let a whole week go by before calling at the post office again.
This was Saturday. By Wednesday her resolve had broken down. When
the hooter sounded for the midday interval she left her bin and
hurried down to the post office--it was a mile and a half away, and
it meant missing her dinner. Having got there she went shame-
facedly up to the counter, almost afraid to speak. The dog-faced
postmistress was sitting in her brass-barred cage at the end of the
counter, ticking figures in a long shaped account book. She gave
Dorothy a brief nosy glance and went on with her work, taking no
notice of her.
Something painful was happening in Dorothy's diaphragm. She was
finding it difficult to breathe, 'Are there any letters for me?'
she managed to say at last.
'Name?' said the postmistress, ticking away.
'Ellen Millborough.'
The postmistress turned her long dachshund nose over her shoulder
for an instant and glanced at the M partition of the Poste Restante
letter-box.
'No,' she said, turning back to her account book.
In some manner Dorothy got herself outside and began to walk back
towards the hopfields, then halted. A deadly feeling of emptiness
at the pit of her stomach, caused partly by hunger, made her too
weak to walk.
Her father's silence could mean only one thing. He believed Mrs
Semprill's story--believed that she, Dorothy, had run away from
home in disgraceful circumstances and then told lies to excuse
herself. He was too angry and too disgusted to write to her. All
he wanted was to get rid of her, drop all communication with her;
get her out of sight and out of mind, as a mere scandal to be
covered up and forgotten.
She could not go home after this. She dared not. Now that she had
seen what her father's attitude was, it had opened her eyes to the
rashness of the thing she had been contemplating. Of COURSE she
could not go home! To slink back in disgrace, to bring shame on
her father's house by coming there--ah, impossible, utterly
impossible! How could she even have thought of it?
What then? There was nothing for it but to go right away--right
away to some place that was big enough to hide in. London,
perhaps. Somewhere where nobody knew her and the mere sight of her
face or mention of her name would not drag into the light a string
of dirty memories.
As she stood there the sound of bells floated towards her, from the
village church round the bend of the road, where the ringers were
amusing themselves by ringing 'Abide with Me', as one picks out a
tune with one finger on the piano. But presently 'Abide with Me'
gave way to the familiar Sunday-morning jangle. 'Oh do leave my
wife alone! She is so drunk she can't get home!'--the same peal
that the bells of St Athelstan's had been used to ring three years
ago before they were unswung. The sound planted a spear of
homesickness in Dorothy's heart, bringing back to her with
momentary vividness a medley of remembered things--the smell of the
glue-pot in the conservatory when she was making costumes for the
school play, and the chatter of starlings outside her bedroom
window, interrupting her prayers before Holy Communion, and Mrs
Pither's doleful voice chronicling the pains in the backs of her
legs, and the worries of the collapsing belfry and the shop-debts
and the bindweed in the peas--all the multitudinous, urgent details
of a life that had alternated between work and prayer.
Prayer! For a very short time, a minute perhaps, the thought
arrested her. Prayer--in those days it had been the very source
and centre of her life. In trouble or in happiness, it was to
prayer that she had turned. And she realized--the first time that
it had crossed her mind--that she had not uttered a prayer since
leaving home, not even since her memory had come back to her.
Moreover, she was aware that she had no longer the smallest impulse
to pray. Mechanically, she began a whispered prayer, and stopped
almost instantly; the words were empty and futile. Prayer, which
had been the mainstay of her life, had no meaning for her any
longer. She recorded this fact as she walked slowly up the road,
and she recorded it briefly, almost casually, as though it had been
something seen in passing--a flower in the ditch or a bird crossing
the road--something noticed and then dismissed. She had not even
the time to reflect upon what it might mean. It was shouldered out
of her mind by more momentous things.
It was of the future that she had got to be thinking now. She was
already fairly clear in her mind as to what she must do. When the
hop-picking was at an end she must go up to London, write to her
father for money and her clothes--for however angry he might be,
she could not believe that he intended to leave her utterly in the
lurch--and then start looking for a job. It was the measure of her
ignorance that those dreaded words 'looking for a job' sounded
hardly at all dreadful in her ears. She knew herself strong and
willing--knew that there were plenty of jobs that she was capable
of doing. She could be a nursery governess, for instance--no,
better, a housemaid or a parlourmaid. There were not many things
in a house that she could not do better than most servants;
besides, the more menial her job, the easier it would be to keep
her past history secret.
At any rate, her father's house was closed to her, that was
certain. From now on she had got to fend for herself. On this
decision, with only a very dim idea of what it meant, she quickened
her pace and got back to the fields in time for the afternoon
shift.
