The Valley (18 page)
Authors: Richard Benson
*
Winnie knows there has been an accident as soon as she sees the policeman talking to Alf at the front door. You don’t consciously expect your husband to be hurt in the pit, but as soon as it happens you realise how often you’ve imagined it. Her actions feel automatic. Once the policeman has explained what’s happened, and that Mr Hollingworth is satisfactory but in hospital, she takes off her pinny and combs her hair, and Alf takes the keys from the sideboard drawer and drives her to the hospital in the Daimler.
Some miners take pride in their blue coal scars, but not Juggler Hollingworth. In several sessions over two days and nights, nurses, many of them the daughters of miners themselves, work at his face with a scrubbing brush and use long steel tweezers to pick out coal from his bloody face, arms and torso. He clamps shut his remaining teeth and screws up his eyes, and between the pickings and the brushings, nurses re-bandage and patch him, and take him out to smoke cigarettes. At the end, when they have taken all but the smallest blue grains from his face, his upper body is pocked with small raw, bloody holes and cuts, and his face is scabby, bruised and pitted. In the soft white skin of his inner arms there are small blue and black constellations where the presence of blood vessels has made it impossible to tweeze out the coal. Years from now these arms will be playthings to his grandchildren who will clamour for a look (‘Show us t’ coal in your arms, Grandad!’) when they visit.
Now, though, when his own children come to see him they look afraid. Roy is discomfited and quiet, and Pauline cries.
The nurses clear Harry’s face so that it heals intact. There are just a few scattered, pinprick pieces left and one small midnight-blue smudge in his hairline. At the end, as the last nurse leans over to bandage him, she pauses and says, ‘I have to ask you this, Mr Hollingworth.’
He looks up.
‘Are you the one who does that trick with that half-pint of beer?’
‘Yes, I am,’ he says. ‘But I’m not telling thee how I do it.’
Highgate, 1948
Winnie is filling a bucket with coal at the Hollingworths’ brick bunker one evening later that summer when she sees Alf come into the yard from the backings. He has been on earlies and his skin is lightly tanned from being out on the allotment in the sun. He smiles at her. ‘Let me carry that for thee, Win.’
She tips a final shovelful of black cobbles into the bucket, closes the bunker, and smiles back. ‘Thank you, love. What’ve you done to your hand?’
His right hand and wrist are heavily bandaged.
‘I broke me thumb at t’ pit, trapped it in some belting. It’s nowt.’
Win takes the hand in hers. ‘It doesn’t look like nowt.’
‘It’s alright. They strapped it up for me.’ He reaches for the bucket handle and they stand for a moment. ‘You’d better come in for a cup of tea,’ she says.
The house is empty: Harry at the club, Roy out cycling, Pauline playing in the backings. Alf places the coal by the hearth and goes over to her as she fills the kettle in the kitchen. He does not touch her, and she does not speak.
‘Is tha alright, Winnie?’
She stares into the sink. He seems to know before she says it.
After she tells him they are quiet, silent as the knives in the sideboard.
‘Is tha sure it’s .
.
.’
‘No. I think so, but I don’t know.’
She doesn’t know, and she never will. The child she is carrying could be Harry’s. But she wants it to be Alf’s.
‘Well, that’s good enough for me.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I love you, Winnie. I want us to go away and get married.’
She does not cry. Her experience and her nature have made her almost vain about her endurance in the way that some women can be vain about beauty. She had borne her father’s belt across her bare back, and she would bear this.
‘Come away with me, Win.’ He seems almost excited.
‘How could I do that?’
‘We could, couldn’t we? We could go to t’ coast, or go and get a little house in Nottingham. Our Harry doesn’t deserve thee, so why should tha have to stay?’
‘What about our Roy and Pauline?’
‘You’d still see them. We could come back.’
There it is: just leave your kids, and we’ll come back to visit them. He is, she thinks, a young man, twenty-six to her thirty-nine years. He has a childishness that she both pities and covets.
