by Mary Gibson
Kitty raised her eyes in disbelief. ‘I told him in confidence!’ she said, scowling at Freddie.
‘Oh, don’t worry, Fred, and thanks, but just keep it to yourself till I’ve gone,’ Milly said. No doubt she would have to get used to people talking about her behind her back.
‘Are you telling Pat where you’re going?’ Kitty asked.
‘No, what’s the point?’ Milly looked thoughtfully into her empty glass, and Freddie lifted it from her hands. ‘I’ll get another round in,’ he said quickly.
Milly studied Kitty, as her eyes followed Freddie. ‘Fred’s a decent feller. Are you two getting serious?’
‘Not serious, but I do like him,’ Kitty said, in a dreamy way that told far more than her words had. ‘Oh, Milly, I’m going to miss you,’ she said suddenly. ‘When are you giving your notice in at Southwell’s?’
‘Next week, then I’m off to the home the following week. I’ll miss you too, Kit, but I’ll be glad to be out of Arnold’s Place. I feel like a leper at home. The girls won’t come near me now, not even to annoy me. I wish they would come and get in my way, or pick a fight... something! But no, they just look at me as though I should be in the nick, as well as Pat.’
Her mother had told the girls that Milly would be going to work as a domestic in a big country house. But her sisters’ reaction had taken her completely by surprise. They’d turned sullen and accusing. Though Elsie had guessed the true reason, Amy didn’t have a clue why she was leaving. One night after she’d lain tossing and turning for hours, debating the wisdom of her decision about the baby, she gave up thinking and nudged Elsie. The truth was, she felt lonely. She knew she was in this on her own, but sometimes, in the middle of the night, she wished she had someone to reassure her. Now, in her isolation, she risked rousing Elsie’s slumbering temper, which could be dragon-like if she was woken suddenly. ‘What you doin’?’ Elsie mumbled, yanking the blanket over her shoulder. Milly nudged her again. ‘Els, Elsie!’ she whispered.
‘What?’ The young girl rolled over.
‘Why are you blaming me for going away? You know why I’ve got to, don’t you?
Elsie’s unblinking, grey cat’s eyes were all she could make out in the darkness.
‘I know,’ she said flatly.
‘I thought you’d be glad to get rid of me, we’re always arguing.’
Elsie rolled over, turning her back to Milly. ‘There’s worse things than arguing. I told you before, once you’re gone, he’ll start on us again.’
Milly had lain awake for a long time after that, her hand resting lightly on her swelling stomach, a tight knot in her chest and a stream of salt tears making their slow progress towards the corners of her mouth. Her poor sisters.
She left Southwell’s with little fanfare. Tom Pelton, the foreman, had said she could have her job back if she didn’t take to ‘domestic service’. She doubted he, or anyone else at the factory, were taken in by the lie, but if it helped her mother get through the disgrace, then Milly would gladly play along. After work Kitty, Peggy and some of the other jam girls had met for a last night at the Folly, though her heart wasn’t in it. Now it came to leaving the bounded enclave of docks and factories that had been her home, she found herself conjuring fears out of the river mist. She’d believed she had no love for the constricting place that had for too long felt like a cage to her, but now, all the unknown tomorrows made her want to stay. If she could only hide here, find a haven for herself and the baby, she wouldn’t care if it were in the meanest court on Jacob’s Island. She quailed at the thought of the country home, staffed by other Miss Greens, sad-eyed, sympathetic and unsurprised at her fallen state. The countryside of Kent, however lush with apple orchards and blossoms, no longer held any attraction for her. She didn’t deserve its beauty. She would concentrate on having the baby, and steeling herself to give it away. And then she would leave Kent and never go back, not for all the hop harvests in the world.
