Jam and Roses (10 page)

Next morning, the embers from last night’s fire glowed feebly as pickers emerged from their huts, men coughing, bleary-eyed, and women bustling, conscious of so much still to do before leaving.

When her mother roused them, they were all grumpy.

‘No use sweatin’ in the bed, get up and pull out the mattresses!’ she ordered, all the dewy-eyed sentimentality of the night before vanished, as the prospect of home loomed.

‘Another five minutes!’ pleaded Milly.

‘Should have come to bed a bit sooner then!’ Her mother hadn’t missed as much as she’d hoped.

Milly rolled off the sleeping platform, dragging her straw pillow and pulling the mattress out from under her two sisters.

‘Leave off!’ snapped Elsie. ‘I’ve got a bad leg.’

‘Oh, we won’t hear the last of this,’ Milly said, lifting the injured leg to pull the mattress off the shelf. ‘Come on, you!’ She dug Amy in the ribs and was rewarded with a ‘Sod off’.

‘Get out the bed, you foul-mouthed little cow!’ Milly pulled her youngest sister up, and together they dragged out mattresses, pillows, straw and old lino, dumping them on the fire, which spluttered to life, as other families began to burn all the evidence of their five weeks in the country. Even their hopping clothes were considered too verminous to be taken home and were added to the fire.

Milly stared at the conflagration, while flames flicked and sparks flew. How could she have let that happen, last night with Pat? Had becoming the hop princess stripped her of all her defences? She had entirely forgotten the girl from Rotherhithe, she had ignored all the warnings, she had suppressed her carefully practised instinct for survival. She was appalled at her own weakness. Now, in the grey mist of the morning, as she stared into the crumbling embers, she found him, unexpectedly, at her side.

‘How’s my hop princess?’ He grabbed her, spinning her round to face him. He looked pleased with himself.

She looked at him uncertainly. He looked so different this morning, bleary-eyed and dishevelled. Her hop prince had changed back into plain old Pat Donovan.

‘Ready to go home?’ he asked, smiling broadly.

She turned back towards the fire, wondering if last night she could have confused deviousness with tenderness. If she had, she feared she might live to regret it.

‘Yes, I’m ready to go home,’ she said, letting her hop garlands fall into the fire.

Autumn 1923

Rosie Rockle was standing at her open front door. Even on this chilly, autumnal Saturday afternoon, many of the neighbours still stood outside their doors, gossiping and catching up on the life of the Place. But today Rosie was alone and as Milly returned from her Saturday morning shift, the woman beckoned to her.

‘There’s been murders this afternoon, Milly,’ Rosie said in a hushed voice, though there was no one within earshot. She folded her arms across her faded pinafore, nodding towards the Colman house.

‘Why, what’s happened?’ Milly followed Rosie’s look and noticed, with alarm, that her own front door was ajar.

‘I just wanted to warn you, love, before you go in. I did my best, but... well, you’d better go and see to your mother—’

Before Rosie could finish, Milly turned and shot across the alley into her own house. Inside it was too quiet. Normally at this time on a Saturday, with the old man’s wages already handed over, there would be the bustle of preparing Saturday tea, groceries for the week dumped on the table, waiting to be packed away, the younger girls picking at the new bread, dipping fingers into the jam and generally getting in the way. The silence didn’t seem that of an empty house. She made her way from the passage, cautiously now, into the kitchen.

Her mother was sitting by the cold grate, head bowed in her hands, crying softly. The two younger Colman girls sat at her feet, white-faced and subdued. If Amy and Elsie had nothing to say, then Milly dreaded to think what they had witnessed.

She ran to her mother, as her sisters shuffled aside to make room.

‘What’s he done to you?’ Milly asked, her voice sounding distant to her own ears, drowned out by the drumbeat of her heart.

Her mother raised a puffy face. Milly let out a cry. Blood oozed through broken skin on her mother’s cheek, an angry bruise already blooming. Ellen Colman held her hand to the side of her head, and as Milly gently removed it, making her mother wince, she uncovered a bloody patch of pink scalp just above the temple. Elsie tugged at Milly’s skirt, silently holding up a handful of long pale hair. It was her mother’s.