The hop-picking season had not much longer to run. In a week or
thereabouts Cairns's would be closing down, and the cockneys would
take the hoppers' train to London, and the gypsies would catch
their horses, pack their caravans, and march northward to
Lincolnshire, to scramble for jobs in the potato fields. As for
the cockneys, they had had their bellyful of hop-picking by this
time. They were pining to be back in dear old London, with
Woolworths and the fried-fish shop round the corner, and no more
sleeping in straw and frying bacon in tin lids with your eyes
weeping from wood smoke. Hopping was a holiday, but the kind of
holiday that you were glad to see the last of. You came down
cheering, but you went home cheering louder still and swearing that
you would never go hopping again--until next August, when you had
forgotten the cold nights and the bad pay and the damage to your
hands, and remembered only the blowsy afternoons in the sun and the
boozing of stone pots of beer round the red camp fires at night.
The mornings were growing bleak and Novemberish; grey skies, the
first leaves falling, and finches and starlings already flocking
for the winter. Dorothy had written yet again to her father,
asking for money and some clothes; he had left her letter
unanswered, nor h
ad anybody else written to her. Indeed, there was
no one except her father who knew her present address; but somehow
she had hoped that Mr Warburton might write. Her courage almost
failed her now, especially at nights in the wretched straw, when
she lay awake thinking of the vague and menacing future. She
picked her hops with a sort of desperation, a sort of frenzy of
energy, more aware each day that every handful of hops meant
another fraction of a farthing between herself and starvation.
Deafie, her bin-mate, like herself, was picking against time, for
it was the last money he would earn till next year's hopping season
came round. The figure they aimed at was five shillings a day--
thirty bushels--between the two of them, but there was no day when
they quite attained it.
Deafie was a queer old man and a poor companion after Nobby, but
not a bad sort. He was a ship's steward by profession, but a tramp
of many years' standing, as deaf as a post and therefore something
of a Mr F.'s aunt in conversation. He was also an exhibitionist,
but quite harmless. For hours together he used to sing a little
song that went 'With my willy willy--WITH my willy willy', and
though he could not hear what he was singing it seemed to cause him
some kind of pleasure. He had the hairiest ears Dorothy had ever
seen. There were tufts like miniature Dundreary whiskers growing
out of each of his ears. Every year Deafie came hop-picking at
Cairns's farm, saved up a pound, and then spent a paradisiac week
in a lodging-house in Newington Butts before going back to the
road. This was the only week in the year when he slept in what
could be called, except by courtesy, a bed.
The picking came to an end on 28 September. There were several
fields still unpicked, but they were poor hops and at the last
moment Mr Cairns decided to 'let them blow'. Set number 19
finished their last field at two in the afternoon, and the little
gypsy foreman swarmed up the poles and retrieved the derelict
bunches, and the measurer carted the last hops away. As he
disappeared there was a sudden shout of 'Put 'em in the bins!' and
Dorothy saw six men bearing down upon her with a fiendish
expression on their faces, and all the women in the set scattering
and running. Before she could collect her wits to escape the men
had seized her, laid her at full length in a bin and swung her
violently from side to side. Then she was dragged out and kissed
by a young gypsy smelling of onions. She struggled at first, but
she saw the same thing being done to the other women in the set, so
she submitted. It appeared that putting the women in the bins was
an invariable custom on the last day of picking. There were great
doings in the camp that night, and not much sleep for anybody.
Long after midnight Dorothy found herself moving with a ring of
people about a mighty fire, one hand clasped by a rosy butcher-boy
and the other by a very drunk old woman in a Scotch bonnet out of a
cracker, to the tune of 'Auld Lang Syne'.
In the morning they went up to the farm to draw their money, and
Dorothy drew one pound and fourpence, and earned another fivepence
by adding up their tally books for people who could not read or
write. The cockney pickers paid you a penny for this job; the
gypsies paid you only in flattery. Then Dorothy set out for West
Ackworth station, four miles away, together with the Turles, Mr
Turle carrying the tin trunk, Mrs Turle carrying the baby, the
other children carrying various odds and ends, and Dorothy wheeling
the perambulator which held the Turles' entire stock of crockery,
and which had two circular wheels and two elliptical.
They got to the station about midday, the hoppers' train was due to
start at one, and it arrived at two and started at a quarter past
three. After a journey of incredible slowness, zigzagging all over
Kent to pick up a dozen hop-pickers here and half a dozen there,
going back on its tracks over and over again and backing into
sidings to let other trains pass--taking, in fact, six hours to do
thirty-five miles--it landed them in London a little after nine at
night.
7
Dorothy slept that night with the Turles. They had grown so fond
of her that they would have given her shelter for a week or a
fortnight if she had been willing to impose on their hospitality.
Their two rooms (they lived in a tenement house not far from Tower
Bridge Road) were a tight fit for seven people including children,
but they made her a bed of sorts on the floor out of two rag mats,
an old cushion and an overcoat.
In the morning she said good-bye to the Turles and thanked them
for all their kindness towards her, and then went straight to
Bermondsey public baths and washed off the accumulated dirt of five
weeks. After that she set out to look for a lodging, having in her
possession sixteen and eightpence in cash, and the clothes she
stood up in. She had darned and cleaned her clothes as best she
could, and being black they did not show the dirt quite as badly as
they might have done. From the knees down she was now passably
respectable. On the last day of picking a 'home picker' in the
next set, named Mrs Killfrew, had presented her with a good pair
of shoes that had been her daughter's, and a pair of woollen
stockings.
