The Milliner's Secret

by Natalie Meg Evans

  ‘On your feet, lazy pute, and go back to earning a living.’ Jac raised a foot, but before he could deliver a kick, he was hit broadside by a young man pounding towards him in a blur of shirtsleeves. They both went down but the younger man recovered first. He stood over Masson, fists bunched.

  ‘You want a fight, you rotten Frog? Then take me on and leave Cora alone.’

  ‘Frog?’ Masson lumbered to his feet. All six feet two inches of him cast a menacing shadow. ‘I’m Belgian, not French. If you don’t know the difference, shut your mouth.’ He sneered at the fists raised against him. ‘Put those away, you scrawny Irish beanpole. I do what I want with my own.’

  ‘His own’, meanwhile, was trying to crawl out of the gutter, using Masson’s waistcoat as a handhold. Masson caught the hand and twisted it. ‘Girl, I want your full wage packet at the end of the week, and I’ll count every sixpence in front of you. Get back to work.’

  He stalked away down Shand Street towards Tooley Street, which was clogged with slow-moving traffic and pedestrians, pausing briefly to toss an object into the road.

  The young man, Donal Flynn, ran to pick it up. It was a leather purse, which he shook into his palm. Clucking in disappointment, he walked back to the gutter and hauled Cora to her feet. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘My face . . . I must look like Joe Louis on a bad day.’

  ‘Even if you had two black eyes, you’d never look like a ¬heavyweight boxer.’

  She managed a pained grin. ‘Flyweight?’

  ‘Just about. Lucky I was around, though. I’d just delivered a crate to the infants’ school.’ Donal poked a thumb at nearby Magdalen Street. It was noon and shrill playground noises reached over the factory roofs. ‘I heard him bellowing your name, so I knew you were in trouble.’

  ‘That’s one way of putting it. I went down like a plank, the air knocked out of me.’ She looked over her shoulder. ‘Let’s go, case he comes back.’

  ‘He won’t – not if he’s going where he usually goes at this time. How much was in the purse?’

  ‘Five pounds. He chased me round half Bermondsey and only caught me when I tripped. When I wouldn’t hand it over, he started in on me.’

  ‘He’s got no right.’

  ‘He’s got the right, Donal. He’s got the hardest punch round here and that’s all the permission he needs.’

  Cora Masson made use of Donal’s shoulder while her lungs recovered. Blood dripped from a cut above her eye, mixing with the grit on her cheek. Fanning out the skirts of her summer dress, she groaned. The printed rayon was smeared down one side with grime, and since they were outside a leather-curing works, she knew what that grime might contain. ‘None of the factory hands came out to help. If you heard me, they must have done.’

  ‘They’re scared. People say your dad once pulled apart a man with his hands.’

  ‘He did. He tells me about it sometimes.’ She brushed the horrible image away. ‘I’m supposed to be on my way to the Derby.’

  Donal laughed, incredulous. ‘You didn’t think he’d let you have a day at the races? You’d be thinking miracles happen.’ He shot a glance down Shand Street. No sign of Jac Masson. The Spotted Cow on Tooley Street had reeled him in, it seemed.

  ‘I never told him I was going and I’d love to know who did.’ Cora took Donal’s arm. ‘Walk with me to Bermondsey Street, then I’ll be all right.’

  ‘Back to work?’ Donal sounded relieved.

  ‘Back to the factory. The buses might still be there. They might!’ she insisted, as Donal shook his head. ‘They’ll make a roll-call and it’ll be pretty obvious I’m not on board because I’m the one who always leads the singing.’ She burst into a music hall number; ‘“He used to be all chuckles, now he’d rather use his knuckles. I’m the girl who gets a shiner from the old man every night.”’

  ‘Save your breath,’ Donal interrupted. ‘I’ll help you walk, but you’re too much to carry. And the buses won’t have waited.’

  He was right. The kerb outside Cora’s workplace was littered with cigarette butts and sweet papers, and a single rose torn off somebody’s Sunday best boater. The mess told of a crowd surging across the yard and cramming on to the buses. The hat factory was still going full-blast, its ducts belching out fully formed clouds, which turned yellow-brown as they met the smog that always hung above Bermondsey. Its unique smell, with keynotes of resin and wet dog, was less pungent than usual, thanks to a stiff breeze. It depressed Cora to think of the banks of machinery behind those brick walls, still turning, blowing, stamping, as if the only thing that mattered to the world was more blessed hats.

