The Northern Clemency (24 page)

So on Monday morning Roy, Tracy’s father, set off for work with a feeling of rank injustice at having had no weekend. On a Sunday, too, he observed. It wouldn’t have been so bad, but living right on the other side of Sheffield, it was a good half-hour in the car even on a Sunday morning, and for what? Sometimes he felt like insisting on moving back to where he’d come from, five minutes from the pit. But she was right, really; the schools were better on that side, and with the way he’d moved up from the job his father had done, hacking away in the dark, to a job up top, managing and holding meetings, making decisions in a suit and a tie every morning, it was as well to live somewhere else. These days, particularly. It used to be that the managers lived a street or two from the men, but nowadays those bigger houses, imposing as they were, were lived in by miners just the same or lay empty.

The traffic wasn’t too bad, apart from the roadworks on the Wicker,
which had been going on for months now, and he was in the car park at quarter to nine, locking the yellow Capri and striding into the office with his hard black lockable briefcase. The car park was full; the men, too, had their cars now, and they’d had to reserve the management’s places, each job described with white paint on the asphalt. The charcoal buildings, the meccano towers and conveyor belts had a temporary air, like the great heaps of slag all about; even the sign at the entrance and the gates were cheap and temporary, like the signs on building sites.

He said a quick good morning to Carol and Norma. “You’re meeting John Collins at eleven thirty,” Norma called after him.

“I’d not forgotten,” he said, as he shut the door to his office. Collins was the NUM man, not as bad as some; they were the same age, they’d been at school together, and they got on as well as could be expected after last year’s shenanigans. After all, Roy was a miner, had been, and his father; that still counted for something. “I’m down below first, if anyone wants to know,” he called, already pulling off the jacket of his suit, hanging it carefully on the coat hanger on the hook behind his chair.

There was nothing particularly wrong; Hoppelton, the mine manager, liked the management to go down the pit at least once a week, whatever was up. Some of them did it at the same time each week; Roy liked to be a bit spontaneous, talk to the men, keep them on their toes. Monday morning was as good as any other time. The girls knew not to come into the office without knocking firmly on the plywood door and waiting for a response. He opened the door of the grey metal locker where the miner’s outfit was kept. He neatly untied his tie, undid his tiger’s-eye cufflinks—they matched the fat orange-and-brown tie, Tracy’s present to him last Christmas though chosen with her mum (they smiled at him from a frame on his desk). He undid his shirt, hung it up, his trousers on the hanger, bouncing them a little to keep them pressed, and then his vest, pants and socks, folding them neatly and placing them neatly, with the rest of his clothes, in a suit-carrier to take over to the pit baths.

It was important to undress completely before starting to put on the miner’s kit; it wasn’t strictly procedure, but he liked to keep these things separate. Everything was kept separate; there were even underpants handed out from Stores; a bit like being in the Army again, he’d thought the first time he’d collected some. He’d never quite got used to putting on communal pants, owned by the mine, the NCB, the
Government, he supposed in the end. But he wasn’t going to buy himself his own special pants. More trouble than it was worth. They were grey and frayed, but as clean as they could be got. The socks, and then the bright orange all-in-one plastic-coated boiler-suit, the hard inflexible plastic boots with the metal toecaps, and with the helmet and gloves, he was ready to go. “I’ll be two hours,” he said to the girls as he left, walking through the office, his suit carrier in his hand, with a completely different walk from the way he’d walked in, stomping as he went. They nodded; they’d plenty to be getting on with.

“Morning, Mr. Bowness,” the man said at the pithead.

“Morning,” Roy said. The man took two metal tokens, one square, one with its corners shaved off, octagonal, dropped one in a slot and handed the other to Roy. He looked at the number—never been able to help it—four hundred and forty-eight. In his head he divided, and divided again—224, 112, 56, 28, 14, 7. It was just something he did. The more you could divide, the better the morning would be, and halving six times was a very good day. He couldn’t have explained that to anyone.

