Jam and Roses by Mary Gibson Read Free Book Online Page A

moonlit river behind her. Why, she wondered, did she submit to those kisses, which so often left her unmoved? Perhaps it had to do with that hollow pit of loneliness inside her, which had deepened since her mother and sisters had left. She didn’t want to hurt Pat, but there was something she was meant to be feeling, which she was not. If she ever managed to join them down hopping, perhaps she would try to forget about Pat and let him drift away as softly as the tide now running beneath her feet. She scanned the green sweep of river, all the while taking great gulping breaths of sharp air. Downstream, towards Greenwich, she watched as huge, billowy white clouds sailed like floating ships above the water. Upstream was the long V-shaped inlet of St Saviour’s Dock, after which Dockhead was named. Milly had learned in her history class that once, long ago, this whole stretch of riverside had been home to the Folly Gardens, a pleasant place on the banks of the Thames where fashionable city dwellers from across the water could exchange the stink of the city for sweet air and cooling river breezes. But that distant past was not in evidence now. The Folly had seen too much wretched life for that, and Milly thought it was unlikely ever to be a garden again.
    The tooting of a lorry horn jolted her back to the present.
    ‘Does your mother know you’re out?’
    ‘Pat!’ She jerked round to see him, with that familiar cheeky smile, half leaning out of the cab window, and hoped he hadn’t noticed her blushing at this interruption of her secret disloyal musings about him.
    ‘Me mother’s down hopping, as well you know!’ she called back.
    ‘How’s the old man today?’
    She shook her head, turning back to the river.
    ‘No wonder you’re looking sorry for yourself.’ He jumped down from the cab and came to join her on the jetty. He had always been a stocky young man but now, as he leaned his muscular arms next to hers on the wooden railing of the jetty, it was obvious how the lorry driving was filling out his physique. When Pat wasn’t moonlighting, his daytime job was to deliver to and from Butler’s Wharf. He had a small lorry yard nearby in Shad Thames and was a familiar sight making deliveries around Dockhead.
    ‘Ain’t you going down at all this year?’ he asked, offering her a cigarette.
    She shook her head. ‘Not for the want of trying. I’ve been making his life a misery this week. But he’s not budging,’ she said, pulling a face.
    ‘I’m going down meself at the weekend,’ he said, drawing deeply. ‘Taking a few of the husbands down in the lorry. Why don’t you come with us?’
    ‘What, in the lorry with the men?’
    ‘You’ll be in the cab with me. You won’t come to no harm!’ He laughed and flicked ash into the fast-flowing tide below.
    Many working husbands visited their wives in the hop fields at weekends, but the journey there usually turned into a drunken beano.
    ‘I’m not worried about that, I can take care of myself!’ Milly pulled herself up to her full height. At seventeen she was already a little taller than Pat, and lugging around seven-pound jam jars had given her arm muscles a docker would envy. Sometimes she found her strong frame an embarrassment and now, suddenly self-conscious, she wrapped her arms tightly around herself.
    ‘Thanks for the offer, Pat, but I’d have to work on the old man, and you know what he’s like.’
    Pat chuckled. ‘Oh, I know! There’s a good reason why Wilf pissed off at sixteen to join the army!’ Her youngest brother had volunteered during the last year of the war, lying about his age, but Pat had no such patriotic tendencies. Instead he’d stayed home and done pretty well from his black-market dealings. He threw his cigarette end into the river. ‘I expect he’ll drive you out too, one of these days.’
    He squeezed her shoulder sympathetically, giving her a quick kiss on the cheek, before jumping back up into the lorry. ‘Just let me know