Jam and Roses

by Mary Gibson

  ‘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.

  8

  The Sewing Circle

  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.

  ‘Come on.’ She pulled her mother up. ‘Let’s creep upstairs, before he hears us.’

  They followed each other up, avoiding the treads that creaked, and M
illy slipped quietly into her room, feeling like a burglar in the night. Amy lay with her head to the foot of the bed, and Elsie stirred as Milly rolled her over. She slipped into the warm spot her sister had vacated and reached down for Amy.

  ‘Come up this end,’ she whispered to the sleeping child.

  Still half asleep, Amy obeyed. ‘Are you cold?’ she asked thickly.

  ‘Yes,’ Milly lied, putting her arms round Amy, so that they were spooned in the bed.

  She lay awake for a long time, remembering that week in the hop gardens. Only two months had passed, but it felt like a lifetime ago. Two months? A sudden anxiety gripped her, with the dawning realization that those golden, early autumn days might have marked far more than the end of summer.

  At the factory next day Milly took more than her allowed quota of toilet breaks – after the fifth time, the foreman told her he’d dock her half an hour if she went again.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ Kitty said under her breath, when she returned. ‘You never have weak bladder trouble when you’re drinking in the Folly!’

  Milly smiled weakly, but her stomach was churning. Her frequent checking only made her more anxious. She told herself to be patient, it could well be a false alarm.

  At the end of the day she walked out of the gates, still lost in her own anxiety, and was waylaid by the last person she wanted to see. He was lounging against his lorry outside Southwell’s, obviously waiting for her.

  ‘Hello, stranger,’ he called to her, ‘I ain’t seen you in days. Fancy coming for a drink?’

  She shook her head. ‘Sorry, can’t, I’m going to the sewing circle at the Settlement.’

  The girls’ club at the Bermondsey Settlement had been a lifesaver for Milly. The rambling, soot-stained Victorian building was home to a group of young Methodist missionaries, called to live among the poor of Bermondsey. They were often doctors or solicitors, who visited the overcrowded terraces and tenements surrounding the Settlement, offering their services free of charge. They ran children’s clubs and country holidays, put on lectures, and encouraged working girls and boys to better themselves.

  Clubs were held on most nights of the week. Milly would go straight from Southwell’s to the local coffee shop, have something to eat, then go on to the Settlement, where she could change out of her work clothes and spend the evening in the warm with her friends.

  She was even beginning to prefer the sewing circle to a night in the Folly. And now, barely looking up, she attempted to hurry past Pat. Milly’s interest in him had waned soon after their chase through the hop fields, and as she’d feared, once back in Bermondsey, she bitterly regretted those fumbles among the green hops of Kent. Out from under the spell of the hop gardens, she could no longer fool herself he was any sort of ‘hop prince’, any more than she was a princess. He’d quickly reverted to being Pat from Dockhead, familiar, predictable and somehow confining. She was sure she ought to feel something a little stronger for someone she was courting and had tried her best to rebuff him.

  ‘Sewing circle! Makes you sound like some old gel.’ Pat’s scornful expression irritated her. She stopped and faced him.

  ‘What’s wrong with sewing? I’m good at it, and anyway, I can’t afford to buy new dresses.’

  ‘You only have to say and I’ll get you a new dress any time,’ Pat boasted, and it was true, he seemed always to have money in his pocket these days. Though Milly knew the majority of his business was conducted by moonlight and out of the back of the lorry, she hoped he was still trying to make a legitimate living during the daylight hours.

  Milly shook her head. ‘I wouldn’t let you buy a dress for me.’

  ‘Well, can I interest you in something else?’ Pat said enigmatically, drawing her in. He whispered, ‘I’m getting a load of tinned stuff tonight. Wondered if your mum could do with some?’

  ‘Knocked off?’ Milly whispered back.

  ‘’Course, knocked off, straight out of Crosse & Blackwell’s!’

  Milly hesitated. The old man seemed less and less willing to hand over the housekeeping each week, and she knew her mother would welcome the food.

  ‘But if you’re not interested...’ Pat shrugged.

  ‘No, I am interested, only I promised to meet Kitty at the Settlement after tea.’

  ‘Well, I ain’t getting it till after dark!’ He winked at her. ‘Tell you what, I’ll pick you up from the Settlement, after your club.’

  ‘Oh, all right then.’

  ‘So what about that drink first?’

  The warmth and life of the pub suddenly seemed preferable to a lonely tea in Reeny’s coffee shop, and Milly agreed. ‘So long as it’s not the Swan.’

  ‘’Course not, we’ll go to the Folly, same as always.’

  ‘All right, anywhere the old man doesn’t go’s fine with me.’

