Authors: Mary Gibson
Milly sighed. ‘All right, Mum, I’ll say no,’ she said obediently, and then desperate to change the subject she pulled her mother off in the direction of the baker’s stall. But as bad luck would have it, the stall was pitched near the Gun Inn, outside which Pat and a group of men stood drinking.
‘Milly!’ Pat called and then the others joined in. ‘Here comes our drinking pal, come on, Mill, give us a song!’
Her mother’s grip tightened on her elbow. ‘See what I mean!’ she hissed, pulling Milly away, so that she barely had time to wave before being dragged to the other end of the green.
‘What d’you do that for!’ She felt hot with embarrassment. There was Pat telling her she looked grown-up and here was her mother, dragging her off like a naughty child. All her life she’d felt an unquestioning loyalty to her mother. But now that practised hard resistance she’d used to deal with the old man seemed to take over. She shook off her mother’s restraining hand.
‘Don’t tell me you’re turning into the old man, telling me what I can and can’t do! I’ll spend my time with whoever I want!’
Mrs Colman stood in shocked silence, and Milly felt her mother’s gaze on her back as she hurried over towards the Gun Inn, yet she hadn’t reached the end of the field before she regretted her harshness. Perhaps she’d spent too many weeks alone with the old man, and that had hardened her heart. Now she felt a tinge of fear, that she might have forgotten entirely how to soften it.
Most of the hoppers preferred to drink outside the pub. There were a few women drinking there, with their husbands and children, who had been treated to bottles of ginger beer.
‘Here, Milly, hold on to your glass, that cost me an extra shilling!’ Pat said as he handed her a pint of bitter. In spite of the good business the hoppers brought in, they were still charged a ‘shilling on the glass’ against breakages. It rankled, but not enough to interfere with their Sunday drink. She took the glass and went to sit with him on the green.
‘Your mum didn’t look too happy to see me.’
‘Take no notice, Pat, someone told her I had a few drinks on the lorry. Says it’ll ruin me reputation.’
He raised his eyes. ‘She forgets you’re grown up now, not one of her little set of jugs no more!’
Milly felt a pang of regret. A few years ago her mother had saved up the money to have that photograph taken of Milly and her sisters. They’d gone to the studio in Sunday best, brightly polished shoes, carefully brushed hair with bows tied neatly, Amy scrubbed clean of all the urchin dirt she so loved. And the photographer had positioned them, in height order. Milly first on the left, willowy and emerging from childhood, Elsie in the middle, skinny and gazing into the distance with a faraway look, and finally Amy, defiantly staring at the camera as though she were calculating what mischief she could get up to next. Her mother had loved it, exclaiming, ‘Oh! Will you look at me set of three jugs, you’re all so lovely!’ Now she felt mean, to have turned on her mother as if she were an enemy, instead of her greatest ally.
She drained her glass. ‘Better be getting back up the field. Mum’ll want help with the dinner.’
Pat looked disappointed. ‘I’ll be down again next weekend, will you want a lift back home in the lorry?’
‘You’re a diamond, Pat. I can’t afford the train, I’ll need to save all me earnings to give the old man when I get back.’
‘Right you are, I’ll see you next week then.’ He seemed to hesitate. ‘Do you want me to walk up the field with you?’
She paused. ‘All right, if you like.’
Halfway up the lane, he put his arm round her waist. She didn’t look at him, but she could feel his slightly beery breath on her cheek as he bent to kiss her.
‘I always liked you, Milly, even when I used to hang about with your brother, but now you’re the prettiest girl down here, do you know that?’
Milly looked up at him, startled by her own power. She’d had childish boyfriends before, but Pat was older, a man. Now, with him standing so close, wanting something from her, she felt an echo of the power she’d had when standing her ground against the old man. But as he held her shoulders, pushing her up against the high hedge, panic caught in her throat and she remembered her mother’s warning. Before he could steal another kiss, she had started away, sprinting up the lane, long legs flashing, shouting.
‘See you next week!’
Without looking back, she flew along the hedgerow until she got to the five-bar gate. Stepping up on to the lower rail, she vaulted over without pause and ran full pelt across the field, arriving at the hut out of breath, with her hat in her hand. Her mother and the other women were in the centre of the field, tending a rudimentary brick oven, where a communal joint had been roasting all morning. Mrs Colman was forking baked potatoes out of the embers and now Milly kneeled to help her.
