by Mary Gibson
‘Mummy’s here!’ was all she had time or breath to utter, before the water entered her mouth and the notorious Fountain current sucked them both under, in its whirling embrace.
She had always known it would come to this. As the waters tugged at her hair and clothes, the coconut raft was ripped from her hand and she felt a certainty that whatever god inhabited the river was exacting his due. She had offered herself and her child to it and then drawn back. How stupid she’d been to think that the river god would be denied its tribute. Holding her son tightly to her chest, she gave herself up to the depths.
The strong undertow dragged Milly and Jimmy beneath the opaque waters, so that they were invisible from the foreshore. But standing on Fountain Stairs were two witnesses to their struggles, and now the eager eyes of Elsie and Amy scanned the surface of the water. They had followed Milly as she’d pursued the old man from Arnold’s Place, and had arrived just in time to see her plunge into the river with Jimmy. The two sisters had run the length of Bermondsey Wall, with Elsie lagging behind, and had tracked Milly downstream, desperately trying to keep up as the tide took her and Jimmy; waiting only for the chance to get close to the river. At Chamber’s Wharf they had glimpsed mother and son shoot by, seen Milly getting closer and closer to Jimmy, but they’d arrived at Fountain Stairs only to witness them both being sucked under by the current.
Now they clung to each other, shivering and terrified, while the river sloshed and boiled up the narrow stairs, soaking them. Suddenly Amy pulled out of Elsie’s arms.
‘I’m coming, Milly!’ she shouted, launching herself through the foaming waves slapping against the stairs, and out into the fast-flowing tide.
Elsie’s cry was lost in the noise of water rushing against the river wall. She saw her sister’s arms whirling in an ungainly crawl which, however untutored, had been acquired in this same treacherous stretch of water. Amy’s forbidden Thames swimming expeditions with Barrel had taught her the secret of the Fountain and she was heading for the exact spot in the stream where the spout spewed out the lucky ones. She began treading water, but the tide’s pull threatened to bear her downstream – only by swimming against the current was she able to stay in the same position. Desperate seconds passed as Amy’s head whipped back and forth, willing the surface to break. Then there was a burst of air bubbles, and the thick green waters broke, as the river like some liquid leviathan opened its maw and shot forth Milly and Jimmy, with such force that they were propelled clear of the water. Today, the old river god had chosen to be merciful – they were free! Amy was on them in a heartbeat. Grasping Milly under the armpits, she shouted in her ear, ‘Hold tight to Jimmy!’
But the instruction was unnecessary, for though Milly could no longer hear her sister, she had Jimmy in a death-like grip, which not all the mighty force of the old river had been able to loosen. Amy turned on to her back and, supporting the two bodies, kicked out for the Fountain Stairs, but the force of water shooting over them and sucking back down threatened to break all three of their bodies on the stone steps.
‘Elsie!’ Amy called as she was dragged back by the undertow. ‘You’ve got to help me. I can’t get them out on my own!’
But Elsie was frozen, her deep childhood fear of the river rising up now, as it caught at her feet and smashed against her legs.
‘Elsie! I’m losing them!’
This time Amy’s cry seemed to unlock something in Elsie, and she began to descend the river stairs. Her skirt billowed out and her hands reached forward, feet slipping as water covered her legs, she toppled back on to the steps. Now, sitting up to her swollen stomach in water, she braced herself, made a grab for Amy and with an almost animal roar, pulled her up until she too was on the stairs. She strained her heavily laden frame, till, one step at a time, she hauled up Amy, who held fast to Milly and Jimmy. Finally, they were all at the top of the stairs, coiled in a sodden spiral of bodies, the sisters intertwined like a three-cornered triskele around the child at its heart.
