Bourbon Creams and Tattered Dreams Read online

  She set to with confidence, surprised that her first attempt was not very pretty. She had obviously been too heavy-handed and the chocolate cream oozed from between the biscuit sandwich, covering the bench with gooey brown sludge.

  ‘No! Not like that, you’ll have no cream left in the biscuit!’ Edna said, snatching away the offending Bourbon and flicking it into a bin. She swiped a cloth over the bench.

  ‘Do another one, quick. She’s waiting on you.’ Edna pointed to the woman on Matty’s left, who stood holding a half-filled packet of Bourbons.

  But this time Matty didn’t press down hard enough and the top biscuit wobbled unsteadily on the cream. The next attempt had the right amount of cream but the bottom biscuit pointed one way and the top pointed another. Edna tossed it away and sighed, looking up at the clock.

  ‘They’re on piecework and you’re costing ’em money!’ Edna scolded.

  ‘Sorry,’ Matty said, each time she ruined a biscuit, feeling humiliated and ridiculous in the stupid hat and the ugly apron. It took all her determination not to squash Edna’s disapproving face on to the next squirt of chocolate cream and walk out. But after half a dozen attempts the forelady was satisfied and Matty began working as a team with the woman next to her doing the packing. Her name was Sophie, a slight, worried-looking woman, whose eyes were continually glancing up at the clock. Once Edna was gone she whispered, ‘You’ll get the hang of it, I’ll slow down me packing till you catch up.’

  That was obviously a great sacrifice for Sophie and Matty smiled gratefully. But even so, she simply couldn’t make her Bourbon creams quickly enough, so that by dinner time she was in a state of breathless anxiety, conscious only that Sophie’s pay packet was going to be a lot lighter this week than last.

  If only she hadn’t been put on Bourbon creams. She could have taken Vita Wheat, or even shortcakes, but the sludgy brown filling made Matty feel nauseous. It didn’t help that Len, a gangly ginger-haired young man in charge of the filling machine, refused to use the scoop provided. Instead, he dug two splayed hairy hands into the solid brown mass of chocolate cream and dumped handfuls of it into the filling machine. Matty tried not to look, but the machine needed constant replenishment and every time she saw his chocolate-clogged hands relieving themselves of their gooey burden Matty’s stomach heaved.

  ‘Shouldn’t he be using the scoop?’ Matty eventually whispered to Sophie, who stopped long enough to break into a smile.

  ‘Vile, ain’t it? He’d pick up the scoop bloody quick if the bosses come round. But hands is quicker. By the end of the week when you’re up to speed you’ll be grateful. Quicker he is, more we earn,’ she said.

  Matty doubted she would last a week. She didn’t think it would be her stamina that let her down – it would be her stomach.

  The following day Matty’s fumbling attempts to create the perfect Bourbon cream were beginning to improve and though she told herself this was only a temporary job, she couldn’t bear to be bad at anything and was determined to get up to speed. By the dinner-time hooter Sophie was congratulating her. ‘Look at her, Win!’ she said, calling Winnie’s attention to Matty’s increasing deftness. ‘She’s quicker ’an a blue-arsed fly, I won’t be able to keep up soon!’

  Matty grinned and pushed up the mob cap, which she’d contrived to flatten into a beret shape. Edna was patrolling and had witnessed the exchange. As she passed Matty, she grabbed the cap and tugged it down low over Matty’s forehead. ‘Keep it regulation. This ain’t a fashion show, cock linnet!’

  Matty’s face burned like a schoolgirl’s. But she bit her tongue and stifled a laugh as Winnie waved two fingers at Edna’s retreating back. Edna seemed to circle her perpetually, like some carrion bird waiting for a creature to die. Why she was so eager to see her fail, Matty didn’t know. But her heart sank when she saw the woman walking determinedly towards her holding a single biscuit in her hand.

  ‘What d’ye call this?’ She shoved the biscuit under Matty’s nose.

  ‘A Bourbon cream?’ Matty ventured and heard a few giggles from the girls around her.

