The Valley (13 page)
Authors: Richard Benson
The boys arrive home for lunch and she feels a renewed surge of love for Roy: the innocent among the guilty! She wipes her hands and takes from the cupboard three willow-pattern plates, three chipped mugs and some flaking cutlery, and lays the table. She removes from the pan the reheated hash made from Sunday’s leftover meat and vegetables, and spoons it onto the plates, making sure Roy and Tommy get the meat. Her own helping she pads out with plain bread, and eats it standing up, sitting the plate on the ledge.
Roy is almost six now. Tall, and with his dad’s droll, heavy-lidded eyes, he sits kicking his white, goaty legs in their grey flannel shorts, and flipping pages of
the
Dandy
as Tommy tries to read it across the table. He is a cute kid and has become his mother’s great love. Sometimes he just puts his thin little arms around the tops of her thighs and says, ‘I love you Mam,’ and these are Winnie’s happiest moments. Years later she will remember these, rather than Harry’s declarations, as being the first time anyone said they loved her.
*
The following Friday, at Winnie’s request and knowing something must be up, her mam – Muv, as she is known by Roy and her other grandchildren – comes to stay for the night. At eight o’clock, after Harry has gone to the club, Annie babysits while Winnie brushes her bobbed hair, puts on her make-up and her overcoat and slips out of the house, through the yard door and into the backings.
The backings have a different code of behaviour to the street at the front: children play here, women stand talking, and you can wear the clothes you wear in the house, slippers, pinnies or hair turbans. Friends and neighbours use the backings to get to each other’s homes, always entering by the back door; front doors are for strangers and official people, a useful distinction since it means that if your visitors are unwelcome, you can escape out of the back. Seeing you in the backings, neighbours assume you are going nowhere unusual, which is why this evening Winnie takes the long route through them to reach Barnsley Road. Unnoticed, she walks to the bus stop near the club, which is close enough to allow her to see the club doors. And then, in the cooling spring air, she waits. Gangs of men, a few women, walk from pub to club; motor buses and a couple of cars go by; in the field opposite, by the small chapel, cows lay cow-quiet in the grass as the light fades; children walk to a still-lit shop and clang the door.
Soon all life is in the club, its windows lit yellow in the dark. She has been watching the building for two hours when she sees Harry coming back from a circuit with Danny, Lanc and Sonny. Her brother has now left school and is working at Barnburgh colliery. Does he know? Surely not, she thinks; surely your brother would tell you?
She stands and waits again, an hour or more, until the time for last orders comes and loud, cheerful men begin to leave: single men, big groups. There goes Sonny, that’s Nancy’s husband, there’s Harold and – Harry.
Harry with a woman.
The woman with her arm linked with Harry’s is Mavis Stocks from Goldthorpe, one of a Scots family that has come to the Dearne looking for work. Winnie knows her by sight: she is short and dark, like Winnie, and unmarried. Taken by a strong, calm self-possession, Winnie watches them sway along the pavement. Mavis laughs at a Juggler joke, and then reaches to kiss him and misses. More lipstick on his shirt. It seems worse than if she had succeeded.
They cross the road to Winnie’s side; she turns round and begins walking away from them, as slow as she can while keeping a good distance. She comes to the railway bridge. She hears slurring laughing behind her, and then the slaps of their drunken feet on the pavement cease and there is the sound of branches and grass. They have gone down to the railway embankment. Winnie stops and turns, walks back and follows on the path.
They are down on the embankment, lying on the ground. Harry is on his back and Mavis is sprawled on top of him. Harry doesn’t see Winnie until she is standing over them. Winnie summons the strength in her packed shoulders and short, thick forearms. Saying nothing, she reaches down to Mavis’s coat, takes hold of it with both hands, lifts her off Harry and chucks her headlong into some long grass.
She ignores Harry, who is frantically adjusting his clothes, and stands over Mavis.
‘Right, lady,’ she says. ‘Get off my husband, and stay off him. Don’t ever come near him, or me, or any of my family again. If you do, you won’t know what’s bloody well hit you.’