The light was too bright, the air too thin. She must be in the wrong place. She knew she had surrendered herself to the river, opening her mouth to fill her lungs with its thick opacity. Drowning was heavy, she knew that, a slow strangling, bursting weight, that crushed the chest and dragged on the body. So why, now, did she feel so light? She knew she couldn’t be in heaven. Her mother had always said she made a bad Catholic, and at the end it wasn’t either the caddywack or the proddywack God she’d turned to, but the old river god – and even he hadn’t heard her prayers. The light hurt her eyes and she groaned, pulling her arms more tightly round Jimmy. But they closed around empty air. He was gone. Her groan turned to a soft whimpering, then a long moan.
‘Jimmy!’
She felt hands exploring her face, soft as butterfly wings brushing her cheeks. She opened her eyes. He gave her the smile she loved, broad enough to dimple his cheeks, bright enough to light his eyes.
‘Mummy’s awake!’ Jimmy said.
Gathering him into her arms, she squeezed so hard he protested, then the room seemed suddenly full of noise. Amy, draped in a huge grey blanket, sat on the edge of the bed where Milly lay and engulfed her in a scratchy embrace, then Elsie, wearing borrowed clothes, joined them.
A voice she recognized said gently, ‘Give her some air, girls.’ And she turned her head to see Florence Green at her bedside. The young woman took her hand, seeming to understand her confusion. ‘It’s all right, Milly, you’re back safe on dry land. Thanks to your sisters; they pulled you out of the river. You’re at the Settlement and we’ve sent for Bertie, and your mother will be here soon. Just lie back and rest now.’
Florence pulled the cover up over her and Jimmy, as Milly felt tears of gratitude begin to trickle down her cheeks. Her child was alive, here in bed with her. She was alive! As her sisters obediently moved away, she pulled them back.
‘No, let my sisters stay.’
She looked up into Elsie’s serious, sharp-chinned face and at Amy’s careless beauty and felt nothing but gratitude, realizing now that they’d both risked their lives to save her and her child. She pulled them closer, remembering something her mother had once said, in another lifetime or so it seemed.
‘Be friends with your sisters,’ she’d begged. ‘You’ll need each other one day.’
It was many days before Milly realized the full extent of Amy’s heroism. She learned it not from Amy, but from Bertie, who, once she was back in Storks Road, nursed her and Jimmy as tenderly as though they were both children. He told her how Amy had braved the strong currents and deadly undertow at Fountain Stairs, and how Elsie had found a superhuman strength to pull all three of them up the stairs. When she tried to thank her sisters, Amy had shrugged and reminded her of all the times Milly had told her off for coming home with wet underwear and dripping hair. Elsie insisted she’d done nothing, but Milly remembered how fearful she’d been of the river, sometimes not wanting even to look at it. She could only guess at the courage it had taken to immerse herself in its waters.
Jimmy wouldn’t leave her side and she didn’t want him to. Her strength had been sapped and the quantity of filthy Thames water she’d consumed left her with a fever, but in spite of Bertie’s protests, after three days she determined to get up from her sick bed. Her life and her child had been given back to her. She wasn’t going to waste it lying in bed. Besides, she wanted to see her mother. She’d been vaguely aware of her presence at her bedside at the Settlement, and had battled to keep her eyes open, and she remembered glimpsing the thin cut at her mother’s throat. She’d tried to raise herself up.
‘The old man?’ she’d managed to ask, before collapsing back into sleep.
Now as she moved slowly around her bedroom, being helped by Bertie into her clothes and shoes, she realized with a start that her mother hadn’t been to see her and Jimmy since their return to Storks Road.
‘Has Mum been round, while I’ve been laid up?’ she asked Bertie.
‘No, love.’ He was
fumbling with her buttoned shoe strap and she bent to do it herself, but her head swam and she found herself gripping his shoulder to steady herself.
‘There, you’re not ready to get up!’ Bertie said.
‘I’m fine, just a bit dizzy. Why hasn’t she been round?’
‘Who?’
‘Mum! She’d normally be here wanting to take over.’
‘Amy’s been giving her the news. You haven’t really been up to visitors.’
Something in his tone made her suspicious. Bertie was an open book, his mobile features reflecting every emotion. Now she could see him struggling to hide his blushes as he bent his head and started buttoning the other shoe.