‘Sorry, Mum.’ She gave her mother a quick kiss on the cheek. ‘It’s just all that time on me own with the old man must have turned me grumpy as him.’
Her mother put a hand to Milly’s face. ‘I’m only thinking of you, love. Just don’t want you to end up with a wrong ’un... like I did.’
Early next morning they made their way to the hop field and gathered round the empty hop bin. It was constructed like a huge manger, with crossed poles at each end and sacking suspended from two side poles. Elsie perched on one of the side poles and Amy stood on an upended bushel basket, while Milly and her mother placed themselves at each end. The pole-pullers were walking around on stilts, with their long-handled bill hooks, cutting down the strung bines, so that they fell with great green swooshes into the bins. Milly took up the first bine, pulling her fingers down its prickly length, stripping off her first hops. She waited for the sharp, acidic smell to be released and when it came, a bright green essence of the countryside, she inhaled deeply.
‘Oh, Mum, the smell of them hops! It’s like perfume!’
Her mother laughed, quickly stripping the flowers from her own bine. ‘You couldn’t bottle it, though, could you?’
Elsie and Amy were happy to pick a bushel or two, but soon grew restless. When the drone of an aeroplane caught their attention, they dropped the bines and stood looking up as it passed low over the fields. Milly could even see the pilot perched between the double silver wings; she waved. Soon Elsie and Amy were off down the high green tunnels of hop plants, running between the bins, their arms spread like aeroplanes as they headed for the wood at the edge of the field.
‘That’s their picking over for the day, we won’t see them till they’re hungry,’ said Mrs Colman.
‘It’s up to us now then, better get cracking.’ Milly wasn’t sorry to see them leave. Most of the time they complained about the prickly bines or their legs aching. The truth was, she and her mother could get on much quicker without them. Soon their hands synchronized into a blur of speed, plucking hops so quickly from the bine that their individual movements were undetectable. Rosie Rockle, their neighbour from Arnold’s Place, stood at the next bin and started up a song. All down the hop field women and children joined in, till the sound of their voices rang through the bines.
‘
They say that ’oppin’s lousy, I don’t believe it’s true, we only go down ’oppin to earn a bob or two, with an eeay oh, eeay oh, eeay eeay ooohhh!
’
The late September sun grew strong and Milly’s pale skin had turned pink by the end of the morning. Already she felt as though her lungs had expanded to accommodate the richer, cleaner country air, and she knew that the struggle with the old man to get here had all been worth it.
At dinner time some of the women came back from the huts with buckets full of tea and they all sat together on the grass, eating large hunks of bread cut from the loaf, with hands already stained black from the hops.
‘Should I call the girls?’ Milly asked. She’d seen nothing of her sisters since they disappeared into the wood.
‘No.’ Her mother shook her head. ‘They know where we are if they get hungry. Let ’em run free.’
They both leaned back against the bin, enjoying the brief respite from the morning’s work.
‘How’s your back?’ her mother asked, rubbing her own.
‘Fine, this is nothing compared to Southwell’s picking room!’ Milly said with a grin.
After a couple of hours more picking, Ned, the measurer, came round. He was a man not much liked. His job was to scoop the hops out of the bins with a bushel basket, and then to weigh them. He could weigh them light or he could weigh them heavy. But Ned was notorious for tamping the hops down tight, so every last bit of air was expelled and the farmer got many more hops in a bushel for his tuppence. The pickers were always at his mercy.
Milly scooped up a handful of hops from the bin, they were good hops, fat and aromatic. ‘I reckon we’ve done over twenty bushel,’ she said to her mother.
But Mrs Colman shook her head, nodding in Ned’s direction as he approached their bin.
‘Not once he’s finished pushing ’em down. I wish those girls would get back here, we need them to go round and pick ’em up.’ Gleaning stray hops from the floor was child’s work, but in their absence Milly did it, then waited in anticipation as Ned measured out their hops into the poke. Only seventeen bushels! They would have to speed up, or get the girls to help a bit more.
They settled down for an afternoon’s work. The singing had stopped and people were picking in quiet earnestness, conscious of making up their day’s pay, when suddenly a shrill scream pierced the serenity of the hop garden. Milly stiffened and shot her mother a fearful look. They dropped the bines and dashed in the direction of the scream.