‘I asked him for his wages, same as always, and he just turned on me,’ her mother said, almost as though this had never happened before. ‘Then he’s done no more than dragged me round the kitchen by me hair. Calling me all sorts. I thought he was going to kill me.’ Her mother’s voice cracked as she tried to control the trembling that ran through her body. ‘I must’ve screamed,’ she went on, gripping her hands tightly together, ‘’cause all the neighbours come running.’ She sank back, looking despairingly at Milly. ‘I’m so ashamed, what must they think of me?’

‘Oh, Mum, why should
you
be ashamed? It’s him!’ she said, as rage began to burn like ice, detached and slow. It was not the normal hot-tempered flare-up she usually felt with Elsie or Amy. It was an anger born of many similar incidents, conceived on those nights when Milly and her sisters would lie awake listening to the thuds and crashes as the old man kicked their mother round the kitchen like a football. It had been nurtured every time he’d lashed out with a careless blow, when something annoyed him. But now the feeling was coming of age.

She disentangled herself from her mother. Turning to her sisters, she said, ‘Amy, can you get a clean cloth and wash Mum’s cuts? Elsie, make up a fire, will you?’

The sisters jumped to their tasks, with no arguments, while Milly went to the corner cupboard where her father kept his brandy.

‘No, Milly, don’t take that!’ Her mother’s face was suddenly alert with fear. ‘He’ll miss it.’

‘Sod him, here, you have a drop.’ She poured a little into a cup and put it carefully into her mother’s shaking hands.

‘Where’s he gone?’ she asked, watching while her mother sipped slowly.

‘Down the pub, I expect, I don’t suppose we’ll see him till late.’

‘Maybe
you
won’t, Mum, but I will.’

‘No, Milly!’ She grasped Milly’s arm. ‘Don’t cross him! You’ll only make it worse for all of us. Just let him have his bellyful and we’ll forget it.’

But Milly shook her hand off and walked out of the kitchen, aware of Elsie’s fear-filled eyes following her. She hadn’t taken her coat off and she was glad of it, once out in the misty chill of the late afternoon. She stepped over some children sprawled across the paving, playing alley gobs, and set off up Arnold’s Place, towards Dockhead, vaguely aware of Ronnie Rockle and Barrel falling in behind her. She registered Rosie and Mrs Knight poking their heads out from their doors as she passed, and thought she heard them call a warning, but nothing could distract her from the slow burning rage which had begun to rise from the pit of her stomach and was now grabbing at her chest. Her breath came in shorter gasps and by the time she passed Holy Trinity Church, the rage had reached her throat. She glanced at people going in for confession; she would not be joining them today. A couple of nuns from the convent came towards her, habits flapping in the sharp breeze, like two black-winged crows. They smiled at her. They’d once been her teachers, the ones she’d made nightgowns for in sewing lessons. But she looked through them without acknowledgement, darting suddenly across the road, narrowly missing a tram, then turning right towards the Swan and Sugarloaf.

There was a pub on every corner at Dockhead; the old man had plenty of choice, but the Swan was his favourite. The pub was now heavily cloaked in river mist. Milly blinked, but her eyes wouldn’t clear. It was as if the mist had seeped behind her eyes and, almost unseeing, she gripped the brass handle, flinging open the pub door.

It was a smoke-filled, beery cavern, packed with men in flat caps, who were already well into the Saturday ritual of drinking away their week’s wages. None of them interrupted their drinking to turn round. She stood in the doorway, letting the freezing wind that whipped up from the river blast its way into the warm fug.

‘Put some wood in the bloody ’ole!’ a young man barked, glaring at her.

When she continued to hold the door open, more and more faces turned towards her. She recognized some of the men she’d travelled to Kent with, on Pat’s lorry. There was Sid, and Harry, reaching up for the pint on top of his piano. Then she spotted the old man, his back towards her, holding a pint of bitter. He was loudly recounting some joke, surrounded by mates from the tannery. She was struck by how jovial and carefree he seemed. None of her mother’s pain had touched him. His features, though bloodshot and drink-befuddled, lacked their domestic scowl; he could almost be taken for an amiable man. It was his laughter, the laughter she never heard at home, that finally caused her building rage to burst free.

‘You bastard, get out here!’ she roared at him. Now every head snapped round. Pints halted mid-sip, conversations stopped and mouths opened. He was almost the last to turn. A look of bewilderment changed, chameleon-like, to embarrassment, as a purple blush suffused his face.

‘What the fuck d’you want?’ he slurred, turning unsteadily to face her.

