Authors: Mary Gibson
‘Have you forgotten your key?’ she called out, throwing open the street door.
But it wasn’t Bertie who’d returned over the floodwaters like a dove: it was her sister Elsie, and the expression on her face told Milly that she had not come bearing an olive branch.
‘I haven’t come to stay,’ she said, unsmiling. Her hair was plastered to her head and she wore a thin coat. Several sizes too small for her, it looked like the one she’d worn to go away to Stonefield. ‘I’ve only come cos we can’t get through to Mum’s.’
‘Of course you can’t. Dockhead’s flooded out, and what the bloody hell are you doing here?’
If she hated her so much, why was it that Elsie always ended up at
her
house every time she escaped? Milly was aware of the rain driving into the passage, soaking the mat, and she felt Jimmy gripping her leg, peering up at his aunt from behind her skirt. It seemed to take an age before she could act, then she grabbed Elsie by the shoulder. ‘Get in here, before someone sees you!’
But her sister resisted, her bony frame immovable. She looked over her shoulder. ‘I’m not on me own.’
Then Milly saw him, standing to one side of the street door, looking like a bedraggled orphan, his flat cap dripping, his gentle eyes staring apprehensively at Milly. It was Bob Clark, the young gardener at Stonefield, and he looked terrified. He seemed as though he were ready to make a run for it, or at least to stay out there in the rain, rather than face Milly’s wrath. She’d imagined all sorts of reunions with Elsie, hoping one day she might build bridges, heal old wounds, but her sister had taken her by surprise yet again. Why did she have to turn up in this deluge, today of all days? Milly was in no mood for another crisis. She forced herself to soften her expression for Bob.
‘You can come in too,’ she said, standing to one side as the two of them traipsed the muddy floodwaters into the house.
With the fire banked, hot cups of tea and bread and jam in front of them on the kitchen table, the storm-driven pair began to lose their chilled pallor. Milly had taken her sister upstairs to find her a dress to change into. It swamped her skinny body, and as she changed from the sopping asylum-issue frock, she turned her back. Bony shoulderblades protruded like wings, and visible ribs ridged her back. Elsie didn’t speak or look at Milly. It was as if all her sister’s attention was turned inward, cocooned in an icy silence that Milly wouldn’t attempt to break. She felt she might have a better chance of finding out what had happened once Elsie was back in Bob’s company.
Downstairs, the kitchen window began to stream as Elsie’s clothes dried over the range, joined by Bob’s jacket, cap and socks. Milly sat down opposite them.
‘So, are you going to tell me what happened?’
‘You’re not to jaw me,’ Elsie said defensively, taking a huge bite out of a slice of bread and jam, followed quickly by another. She licked jam from her fingers and eyed Bob’s plate. ‘Don’t you want your’n?’
He shook his head and pushed his plate towards her. ‘No, you have it.’
Milly was astounded to see Elsie tuck into a third slice.
‘Elsie, you must have worms!’ She tried to make light of the fact that her sister was clearly starving.
Elsie carried on chewing with her mouth full, saying, ‘There’s nothing like home cooking.’
Milly smiled nervously. She couldn’t work out if Elsie was criticizing her for not offering a cooked meal or if she was just being ironic. ‘It’s not cooked!’
Elsie inspected the slice. ‘It’s Southwell’s jam and it’s bread from Spa Bakery. That’s what we’d call home cooking where I’ve been the last four years.’
There was so little expression on her face that Milly had no idea what she was feeling. Yet as Jimmy pulled on Elsie’s skirt, whispering, ‘Are you my auntie?’ her face lit up.
Milly remembered that look of delight, from the days when her sister would gaze in pleasure at one of her grottos, and the captivated intensity that had played over her face as she sang at the Star. It was the old familiar Elsie who dropped to the floor beside Jimmy, and tears stung Milly’s eyes when she saw her little boy drawing out the sister she knew. It didn’t matter that Elsie was cold to her, so long as, somewhere behind that blank facade, she was still there.
Milly turned to Bob. ‘Why on earth have you helped her run away again, when she’ll only have to go back?’ she asked in a low voice.
Elsie’s head shot up. Peering over the table at Milly, she said, ‘I’m never going back and I haven’t run away. I got married.’
‘Married!’ Milly looked in astonishment from her sister to Bob, who shifted in his seat, and choked on his tea.
‘What, to him?’
Elsie stood up and walked over to Bob, banging him on the back vigorously, before putting her scrawny arm round his shoulders.