  ‘All right, clever dick! I’m talking about this. Edna pointed to a ginger hair curling out of the chocolate-cream filling of the biscuit. ‘I told you to keep your hat on proper and now one of yours has got in the biscuit!’

  ‘I’m auburn!’ Matty said.

  ‘I call that ginger,’ Edna said, and though Matty knew she should keep silent, her instinct for putting down hecklers kicked in and she shot back: ‘There’s only one ginger nut around here and he never come out of the bake ovens!’

  The girls around her burst into laughter and even Len, who had picked up the scoop as soon as Edna came into view, gave her a wink.

  ‘Have your laugh, but you’ll be smiling the other side of your face when your pay’s docked one and six for bad hygiene!’ Edna threw the biscuit into the bin and walked off with a small smile of triumph on her face.

  But Matty wasn’t to be cowed. She persisted and was proud of herself when she was handed her pay packet at the end of the week. With the docked money it didn’t even amount to two pounds, but she’d earned it herself and, supplemented by her pub singing, she’d have enough to live on, putting any spare towards paying Frank off. Before leaving the factory that Saturday lunchtime, she went along with Winnie to the staff outlet to buy one of the cheap packets of broken biscuits the workers were allowed to purchase. They were the assorted rejects from all the lines, and though her nephews might not be enjoying the reflected glory of their film-star aunt any longer, that night when she went to Vauban Street Sam’s boys seemed even more impressed by the packet of broken biscuits she presented them with.

  Matty found the only way to make her new life bearable was to sing as she worked. Soon the girls around her on the Bourbon-cream line were encouraging her.

  ‘Give us a song, Matt!’ Sophie would ask, and Matty knew that the woman had an ulterior motive, for the more Matty sang the quicker she worked. Then Winnie would call out for a particular song and the requests would flow faster than she could meet them. She buoyed the production line up with cheery songs – ‘When You’re Smiling’ or ‘Sunny Side of the Street’. Then the older women would shout out for the music hall favourites, raucously singing along to ‘A Little of What Yer Fancy Does Yer Good’. The saucier the song the more they liked it and the more rumbustious they got. Sometimes the choruses reverberated so loudly in the high-ceilinged building that they were hard put to hear the foreman when he came in with the day’s orders.

  Then one morning as they were in full flow during a particularly boisterous version of ‘Oh, Oh, Antonio’, they heard Edna’s voice shouting above the din.

  ‘No singing! No singing!’

  There were a few stragglers who carried on regardless, but soon these realized they were on their own and gradually fell silent. Edna’s strident voice broke through.

  ‘Oi, you lot, look at this! What does it say?’ She was pointing at a painted sign by the door, which Matty hadn’t seen before and she assumed must have been put up overnight.

  ‘No singing!’ Edna repeated, only to be drowned out by boos from some of the girls.

  ‘Management say it’s a distraction and the subject matter is lewd! There’s to be no more singing.’

  ‘Miserable bastards!’ Winnie shouted.

  ‘Oi, that’s enough of that, Winnie Roberts, or you can go up to the office and get your cards for swearing!’ Edna called back.

  Matty had been astonished to learn that the firm’s Quaker founders had set a high moral tone for the company and operated a strict no-swearing policy, which she thought would be nigh on impossible to enforce. But Edna was obviously going to try. Winnie pursed her lips defiantly, but there were no more protests and the muttering soon died away. Matty was left dumbly facing a line of Bourbon creams with no cream in them, wondering how on earth she was going to get through the day without music. The production line had become a surrogate stage for her, and singing had helped h
er to ignore the sickly sweet smell of vanilla and chocolate that greeted her each morning along with the blocks of fat, sacks of flour and sugar that went into the vats of cloying biscuit mix. At least there’d been the consolation of entertaining a floor full of women while they worked. But now it seemed even that would be taken away from her. It was ironic; the Cockney Canary had landed herself in the one place where she was expressly forbidden from singing.

  As she turned her face to avoid the sympathetic gaze of Winnie and Sophie and all the other silenced workers, for some reason her mind went back to her time as a munitionette at the Arsenal. It had been a braver time, when she was fearless and confident about her future – now she’d meekly allowed herself to be silenced by a martinet. Give me the stink of cordite and the terrors of TNT, she thought. I’d rather be back there with my skin turning yellow as a canary, than spending my days up to my eyes in Bourbon creams.