11
A Home in the Country
June 1924
Milly lay in the narrow, iron-framed bed, staring up at the sloping ceiling. The long dormitory stretched from one gable end to the other, and ancient oak floorboards sloped down towards the door, giving the room a rakish tilt that made her nauseous. But that was nothing new. She’d spent most of her pregnancy feeling sick. She turned her head towards the oriel window; one of its five oak-framed panes was propped open. The edge of the curving terrace wall that fronted the house was just visible from her bed, nearest to the window. From the terrace, the grounds fell away towards a copse and a reed-fringed lake. Beyond, she could see the hazy green layers of the Weald of Kent, disappearing into a purple smudged horizon. A cool, early morning breeze came through the open window, bringing the scent of dew-wet grass into the low-beamed room.
She eased herself on to her elbow, wincing as the baby shifted, catching on some invisible nerve with a probing toe or finger. Milly pulled the white bedspread up over her arms and sat up, leaning back against the iron bedstead. None of the other girls were stirring, but Milly often tried to wake up early. It was the best time of day to enjoy the quiet beauty of the place before the high-pitched chatter of the nine other girls in the dormitory intruded. She liked to play an early morning game of make-believe, that this was her very own house. The other girls vanished, and their gentle snores and mutterings faded away. She let her eyes rest on the wood panelling and the dark old paintings of religious scenes, and lastly she turned to the magnetic view from the window. For a few minutes each day, she’d been able to forget that her residence here was a temporary penance; she’d even sometimes managed to blot out the life she’d left behind.
But beyond the copse was a cluster of oast houses, rising above the treeline, and sometimes their pointed wooden cowls spun round like accusing white fingers. Then all her daydreams would be shattered as she remembered why she was here. Anyway, the baby was getting too big to pretend away; no amount of daydreaming could make the huge bump beneath her nightgown vanish. Soon her child would emerge to take its first look at the world, and Milly was torn between wanting the day to arrive and wanting to stave it off forever. His arrival would mean her departure, and she dreaded having to leave a place that, against all odds, she’d become attached to. The house was called Edenvale, yet like all Edens, it had its viper and its share of shame.
‘Oooh!’ She started as a sharp scratching feeling in her stomach caught her unawares. The baby had a peculiar way of getting her attention; sometimes it felt as if its little finger was deliberately stroking her from the inside. It was an odd sensation, not painful, but insistent and impossible to ignore. She might as well get up.
Quietly, she got out of bed, but the old springs creaked so that Rita, the sixteen-year-old from Whitechapel, in the next bed, stirred. Rita had been terribly homesick, though Milly couldn’t imagine why. She’d told Milly one of her own family was the father of her baby, though she would never dream of naming him.
‘Morning, Mill,’ the girl said, stretching. Her eyes, sticky with sleep, forced themselves open and her oval face emerged, white as the bedspread. She’d had an even worse pregnancy than Milly. ‘Gawd, I do feel sick! What day is it?’
‘Sunday,’ Milly answered. ‘I’m getting in the bathroom.’
‘Ohhh, I hate Sundays,’ Rita groaned. ‘Twice as many effin’ prayers today!’
Milly laughed. Rita had the face of an angel and the mouth of a stevedore.
‘Too right,’ Milly agreed.
Prayer times at the home came far too often for Milly’s liking. Aimed at making the girls suitably ashamed of their fallen state, little homilies urged them to be grateful for the chance of giving their babies away to parents more deserving than themselves.
The matron led them in prayers of penitence every morning at breakfast, but on Sundays they paraded down to the village church in a crocodile, wearing their unmistakable Edenvale uniforms. On arrival, their own clothes had been taken away to be ‘deloused’. Much
to Milly’s disgust, they were issued with shapeless, long grey shifts and gabardine mackintoshes. Milly and Rita defied the humiliation, insisting on hitching up the shifts with sashes and rolling up the mac sleeves, anything to make them less drab and institutional. Some girls cried themselves to sleep every night after the weekly public humiliation. Milly never once cried with shame, but as the birth drew nearer, she sometimes found her pillow wet with the tears of an undefined yearning. She worried that she was losing her resolve, terrified that when the time came to give up her baby, she wouldn’t be strong enough. Talking to Rita didn’t help. The young girl was the least emotional of all of them, and viewed her situation with an almost brutal practicality. She was an expert – she’d been through it all before, when she was fourteen.