Finally, he was able to speak. ‘Yes, Milly, she’s married to me.’
‘But she’s still only seventeen. She can’t marry, not unless the old man signed the form.’
‘We got the form signed,’ Elsie said enigmatically.
‘What, you’ve seen the old man?’
Bob blushed and Elsie stared stonily at her, as though she were an idiot.
‘Oh, you dozy pair of sods, you’ve not forged his signature?’
The couple nodded simultaneously. Bob cleared his throat. ‘It might seem stupid, Milly, but even if we could’ve found your dad, he’d never have signed the papers, would he? And getting married was the only way Elsie could get out of Stonefield.’
Milly didn’t understand. ‘But what about the charges against her?’
Bob shook his head. ‘It’s an open sentence, once you go in there. But the board has the choice to hand a married woman inmate over to her husband’s care.’ He looked up at Elsie, a shy smile playing on his face. ‘I’m your gaoler now, ain’t I, Else?’
Elsie’s serious expression resolved itself into an intense focus as she looked into his eyes. ‘More like my saviour, Bob Clark.’
‘So she’s free for good?’ Milly asked Bob. ‘And it’s all legal?’
Bob nodded. ‘Apart from forging your father’s consent.’ He grinned.
‘Well, you two have got a lot of explaining to do. Start at the beginning ’cause it looks like we’re going nowhere for a while.’
Heavy rain spattered the kitchen window, and the odd rumble of thunder announced that the storm was still overhead. They sat by the fire while Bob, with the occasional interruption from Elsie, told Milly how their love had blossomed in the unlikely gardens of Stonefield.
‘At first I just wanted to protect her, poor kid. She didn’t know what’d hit her when she first went in. It’s a scary enough place if you’re mad, but if you’re sane, it’s a bloody nightmare. Bad enough even for me and I only worked there! Anyway, I couldn’t stand to see her going under, so I made sure she got assigned gardening duty.’
Milly nodded. She knew this but hadn’t realized just what it had meant for her sister.
‘It was the only thing that kept me from going off me rocker,’ Elsie said, addressing Bob rather than Milly, whose eyes she still avoided. ‘I knew I was stuck there forever, when that solicitor couldn’t do nothing for me. But when I was in the garden with Bob, sometimes I could forget there was walls all round. I just used to look up at the trees and when the wind blew ’em about, I thought, well, they’re beautiful and the flowers are beautiful, and I could see a bit more sky there than I ever did in Bermondsey. So I lived for the garden.’
And for the gardener
, Milly thought, as Elsie closed her hand over Bob’s. The beauty of trees and sky may have saved her, but so had the boy with the kind face.
‘Of course, at first it was just friendship,’ Bob said, ‘but later on, well... we both felt it. But neither of us was brave enough to say anything, not until last autumn.’ Bob paused and looked at Elsie, as though asking permission. Milly saw a brief nod from her sister.
‘She was really low, weren’t you, love?’
With the faraway look Milly had seen on her face at the asylum, Elsie nodded again. ‘Bob saved me.’
‘I found her at her favourite tree, an old winter-flowering cherry, right at the end of the grounds... Luckily, she didn’t know how to tie the knot properly...’
The heat from the fire couldn’t prevent a chill from lifting the hairs on Milly’s arms. ‘Oh, Elsie, no!’
Elsie, at last, looked her full in the eyes, and Milly recognized that shameful, hopeless expression. She’d seen it once before, on her own face, staring back at her from the mirror after that night on Fountain Stairs.
‘Bob promised me he’d get me free, if I could just live one more day,’ Elsie said in a barely audible whisper, ‘and I thought I could hold out another day, and then another, and before long, he’d got the special licence and we was married in Stonefield Chapel at Christmas.’ She gave a wan smile. ‘I’m sorry my family wasn’t there, but we had to do it on the quick.’
Milly’s heart broke for her sister then. She knew that desperate place, where ending your life seemed preferable to the pain of living it. She was about to wrap her arms round her, but in that moment Elsie’s softness was veiled again, replaced by a hard blankness.
‘Wait till Mum finds out you’re married,’ was all Milly managed to say. But the thought of her mother revived her anxiety. ‘I wish Bertie would hurry up home, though. He’s probably doing a good Samaritan somewhere and I won’t see him till dark.’
She asked the two of them how near they’d got to Arnold’s Place and their description of the road up from London Bridge was even worse than the flooding she’d seen.
