Lemon Sherbet and Dolly Blue (19 page)

The car crushed my great-grandfather's right foot. He was hospitalised for months and underwent at least two operations. The damage to Dick's ankle was so severe, his right leg had to be shortened. It was weeks before he was allowed out of bed and, when he was, he had to learn how to walk all over again, and while wearing a heavy built-up shoe. Left foot forward, swing the right leg round. Dot one and carry one, he said.

Dick was like a child discovering his mobility, inching his way around the table, and from the table to the piano to his chair. A long time passed before he felt able to tackle stairs. As soon as he could, the back bedroom was made over for his use and Eva went in with Betsy. He could not bear to have anything or anyone pressing on his injured foot. Neighbours said it was just as well the accident had happened now, and not years earlier, which was true in many respects – Dick was in his sixties and nearing retirement – but of insufficient comfort. Dick would never be fit enough to work again and would limp for the rest of his life. The future appeared to be shrinking.

The timing of my great-grandfather's accident was particularly unfortunate, sandwiched as it was between the miners' lock-outs of 1921 and '26, two of several stoppages over pay and working conditions during that decade. With each dispute, miners' wives
held their breath and wondered how long their men could hold out – three weeks in 1920; three months and more in 1921; six months in 1926, following on from the May General Strike.

As in previous strikes, lean times for the neighbourhood meant lean times for the corner shop. By 1926, Betsy felt she had managed a whole calendar of stoppages but, this time round, Dick's ill health made the family's own circumstances more precarious. The money paid from sick clubs did not stretch that far, and there were now three adults to feed. At least with Eva working alongside Betsy, they could assess the situation together. Now, more than ever, they needed to hold their nerve.

For some, the General Strike was a nine-day wonder, the sight of volunteers driving buses and carts recalling the Great War and a sense of pitching in, but for miners and their employers the strike reopened bitter arguments and old wounds.

‘Not a penny off the pay, not a second on the day,' colliers insisted. Associated trades were quickly affected. Within a week, the Staveley Coal & Iron Company shut down its Devonshire Works, putting nearly 1,300 men on to the streets. The closure of the Sheepbridge Works added another 1,000 to their number. By
the end of the first month, some 5,000 miners had sought relief from Chesterfield's Board of Guardians. In response to a delegation protesting at its slow distribution, the Mayor went to the Guardians' offices to see things for himself and found some three to four hundred men standing in line. Most had been waiting a long time; some had fainted. The strike still had six months to run.

Mildred Taylor and Nora Parks had seen it all before. Their whole married lives had been punctuated with stoppages, albeit shorter ones than this. Now, they watched the strike from the sidelines and from the perspective of their sons. Men whose earliest experiences of a strike had been as a lark and a skive – a welcome glimpse of life without school or work – were now married with young children. By 1926, Mildred's son, Albie, a pit man still, though no longer a daredevil pony driver, had six and another on the way. His wife looked heavier and more exhausted by the month. ‘I might as well sit on these, Mrs Nash,' Ellen said, coming into the shop and sinking on to the sack of potatoes. ‘I don't know how I'm supposed to buy them.' She was asking the same questions her mother-in-law had asked years before.

According to Mildred, who liked to make her opinions known, her daughter-in-law was a good lass, though a lass was something Ellen had barely had the chance to be. She'd been her mother's unpaid housemaid, nursemaid, and the rest, well before she reached fourteen. Now she had children at two-year intervals (and sometimes with a shorter gap), the fruits of a marriage made in the immediacy of wartime and endured ever since, her husband expecting his due in all things and food on the table the minute he came home. ‘I mustn't stop, Mrs Nash. I'll have Albie doing the great-I-am.'

Some women grumbled about men getting under their feet,
the smaller complaint going some way to alleviate the tension of how to make two ha'p'orth of nothing feed a growing family, other neighbours complained that their husbands were down by the canal, a favoured spot for gambling. Crouched over a game of pitch-and-toss in the half-light cast by the bridge, with someone posted up above as lookout, it was easy to lose a hour or two, and their remaining coins. Betting in all forms was a constant source of anxiety. ‘He's gone to put a bet on,' – conveyed to Betsy in a hushed voice by many a woman at the end of her tether. With money scarcer than usual, parcels went in and out of pawn so fast they were hardly worth unwrapping. Mrs Driver joked that, if she'd nothing left to pawn, would Johnny Dodd pay out on brown paper and string?

Miners' children rode Chesterfield's buses for free; collections were made to alleviate hunger. Men swapped home-grown vegetables for shoes soled or a haircut, women exchanged half a cup of sugar for half of flour. The backdrop to these long days and even longer months was the weather. The summer of 1926 was glorious, heat stretching into the autumn. Boys released from dank service underground swam in the River Rother; neighbours stood on their back steps, drawn to the door by nothing more than the balmy evening.

Neither strikers nor the authorities wished to be regarded as weak. When an angry group of colliers smashed the windscreen of a lorry carrying slack, the Mayor sentenced the ringleader to two months' hard labour. Two witnesses, fellow strikers called in the man's defence, found themselves marched out of the courtroom and straight back in again, and this time, placed in the dock. Admitting their own presence in the mob earned them a month's hard labour apiece.