  Donal helped Cora to a section of low wall, taking her weight more easily than his earlier comment had suggested. He carried no spare flesh, but he was fit from pushing laundry crates around the streets six days a week. And while Cora was tall – her height and fair colouring proclaimed whose daughter she was – she was lightly built. ‘Underfed’ was how schoolteachers had described her during her childhood. Having made sure Cora could sit unaided, Donal went to retrieve the barrow he’d abandoned earlier.

  When he returned she asked for her purse.

  He handed it to her. ‘Empty as a kipper’s socks.’

  ‘Not quite.’ She extracted a white ticket. Number 22, which happened also to be her birthdate and her age. ‘My lucky number. I knew I was going to get chosen in the raffle this year.’

  Donal nodded. ‘My sisters were dead jealous.’

  ‘Well, they don’t have to be now. See, that’s how luck works. Fate delivers a parcel, all shiny, and it turns out to be horse sh—’

  ‘Don’t swear, Cora.’

  Today, 2 June, was Derby Day, the pinnacle of the English flat-racing season and a high point in the Londoner’s calendar. Since early morning, buses, trains and private vehicles had been pouring out of London, heading for Epsom Downs. Pettrew & Lofthouse, Hat Makers of Distinction, where Cora worked, had a Methodist board of directors who disapproved of horse-racing and, indeed, any form of mixed-sex gallivanting. But even they were forced to concede an annual tradition that allowed a lucky group of workers to join the outflow. This year – 1937, Coronation Year and, by definition, exceptional – they’d agreed that a hundred workers should be chosen to go, rather than the usual fifty. Last Friday afternoon, ticket number 22, with Cora’s name on it, had been pulled out of Old Mr Pettrew’s big top hat.

  ‘Wouldn’t have killed one of those buses to wait.’ Cora gave the ticket to the breeze. ‘I nipped home to change and my dad ambushed me.’

  ‘Where’d you get that five pounds from?’

  ‘Where d’you think?’ Since Christmas, she’d worked evening shifts at the laundry owned by Donal’s grandmother. Finishing at Pettrew’s at six, she’d make her way to the Flynn’s building on the corner of Tooley and Barnham Street to put in a ¬further two hours’ work before going home to prepare tea for her dad. ‘Ten hours a week scorching my knuckles for a few bob and that bloody man thinks I’m going to drop it in his pocket?’ She hurled the purse into Pettrew’s yard. ‘D’you ever wonder if life’s worth living?’

  ‘Here.’ Donal offered his cap. ‘Wipe your face. I don’t mind if you get blood on it.’

  ‘Haven’t you got a hanky?’

  ‘It’s at home.’

  ‘So what’s this?’ Cora flourished a square of linen.

  Donal shoved his hands into his jacket and groaned because he always fell for it when she pickpocketed him. ‘If you’d been alive fifty years ago, they’d have hanged you, Cora.’

  ‘No. I’d have got away and they’d have hanged you.’

  Strangers often took Donal for Cora’s younger brother, though he was actually three years older. While she was fair, he had the black hair of Galway but, for all that, they’d grown up to look a bit alike. ‘Injured innocence,’ as Cora explained it, ‘and soupy blue eyes.’ Donal had got into the Troc-Ette Cinema on Decima Street at child’s rates until he turned seventeen.

  Watching
her dab her cheek, he said, ‘I taught you how to throw a punch back at a bully.’

  ‘Wouldn’t dare.’

  ‘My dad never hits my sisters, only us boys.’

  ‘My dad is a gentleman – breeding is all in the fists, don’t you know.’

  Donal chewed over this ambiguous statement, before adding, ‘Dad never laid a finger on my sister Sheila, not even before she became WPC Flynn, because she’s halfway to being a saint. He threatens to wallop Marion and Doreen all the time, when they stay out late with their young men. Never does, though.’

  A pair of motor charabancs were pulling out of a factory opposite, open backs crammed with women hanging on to their hats, men in flat caps and jaunty cravats. Another race-day convoy. Someone hoisted a banner bearing the legend ‘Better stick with Bennett’s Glue’.

  Cora felt a wrenching jealousy. What must it be like to enjoy the moment, without having to store up excuses for daring to have a good time? She yelled above the growl of engines, ‘I hope you stick to your seats.’