Bob stood up. ‘Why don’t I see if I can get over there? It looks like it’s easing up.’
Elsie jumped up and was at Bob’s side. ‘It might be dangerous!’ She plucked at his sleeve, almost like a child who didn’t want its mother to leave.
But he took her by the arms and said firmly, ‘I can’t drown in four feet of water, Else. You’ll be all right here, with your sister, won’t she?’
‘Yes, ’course, and I could do with some help with the kids. I usually rely on Bertie to help me settle them down of a night. He’s got the patience of a saint!’
With Bob gone, the awkwardness between the two sisters was even more evident. The old battleground between them was so familiar, she hardly knew how to talk to Elsie now, without being ready to deliver a barb or receive a blow. Stonefield may have scoured away her sister’s dreams, leaving her with unimaginable nightmares, but being loved by Bob Clark had given her a softness that all her residual armour couldn’t hide and Milly hoped eventually that the veneer would crack open, just enough to let her in.
Milly gave her the job of getting Jimmy ready for bed and she watched as Elsie sat him on the draining board, washing his hands and face carefully with the flannel, then coaxing him into pyjamas. She was equally patient with Marie, who at two was a slippery toddler and hated to be fussed over.
‘You’ll make a good mum yourself one day, Elsie,’ Milly said as she took Marie from her. ‘Let’s get these two up to bed.’
Afterwards they sat and waited for the men to return, while Milly, trying not to be anxious about Bertie’s long absence, asked Elsie about her plans.
‘Have you thought where you two’ll live?’
She knew that Bob lived in tied accommodation near the asylum, but presumed it was for a single man. ‘Has Bob got a big enough place for the two of you at Stonefield?’
Elsie seemed to start at the very notion. ‘Oh, we’d never live at Stonefield. I couldn’t stand the sight of it! Anyway, Bob’s had to leave his place.’
‘Why?’
‘They sacked him for fraternizing.’
‘What! But you’re not an inmate, and anyway he married you!’
‘I know, but the governors said it must have been going on a while and that it wasn’t a good example to the inmates, so he’s out of a job.’
‘Oh, Elsie, love, that’s terrible. Believe me, it’s not easy for the men to get jobs round here. He’ll be lucky to get anything.’
‘We’ll be all right. I’ll get a job.’
Elsie had been out of the world a long time and Milly tried to explain that the days of walking into jobs were over; even for low-paid women, it was getting harder and harder.
‘I can put in a word at Southwell’s for you, but I’m not sure you’ll be up to lugging those stone jars around or standing up all day peeling oranges.’
In truth Milly thought the foreman would take one look at her frail frame and send her packing. But she was more worried about Bob. She feared if he didn’t get work soon, Elsie could be swapping the asylum for the poor house.
‘We could stay at his sister’s in Vauban Street, but we’d have to sleep in the kitchen. They’ve only got two bedrooms and Bob doesn’t want to turf out their kiddies. So I was thinking of asking Mum if we could stay at Arnold’s Place. Amy could sleep with Mum, just till we get somewhere.’
‘The place might not be in any fit state for anyone, not after this lot.’ Milly looked out into the blue-shadowed evening. The rain had stopped, but the sky still threatened and as the clock ticked, the two sisters fell silent, each lost in their own anxieties. The enforced incarceration in the warm steamy kitchen, and the long, drama-filled day, eventually had its effect and Milly found herself nodding off to sleep. Elsie must have joined her, for they both looked up with equally startled expressions as the kitchen door burst open.
‘Look who we’ve brought home!’
Bertie and Bob walked in, followed by a mud-spattered Amy holding a bundle of clothes, and then Mrs Colman, with hair falling down and a searching look in her eyes. She held her arms wide open and Elsie ran into them.
Bertie looked at Milly and winked. ‘Never rains but it pours, eh?’
January
–October 1928
‘You’re not going back!’ Milly was engaged in a tussle with Mrs Colman, who insisted on returning to Arnold’s Place the morning after the flood.
‘What else am I going to do? Sit here and let me home go all mouldy?’ Her mother was already putting on her coat. ‘Amy!’ she called upstairs. ‘Ain’t you up yet?’
Amy was exhausted after her ordeal during the flood, which had involved carting every one of her mother’s few possessions up to the bedrooms. As the water level rose in Arnold’s Place, surging up the passage and eventually pouring through the front window, she’d waded back and forth to the scullery, retrieving as much food as she could.