  That evening as she walked home black, bare branches of cherry trees fractured a leaden sky. Planted a decade earlier by the Bermondsey Beautification Committee, she tried to imagine a time when their fat pink blossoms, hanging against a deep blue sky, would dance and splash their shadows on the pavements. She blessed the lady mayoress, Ada Salter, with her vision of a Bermondsey in which there was ‘no house without a window box, no street without trees’. But today Matty’s own imagination, which had always been able to supplement harsh reality, failed her. And she couldn’t imagine that spring, that better time. Grief for her child, for Eliza and for her own lost future seemed to have fractured her, and the weight of it was as heavy on her chest as the leaden sky above her.

  Perhaps she was just weary after a ten-hour day in the hothouse of Peek Frean’s, but she thought it was more the ‘no singing’ that had made her feel so defeated tonight.

  She walked through the back kitchen and out into the yard, which, even though she’d tended it better than Eliza had, still accused her with bare patches of earth. She found it as oppressive as a prison yard, for it was surely Will’s house and Will’s garden, not hers.

  Matty was booked to sing at the Concorde pub that night, but as the house with its ticking mantle clock, its hissing Ascot and its sun-striped parlour seemed to be rejecting her, she decided she might as well go there early. She shrugged off her coat and went to change.

  Winnie had told her she’d come along to boost the audience at the Concorde, which was the pub favoured by the Peek’s workers. They had taken up an easy friendship where they’d left it three years earlier. Though Matty had reservations about her being Tom’s sister, she’d got the impression from Winnie that he was long over her. So, if they bumped into each other, at least Matty wouldn’t have to agonize over ruining his life, nor torment herself with regrets about what could have been. When she arrived at the pub she was surprised to find Winnie already there, with Sophie and a few other girls from the Bourbon-cream line. She barely recognized them without their caps and aprons. For now, seated in a row, with their perfect marcel waves, painted eyebrows and bright lipstick, she thought they wouldn’t have looked out of place on a chorus line. Matty broke into her trouper smile, the one that could ignore the state of her heart.

  ‘Hello! It’s Peek’s very own Tiller Girls!’ she exclaimed, giving them a minstrel wave.

  They held up their hands, gave her a wave back and shouted in unison: ‘No singing!’

  7

  Inheritance

  February–March 1931

  Matty was nervous. But then, the courts were designed to make anyone dressed in normal clothes nervous. Barristers sailed through the high-ceilinged entrance hall like white-headed, black-winged birds, their robes billowing, chins thrust out in determined flight. They knew where they were going; this was their realm and she and Sam were mere interlopers. She recognized the feeling of a closed world. What else was Bermondsey after all? They stood in front of a solid oak door that led to the courtrooms. They were waiting for their barrister.

  ‘He’s late,’ Sam whispered, glancing nervously towards the glass-panelled entrance doors at the far end of the vestibule.

  ‘He’ll be here, don’t worry,’ Matty replied, refusing to whisper.

  And then she spotted him pushing through the entrance doors, a bundle of documents under one arm, small glasses glinting in the shaft of light streaming from a high window. He crossed the black and white tiled floor with a speed that belied his bulk, which was accentuated by a voluminous black robe. He bore down upon them like a well-fed bird of prey that had spotted two unsuspecting mice.

  ‘Mr Gilbie, Miss Gilbie.’ He gave Matty a firm handshake. ‘Are we ready?’ Not waiting for an answer, he swivelled on his patent-leather shoe, pushing through the oak door into a narrow corridor, expecting them to follow. More doors led off the corridor into various courtrooms. He stopped at the last.

  ‘Now, I must warn you, Mr James does have a case.’ He tilted his head to one side, judging the effect of his words.

  ‘But that’s not what Eliza’s solicitor told us!’ Sam said. ‘Matty is entitled to benefit.’

  He said it with such finality it almost seemed a truth. Yet Matty hoped it was not, for her life would be simpler, if harder, without the burden of this inheritance.

