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tightened and she was shocked to find herself on the verge of tears. Even she hadn’t been aware just how much this meant to her. It didn’t help that Elsie and Amy were giggling over the hopping box, impervious to her disappointment.
    ‘But he’s let me go hopping the last three years and I’ve always got another job after. Why can’t I go this year?’
    Her mother shook her head. ‘He says our hopping money’s not enough and Southwell’s is too good to give up. He says there won’t always be other jobs to walk into.’
    Milly left the meat unsliced. Ashamed of the tears pricking her eyes, she walked to the shelf and took down the smallest blue willow-pattern jug.
    ‘I’m sorry, love, don’t get upset—’
    ‘We’ve got no pickle for the meat. I’ll go to Hughes,’ she said, hurrying out before her mother could see the tear trickling down her cheek.
    In the street, she brushed it away and set off for the grocer’s, sprinting as fast as her long legs could take her. If only her feet had wings attached and she could fly up above the streets and docks, high over the Thames, eastward over London till she reached the green hop gardens of Kent. But that was stupid thinking, the sort that got Elsie into so much trouble. She slapped to a halt outside Hughes, chest heaving, clutching her ribs where a stitch had caught her suddenly.
    She hated going into the grocery, for Hughes was a superior man with a stony face, full of unspoken criticism. She’d known him since childhood, but he never smiled at her. Even the way she asked for jam or pickle seemed to draw a withering look from Hughes. He wasn’t from around Dockhead, but however much he disapproved of the ‘Bermondsey Irish’ who lived there, he didn’t seem to mind taking their money. The Colmans were Bermondsey Irish, Milly’s mother one of the descendants of Irish navvies who’d come over a hundred years earlier to build London’s first railway viaduct. The little Irish community, sometimes just called ‘the caddywacks’, had clustered around St Saviour’s Dock, forming an enclave within Bermondsey. Hughes was definitely not a caddywack and he let you know it.
    ‘Two penn’orth o’ pickle, please!’ She defiantly banged her mother’s precious jug on to the marble counter before realizing it wasn’t Hughes standing behind it. Instead there was a young man she judged must be in his mid-twenties. She thought there was a resemblance to Hughes, the same fresh colouring, neat ears and nose, but there the likeness ended. He had a pleasant oval face and clear blue eyes, with eyebrows that slanted upwards like little wings. He raised one of these now to comical effect.
    ‘Someone’s not happy!’ he said, smiling at her.
    ‘Sorry,’ she muttered. ‘I thought you were Hughes.’
    He chuckled. ‘He has that effect on me as well, sometimes,’ he half whispered. ‘But I am a Hughes too, Bertie Hughes. I’m his nephew.’
    ‘Ohh,’ Milly said, taken aback by his friendliness. ‘I didn’t know he had any family. He doesn’t live round here.’
    Bertie Hughes carefully weighed Milly’s jug and then spooned the mustard pickle out of a seven-pound jar on the counter.
    ‘No, we come from Dulwich way. I’ve been working in the Camberwell shop, but he’s moved me here for a few weeks, says he needs a holiday.’
    ‘A holiday? Lucky sod. Probably just wants to get away from the Bermondsey rough,’ she said bluntly.
    He grinned. ‘Probably.’
    Then she had to laugh with him. For some reason the encounter with Bertie Hughes had lightened her mood, and she left with the beginnings of a plan to ensure she would still have that ‘holiday’ of her own.
    But for her plan to work, she would need her mother’s help. And so, that evening after the old man had gone to the Swan and Sugarloaf and her sisters were in bed, she sat opposite her mother in the quiet kitchen. Without the tension of her father’s presence or the conflict with her sisters, this