Presently, with a rattle and a roar, the cage came up, a fragile box in a fragile set of supports. The man pulled the concertina doors open, just like a liftman in a shop, and with ten men he stepped in. The doors were pulled to, and with an electric beep, the lift plummeted; you never got used to that. The only light as it made its shaking, banging fall, hitting the metal struts as it fell, came from the single weak bulb in the roof, loosely wired up like a casual arrangement. The men had been talking noisily at the top but, as they always did, they shut up at this point. The lift seemed to hit something immense and soft, some elastic substance, slowed agonizingly; you felt it might reach the bottom and bounce back. But it hit bottom, and they opened the doors and set off.

There was a longish walk at first, down passages wide and clean as a hospital’s, held up with metal struts. The older miners said they preferred the old wooden ones; said they groaned before they gave way, you had a chance to get out before the roof caved in. There might have been something in that, but then again, it was generally the wooden struts that gave way, not the steel ones. A string of lightbulbs festooned the way and, after ten minutes, he came to a little buggy. All around, the noise and thud of the mine was gathering, concentrating; it was like being inside a huge body, and listening to the remote thunder of the heart. You were inside the earth here, and it might have been the
earth’s heart that was beating, not just the roar of distant machinery. They set off, Roy and three men, down less established passages, the roof a little lower, and they started talking again. He found he knew two of them; one, Cavan, he was famous, a champion amateur ballroom dancer, and it turned out he and his wife, they’d just won third prize in a contest in Blackpool, two weeks back.

“In the Latin,” Cavan said seriously. “My wife, she keeps on at me, have a go at the tango, but I don’t know about that.”

“No,” Roy said. “Stick to what you’re good at and you won’t go far wrong.”

The buggy only went so far; as you went into the mine, the passages were more and more provisional, the roofs lower, the heat greater, the sides just hacked out any old how. They came to the next stage, a roaring conveyor belt, laden with fragments of coal, and left the buggy. Over the belt, a temporary platform stood, like a viewing platform; Roy mounted this, kneeling on the platform, the roof touching his back, and, like a diver, dropped neatly on to the belt as it ran. It had been an advantage to him, being only five foot six; you suffered if you were much taller. On his hands and knees, his head up, he watched the approach, again lit by garlanded lightbulbs, of another platform, now facing this way. Roy half rose and jumped neatly on to the platform, almost like a cat, and, brushing himself down casually, he got out of the way of the man thirty feet behind him. It took a bit of practice, and a new man was always likely to lose his nerve at the crucial moment, be swept away beyond his commuting point.

Now the heat was getting fierce, and the coal dust flying in wet, sooty clouds; the drill was hosed down constantly as it worked, but the stuff still got everywhere. Roy followed one of the men into a narrow crevice, perhaps four feet high, and along towards the huge fury at the centre. The seam was a good one, and yielding beyond expectation; the men liked it, too, he knew, when they hit on a rich fresh seam, liked throwing it out in wheelbarrow loads; when there was nothing fussy about it, when it was more like demolition than dentistry. Not that they’d say anything. He didn’t linger, no point, and shortly he was past the seam, and out into what now seemed almost like the open air, a passageway nearly six feet high.

He managed to get round a good part of the works, shouting questions as he went, and was back at the pithead by eleven. On the way back, as always, he was aware of following the great river of coal in the
direction it took, following it up to the surface, leaving it as it went on its several purposes; left it as it poured thunderously on to one of those great black mountains, the stocks, and then, subsequently, off to be burnt, to make electricity. He went into the little building by the pithead. There were no designated showers for management—another idea of Hoppelton’s, that it was good for relations in some way too embarrassing to delve into—but the men’s showers were empty at this time of day. You weren’t likely, having once been a miner, to be shy, though. You couldn’t get it all off; you could always tell a miner from the rim of black around his eyes, like makeup, like, ridiculously, one of those pop singers. He peered into the little mirror, and, with fistfuls of cold water, scrubbed at his face. It was almost all off, all but a touch here and there, in the odd crevices of your face. Nothing like a coating of coal dust to make you realize the contours of your face, like a shifting and private geology. If he didn’t hurry, he’d be late for the man from the union. He dried and dressed. There was a patch on his back he hadn’t reached; his shirt stuck wetly to him there as he hurried across the car park, the cold of the surface air cutting him. Like a knife, he said to himself.