She didn’t answer. Instead, using his drunken surprise to her advantage, she charged, barrelling through the crowd. Men jumped out of her path, beer spilled over her, as, head down, she launched herself straight for his midriff. She had grown taller than he was in the last year and was much quicker on her feet. His glass crashed to the floor as he doubled over, winded, gasping for breath. She bent her knees, bringing up her fist as she did so, to connect with his jaw in a satisfying crack that sent him spinning.

‘You ever...’ she grabbed his jacket, spun herself round like a discus thrower and using muscles built up hauling seven-pound jam jars, flung him towards the door, ‘hit my mother...’ and he sprawled flat on the beery sawdust as she aimed a kick at his backside, ‘again...’ His head cracked the edge of the door. ‘An’ I’ll kill you!’

She brought her booted foot up under his midriff, sending him clean through the door and out into the street. Her breath came like a serrated blade, in jagged bursts, as she bent forward, hands on thighs. Almost spent, she became aware of the crowd surrounding her on the pavement, some cheering her on, others jeering and laughing at the old man.

‘Go on, Mill,’ she heard a friend of her mother’s shouting, ‘give the bastard some of his own treatment!’

She heard a piano, playing incongruously, and realized that Harry was still pounding away, almost as though he was providing musical accompaniment to the drama. She straightened up. Her father was still lying on the pavement, seemingly unable to get up. Remembering all the times her mother had been his football, she ran forward, aiming one last punishing kick into the old man’s kidneys as he struggled to rise. He slumped back, curled into a ball and covered his head. She leaned over him, whispering hoarsely into his ear, ‘Don’t you
ever
touch my mother again.’

Spent now, panting and trembling, she felt the world around her coming back into focus. She recognized individual faces in the crowd, saw Ronnie and Barrel among the hooting children attracted by the brawl. She even noticed the passengers on the top deck of a passing tram, staring down curiously at father and daughter trapped like two prizefighters, in a ring of bodies outside the Swan.

Pushing her way through the crush, it struck her like the blow that he hadn’t landed: her father was a coward. It seemed so obvious now, but how had it taken her a lifetime to discover it? All those years they’d suffered under his tyranny and she had left him back there, a cowering bundle on the pavement. But coward or not, she knew there would be consequences and, realizing what she’d done, a tremor of fear, not for herself but for her mother, seized her. She ran towards home.

The day Milly Colman called her old man out of the Swan and Sugarloaf was talked of for many years in Arnold’s Place. It was embellished so much that one version even had her ending up killing him and swinging for it. But for Milly, it was the day her life changed forever. The word had quickly got back to Arnold’s Place, and she was confronted by a huddle of neighbours outside her front door.

‘Good on yer, Milly,’ Rosie Rockle nodded approvingly, ‘he won’t hit her no more, not after that pasting. Our Ronnie said you give him a bloody good hiding!’

‘I did, Rosie,’ said Milly, as the other women moved aside, murmuring their admiration. ‘I’d better tell me mum.’

‘I think she already knows, love,’ said Mrs Knight, but her look was pitying rather than admiring, perhaps not so convinced that Milly had helped her mother at all.

Elsie and Amy had been part of the welcoming committee on the doorstep and now followed her inside. The kitchen looked just as it normally did, the furniture had been straightened, the fire lit and the groceries put away. Her mother was sitting at the kitchen table, hands flat on the white scrubbed boards. Other than the bloody patch, which she had tried to hide by combing over her hair, she looked her normal tidy self, face washed, and a clean pinafore wrapped around her skinny body. She raised hopeless eyes as Milly entered.

‘It won’t do no good, Mill. You’ve only made it worse.’ She shook her head. ‘He’ll end up killing you. I know him. You’ve shown him up in front of his mates and he won’t let it be.’

‘I had to, Mum—’

‘We’ve still got to live with him!’ her mother interrupted. ‘I need his wages for their sakes.’ She nodded towards the girls. ‘But I’m scared what he’ll do now. He’ll kill you in your bed and I’ll never be able to sleep quiet again. I think you’ll have to go, love, keep out of his way for a bit.’

Milly sat down heavily on the chair opposite her mother. She was right. There would be no peace in the house for her mother or sisters, not while Milly was there. Even if she’d scared the old man enough not to beat her mother, there were other ways he could make all their lives miserable.