  It would be quicker to walk through the narrow courts and alleys than to drive in the lorry, so Pat left it parked outside Southwell’s and they set off briskly through a freezing fog that was settling low over the rooftops. Milly jammed her hands into her coat pockets. They were chapped and bleeding from peeling a barge load of early Seville oranges, and the bitter cold of the unheated fruit-picking room hadn’t helped. She hated marmalade season, for on bad days it ruined her fingers and robbed her of one of the few things in life that lifted her heart, her sewing. Still, tonight she was determined to finish the new dress she was making for her mother, sore fingers or not. Cutting down Farthing Alley, they skirted a few empty prams left outside front doors, then crossed a close huddled court of dilapidated houses, leading into Hickman’s Folly.

  ‘Shall we knock for Kitty?’ Milly asked as they passed her door.

  Pat looked a little crestfallen. No doubt he was hoping for an hour alone with Milly, but he nodded. The Bunclerks had apparently finished their tea and Percy opened the door with his face still covered in a good portion of it.

  He screamed into the dark interior, ‘Kitty, it’s yer mate!’ and dashed back down the passage.

  Kitty came to the door and seeing Pat, her face hardened, ‘Ain’t you going to the club tonight?’ she asked Milly.

  ‘Yes, but we’re going for a drink first, can you come?’ Milly’s expression was a mute appeal. Kitty knew that she was tiring of Pat and gave her an accusing look, which Milly knew she deserved. It was no good complaining about him to Kitty, if she encouraged him the very next time she saw him. Kitty threw on her coat, glad to get out of the cramped hubbub of her home, and they soon came to the Folly.

  A weak golden glow from the gas lamp on the wall opposite cut through the fog and lit up the door. They hustled inside and were immediately hit by a pall of cigarette smoke, thick as the fog outside. But the gaslight and chatter and warmth of the packed bodies was welcoming, none the less. Some of Pat’s friends spotted them and beckoned him over to a table in the corner, where seats were found for Milly and Kitty. Freddie Clark was there already, and Milly noticed a slight blush colour Kitty’s face. Clara and Ivy, a couple of jam girls Milly knew, were sitting at the same table and the girls immediately fell into the latest factory gossip, eager to find out what each knew about the current round of lay-offs. Preserve making was always dependent upon the season and in winter, when the summer fruits disappeared, so did many of the women’s jobs.

  ‘The Seville oranges are early, they’re rolling in off the docks,’ Pat added helpfully. ‘At least you’ll have plenty of peeling and pulping to keep you busy on the marmalade. Matter of fact, I’ve got a couple of barrels round the yard if anyone’s interested?’

  Milly groaned. ‘Talk about coals to Newcastle, don’t you think we can ’alf-inch as many as we like? But I’m sick of the smell of oranges this time of year, look at the state of my hands! To think I used to look forward to getting an orange in me stocking every Christmas!’

  Milly held out her raw hands for inspection as the other girls agreed with her. Working in the finishing room, their hands were at least saved from all but th
e irritating effects of the glue used to label the jam jars.

  Pat suddenly took one of her hands.

  ‘You should give that up,’ he said suddenly. ‘You’re too good for that work.’

  A round of ‘ooohs!’ from the other girls followed and Milly snatched her hand away.

  ‘Chance’d be a fine thing,’ she said, picking up the pint of bitter Pat had bought her. ‘What else would I do? Make biscuits instead of jam?’

  Pat was silenced. But Milly remembered how she’d once dreamed of being something else, a seamstress. The nuns at school had taught her needlework and had always praised her skills – except when she let her desire for beauty outweigh their instructions to make plain, serviceable garments. As schoolgirls they were set the task of making the nuns’ nightgowns and once Milly, tiring of plain tucks, had set about inserting some fancy smocking on Sister Clare’s nightdress. This particular nun was a gentle, sweet-tempered teaching sister, and Milly had simply wanted to do something nice for her. But her generous impulse was ill-judged, as it was Sister Mary Paul who was collecting in their work that day.

  ‘Girl Colman,’ had come the shrill voice of Sister Mary Paul, when the sewing class was over. ‘You will unpick this frivolous frill immediately!’

  This was all the thanks Milly got, along with a sharp rap of the ruler over her knuckles. She had wanted to ask, what was the harm? Was it so wrong to have something that looked lovely, as long as it did the job? But not wanting another rap or worse, she’d held her tongue and undid all her work. But the idea of becoming a seamstress, making beautiful dresses in expensive velvets and silks, had lodged in her child’s imagination, and when the time came to leave school Sister Clare had found her an apprenticeship with a West End seamstress. For a few days Milly knew the joy of a dream come true, until it was squashed firmly by the old man.