Outbreaks of violence continued throughout the summer and grew even uglier when, following an approach by the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire pit owners, some colliers went back to work. By the end of August, most Derbyshire mines had re-opened; extra police were drafted in to protect the returning men. During one court session the following month, magistrates dealt with forty-four charges of strike-related incidents at one sitting.

Miners and colliery owners finally came to terms in November. (‘It was not a fair deal,' was one miner's understated response.) The Staveley Coal & Iron Company began preparations to re-open, though, in a pattern repeated elsewhere, not all workers were immediately re-employed. Some men never returned to the pit; some miners were completely broken by the strike. At least one Chesterfield collier committed suicide.

In some mining districts, even wholly unrelated trades collapsed under the weight of industrial action. Small shops went under, dragged down by customers unable to buy goods or repay old debts. Thankfully, the corner shop survived. My great-aunt always found the sound of boots striking cobbles reassuring. Now, I understand why.

The 1926 strike may have helped my great-grandfather reach a decision. The accident that looked like a catastrophe was actually his salvation. Some eighty yards up the hill from the corner shop stood the Wheeldon Mill Plantation, the small copse you could see from the house. This four-acre wood was private property and therefore inaccessible, but Dick had walked past the entrance so many times, he could describe the trees nearest the road with his eyes closed. Oak, ash, elm, silver birch. He had seen them grow in stature, knew the spreading green of their branches and the
beauty of their winter silhouettes. For almost twenty years, he'd heard birds sing in trees he could see but was forbidden to sit beneath, and watched the woodland floor flush mauve with violets whose scent he could never get close enough to catch. If Dick rented the wood, he could raise chickens and sell their eggs. He could also sit beneath those sheltering leaves.

My great-grandfather had spent his earliest days outdoors; he did not have to think for very long. He approached the owner, a retired farmer, and a deal was struck. Keeping poultry satisfied a practical need; the wood took Dick back to his beginnings.

By the 1920s, a cat's cradle of relationships criss-crossed Station Road and its adjacent terraces. Married siblings were raising families a short stride from one another; cousins' games stretched across their neighbours' doorways; an aunt was close in age to her niece; a brother and his wife were bringing up his sister's sons. Grandmas took in grandchildren; older children came and went. Courtships flourished in doorways, setting up new allegiances
between families. Unlike earlier generations at Wheeldon Mill, these families were mostly Derbyshire-born, one man's nickname ‘Sheff' (as in Sheffield), branding him forever as a foreigner, an outsider. But not everyone lived hugger-mugger with their neigh-bours. Some kept themselves apart, called for their groceries, said ‘Good Day', and went away again; others brought the smallest details of their lives into the shop.

Maud Cartwright and her family, newcomers before the First World War, were now firmly ensconced in the neighbourhood, and Maud a regular back-door visitor as well as a customer via the front. Though now in her fifties, she had a late-born daughter at home. Ten-year-old Pearl was her darling. Everything Pearl said and did was worth repeating; her clothes were a matter of particular pride. Maud took great care with her own appearance too. Unlike those neighbours who shopped in their pinny, with a coat pulled over the top, this small, trim woman ventured out in nothing less than a skirt and blouse. Maud's appearance was secondary to Pearl's, however. With her older children now in work or off her hands, Maud had time to lavish attention on her youngest daughter, and long tales of Pearl's achievements to relate to Betsy.

Back-door visiting was now such a strong part of life at the corner shop that a hard chair was permanently positioned on the threshold. Activity in the house was frequently overlaid with neigh-bours' talk, whether brief interruptions for a forgotten packet of rice or tin of peas, or a tale that was long in the telling. Even the voices of those who remained standing carried into the room. Evenings and Sunday afternoons were especially liable to interruption; Sunday was also the day when friends and relatives visited, sometimes all arriving at once.

Zoe Graham, a mother now, living higher up the hill, brought
little Georgie to see them, and Eva's friend Carrie walked five-year-old Harold round from Newbridge Lane. Ethel visited too, catching two buses from the other side of the town to show off young Rolly, the spitting image of his dad and just as much of a handful, she said. When Ethel walked through the door, it was as if she had never left. She'd throw off her coat and start clearing the table or tackling the pots straightaway. ‘Oh, you make me feel starved,' Betsy would say, shivering at the sight of Ethel's sleeveless cotton frock. This less upholstered generation only had to stand in front of my great-grandma to raise her goose bumps.

Cousin Charlie visited with his doting wife Edie and their young children. Though fleshed out since his wartime convalescence, Charlie was an invalid nonetheless, his rasping breath the legacy of the gas attack that finally brought him home; Edie was constantly alert to any alteration in his breathing while trying to pass it off as of no consequence.

There was a regular parade of Betsy's sisters, including stately Auntie Annie and Betsy's youngest sister, Liza, with her dry turn of phrase and even drier tales of her married daughters, Emily and Annie, who might be sisters but were as alike as chalk and cheese. Dick's family called too: Uncle Dick was a great favourite among them. His nephew Will, an army regular, had fought in the Boer War and could still spin suspenseful tales of Ladysmith and the Relief of Mafeking. Annie could remember Union Jacks fluttering in people's doorways when she was the tiniest thing, and was fascinated by Will's stories. His son Will (a third generation William), had worked with Dick at the brickyard – ‘and we're still speaking,' he liked to say. Young Will broke the family tradition by calling his son Richard, after my great-grandfather.