The fragile sense of a protected existence Francis felt from his membership of the game-playing group, he couldn’t talk about that. The others, the core players, didn’t seem to notice it or value it. If they had any kind of status in the playground, they seemed indifferent to it. But the glamour was real, and by the beginning of December, there were twice the number of regular players there had been. With enlargement came a kind of sour irony, an aggression he couldn’t encompass, and not all the regular players were, or seemed at all likely to become, his friends. The size of the game was unwieldy now, and often it could only be played in the longer stretch of the dinnertime break. Those shorter breaks in morning or afternoon, they could be entirely absorbed in sour squabbles over the allocation of roles, which they’d never troubled with before.

One day in the playground, Francis saw a new thing, and it stopped him as he was running. Seven, suddenly eight, then nine girls in a ring, not touching, and they were singing a song. Their gestures were grotesque, full and parodic of something, like a mockery, a cartoon, but their faces were shining with a new revealed delight. “I’m Shirley
Temple, the girl with …” they were singing in full, hoarse voice, but just then one of the players, a new participant in their game, collided with Francis with deliberate force, sending him to the concrete ground where he lay aching and dizzy.

“That’s you, you’re spud now,” the boy said vindictively, using one of the new terms of the game that had recently crept in, and ran off, spitting jubilantly on his hands while his friends congratulated him raucously on getting the new kid. Francis sat on the ground and watched this new game of Shirley Temple—he didn’t care that it was a girl’s game. They raised their skirts, explaining in song that she wore her skirts up there. Where had this come from?

“Are you playing?” Andrew said, helping Francis up again without offering him his hand.

“I don’t like it,” Francis managed to say, when the old group of players was assembled in their usual place on the steps after they’d finished their dinners. It had become a usual thing, and the new, the rougher players would saunter out in time. “I don’t like it that there are so many new people playing. I think we ought to go back to how we were.”

But he’d said something wrong, apparently, and straight away Susan said, quite rudely, “We were playing it long before
you
came, and if we’re talking about new players …”

She didn’t finish, but Francis was hurt. It was ridiculous, too; Susan didn’t like them any better than he did. It hadn’t occurred to him, though, that he might seem like a latecomer in any but the most literal sense. It must be absolutely clear to others as it was to him that his natural place, through niceness, was with the kindly, brave band of friends, whenever he had come along, and not with the unkindnesses of the interlopers.

All the same, his loyalty remained with the game at that transitional period, even while, every day, the new game and ritual of the Shirley Temple exchanges drew in more and more participants. A few days in, and there were boy players as well as girl, despite its obviously feminine nature and subject, and not necessarily the sissy ones, either. The boy participants, they made more of a pantomime of girl-behaviour during the game’s verses, and exaggerated their boy-swagger to compensate between bouts; they drew their imaginary skirts up to the grey waistband of their trousers and made smacking busses with their lips to each other, before the end of the chant, and they fell in swaggering disorder to the floor, hilarious and shouting, and, almost at once, the song began a new cycle. It looked, frankly, exciting, but Francis’s loyalty
remained with the game, their game, feeling like any formerly prosperous man who has over-extended himself carelessly, overestimated the lasting appeal of the source of his prosperity, and telling himself unconvincingly that if only the scale of operations could be reduced, all would be as it was before.

He decided to tackle Andrew on the subject. Andrew was his best friend. Francis had decided that. The tentative “I say,” archaic but Sheffield and inspiring no mockery in the group or anywhere else, was probably a superficial link to the culture of London. But Andrew was a reader, mostly; he knew Jennings, and he knew the Broomhill library, which had so delighted Francis in the summer and which he was now filleting week by week. They had both read all the Uncle books, Francis one book ahead, and were now deep in Professor Branestawm. The dramatis personae provided them with a cryptic bond and a stock of abstruse insults. The headmaster was Beaver Hateman, and Tracy, Frances’s weak-willed sidekick, was Jellytussle, and a dinner lady Mrs. Flittersnoop, though she wasn’t, Francis thought, quite worthy of it; anyway, they couldn’t be expected, the real people, to see the force of these labels even if they heard them.