‘I can’t leave my kids. It doesn’t matter what Harry’s like. You can’t ask me to do that, love.’ She says she loves him; she says she would like to go with him, but not now. ‘One day, when they’re grown up. Come back and fetch me.’
‘I will.’
‘Will you?’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I will. I promise.’
They reach the end of the conversation sooner than either would have guessed. Moving away from the window they embrace. It is ending so quickly, far more quickly than it would in one of Winnie’s novels.
‘I shall go and tell Harry now,’ he says. ‘And then I shall go away until I come to get you.’
Harry: she had wondered how to tell him. But now, right at the end, Alf is looking after her again. She feels grateful, and afraid.
*
Alf pushes through the club doors into roaring noise, heat and smoke. Men call greetings to him as he passes them, but he barely acknowledges them. He finds Harry at the bar, performing to a small, laughing crowd. His face still has fading bruises and red marks from the explosion, and there is the blue scar in his hairline. He delivers a punchline, and then looks up. ‘Ayup, it’s our Alf! Does tha want a drink, sirree?’
‘Aye, alright –’
‘That’s a pity, cos if tha’d been here five minutes since, I were buying a round.’
The men laugh. The steward asks Alf what he’s having, but Alf ignores him.
‘Can I have a word with thee, Harry?’
‘Is tha cadging money again?’ The men listen for the punchline, but Alf leans in and then says, ‘I need a word, Harry, serious.’
‘Bloody hell,’ says Harry. ‘Wait here, lads, I’m just going to consult my stockbroker.’
They move away from the bar to a less crowded area near the billiard table. Harry looks bemused. Alf lowers his voice and says, ‘Harry. Winnie’s pregnant, and it’s mine.’
Harry places his pint glass on a table and wipes his mouth. He says nothing. It is Alf who cracks first. ‘What’s tha got to say then?’
‘I think tha’s got a bloody cheek coming in here to tell me that, that’s what,’ he says. ‘But never mind what I’ve got to say. I’d say it’s thee that’s got t’ explaining to do.’
Alf confesses: the attraction, the conversations, the mornings when Harry was at work and the kids were at school. He tries to bring the exchange to a climax. ‘Look, I’ve a broken thumb. If tha wants to go outside, I’ll fight thee with one hand behind my back. That’s fair because it’s what I deserve.’
Harry studies his young cousin as someone might study a small child threatening to fight an adult.
‘I don’t want to go outside, Alf. What I want is for thee to get out my sight.’
‘Well, I will then. But I’ll tell thee one more thing: I’ve asked her to come away with me, but she won’t come because of t’ kids. So I’ll go away from her, and you won’t see me again, and I shan’t tell anyone about any of it.’
‘That’s right big of you, cousin .
.
.’
‘But there’s one more thing, Harry. If you lay one finger on her, or them kids, I shall find out and I shall come back and I shall kill thee. I mean it.’
‘Get out.’
‘I mean it, Harry.’
‘Out!’
*
Later that night, muffled bangs and shouting downstairs at Number 34 wake Pauline and Roy Hollingworth in their beds. Their dad accuses, their mam counter-accuses. A glass smashes against a wall, there is a lull, then the shouting begins again. Pauline gingerly comes downstairs and eases open the door. Her mam is shouting at her dad, something about his other women.
‘Please stop it, Mam.’
Win glares at her. ‘I should have known you’d take his side.’
‘I’m not on anybody’s side. I just don’t want you to fall out.’
Harry stands by the fireplace, swaying. He stares at Pauline. Winnie effortlessly retakes control, sends Pauline back to bed, and then goes upstairs herself. For the next two weeks she and Harry do not speak to each other, addressing the other through either Roy or Pauline.
Alf leaves the Dearne Valley, taking the spirit rosary with him. Knowing the baby may be his, Harry accepts it as his own. Winnie believes Alf
will
come back; his vow is a promise of salvation, the child an embodiment of that promise. She tells this to no one until 1958, when she confesses to a new friend that, whatever Harry thinks, she has for ten years been thinking of the day in the far-off future when Alf will return to rescue her.