  ‘We’re the ones stuck,’ Donal said glumly. ‘Least you had the chance to go. My gran doesn’t believe in holidays except on a saint’s day, and only if it’s an Irish saint called Patrick. Then she only gives us half a day and the halves get shorter every year. Same dirty streets, same dirty river. That’s my life.’

  Cora squinted into a sky that was blue with promise behind the smoke. ‘When the sun shines on the righteous, it rains on us.’ She tugged his arm. ‘Let’s go anyway.’

  But not in a torn rag of a dress. ‘I’ll have to borrow something off one of your sisters,’ she informed Donal. They were walking by way of Tooley Street to Barnham Street, where they both lived, though at different ends. Donal needed to return his barrow to the laundry and put on a jacket. ‘We’ll sneak in and out,’ she told him. ‘By the time anybody realises we’ve gone, we’ll be on the train to Epsom Downs.’

  As they walked up the passageway to Flynn’s Laundry, Donal pointed out that they were both broke. You couldn’t go racing on less than ten shillings. As for borrowing a dress, Marion and Doreen were ‘fearful protective’ of their wardrobes. Sheila, he conceded, didn’t care for clothes and dressed like a policewoman even when she was off duty. ‘But you wouldn’t want any of her battle-axe outfits.’ He unlatched a gate, adding, ‘If Gran sees us, I shall ask to go. I’m no good at lying.’

  ‘Better make sure she doesn’t see us, then.’ Following Donal into a yard enclosed by low buildings, Cora ducked under a line laden with men’s combinations, thirty pairs or more. Must be a new ship in. Many of Flynn’s customers were seamen whose vessels came into Rotherhithe docks from Hong Kong, India and the South Seas. A contrary place, Bermondsey. A backwater on the doorstep of the world. Seeing movement in the window of one of the laundry houses, she told Donal to park his barrow quickly. Why did it have to squeak? Too late.

  A woman in a green apron emerged from an outbuilding. Her sleeves were rolled, her white hair twisted up so tightly it stretched her eyes and the cords of her neck. Cora never saw Granny Flynn without thinking of a spring onion.

  Granny glared at Donal. ‘One hour to deliver one load?’ Taking in Cora, she mumbled something unintelligible. Shortage of teeth and an indelible Galway accent made Granny hard to follow even in these parts where a third of the population was immigrant Irish.

  Donal translated: ‘She’s asking if you’ve come to help out.’

  ‘Blast that,’ Cora said. ‘The heaviest thing I want to lift today is a race card.’

  ‘I could use an extra pair of hands at an iron.’ Granny eyed Cora’s torn sleeve, her grazed arms. ‘Even if they are both left hands.’

  ‘Sorry, Granny.’ Cora’s first job had been here, when she was fourteen. Out of school on the Friday, arms deep in suds on the Monday. The best thing she could say for Pettrew & Lofthouse, it had got her away from endless washday. She’d never disliked Granny Flynn, and the other women had been friendly, but lifting sopping blankets out of boilers in fuggy steam all day had thickened her lungs. Her hands had peeled from the caustic, and the skin between her fingers had become so raw, it had bled.

  She’d asked once, back then, ‘Why should I be in agony so other buggers can have clean sheets?’

  After clipping her ear for swearing, Granny had answered, ‘Because you’re working class, which means all work and no class.’

  Cora had called at Pettrew’s the day after and asked to see the hiring manager. Beavering on the production line at a hat-maker’s wasn’t much of a step up socially, but at least her hands had healed.

  She said now to Granny, ‘Any other time I’d be thrilled to wield a flat iron in your company.’ Be polite. She might need more casual work the way things were going. ‘But I’m off to hobnob with the upper crust.’

  Granny gave a cackle. ‘You won’t have seen yourself in the mirror, then?’

  Cora muttered to Donal, ‘That green dress Sheila wore at the St Patrick’s Day party here, has she still got it?’

  Donal shrugged uneasily but Cora led the way to the main house, saying, ‘It’ll be back in her cupboard before she’s finished her shift. She’ll never know.’

  Donal closed the kitchen door behind them. ‘She’ll know. Sheila always knows who ate the last biscuit or who gave the gas money to a bookies’ runner. And, Cora, she’d say you ought to go back to work, like your dad ordered.’

