Free Jam and Roses by Mary Gibson Page A

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