‘Gi’o’er Win,’ says Harry. ‘It was just – ’
‘Shut it, Harry. YOU,’ she says, turning back to the woman, ‘keep out of my sight, or I’ll let everybody know what you are.’
And then she bends down, looks intently at Mavis and slaps her hard across the face.
‘That’s to help you remember.’
She leaves them both there and strides up the banking towards home, the gypsy girl stumbling alongside her, trying to keep up.
Bridlington, 1939
The confrontation on the railway embankment is an important victory for Winnie and she underscores it by making Harry sleep in the front room and refusing to speak to him for days on end. If he needs to ask her a question or tell her something, he must do it through Roy, Tommy or Juggler Jane. Winnie does not enjoy the arrangement but she learns that by imposing awkwardness on the home she gains power; once she feels him to be broken by it she begins to talk to him and the house is calm and respectful again. Harry comes home each night, and Winnie goes out with him to the club more often.
She has come to loathe his drinking though, and his slurred indelicacies, stale-beer odour and phlegmy snores remind her of her father’s warnings. She thinks to pass those warnings on to Roy to ensure he doesn’t follow his father, and when she and he have eaten Sunday lunch, and she has left Harry’s plate to warm because he is still at the club drinking, she takes him into the front room to teach him a lesson. Roy plays with toy soldiers or reads his comics, while Winnie listens to the radio news about Hitler and Germany. When she sees Harry coming back from the club, perhaps with Danny beside him, both weaving a little, feet falling a little clumsily, Winnie says, ‘Come here, Roy, just look at this,’ and takes him to her side and points to Harry and Danny, and Roy laughs, which is not the response she seeks. She puts her arm around him and guides his thoughts. ‘The daft ’apeth,’ she says. ‘Look at him, he can hardly stand up!’
‘Is he drunk, Mam?’
‘Yes he is. He should be ashamed of himself.’
‘He’s funny though, in’t he?’
Win says nothing. Roy slips her grasp, and runs out of the room and down the street to his dad.
*
Through the long hot summer of 1939 the radio news carries stories of Hitler’s armies threatening Poland. Men come to paste up posters about evacuees and to cut down the iron railings outside Number 34; in the club and in the backings men and women say, Rubbish, it’ll turn out to be a lot of fuss about nowt, you watch. Winnie and Harry agree, even when the council begins recruiting air-raid wardens and more men come to build a brick air-raid shelter in the yard. If anything, the feeling of unreality draws them and the people around them together and brings a mood of, if not quite fun, then at least casual abandon. On the last day of August, as German forces gather to attack Poland, and Britain mobilises its armies, Harry drives Winnie and Roy in the motorcycle and sidecar for a long weekend at Bridlington’s South Shore caravan park with his sister Clara and her new husband, a Bolton-upon-Dearne man called Ernie Towning.
Bridlington is heaving. The 1938 Holidays with Pay Act has allowed millions of people to take a week’s holiday with pay for the first time, and rearmament has put money back into their pockets to spend on such things as caravan holidays, amusements, fried food, cheap sweets, novelty clothing, music and beer. The TUC conference is being held here and there are suited union men in the pubs and on the streets. You’ve hardly been able to shift all summer, the people in the caravan next door say; the pleasure boats have been that busy the captains have been fined for overcrowding.
On Saturday, as Winnie, Harry, Roy, Clara and Ernie queue for ice-creams and sit on the packed beach, Bridlington buzzes with war talk. Hitler has invaded Poland, Britain has told him to withdraw. He hasn’t replied but he will, he’ll pull out, you just watch. At night they have to black out the caravan windows, but still no one thinks anything will really happen; on Sunday, the day of the deadline Britain has given to Germany, the Hollingworths get up early and take the steps that run from the low, grassy clifftop down to the beach. Winnie, in her swimsuit and cap, skin reddened by yesterday’s sun, wades out to the sea and Harry sits watching her, wearing an old loose jacket and trousers and a tam-o’-shanter he has bought from one of the shops. Roy makes sandcastles and does handstands with Ernie and Clara. Around them there are men in old suits and black woollen bathing costumes, and women in flowery cotton dresses. The air is filled with the smell of salt, sand and sweet frying fat, and the sounds of children and seagulls and the North Sea waves splashing onto the sand.
