Jam and Roses (11 page)

‘It’s all right, Mum,’ she said, moving round the table to grasp her mother’s hand. ‘I’d made up me mind to go, but now he knows what I can do, he’ll leave you alone... at least for a while.’

‘Oh, Jesus,’ her mother sobbed. ‘Me poor girl, you’ve got nowhere to go. But you can’t be here when he gets home—’

Just then they heard the front door banging open and the old man stumbled into the kitchen. He had lost his cap and his choker was askew. Milly’s mother jumped up to stand in front of Milly. Her father staggered, holding one hand to his ribs. He didn’t look at Milly; his eyes slid past her to Mrs Colman.

‘Get me the liniment, she’s broke me fuckin’ ribs.’ He slumped down into his chair by the fire, wincing. Her mother went to the sideboard and the old man stared at the fire, speaking almost to himself. ‘Keep her out of my sight. I don’t want to see her.’

‘Go on...’ Her mother was pushing Milly out into the passage. ‘Make yourself scarce.’ She lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘Come back when he’s in bed!’

Milly stepped out into the street, where by now the excitement had already died down. Domestic disputes came and went with great regularity in Arnold’s Place and they were always conducted in public. The houses faced each other with only nine or ten feet of paving between them and the front windows were positioned opposite each other, so that any degree of privacy was minimal. But the neighbours had retreated inside for Saturday tea and Milly found herself contemplating a long evening alone. She looked for regret in her heart, but couldn’t find any. The remembered sensation of her fist connecting with his jaw was so sweet it was worth a lifetime’s exile, and she had the deeper satisfaction of knowing she’d saved her mother from any more abuse, at the very least until his ribs healed. She absent-mindedly rubbed her grazed knuckles, then made up her mind.

Saturday night was dance night at Bermondsey Baths and she’d arranged to meet some of the other jam girls there. Why should she change her plans? If her own home was denied her, she would find another, on the streets of Bermondsey.

She headed for the two-up two-down in Hickman’s Folly, where Kitty Bunclerk lived with her parents, five sisters and little brother Percy. After six girls, Mr Bunclerk had wanted to name him Perseverance, but Mrs Bunclerk, being more merciful, had suggested they compromise with Percy.

When she arrived they were sitting down to Saturday tea. As one of the older Bunclerk girls ushered her through the narrow passage, Milly smiled at the three youngest children, who were seated on the stairs, plates balanced on their laps. The tiny kitchen wasn’t big enough for them all to sit round the table at once and Milly could barely fit herself into the room. Mrs Bunclerk welcomed her in, just as Kitty came out of the scullery.

‘You’re early! We heard you give your old man a good hiding! Has he chucked you out?’ Kitty asked, wide-eyed.

‘Not yet, but I’m steering clear of him for a bit.’

‘You’d better keep your head down, love,’ a toothless Mrs Bunclerk smiled cheerily, ‘and lock the bedroom door an’all, he’s the sort’d kill you in your bed!’

‘Mum! Stop it, you’ll frighten the life out of her. Come in the scullery, Mill.’

The others looked disappointed as Milly squeezed round the table and out into the back scullery.

‘What are you going to do now?’ Kitty turned her bright, concerned eyes on Milly.

‘I’m going to the dance, what else?’

Kitty burst into giggles. ‘Milly Colman, only you could pay your dad in front of the whole world and then go dancing as if nothing had happened.’

‘Well, I’ll need to tidy myself up a bit first, look at the state of me.’

She peered into the small mirror hanging on a nail above the sink and pulled at her hair. Looking down at her coat, she noticed it had lost a couple of buttons in the scuffle. ‘And look at me dancing shoes!’ Milly lifted her foot, to show her friend the old work boots she was still wearing.

‘Come upstairs with me, there ought to be
something
we can find for you to wear, with six girls in the house!’

Squeezing back through the kitchen and stepping over the children still seated on the stairs, they made their way up to the bedroom where each night Kitty and her five sisters squeezed into the one bed, while Percy still slept in their parents’ room. After a little rummaging around in a narrow wardrobe, Kitty emerged with a pair of strapped shoes and a blue shift dress.

‘This is our Ada’s best dress, she’s more your size, and try these shoes on, her plates are bigger than mine.’

Milly took the shoes. ‘Shouldn’t you ask her first?’

