The Valley (20 page)

‘God knows,’ says Winnie.

Everyone talks about the decorations in the village, and the fete, and the Queen, about how young she is, and how hard it has been for her losing her father like that. Annie says that Walter would have liked all the celebrations, because he always loved the King and the royal family. Danny tells Sonny to ask for a particular barrel of beer at the club, because that is the one the steward has added a bottle of whisky to for the royal occasion.

An hour later Harry comes in in his work clothes, grease smears on his hands and face. ‘I’ve been working for Her Majesty,’ he announces, and orders Millie out of the kitchen so he can have a stripwash at the sink.

‘It’s nowt I’ve not seen before, Juggler.’

‘Humour him,’ says Winnie. ‘He takes more time getting ready than a woman.’

After he has washed and taken his time standing before the sitting-room mirror to comb his hair, knot his tie and apply a gold-plated tie-clip, the adults leave Muv with the children and clatter out of the door, down the steps and up the street towards the Halfway Hotel and the club. The sky is overcast, and to the west, towards the Pennines, banks of dense clouds are gathering. Across the road the cows lie in a fenced-off part of Benny Slater’s field as if guarding the farmhouse. In the other part there rises from the ground a gigantic scaffolding structure, with a six-foot-high wooden platform and, at the back of that platform, a latticework of pipes, iron bars and wooden poles. The group stops to admire the size of Harry’s construction. ‘I just wanted everybody to be able to see,’ he says.

*

The next morning the valley is hung with a veil of grey drizzling rain. With the radio news on, Winnie cooks and cleans while Harry shuttles between the yard door, where he looks up at the clouds, and the sitting-room table, where he draws little sketches on envelopes. At noon Win dresses Lynda as Little Bo Peep and then makes Pauline strip to her vest and knickers and stand on a newspaper while she rubs gravy browning into her daughter’s arms, legs and face. Looking up, Harry says he thought they had an Arab in the house and performs a burst of the Sand Dance.

Once browned, Pauline dresses in her outfit: black blouse, long black skirt, bolero jacket, three-cornered scarf with brass coins hanging from its edges, and red-white-and-blue ankle socks. ‘Lovely,’ says Winnie, and if there is any danger in dressing someone as a copy of your own long-standing spirit guide, neither she nor Annie appears to be aware of it.

As the Hollingworths cross the road to the field in the faint drizzle, they can see everywhere Union Jacks and portraits of the Queen. Assembled for the fancy dress are Boudiccas, Queens of Hearts, princesses, cowboys, robots and clowns, and hundreds of children dressed up in red, white and blue, some in outfits fashioned from large flags with head and armholes cut in them. The scene ought to look joyful but, standing in a spitting Yorkshire rain, most of the children look uncomfortable and cold. As Pauline joins her age group she tastes something salty running onto her top lip and into her mouth; pink spots bloom on her arms, and by the time her line moves, a brown tide of gravy browning is soaking into the tops of her woollen ankle socks. She hopes that since the other costumes are so striking, and most of the girls are so pretty, the judge won’t notice her. She is disappointed.

‘And now,
The Gypsy
!’ booms the judge – a man from the club committee – from under an umbrella. ‘She’s very good! But I don’t think a gypsy would wear
ankle socks
!’

People in the crowd chuckle, and under the streaked browning, Pauline reddens.

‘No, I’ve never seen a gypsy wearing jazzy ankle socks
like that
!’

‘Sorry,’ Pauline squeaks, but no one hears her because the crowd is still laughing.

The judge moves on to someone dressed as Britannia, and Pauline decides that in future she will refuse to wear any socks knitted by Muv, whatever the colour or occasion.

In the end, neither Pauline nor Lynda, who has been tottering along with the under-fives, receive a prize. Once the judge has handed out the firsts, seconds and thirds, and the rumours about it all being a fix have circulated, the mothers, fathers and children drift away to the stalls and games. The clouds and rain clear and the grass and roadways dry off. Winnie takes the girls home to change into sky-blue taffeta dresses that she has bought to wear in the evening, and Pauline begins pulling off her outfit as soon as she gets in the door. The gypsy girl’s public incarnation has gone badly, but this will not be the day’s only unfortunate ending.