‘No good getting attached, is what I say, Mill, you just got to push the little bastard out and say cheerio, ain’t ya?’
Milly envied her detachment. Her own pregnancy seemed to have leached away all her old bravado. She felt her once hard muscles softening into maternal folds of flesh, and her inner strength melting into a sentimental pulp that filled her with impotent anger at herself. Now, as she shuffled off towards the communal bathroom, she felt tears welling and told herself to toughen up. Yesterday, Ida, a big-boned girl from Peckham, had given away her baby to a well-to-do, middle-aged couple. The poor girl had come back to the dormitory howling and no matter how much Matron told her to control herself, that she was upsetting the others, Ida continued to sob all day. Soon that would be her, Milly reflected, but she was determined not to howl. She would put her baby first and be glad to sacrifice her own feelings on the altar of maternal love.
The bathroom was a long white-tiled room, with a row of sinks and two baths at the end. She could hear the other girls waking and chatting, and hurried to slip off her nightgown. The baths were used on a rota basis and it was her turn this morning. A proper bath, with taps and running hot water, was an unheard of luxury for Milly, but she still hadn’t got used to bathing in front of strangers. At home they would get the grey tin tub in from the yard, fill it a pan full at a time from the copper, and then she and her sisters would share the bathwater, Milly first, then Elsie, then Amy. They would scrub each other’s backs, but then her sisters were not strangers.
Easing herself gently into the hot water, she realized with a pang just how much she missed those infuriating sisters of hers. That was one thing amongst many that had changed during her stay in Edenvale, which Milly knew was a paradise compared to other unmarried mothers’ homes. Yet the orderly routine of prayers, hymns and hard work, scrubbing floors or sewing sheets, had seemed at first like a prison sentence. Still, it was a penitentiary that allowed for time in the gardens or accompanied walks in the surrounding lanes, and it was at such times that Milly found time to think. This was another luxury, like proper baths, that was little known in Arnold’s Place. She was surprised to find that she was not the same person who’d arrived there all those months before. The things she’d imagined she would miss – the dances, the drinking, her friends at the Folly – she’d hardly given a thought to, yet here she was, missing the two people who’d always given her the most trouble, her sisters.
It was as she hauled herself out of the bath that the first contraction caught her. She stumbled, but managed to grip the rolled bath edge. Her breath coming in quick gasps, she waited while the pain diminished, then stood up naked, dripping and trembling. All modesty forgotten, she screamed out, ‘Me baby’s coming!’
Immediately she found herself surrounded by a gaggle of girls, grabbing at her, eager to help her out of the bath. Rita waddled off to tell Matron and, as another contraction doubled her over, Milly wailed at Rita’s retreating figure, ‘Mum never told me it would be as bad as this!’
Rita shot back, entirely unsympathetic, ‘Lot of good that would’ve done you!’
Milly’s delivery was relatively quick and later Rita told her she’d had it easy. But though the time might have been short, it felt to Milly as though she were being ripped open. She privately thought the speed of her delivery was down to the midwife who’d decided to move things along with a strategically placed knee in her stomach.
Afterwards, when she’d been stitched up and the midwife handed her the tightly swaddled bundle, Milly looked down at the round, tiny face staring placidly up at her and wondered how she could feel such tenderness for the little demon who’d just put her through hell. He had a broad button nose and a small ‘o’ of a mouth, but his eyes were captivating, almost oriental in their shape, and they sparkled with what she could only describe as delight. He looked happy to have been born.
‘You be happy while you can, me old son.’ She pushed back the white swaddling cloth and kissed the silky, gold splash of hair that covered the crown of his head. And as she began to nurse him, she saw his little fist creep up to her breast, until slowly his uncurled index finger began that familiar, rhythmic stroking he had perfected inside her womb.
They were allowed to keep their babies with them, day and night, for almost six weeks. The nurses always referred to them by surnames. Their adoptive parents, they explained, would give the children their real names. But Milly couldn’t be so detached. She gave her little boy a secret name: to her he was Jimmy, named after her beloved middle brother, who’d died in 1916 at the Somme when she was only ten. She had worshipped Jimmy from afar, the hero who would surely return, unlike her poor elder brother Charlie, killed at the Battle of Loos the year before. When Jimmy had marched away, her mother promised her he would come back. God, she said, would not be so cruel as to take a second of her sons. God, perhaps, had not taken him, but a German shell certainly had.