Highgate, 1949; Suez Canal Zone, Egypt, 1952–53
Lynda Clare Hollingworth, Winnie’s baby, is born at 34 Highgate Lane on 10 January 1949. Millie, Olive, Annie and Pauline say she looks just like her mam: her mother fingers the lay of the little girl’s hair at the temple and thinks of Alf. Harry remains cool towards his wife, but treats the baby as his own, dancing her in the air to the radio and taking her out into the garden to look across at the fields, just as he had done Pauline and Roy.
In the months that follow, the Hollingworths and Parkins move into new work and change routines as the pinched, post-war pessimism gradually lifts, and food and fuel shortages become less frequent. Annie, sixty-two and with unevenly dyed greying hair, moves to Elland near Halifax, where she lives near her third daughter, Olive, in a one-room cellar flat, and supplements her pension with sittings, sock-knitting and occasional wins on the horses. To the envy of their friends and relatives, Millie and Danny and their children move from Highgate Lane into a new prefab in Bolton-upon-Dearne, while their eldest Brian moves to Newmarket to train as a jockey.
Harry, taking his accident as a kind of warning, resigns from the pit and works first as a builder on new coke ovens at Manvers Main, then as a driver on the penny-a-ride pit bus, and finally as a lorry driver for the glassworks in Swinton, a small town to the south of Bolton-upon-Dearne, delivering empty bottles and jars to pop factories, breweries, whisky distilleries and pickle plants. He enjoys the work, and soon he will say that as far as he is concerned the government should fill in every pit in the country and close them all for good. With his accident compensation money he buys a fur coat for Winnie, a Sobell radio and, at £98 (the bulk of the money), a fourteen-inch television set. The television occupies the space once taken by the piano, which they sell. It is the second television set on Highgate Lane, the first having been bought a few months previously by Johnny Keane, a comedian with the Mother Riley Roadshow. Roy, Pauline and the other children from the street have been standing outside Johnny’s house in the early evening, trying to see the rumoured black-and-white figures glowing through the net curtains like ghostly apparitions.
The Hollingworth television is a novelty and a big draw for the family and neighbours, who treat it as a domestic version of a cinema, something to be watched together and to dress up for. When Annie comes to stay she watches the TV in much the same way as she experiences Spirit at a sitting; she knows the presenters can’t see her, but she feels she has a relationship with them. Like Granny Illingworth, Comfort and Nelly, she feels compelled to put on her best clothes and pat her hair into shape, and lower her voice in the presenters’ presence because they speak with such refinement and wear evening dress. The ladies always sit up nicely when the television comes on.
‘They can’t see thee, Nelly!’ says Harry.
‘I know, Juggler!’ she replies, but still sounds unsure.
Nelly wouldn’t defer to bosses or gentry, but the television screen makes her awed and gullible.
*
Roy, now in his late teens, is fanatical about the television set and the radio, and to Pauline and Winnie at least, he embodies a new public mood that comes with television, better-stocked shops and plentiful money. He is tall like his father, a fast talker and wide and lean in the chest from weightlifting and cycling. Dark hair, thick moustache, blue eyes: girls like him and he is courting the best catch in Highgate, June Lancaster, an auburn Bette Davis beauty from a well-off and well-respected family. If Winnie had hoped that he would settle down at Bolton-upon-Dearne senior school, a tall-windowed 1930s building where Roy’s year was the first intake after it became a secondary modern, she was disappointed. Indifferent to lessons other than woodwork, metalwork and history, Roy, it seemed to his mother, liked to withdraw into a private world of books, comics and motorcycles. He befriended a boy known as Humpy Gascoigne, so called because he had a mild curvature of the spine. Humpy’s father ran a scrap business near Highgate’s marshalling yards, and the pair taught themselves to dismantle and repair old Vincents, BSAs and Royal Enfields given to them by Mr Gascoigne. Harry thought the Gascoignes were mucky and idle, and banned Roy from associating with ‘the hump-backed little bugger’, but Roy took no notice. He lied about where he was going, and spent most of his spare time in the Gascoigne’s yard, or at home reading stories from military history.
