Jam and Roses by Mary Gibson Page A

on, others jeering and laughing at the old man.
    ‘Go on, Mill,’ she heard a friend of her mother’s shouting, ‘give the bastard some of his own treatment!’
    She heard a piano, playing incongruously, and realized that Harry was still pounding away, almost as though he was providing musical accompaniment to the drama. She straightened up. Her father was still lying on the pavement, seemingly unable to get up. Remembering all the times her mother had been his football, she ran forward, aiming one last punishing kick into the old man’s kidneys as he struggled to rise. He slumped back, curled into a ball and covered his head. She leaned over him, whispering hoarsely into his ear, ‘Don’t you ever touch my mother again.’
    Spent now, panting and trembling, she felt the world around her coming back into focus. She recognized individual faces in the crowd, saw Ronnie and Barrel among the hooting children attracted by the brawl. She even noticed the passengers on the top deck of a passing tram, staring down curiously at father and daughter trapped like two prizefighters, in a ring of bodies outside the Swan.
    Pushing her way through the crush, it struck her like the blow that he hadn’t landed: her father was a coward. It seemed so obvious now, but how had it taken her a lifetime to discover it? All those years they’d suffered under his tyranny and she had left him back there, a cowering bundle on the pavement. But coward or not, she knew there would be consequences and, realizing what she’d done, a tremor of fear, not for herself but for her mother, seized her. She ran towards home.
    The day Milly Colman called her old man out of the Swan and Sugarloaf was talked of for many years in Arnold’s Place. It was embellished so much that one version even had her ending up killing him and swinging for it. But for Milly, it was the day her life changed forever. The word had quickly got back to Arnold’s Place, and she was confronted by a huddle of neighbours outside her front door.
    ‘Good on yer, Milly,’ Rosie Rockle nodded approvingly, ‘he won’t hit her no more, not after that pasting. Our Ronnie said you give him a bloody good hiding!’
    ‘I did, Rosie,’ said Milly, as the other women moved aside, murmuring their admiration. ‘I’d better tell me mum.’
    ‘I think she already knows, love,’ said Mrs Knight, but her look was pitying rather than admiring, perhaps not so convinced that Milly had helped her mother at all.
    Elsie and Amy had been part of the welcoming committee on the doorstep and now followed her inside. The kitchen looked just as it normally did, the furniture had been straightened, the fire lit and the groceries put away. Her mother was sitting at the kitchen table, hands flat on the white scrubbed boards. Other than the bloody patch, which she had tried to hide by combing over her hair, she looked her normal tidy self, face washed, and a clean pinafore wrapped around her skinny body. She raised hopeless eyes as Milly entered.
    ‘It won’t do no good, Mill. You’ve only made it worse.’ She shook her head. ‘He’ll end up killing you. I know him. You’ve shown him up in front of his mates and he won’t let it be.’
    ‘I had to, Mum—’
    ‘We’ve still got to live with him!’ her mother interrupted. ‘I need his wages for their sakes.’ She nodded towards the girls. ‘But I’m scared what he’ll do now. He’ll kill you in your bed and I’ll never be able to sleep quiet again. I think you’ll have to go, love, keep out of his way for a bit.’
    Milly sat down heavily on the chair opposite her mother. She was right. There would be no peace in the house for her mother or sisters, not while Milly was there. Even if she’d scared the old man enough not to beat her mother, there were other ways he could make all their lives miserable.
    ‘It’s all right, Mum,’ she said, moving round the table to grasp her mother’s hand. ‘I’d made up me mind to go, but now he