Groups of prospective parents came to Edenvale each week to meet the newborns and choose their babies. Three other girls had given birth at about the same time as Milly, followed by Rita, whose little girl was blonde and as beautiful as her mother. She was the first to be taken away. And Rita, hard as nails, seemed genuinely relieved.
‘Well, that’s her sorted out. It’s a weight off me mind, Mill. I can’t wait to get out of this place and have a bit of life. I should think yours’ll be next, people want boys, don’t they?’
Milly nodded. She could only put Rita’s hard-heartedness down to the circumstances of her pregnancy, but she couldn’t share her steely attitude. Each day she spent with Jimmy only made it harder to contemplate giving him up. As he nuzzled her breast, she would dip her head to breathe in the scent of him, and when his eyes locked on to hers, she found it almost impossible to look away. It was as if she were becoming addicted to her own child.
The next baby to be chosen was indeed a little boy, larger and more robust-looking than Jimmy, then another little girl was taken away. When Milly saw Matron bringing Jimmy back to her, unclaimed, her heart filled with such relief, she thought it would break through her chest. As Matron stood before her, still holding Jimmy, she explained that the only couple left had been disappointed not to get the little girl, but were going away to think about taking Jimmy.
‘But, Milly, you shouldn’t get your hopes up, they really weren’t sure if they wanted him...’
At that, something in Milly’s heart rebelled. ‘If he’s not good enough for first choice, then I don’t want them to have him at all!’ She took Jimmy from the matron, and held him tightly to her.
‘You can’t afford to pick and choose, young woman.’ Matron’s face was full of undisguised disapproval. ‘If you must know, these are a respectable, wealthy couple, with a beautiful house in Canterbury. Your boy will want for nothing. He’s not exactly a robust infant; this may be his only chance. Would you rob him of that and take him back to the slum he was conceived in?’
‘He wasn’t conceived in a slum,’ Milly said, her voice rising with anger. ‘He was got in a hop garden and he’s not anyone’s second best. I’m telling you they’re not having my Jimmy!’
‘Keep your rough factory voice for the streets! The parents are having tea on the law
n and if they hear your common screeches, they’ll definitely reject the poor child!’
Milly stood up, brushing past the matron and, still holding Jimmy tightly to her breast, she poked her head out of the dormitory window. There below was a well-dressed middle-aged couple, drinking tea with Mr Dowell, the home’s foremost benefactor.
‘Oi, you two! My Jimmy’s too good for you, you ain’t havin’ him!’
Their polite smiles turned to embarrassed disapproval at the sight of Milly shouting from the window. As Matron pulled her back into the room, she heard Mr Dowell mutter hastily, ‘A jam girl from Bermondsey, I’m afraid, but it wouldn’t be fair to penalize the child...’
Milly twisted out of Matron’s grasp. Turning her back on her, she began to nurse Jimmy, who’d been woken by her shouting and was now grizzling in her arms.
‘See, you’ve made the poor mite cry, give him to me!’ Matron held out her arms, but Milly stubbornly shook her head, so that the woman was forced to come and sit down beside her.
‘See sense, Milly, you really have no choice,’ she said, altering her tone. ‘If you take him back to Bermondsey, we’ll recommend you as unfit and he’ll have to go into an orphanage. Is that really what you want?’ When Milly didn’t reply, she pressed further. ‘I’m told his grandfather is a violent man?’
Would they use that against her? Milly was astonished that the matron knew so much. Who had told her, Florence Green?
‘I can look after him on my own. I’m not taking him back home.’
‘Where would you take him?’ The woman pushed on with her maddeningly sensible, inescapable practicalities. Where would she take Jimmy? How would she live? But these questions paled beside her utter determination not to allow her beloved little boy to go to a home where he could only ever be second best.