Hopping. Melanie McGrath
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still dark when she was woken by Franny’s little hands prising open her eyes. From outside came a faint panting sound and a tap-tapping. Sufficient moonlight filtered through the gaps in the boards to give Daisy a dusty impression of the interior of the hut. Old Nell was lying next to them, now, asleep, and on the palliasse beside lay Mrs and Billy Shaunessy.
I don’t like it here, Franny whispered.
Daisy held her younger sister and stroked her head.
Ssh. Tomorrow I’ll take you to where the fairies live.
I don’t want to see the fairies, Franny said, I want to see the toffee apple man.
When they next woke it was only half dark in the hut. Daisy thought she heard a man shouting, then his voice became fainter. Nell was no longer lying beside them and the smell of wood burning drifted in from outside. Daisy pulled on her clothes and boots and went out. It was only half light but already Alfie had a fire going and Mrs Shaunessy was busying over it with a tea kettle. The grass was hung with white cobwebs. Down by the long drops rabbits scudded along the fringes of the woods, their bobtails bloody with the sunrise. Daisy returned to the hut, woke her sister and helped her to dress, and Mrs Shaunessy set down a breakfast of bread and marge and warm milk, but Franny pushed hers away, saying she couldn’t eat with the trees watching.
After breakfast the girls followed old Nell, Alfie and Joan, and Billy and Mrs Shaunessy out of Pheasant Field, and along a small flinty lane and past another row of huts that Mrs Shaunessy referred to as the Dovers, because the pickers from Dover were staying there, to the dip that marked the boundary between Big Kit and Old Ground. Here, there was a fence of wide stakes which acted as a windbreak – Mrs Shaunessy called it a Poll Loo – and beyond the Poll Loo Daisy became aware of a great swell of talk and song and they found themselves at the entrance to a sort of country factory whose walls were made of leaves. Here dozens, maybe hundreds, of families milled about, laughing and chattering, and there was a slightly nervy, competitive air, which reminded Daisy of Chrisp Street market at half past seven in the evening, just before the costermongers began reducing their prices. Many of the families carried paraffin stoves, baskets of food and jars of tea, and most seemed to have covered themselves with sacks or heavy aprons. Among the throng, Daisy recognised Lilly, who waved and gesticulated. Then Mrs Shaunessy drew some sacks from her bag and, ignoring Franny’s protests, she began tying them round the girls with lengths of string, before covering herself. Not long afterwards, a man arrived on a chestnut horse and opened the gate and the women and children surged forward, elbowing and pushing anyone who got in their way.
Hold hands and don’t lose me, shouted Mrs Shaunessy, but this was easier said than done in the general scrum, and even though Daisy and Franny were used to crowds, even though they wandered daily through the most overcrowded alleys and rookeries in a fiercely overcrowded city, it was as much as they could do to keep themselves from being heaved upwards by the crowd and flung down and trampled.
The leaf factory was divided into long alleys marked by a kind of high fencing of poles and wire, along which the hop bines curled upwards to a height of 20 feet. Men were moving about directing families down the passageways, at the ends of which sat huge baskets. Up ahead they saw Alfie waving and shouting.
This is our drift.
Mrs Shaunessy turned to the two girls and through the din signalled them to wait and not do anything until Billy showed them how to pick. Not long afterwards, the man on the chestnut horse drew a large handbell from his saddle pouch. At the sound of the bell, a roar rose up from the crowd of the sort that Daisy had only ever heard before outside the football grounds, as hundreds of women and children dived as fast as they could into one or other of the green alleys, shouting and jostling. Alarmed, Daisy followed Billy, dragging Franny behind her as Billy elbowed his way inside the alley. The air suddenly felt dense and musty. Sprinkles of sunshine fell from the roof but otherwise the only light came from the now distant ends, and when her eyes had adjusted, Daisy saw Billy standing beside them with a thin twine in his hands, from which soft leaves flapped, like pieces of brushed cotton. Between the leaves hung bunches of papery grey-green buds. Billy dropped on to a piece of sacking. With his left hand he held fast on to one end of the twine, then quickly he ran his right hand along the bine, applying force whenever he reached a bunch of cones.
Strip and pinch, strip and pinch. See? There ain’t nothing more to it than that.
When the bine was stripped and the cones had accumulated in a dip in the sacking, he gathered them up and threw them into an upturned umbrella that sat between himself and the spot where his mother stood, pulling down the cut ends of bines from the high wire around which they were entwined, then he grabbed another bine and began to repeat the procedure.
Daisy picked up a bine of her own. The soft stem, still coiled clockwise, felt downy and wet. She moved her hand along it, reached a short stem from which a few cones hung, and pinched. The cones did not give way immediately and she was surprised at how hard she had to squeeze her fingers to maintain a purchase on the short stem. So this was where Billy had perfected his pinching technique. No wonder he was such a master at it. She carried on down the bine, stripping and pinching, until she reached the end, then, copying Billy, she lay the naked bine neatly down in the alley and reached for another. Franny sat beside her, playing at picking, but for every cone she removed from its stem, she picked a half-dozen leaves. The work wasn’t arduous exactly, but neither was it as simple as it had at first seemed. From time to time Billy took up the umbrella and emptied it into the basket at the top of the alley. Every so often a pole puller came round with a wooden pole on to which was bound a curved knife. With this hop dog, he sliced at the bines caught in the roof of the factory, and having cut them, he yanked each in turn until they tumbled to the ground. Over in one corner of the garden, a family had begun singing.
They are lovely hops
When the measurer comes round
Pick ’em up, pick ’em up off the ground
When he starts to measure, he don’t know when to stop
But we don’t care, we’ll pick some more
Cause they are lovely hops
Oh! Lovely hops they are
They are lovely hops.
Soon they were joined by others, until the song spread right out across the garden.
After an hour or so there was a great cry of Tally! from the top of the drift and Alfie shouted Hover up!, at which Billy Shaunessy dropped what he was doing and raced to the basket. By the time Daisy reached it, he was already elbow deep in the hop basket, pulling up twigs and leaves and turning over the hop cones so they sat lightly on one another and filled more of the basket.
Two men appeared at the top of the Shaunessys’ drift. One of them scooped out the cones into a smaller basket, then tipped them into a long, cylindrical sack, while the other handed Alfie a wooden tag and made notes in a book. A family followed behind, collecting up the cylindrical sacks, sealing them and heaving them up on to the same wagon that had brought their bags from the station.
Over the course of the next few hours, Daisy began to refine her technique, speeding up the pinching action until she was picking almost as fast as Billy. Before long, she realised that the bines were coated with tiny claws pointed in a downward direction. If you pushed your hands upwards, the claws pricked and the skin soon became very irritated and sore, but so long as you kept your hands moving towards where the root of the plant would have been, the claws didn’t bother you. Once she realised this, she noticed that Billy Shaunessy was meticulous about avoiding being pricked but had not bothered to warn her. Well, never mind. After a day or two’s practice, she would have perfected the art of pinching. Then he’d better watch. There was not much between hopping, she thought, and assembling flowers. Though the flowers were fiddlier, both required the same complex hand movements but demanded no particular mental effort, and pretty soon she found she was free to allow her mind to wander. She thought about her mother then, and how much she was already