedding guests grabbed their beers and cleared out of the way as more police piled on top of Pat, who was screaming, ‘Yer breaking me fuckin’ arm!’