Hopping. Melanie McGrath

immediately stopped picking and set about preparing lunch. While Mrs Shaunessy handed round slices of Dutch cheese and raw onions, wrapped in sacking to protect the food from the bitter tar now covering everyone’s hands, Joan put a kettle on the paraffin stove and made everyone a cup of tea sweetened with condensed milk. Heated discussions broke out about the heaviness or lightness or houseyness of the cones, whether they were larger or smaller than usual, and whether they were softer or crisper, ripe or unripe. Half an hour later the bell rang to signal the end of lunch, and bit by bit the women and children vanished back down the green factory walls.

      By mid-afternoon, the sun was beating down hard through the canopy of leaves and the gardens were sultry and filled with dappled light. A nearby family began a rendition of ‘Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage’ and others joined in, some in rueful tones, but everyone seemed in good humour. At five o’clock, when Daisy’s arms and shoulders were aching and her hands were dark as fury and the fingers needly and stinging, the man on the chestnut horse rode by and called out No more bines and, a few moments later, Daisy found herself in the flow of women and children heading out of the green factory and back along the flinty lane towards Pheasant Field.

      Lilly was waiting for her outside hop hut number 21.

       So?

      Daisy looked at her blackened hands.

      Oh, that ain’t nothing to fuss over, Lilly said. Here, you wanna come blackberrying? Daisy glanced over at Franny but she seemed to be busy with some game, so she left her there.

      The two girls started down Pheasant Field hand in tarry hand, washing themselves in the trough just beside the gate, then they continued on until they reached Featherbed Lane. Turning north, they marched along the flints, grabbing at delicate umbrels of cow parsley and scatters of pink bladder campion as they went, as far as Danecourt Bridge where the railway line formed steep shoulders lined with hazel and elderflower and brambles, stopping every so often to plant blackberries in their mouths, and by the time they returned to the huts, Pheasant Field was already bathed in twilight shadow. There were fires lit and some families had made torches from bulrushes, which gave off a magical, orange light. Someone was playing a piano accordion, and outside number 21 Alfie was cursing the wall-eye that left him unfit for duty and Mrs Shaunessy was talking about the letters she’d already had from Patrick. It wasn’t all rosy. Some of the letters the sweethearts sent to the soldiers made them laugh. In one, Patrick had said, a young wife had asked her husband how many times the soldiers had managed to get out to the pictures. Patrick Shaunessy was trying not to be too downhearted, though, because the war would be over soon. He was sorry not to be able to visit the hop that year, and he missed it, since to him the hop was the merry in England and the great in Britain all combined. Still, he said, Marie was to keep his place for him, because as sure as eggs is eggs, he’d be there next year.

      Alfie said he’d drink to that and the adults all raised their mugs of tea and Mrs Shaunessy started up ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’.

      The following morning Daisy woke to a dewy dawn full of cobwebs and pink-tailed rabbits. At seven thirty she and Franny set off once more with the others through the oak gate towards the great green factory. Daisy picked quickly from the start now, methodically stripping and pinching until she had a rhythm going. After a lunch of bread and cold sausages, Mrs Shaunessy told Franny to go and play, and without the distraction of her sister, Daisy found she could work faster still, her fingers and hands knitting the delicate movements together with such proficiency that by the time the man on the chestnut horse had called No more bines, she was confident she had perfected her technique, and she sensed from the care Billy Shaunessy was taking with her that he knew it too. If nothing else, hopping had given her a pinch to be reckoned with.

      That evening, Mrs Shaunessy told them to go off and play, so Lilly took Daisy to the old gravel pit where a colony of feral cats was chasing butterflies, and they gave each cat a name – Big Marmalade, Smuts and Ship’s Cat. Daisy noticed not only how many butterflies lived in the country, but also how many birds there were, so many that even if you rolled your index finger and thumb into a tiny circle and looked through the hole, there would always be birds trapped inside your fingers. They were returning back across the fields when they saw Billy coming towards them with a smirk on his face, saying Mrs Shaunessy wanted Daisy to return immediately to Pheasant Field. There they found a great hullabaloo of women, with Franny, red faced and weepy, at its centre.

      What were you thinking? said Mrs Shaunessy, grabbing Daisy by the shoulders and giving her a good shake. Leaving your sister like that?

      The little girl had been picked up by the carter, who had seen her dangling her legs over the platform at Selling station. When questioned, Franny had said she was waiting for the train to Poplar, but the carter, surmising from her accent that the little girl was an East End picker, had brought her back to Gushmere Farm.

      She could have been killed, and then what’d I say to your poor ma what’s already lost her twinnies and ain’t all there in the head? Lord save me, Daisy Crommelin, if you shouldn’t be bleedin’ well shamed of yourself!

      Daisy had never heard Mrs Shaunessy swear before. It was rather alarming. She felt rage and shame in equal measure. The injustice of it, when it was Mrs Shaunessy who’d told them to go and play! But she knew such thoughts were dangerous. It had been thoughts like these – like thinking she deserved a toffee apple flat and had a right to one – which had set off the train of events leading to Elsie’s absence and their current exile. Whatever happened, Franny was special, and it was Daisy’s responsibility to look after her, particularly now, when they were away from their mother and father.

      Mrs Shaunessy never heard the full story behind Franny’s flight but Lilly heard it later from another girl and passed it on to Daisy. Billy Shaunessy had taken Franny to one side and told her that a giant lived at the top of the beanstalks in the hop garden waiting for little girls to eat. So terrified had she been by this news that she had run directly to the train station to wait for the next train home. It was only fortunate that no train had come, or Franny Crommelin might have found herself alone at London Bridge.

      From then on, Daisy did her best to keep her sister in her sight. During the day, while she picked hops in the Shaunessy family drift, she had Franny stay beside her and play with some dolls Daisy had made for her from twigs and pieces of rag. At five every day all picking would cease. This was the time Daisy loved best, when the evening stretched out before her, plump with possibility. She would take Franny and with Lilly they would go blackberrying or swimming in the dank little pool the locals called Ghost Hole Pond, or they would sit at the rim of the chalk pit watching the antics of Big Marmalade and Ship’s Cat or the swallows diving for insects and dandelion clocks rising up on the summer thermals. At other times they would clamber across the downed oaks in Winterbourne Wood and climb to the top of Iron Hill and watch horses and carts and the occasional steam tractor or thresher lumbering along the Roman Road, and Franny would say Is that the tram? and Daisy would laugh and reply:

      There ain’t no tram in the country, silly, and gazing out across the beamy hills and wooded nooks of the Kentish Downs, Daisy would comfort herself with the thought that here, where the horizon stretched out as far as the eye could see, the tumult of war and even her mother’s illness seemed so fantastically remote it was hard, sometimes, to remember them. She began to miss her old life less and less; Elsie, flower-making, Old Pigswill and sickly-coloured fogs. All she longed for was Joe, and his stories.

      And so the weeks passed until, one day in September, it started raining. It rained so hard that the bines dripped with drowned insects and the hop cones softened and clung to their stalks; it rained on the huts until tiny ropes of water snaked along the walls and on to the palliasses and the cinder paths until they ran in muddy streams; it rained on the evening fires and on the washing put out to dry. And it rained the next day and the day that followed that. By the end of the third morning, Franny was coughing green phlegm and by the afternoon a fever had set in. The next day the hop doctor called, announcing himself, as he always did, with a cheery Bring out your dead!, but he had nothing to offer except to tell Mrs Shaunessy to keep the girl warm and dry, two things which, given the weather,