It was not until the evening that Dorothy managed to find herself a
room. For something like ten hours she was wandering up and down,
from Bermondsey into Southwark, from Southwark into Lambeth,
through labyrinthine streets where snotty-nosed children played at
hop-scotch on pavements horrible with banana skins and decaying
cabbage leaves. At every house she tried it was the same story--
the landlady refused point-blank to take her in. One after another
a succession of hostile women, standing in their doorways as
defensively as though she had been a motor bandit or a government
inspector, looked her up and down, said briefly, 'We don't TAKE
single girls,' and shut the door in her face. She did not know it,
of course, but the very look of her was enough to rouse any
respectable landlady's suspicions. Her stained and ragged clothes
they might possibly have put up with; but the fact that she had no
luggage damned her from the start. A single girl with no luggage
is invariably a bad lot--this is the first and greatest of the
apophthegms of the London landlady.
At about seven o'clock, too tired to stand on her feet any longer,
she ventured into a filthy, flyblown little cafe near the Old Vic
theatre and asked for a cup of tea. The proprietress, getting into
conversation with her and learning that she wanted a room, advised
her to 'try at Mary's, in Wellings Court, jest orff the Cut'.
'Mary', it appeared, was not particular and would let a room to
anybody who could pay. Her proper name was Mrs Sawyer, but the
boys all called her Mary.
Dorothy found Wellings Court with some difficulty
. You went along
Lambeth Cut till you got to a Jew clothes-shop called Knockout
Trousers Ltd, then you turned up a narrow alley, and then turned to
your left again up another alley so narrow that its grimy plaster
walls almost brushed you as you went. In the plaster, persevering
boys had cut the word ---- innumerable times and too deeply to be
erased. At the far end of the alley you found yourself in a small
court where four tall narrow houses with iron staircases stood
facing one another.
Dorothy made inquiries and found 'Mary' in a subterranean den
beneath one of the houses. She was a drabby old creature with
remarkably thin hair and face so emaciated that it looked like a
rouged and powdered skull. Her voice was cracked, shrewish, and
nevertheless ineffably dreary. She asked Dorothy no questions, and
indeed scarcely even looked at her, but simply demanded ten
shillings and then said in her ugly voice:
'Twenty-nine. Third floor. Go up be the back stairs.'
Apparently the back stairs were those inside the house. Dorothy
went up the dark, spiral staircase, between sweating walls, in a
smell of old overcoats, dishwater and slops. As she reached the
second floor there was a loud squeal of laughter, and two rowdy-
looking girls came out of one of the rooms and stared at her for a
moment. They looked young, their faces being quite hidden under
rouge and pink powder, and their lips painted scarlet as geranium
petals. But amid the pink powder their china-blue eyes were tired
and old; and that was somehow horrible, because it reminded you of
a girl's mask with an old woman's face behind it. The taller of
the two greeted Dorothy.
''Ullo, dearie!'
'Hullo!'
'You new 'ere? Which room you kipping in?'
'Number twenty-nine.'
'God, ain't that a bloody dungeon to put you in! You going out
tonight?'
'No, I don't think so,' said Dorothy, privately a little astonished
at the question. 'I'm too tired.'
'Thought you wasn't, when I saw you 'adn't dolled up. But, say!
dearie, you ain't on the beach, are you? Not spoiling the ship for
a 'aporth of tar? Because f'rinstance if you want the lend of a
lipstick, you only got to say the word. We're all chums 'ere, you
know.'
'Oh. . . . No, thank you,' said Dorothy, taken aback.
'Oh, well! Time Doris and me was moving. Got a 'portant business
engagement in Leicester Square.' Here she nudged the other girl
with her hip, and both of them sniggered in a silly mirthless
manner. 'But, say!' added the taller girl confidentially, 'ain't
it a bloody treat to 'ave a good night's kip all alone once in a
way? Wish _I_ could. All on your Jack Jones with no bloody great
man's feet shoving you about. 'S all right when you can afford it,
eh?'
'Yes,' said Dorothy, feeling that this answer was expected of her,
and with only a very vague notion of what the other was talking
about.
'Well, ta ta, dearie! Sleep tight. And jes' look out for the
smash and grab raiders 'bout 'ar-parse one!'
When the two girls had skipped downstairs with another of their
meaningless squeals of laughter, Dorothy found her way to room
number 29 and opened the door. A cold, evil smell met her. The
room measured about eight feet each way, and was very dark. The
furniture was simple. In the middle of the room, a narrow iron
bedstead with a ragged coverlet and greyish sheets; against the
wall, a packing case with a tin basin and an empty whisky bottle
intended for water; tacked over the bed, a photograph of Bebe
Daniels torn out of Film Fun.
The sheets were not only dirty, but damp. Dorothy got into the
bed, but she had only undressed to her chemise, or what was left of
her chemise, her underclothes by this time being almost entirely in
ruins; she could not bring herself to lay her bare body between
those nauseous sheets. And once in bed, though she was aching from