‘She’s not going to need them. She’s doing overtime tonight. You try ’em on, I’ll go and talk her round!’

Kitty disappeared downstairs while Milly slipped into the dress and shoes. Soon Kitty reappeared with Ada, who was younger than Milly and not quite as tall. She worked at Southwell’s too, but in the candied-peel department. Ada always held her large hands under her armpits, as though she were nursing them. They were permanently red and swollen with inflamed cuts, from peeling citrus fruit.

‘Ohhh, you cow,’ she said enviously, as Milly turned round, ‘you look better in that dress than I do!’

‘D’you mind, Ada, just this once?’

‘No, you go out and enjoy yourself, Milly. You deserve it after the show you give us all today!’

Ada told her that the crowd outside the pub had included many of the jam girls, and they’d all enjoyed themselves afterwards, retelling the fight blow by blow. Milly felt like one of the celebrated boxers from the Thomas A Becket. Conscious of the irony of moving from hop princess to prizefighter in a few short weeks, she gave Ada a wry smile. ‘Well, I’m glad I brightened up someone’s day!’

When they arrived at the Bermondsey Baths, there was already a crowd of young men and girls in their Saturday night finery queuing outside. There had been no time for Milly to give her mother her pay packet, so she still had it with her, and when their turn came to pay the entrance, she dug around in the envelope for a sixpence.

‘Are you meeting Pat?’ Kitty asked her.

Milly turned up her nose. ‘I don’t know, Kit, he’s getting a bit of a handful. I might fancy a change!’ She sounded more unconcerned than she felt, for that one night when she’d given in to Pat, down hopping, had never been repeated, much to his frustration, and she was getting tired of fending him off.

‘Well, make up your mind quick, here he comes.’

Pat came up to her, smiling. His sandy hair had resisted the oil he’d plastered it with, but she could tell he’d made an effort to look smart, in his best suit and shiny two-tone shoes.

‘Fancy a dance?’ he asked eagerly.

‘Let me take my coat off first!’

He took the coat from her shoulders and stood back admiringly. ‘You don’t look bad for an old bruiser!’

Kitty laughed and Milly shot her a look. Obviously there wasn’t anyone who hadn’t heard. The piano and little band struck up a foxtrot and Milly let herself be whirled away. She was a good dancer and could match Pat’s long strides with ease. She loved the newer dances and the jazzier tunes, and before long she was abandoning herself to the rhythm of the music, swinging arms and legs and matching Pat, move for move, in a whirl of gaiety that banished for a time all the violence of the day.

Although officially there were no drinks for sale on dance nights, there was always a fair amount of illicit alcohol being surreptitiously consumed. Pat had smuggled in half a bottle of gin, and before too long she felt tipsy and numb. By the end of the evening, a cocktail of gin and natural optimism had conspired to mask her anxieties about the war at home. But when the dance was over, and they left the Baths, Pat began pulling her towards the river stairs at Southwell’s Wharf. His hand grasped her wrist.

‘Come on, Mill,’ he slurred, ‘give us a kiss.’ But she didn’t want to kiss him. She wanted to creep home and hide herself in some corner till her bruised knuckles stopped aching and her head stopped thumping.

‘Goodnight, Pat,’ she said, but as she turned away he reached out, catching her by the hair. Remembering the pale skein of hair the old man had ripped from her mother’s head, bitter anger rose like bile in her throat. She spun round and said, with cold fierceness, ‘Don’t touch me, Pat. Just go home.’

She’d already fought one man today, and she’d rather not have to take on another.

December 1923

Milly walked through the freezing December streets, coat collar up, chin buried in her scarf. Warm breath plumed up around her cheeks, but she was shivering. After an evening at the Bermondsey Settlement girls’ club, it had been too early to go home and she’d been walking for over an hour, wasting time until she could be certain that her father had gone to bed.

It was over a month since she’d given her father a beating and from that day on, Milly had been forced to live a fugitive life. It had been an uncomfortable limbo. She couldn’t move out, her wages simply wouldn’t cover rent and board in a lodging house, yet neither could she feel part of the old life in Arnold’s Place. Instead she haunted her home like a ghost caught between this world and the next. The only way to keep any semblance of peace in the house was to make sure she stayed out whenever the old man was at home. It was a game of cat and mouse, which meant she found herself thinking about the old man far more than she would have liked.