  ‘Donal, if you ever want to do more than push a barrow down dirty streets, you need to stop taking orders. There’s a world out there and you’ve got a brain. You were the best at maths in school by a mile. You’re good-looking, too, when you’re not cocking your head and staring at your boots.’

  ‘Let’s see to that eye of yours.’ Donal ushered her down into a scullery. At weekends, the Flynn household was as noisy as a zoo, but today the younger children were at school and everyone else was working. Donal’s mother had died twelve years ago, in the same year Cora’s mother had left home. Molly Flynn, it was said, had dropped dead from exhaustion, ten babies plus her wash-house work. Whereas Cora’s mother, Florence Masson, had chucked her bloomers over a ship’s mast. Which was a fancy way of saying she’d scarpered with a sailor.

  Inaccurate, as it happened. Florence had left England with a man called Timothy Cartland. An actor, not a mariner. They’d gone to New York to make their fortune on Broadway.

  ‘I’ve just realised,’ Cora said, as Donal dipped a napkin into cold pump water and added a slosh of witch-hazel. ‘It’s twelve years to the day since my mum left. We went to the races, she stalked off after a row and we never saw her again.’

  ‘Put this to your eye and I’ll see if the range is hot. You could use a cup of tea.’

  The pad stung, and she shouted after Donal, ‘I reckon Mum had the right idea. Off to the Derby and vamoose. I’ll do the same one day, jump aboard a ship and go.’ She realised too late that Granny Flynn was standing halfway down the scullery steps.

  ‘Go to sea, is it, Cora? I’ve heard you like the company of sailors.’

  Donal’s face appeared behind the old woman’s shoulder. ‘Gran, don’t. That’s how rumours start.’

  ‘It’s how other things start, too, and I’ll say what I like in my own house.’ Granny came all the way down and pulled the pad from Cora’s eye, sucking a breath through her gums. ‘Swelling like a bantam’s egg. Give it an hour, you’ll be seeing the world soft-boiled. Am I to take it you’re off to the races?’ When Cora confirmed it, she sniffed. ‘Where does the money come from?’

  Cora put a hand under her skirt. She fiddled with her stocking top before bringing her hand out triumphantly and waving notes at Donal, who was blushing and staring at the floor. ‘Five quid, still warm. Count them, Donal.’

  He did. ‘Where’d you get it?’

  ‘I stuck my hand in my dad’s pocket.’

  Granny looked scandalised. ‘Stealing from your own father?’

  ‘He was using me as a punch-bag at the time.’

  D
onal burst out, ‘Had he seen, he’d have kicked the head right off you. And me.’

  Cora grinned. ‘He didn’t, though, did he? We can have the day of our lives on a fiver. Give in, Donal.’

  Granny folded her arms, the physical embodiment of the word ‘no’. ‘You’ll hand it all back, Cora Masson. What’s yours is legally your father’s and you owe him your duty.’

  Cora regarded the old woman thoughtfully. Granny liked to take a moral stand, but her sermons were generally strongest on Mondays, the day after she’d made her confession at church to Father O’Brien. This far into the week, the religious starch had usually been steamed out of her. ‘Wrong on both counts. I’m over twenty-one. And if we’re talking about conscience, yours should tell you to give Donal the rest of the day off.’ She shoved a wispy curl behind her ear. She could go alone, but where was the fun in that? ‘Derby Day is St Patrick’s other holiday. There’ll be more Irishmen on the Downs than you’d find in the Emerald Isle.’

  Granny planted her fists. ‘I need Donal here. We’re flat out.’

  ‘You’re always flat out. And he needs a few rays of sunshine – look at his cheeks. What’s one afternoon?’ Cora sensed Granny was weakening. ‘We might back a winner, bring home a fortune. Then you could retire to the primrose pastures of Penge or Catford and never have to look a pair of grubby combinations in the eye again.’

  Granny leaned forward. ‘Think you’ll escape these streets, girl?’

  ‘Why not? My mum did.’

  ‘So they say, but you’re like all the rest of us, stuck like a hob-nail in a crack of the pavement.’ She peered at Cora’s ruined stockings, then at her shoes, with the little bit of heel that had stopped Cora outrunning her father. ‘I’ll say this for Florence Masson, she was always bandbox neat. Dainty, kept her figure. The consequence of being a retired actress, I suppose.’ Granny pronounced ‘actress’ as if it were an indecent, foreign word.