  ‘I am not saying he will win the case, just that he has it.’ The barrister attempted a smile, but Matty had seen bad actors do better. ‘His “reasonable expectations” as the only child of Miss Gilbie are the basis of his claim. As a dependent with no other income... you understand?’

  ‘But that’s a lie, he’s got an allowance for Cambridge and later on he’ll have his father’s money...’ Sam attempted to explain what the barrister must already know. But her brother had taken his role as executor so seriously, and had been so intent on getting justice for her, that now she could see the suggestion they might lose had really shaken him.

  ‘Sam,’ Matty laid a hand on his arm, ‘let’s not start accusing Will. Perhaps he really is struggling.’

  ‘Struggling my eye.’

  But their barrister ignored Sam’s flash of anger and looked down at his watch. ‘I don’t want you to worry, I have every confidence. The will is undeniably valid and we’ll have our judgment well before lunch!’

  As he turned away to open the courtroom door, Matty puffed out her cheeks and patted an imaginary belly, mouthing ‘he’s hungry already!’

  She was rewarded with a suppressed smile from Sam at her larking around and she took hold of his hand, to steady herself as much as him as they entered the courtroom. But once inside Matty was surprised. It was much smaller than she’d imagined, little more than a windowless, wood-panelled box with another smaller raised box at the front and a few wooden benches, which she doubted would hold more than fifteen people. When she thought of the thousand-seater theatres she’d played in in New York and the West End suddenly this didn’t seem so frightening after all.

  She heard the door squeak open and looked round. Her eyes met Will’s, but his gaze slid away and he gave no sign that he’d seen her. He inclined his head, listening to his barrister, before sitting down on one of the benches alongside hers. He looked paler, thinner, and though he was the one responsible for putting them all in this position, she found her heart going out to him. What did he think he could gain? Matty had known riches and she had known poverty, and her happiest days had certainly been her poorest, living in Beatson Street, with her parents still alive, making ends meet in their tiny terraced house down by the river. Even now, when she was struggling to earn a few pounds a week, she knew she’d rather be at Peek’s than living a life of luxury with Frank in New York. She tried to study Will’s face without making it too obvious. His dark eyes had a bruised look about them and she wished he had not made himself such an exile in his grieving for Eliza.

  But then the judge came in and interrupted her musings. They all obediently followed the clerk’s instructions to stand. The judge, wearing a more ornate wig and robe than the barristers, mounted stairs to his bench and picked
up his gavel. He reminded her of Bernie at the Star, in the days when it had been a full-time music hall and he had been master of ceremonies, banging his gavel with abandon at each new wonder, announcing each act in a more convoluted fashion than the last. ‘And here for your delectation,’ he would declare, ‘that charming chanteuse, contrapuntal crooner and cantatrice of captivating coloratura, Bermondsey’s very own Cockney Canary, Matty Gilbie!’ Then Bernie would go mad with the gavel, getting up a sweat and rousing the audience, so that by the time she stepped on to the stage they were roaring for her and she already had them in the palm of her hand. Those days were beginning to seem very far away, and she, a very different Matty Gilbie. When the judge’s gavel cracked down hard, she was jolted back to the present, yet something of her youthful confidence returned with the sound and she looked full into the judge’s hooded eyes, knowing that his stage was no finer than hers had once been.

  The barristers took it in turn to put their cases. Their own was matter-of-fact, almost off-handed in his performance, as he gave a mumbling summary of the facts. He sat down, checking his watch, and Matty saw him yawn as he began shuffling documents into order. Will’s barrister seemed much more impressive. He was vehement and convincingly certain of his client’s ‘reasonable expectations’, as Miss Gilbie’s only child, laughing sometimes that the thing had even come to court.

  He appeared to have finished and was about to sit down when he sprang up again, waving another document in his hand. ‘Furthermore...’ he continued, ‘there can be no doubt that Eliza Gilbie changed her will because of the undue influence of her sister, Matty Gilbie, an actress and variety artiste—’ he wrinkled his nose with distaste – ‘who associated with American mobsters and after hitting upon hard times fled her debts in America to graze upon pastures new!’