At about quarter past eleven, the skies fill with the sound of sirens. ‘Chamberlain’s been on t’ radio,’ a stranger on the beach tells Harry. ‘Germany’s not withdrawn, so it looks as if that’s it!’
Winnie, Harry, Roy, Ernie and Clara sit looking at each other.
‘What have we to do?’ says Ernie.
‘I think we should go home,’ says Winnie.
So does everyone else. All around them people are packing bags and leaving, as if sitting on the beach has come to feel frivolous and distasteful.
‘Come on,’ says Harry, and he, Winnie and Roy gather up their things, climb up the cliff and head off in the motorcycle and sidecar, inland from the sunlit shore.
Highgate and Sheffield, 1940–45
At first everything changes and nothing happens. Soldiers install anti-aircraft guns on the crossroads in Highgate and RAF men bring white barrage balloons to float high in the blue skies over the village. Harry volunteers to be an ARP warden and goes with men from the council to test air-raid sirens, and one night German bombers fly over, but they drop no bombs.
Many of the young men in the valley rush to join the armed forces. Lads have been signing up to escape unemployment for several years but now recruiting officers turn thousands of them away; foreseeing war and a shortage of men to dig coal for Britain’s home fires and industry, the government has made mining a reserved occupation. Some talk their way in, others don’t. Winnie’s brother Sonny tries to join the Merchant Navy, but when he tells his recruiting officer that he is a miner the officer tells him to get back down the pit and not to come back or there’ll be trouble.
Meanwhile for Harry a new opportunity presents itself. He stays at Manvers but signs up the troupe with the Entertainments National Service Association. ENSA – Every Night Something Awful, the troops call it – pays entertainers handsome rates to perform in shows for armed forces personnel. Reliable turns are in short supply, and as the Mother Riley Roadshow can provide a full evening’s entertainment, the organisers like it. They pay up to £10 a night, and for this money Harry, Millie – who now has a fourth child, Tony, born in the summer of 1939 – and the rest get on buses, borrowed cars and the motorcycle and sidecar to take the Sand Dance, Old Mother Riley and the snap-tins-and-Dudleys drag-drumming act to the troops and workers in the messes and NAAFI huts of Yorkshire’s West Riding.
In these jumpy, undecided days at the start of the war, much of Winnie and Harry’s young-marrieds’ rancour dissipates. They become friendlier and by the autumn of 1940 Winnie is pregnant again, due in May. With Juggler Jane and Tommy, the arrival of another baby will take the number of people in the house to six. This does not seem too many to Jane, but Winnie would like some extra room for the second child, and anyway, with the ENSA money they can manage without Jane’s rent. Winnie frets about telling her, but the old lady just says, ‘Nay lass, when it’s time to go, it’s time,’ and a few days later disappears in a swish of black satin and a rattle of the spirit rosary. The next time they hear from her she has taken Tommy to live with one of her nieces in a small stone cottage in Bolton-upon-Dearne. Harry buys the family a mixed-breed dog called Bonzo, and Winnie redecorates Jane’s old room ready for the new baby.
*
One evening in December 1940, a few weeks after Win’s pregnancy is confirmed, Harry leads the troupe to an ENSA booking near Sheffield. The concert is at No.16 Balloon Centre, an RAF barrage balloon base on the southerly edges of the city, which, because of the expected air raids on the steel mills, is heavily defended. Riding the motorcycle there with Millie, props trunk crammed in the sidecar, he sees ack-ack guns in farmyards and, tethered to moorings at road junctions, barrage balloons which look almost toy-like. As they draw closer to Sheffield they pass more and more army lorries and armoured cars, yet it all seems unreal; Coventry and Birmingham have already been attacked because of their heavy industry, but it seems impossible to think of the bombs being dropped on somewhere they know.
The concert hall sits among vast brick balloon hangars, accommodation huts and a rifle range. An entertainments secretary greets the troupe and guides them to a screened-off dressing room beside a makeshift stage in the Naafi where wooden chairs have been laid out. ‘Look out for the nits,’ he says, ‘we’re infested with ’em.’