‘Bertie Hughes, you’re a terrible liar. What’s going on?’
He moved to sit on the bed beside her. Taking her hand, he stroked it gently. ‘I haven’t told you anything because you’ve barely been able to lift your head from the pillow. You’ve been in no fit state.’
His characteristic slowness was agitating her even more than usual. ‘Has something happened to her? Just tell me!’
He paused for a moment, then sighed. ‘Your mother’s had some troubles of her own, love.’
33
Trees of Heaven
October 1928–May 1929
‘Dead? How? At the river?’ If she had been the cause of it, she would have to live with the consequences, but she wouldn’t have, couldn’t have done anything differently. Her mouth had gone dry and all her determination to get up and face the world had drained away. Her legs were weaker than the beef tea Bertie had been spooning down her mouth for the last three days. She wished her brain felt more connected to her body and she wished her feelings were more connected to her brain. It was as if the river had melted all the normal everyday connections that allowed her to function properly in the world, and she realized, with a jolt, that she had begun to cry. The old man was dead, and she was crying. How could that be? The truth was, she had so often wished him dead it had become second nature, but now she began to suspect that all along, she had only really wished him – different. The old man had been her father... once.
‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Bertie said, reading her mind.
‘No?’ But she had left the old man lying in a pool of his own blood; she had sliced the back of his legs and hobbled him. She had left him, bleeding to death for all she knew, on that barge.
‘No!’ he said with emphasis. ‘You did what you had to do to protect our son and I’m proud of you. Your father killed himself.’
‘How?’
‘We don’t know if it was deliberate or an accident, but he drowned.’
‘In the river?’
Bertie shook his head. ‘Not the river. It was at Neckinger Mills.’
‘In the lime pit,’ she whispered, a shiver raising every hair on her body as the image flashed into her mind of the old man, face down in a square pit of liquid lime; hairless, bloated white flesh already pulpy and softening.
‘Strike me dumb, how did you know that?’
‘Elsie had a dream, ages ago, that he’d drowned in one of the lime pits.’
Bertie whistled. ‘Looks like Polly Witch got it right this time!’
Milly put her hands to her face, rubbing at her eyes, wanting to erase the horrible image. She shuddered. ‘I wouldn’t have wished it on him, not even after everything he’s done to us. It’s horrible, Bertie.’ And she leaned into him, letting the bitter tears fall for her unloving father.
‘But how could he have even walked, after what I did to him?’ she asked after a while.
‘I think all the blood made things look worse than they were. Some people saw him later on Sunday, walking past Neckinger Mills. He was bloody and hobbling, and looked half mad they said. Then later on, some kids saw him climbing out of the tannery, over the wall next to the pits.’
Milly knew the place. It was a fairly low wall they had used to run along as children, and the grid of lime and tanning pits beyond were visible from there.
‘They said he looked drunk, had a bottle in his hand, started shouting at them to clear off, but then he just fell back and disappeared. We think he must have toppled back into one of the pits.’
‘But why would he go there of all places? There’s no reason to it all.’
‘Oh, there’s a reason, Milly. It turns out he’d been hanging around the place for weeks on and off, even asked for his old job back, and when the foreman refused him, he started getting abusive, saying he’d torch the place.’
‘I’m not surprised he’s been back for a while. I never told you, but I felt as if someone was following me, back when we had all that fog.’
‘Why didn’t you say anything?’
‘Well, I never saw anyone, but now I know it was him.’ She shuddered, thinking of all the times when she’d been at his mercy, whirling round in the fog to find nothing there at all. ‘But he never damaged anything at the tannery?’
‘I think he probably got distracted. After they fished out his body, the police found the offices broken into and the directors’ drinks cabinet empty.’
It was a pitiful end, and now she was no longer at the old man’s mercy, she found she had room for her own. Being turned away from the tannery must have seemed the last nail in the coffin of whatever dignity he still possessed.