‘Where did it come from?’ asked Rosie, puffing along beside them.
‘From over there, in the trees!’ Milly answered, beginning to outstrip the other women who’d followed them. Soon she was at the margin of the wood. A little way in, standing frozen under the green shade, was Amy. She was staring down at her hands, which were covered in a red sticky substance. At first Milly took it for the dark stain of blackberries, but as she caught hold of her sister by the arms, she saw the stain was not black but red. It was blood.
‘What’s happened, have you cut yourself?’
The young girl opened her mouth, but no sound emerged. She shook her head, seemingly mesmerized by the gory coating on her palms. Milly’s mother kneeled down, frantically examining the child for a wound.
‘Are you all right, love? Where’ve you hurt yourself?’
Amy’s white face suddenly puckered. Then pointing back into the wood, she gasped, ‘It’s Elsie!’
Milly shot off, down the shadowed path that led into the heart of the small wood, tripping over roots and fallen branches. She sped on until she came to a small clearing and there, beneath a tree, was Elsie. Deathly pale, unconscious and very still, she lay on her side with one leg bent beneath her. As Milly drew closer, she saw blood pooled around her sister’s skinny leg. It had been caught in the sharp jaws of a trap. For an instant Milly froze, then she screamed. ‘Mum! She’s over here!’
Her mother entered the clearing, with Rosie and a gaggle of white-faced children tumbling after. Milly was suddenly galvanized. She picked up a small branch and commandeered Ronnie, Rosie’s grandson.
‘All right, Ron, I’ll open up the trap as far as I can, and when I tell you, wedge this stick in the jaws so it stays open, got me?’
Ronnie nodded and dropped to his knees beside Elsie, holding the branch at the ready. Milly grasped the jaws of the trap and heaved. Straining till her head felt it might burst with the pressure, she pulled with all her strength, but the jaws held fast.
‘It’s useless!’ Then spotting Rosie’s other grandson, a beefy boy nicknamed Barrel, she called out to him. ‘Come and hold that side for me!’
Barrel held one half of the trap in his solid grasp while Milly strained on the other half, till it gradually opened a few inches. It would have to be now, before her strength ran out.
‘Now, Ron! Shove in the stick!’
Ronnie rammed the stick between the two jaws, quickly removing his hands from danger, as Milly let the jaws ease off on to the stick and swiftly pulled Elsie’s leg out of the trap.
‘Oh, me poor baby!’ Her mother was wailing and useless at Milly’s side. The deep gash in her sister’s leg ran the length of her shin, the flesh folding open like a meaty book, to reveal a pearl-white bone. Milly felt faint, but caught hold of the two halves of flesh and squeezed them tightly together. Vaguely aware of her mother’s weeping, she looked up.
‘Don’t let go, Milly!’ her mother said. ‘Don’t let go of your sister!’
‘I won’t let go, don’t worry!’
Milly held tight to Elsie’s leg while Ned and another man carried her across the field to the lane, where the farmer already had a lorry waiting. They laid the insensible Elsie on a blanket in the back of the lorry, then set off on a rackety, nightmarish ride through the narrow winding lanes of Kent, heading for the hoppers’ hospital at Five Oak Green. Milly’s hands were firmly clasped round her sister’s leg the whole time, while her mother sat gripping the side of the lorry, moaning her low pleadings to Our Lady all the way.
The hoppers’ hospital was no more than a large cottage, but the doctor there was efficient and gave his services free to the hop-pickers. Only when he assured her that she could release her vice-like grip did Milly let go of Elsie’s leg. In an anteroom she washed her sister’s blood from her hands. There was so much of it! What if she had lost too much? What if she never woke up? Milly’s legs buckled and she held herself steady against the china basin. Suddenly a life without Elsie’s odd presence seemed impossible; her thwarted grottos and derided dreams seemed brave now and sad, rather than stupid. Milly went back to the waiting room, and gripping her mother’s hand, for once matched all her fervour and faith in praying for her sister’s life to be spared.
September 1923
Amy stood defiantly at the hopping-hut door, still in the clothes she’d slept in, straw from the palliasse sticking out of her tangled nest of hair.
‘I ain’t having a wash today,’ she said. She bore evidence of yesterday’s drama, with streaks of mud and even some of Elsie’s blood on her face.