She usually ate her dinner in the Southwell’s mess room, and after work, instead of going home, she took to meeting up with the other jam girls in the Folly or at the Settlement. She only ever returned home to fall into bed and sleep, but even then she made sure to wedge a chair against the bedroom door, to prevent any drunken intrusions from the old man. She often wondered if the hiding she’d given him had been worth it. Sometimes she thought her mother would have welcomed his regular beatings, in return for the old semblance of family life.

When Milly finally crept into the house, she found her mother sitting by the fire in her nightgown.

‘Oh, Mum, you shouldn’t have waited up,’ Milly said to her softly. Careful to keep her arrival quiet, she tiptoed over to sit on the floor beside her mother, entwining her arms round Ellen Colman’s skinny legs.

‘Well, it’s the only time I get to see you these days, love.’

Milly looked up into her face. ‘You look sad.’

She allowed her mother to stroke her hair as if she were a child again.

‘It’s enough to make me sad,’ her mother sighed. ‘It’s like being in the middle of a battlefield in this house, what with you and him at each other’s throats and then you can’t even be friends with your sisters. This house... there’s never any peace in it.’ She shook her head sadly. Milly felt so helpless. She’d done her best to free her mother, but with two children and no income of her own, Mrs Colman was in the same economic prison as all the other wives in Arnold’s Place. And now Milly feared she’d only succeeded in making that prison a more unpleasant place.

‘I wish I’d done a proper job and killed him,
then
we’d have had some peace,’ she said fiercely.

‘Milly Colman!’ her mother said in a shocked whisper. ‘You don’t mean that! Whatever he’s done, he’s still your father!’

A long creaking came from the staircase and they both froze, holding their breaths, until it was clear the sound was only the wind finding its path through the ill-fitting front door. Milly snuggled in closer to her mother’s legs, trying to catch some warmth from the fire.

Looking up at her mother now, she felt truly sorry that she’d robbed her of all those illusions that they were a real family. It had always been a stretch. Perhaps if she’d succeeded in her attempt to forge a stronger bond with her sisters, Milly would have tried harder to submit to the old man’s tyranny, for the sake of a quiet life for all of them. But, even before her great rebellion, there seemed very little glue holding them all together. Her mother simply hadn’t the strength to be the lynchpin in the family, and Milly, try as she might, had failed to be one either.

‘I only ever wanted the family to stick together,’ Mrs Colman said, ‘but sometimes I truly wonder how we can all be the same blood. It’s only that I know for a fact those girls are your sisters and he’s your father!’

She gave Milly a searching look, as though she were answering some unasked question.

‘Oh, I don’t doubt we’re the same blood, Mum. It’s just we’re all stubborn and selfish... except you.’

She got up and planted a kiss on her mother’s cheek.

‘You could at least try to get on with your sisters, they need you, now more than ever.’

‘Oh, I’ve tried, Mum, but sometimes I wonder if they really do need me,’ Milly said wistfully, catching her mother’s melancholy. ‘But Elsie’s always off in a world of her own, and Amy’s sharp as a box of knives... even when I offer to help her, she just pushes me away.’

Her mother shook her head in denial. ‘You was the one looked after her when she was a baby, she thinks the world of you!’

Perhaps it had been true once, but now? She found it hard to believe. Amy had been a war baby. Charlie was dead before she reached her first birthday, and Jimmy before her second. When their brothers were killed, Mrs Colman seemed to fade away, hardly able to keep herself alive, let alone a baby, so Milly had become Amy’s surrogate mother. She had a distinct memory of her ten-year-old self, just after hearing of Jimmy’s death. Her mother had left Amy screaming, unchanged and unfed, and so Milly had taken it upon herself to look after her.

She remembered singing ‘Rock a Bye Baby on the Treetop’, with tears streaming down her face, as she bounced Amy along in her pram. Amy had laughed in delight, enjoying the rough bouncing, demanding more, yet Milly’s own misery went unsoothed. She was little more than a child herself, her mother vanished in grief, her two brothers dead and her father, a brutal drunk, wreaking vengeance in all the wrong places. She had poured out all her tender feelings on the baby, but Amy seemed to sense she’d been born in a war zone, and from an early age had learned to survive on her own. Milly remembered picking her up that day, wanting to hold her softness against her wet cheek, but Amy had wriggled like a fury.