‘Do you know what he said to me on the barge, while he was dangling my poor baby over the side? He said it was living in a houseful of women that ruined him.’
‘Oh, that’s a load of old tosh, Milly.’
‘Not really, he blamed us for being alive, while our two brothers were dead, and he blamed Wilf going away on us too, said the women had taken all the jobs...’
Bertie held her tighter. ‘Wilf left because he couldn’t stand your father. And there’s only one thing ruined the old man, my love, and that’s the drink. So there’s to be no more talk of blame, hear me?’
‘I need to go and see Mum. She’s had to go through all this on her own and I wasn’t there to help.’
‘Not alone, she’s had your sisters.’
Her sisters. Suddenly she felt lighter, suddenly the phrase sounded full of promise. Now their common enemy was gone for good, perhaps they really could be bound together by something other than fear.
‘Where are they?’
‘They’re at the undertaker’s.’
The old man’s funeral was discreet and painful. Her mother had insisted everything be done properly, just as though he’d been a real husband and father. And Milly understood that it was as much for her own sake that her mother wanted it this way. Her life with him had been one long humiliation, always to be referred to as ‘poor Mrs Colman’, always to have been powerless, fighting for a respectability that he inevitably sabotaged; it had eaten away at her native pride, but hadn’t destroyed it. Now the burying of him was perhaps the first independent act she’d carried out in her adult life, and Milly had to admit, she did it well.
Everyone was decently dressed in black. The men’s suits came out of the Common Thread Clothing Club, and Milly and Elsie made every other black garment. There was a Mass and a proper Christian burial, as his death had been ruled an accident, not deliberate suicide. Milly stood through it all with a rigidity that made her muscles tremble and her jaw ache. The few tears she’d had to spare for her father had already been shed. There was no crying at the old man’s funeral.
After the burial they went back to Arnold’s Place, where a few of his more sober workmates, and some of the neighbours, were given sandwiches and nothing stronger than tea. Admittedly the crockery and furniture had to be borrowed from Storks Road, but afterwards Milly could see a sort of grim pride in her mother’s face, when Mrs Knight said her goodbyes and added, ‘All very respectable, Mrs Colman, very respectable.’
The baby’s cries were insistent and piercing. Milly rolled over in bed and curled against the curve of Bertie’s back.
‘Thank gawd I don’t have to get up for this one.’
&n
bsp; ‘Your turn’ll come again soon enough.’ He was awake.
She pulled him over and laid her head on his chest. She was happy. Elsie had brought home her new baby girl just before Christmas. They had called her Ivy, not just for the season, but because, as Elsie said, it was a plant that would flourish almost anywhere. The baby had certainly thrived and if her lungs were anything to go by, she had the constitution of an ox. Milly could only think it came from the Clark side, for the child had very little of Elsie’s fairy-like fragility.
But Milly’s happiness had another cause, for shortly after the new baby arrived she found that she was expecting another child herself. Bertie’s happiness, she knew, was tinged with worry. She had tried to reassure Elsie that babies didn’t cost much, but now the reality was hitting home. Bob had been out of work for a year and her own husband hadn’t worked full time for almost three. If she was honest, her own happiness was sometimes interrupted by fear that their precarious ark would spring a leak at the worst possible time. But she took strength from the fact that the Common Thread was still thriving.
This morning, the two men were going to try for some labouring jobs with Bermondsey Borough Council. Their slum clearance programme was well under way and the dilapidated houses around Cherry Garden Street had been demolished. Finally, the area had begun to reflect a little of that old pleasure garden, filled with cherry trees, which had once graced the banks of the Thames centuries ago. Soot-encrusted hovels had been replaced with an incongruously pretty estate of cottages, boasting their own front gardens – the result of a long-held dream of their MP, Dr Salter, to replace all the slums of Bermondsey with something that people could be proud to live in. Milly and Bertie had walked around the flagship streets of Wilson’s Grove, marvelling at what previously had seemed an impossibility: in the shadow of factories and wharves, a little garden village had grown up.