*

At four o’clock they all go over to the club, where the ceilings are hung with bunting and Union flags, and a feast of quartered sandwiches, iced buns, and red jelly and custard awaits them on trestle tables for the coronation tea. Afterwards they walk back to Number 34 to watch the repeat of the coronation ceremony on television. Most families do the same, and for a few hours be-flagged Highgate falls quiet in the late-afternoon sunshine. In the field, in the dull, warmish early evening breezes tug at the tarpaulins hanging over deserted stalls and sideshows. In a corner away from the cows and pit ponies, a group of beery lads kick a football around. Benny Slater checks his fence and, up on the scaffolding, Juggler Hollingworth makes his last adjustments to the pipes, bars and poles, then climbs down and walks home to where the Hollingworths are drinking tea and watching the crowning of their young Queen.

When dusk falls the family put on their coats and shoes and step out into the night air. There is the sound of people laughing and shouting, and the smell of drying earth and bonfire smoke. In the field Harry goes to join a group of men clustered about the scaffolding, while Winnie, Annie and the girls take up a good position at the front. Harry selects a handful of fireworks from a metal box and then climbs up a ladder to the platform. He nails pinwheels to the wooden poles, inserts rockets into bottles, and sets individual fireworks on small plinths of bricks built to varying heights. Walking above the crowd in the twilight, checking a nail or straightening a brick, he looks like a compère of a ghostly mechanical theatre, though when friends in the crowd call out to him, he is too absorbed to answer. Finally, in the darkness, he leans down to confer with the organiser. Someone shouts out, ‘Go on, Juggler, we’re ready!’ and he nimbly trots along the platform lighting the pinwheels until the field in front of the stage is illuminated by a bright, magnesium-coloured glow. The crowd oohs and coos. Hundreds of hands spatter applause. He lights a fuse linking several Roman candles which erupt in succession, casting colours and dancing shadows across the bodies in the crowd and over the concrete walls of the mission church behind. Danny, who is helping, passes up more tubes, wheels and rockets, as Harry dodges the still-lit crackers and lights new ones to keep the display going.

‘I hope he’ll be careful,’ Winnie frets to Muv.

‘Stop wittering, Winnie,’ says her mother. ‘He knows what he’s doing.’

And then, as a shower of silver stars bursts in the sky high above the village, just as other stars are bursting above other villages in the valley, Harry lights three large crackers linked with a fuse, but they fizzle. Seeing something is not right he edges forward to look, but suddenly they all go off at once, with a mighty bang and a bright flash. As he steps back to avoid the sparks he feels part of the scaffolding give way, and he leaps clear. To Winnie, Annie, Pauline, Lynda and the others watching it is as if one of the crackers has blasted him off the stage and up into the air.

This, then, is how England’s new Elizabethan age begins for the Hollingworths: with a little gypsy girl in gravy browning showing herself in patriotic socks, and the Juggler flying across the night sky over the valley, lit by the fiery-bright smoking lights of his own display, flailing about and falling. His body thuds hard into the earth and Winnie runs to where he is lying, face down and still in the damp grass.

Part Four

22 Victorian Underwear and Science-fiction Shoes

Highgate, 1952–55

‘If I ever find out who was supposed to have tightened them bolts on t’ scaffolding,’ Pauline Hollingworth hears her dad saying, ‘I’ll stick a rocket up his backside that big that he’ll go up and never come back down again. Take these plates away and turn t’ radio up, will tha?’

It is a month after the great Coronation Day fireworks disaster and Pauline is on the stairs, listening to her mam and dad in the sitting room, and laughing to herself.

‘Give me a chance wi’ t’ fetching and carrying, Harry. I’m not your flaming servant.’

‘I’ll gie thee flaming servant. Don’t bother, I’ll do it my sen. This damn thing won’t let me move .
.
.’

The damn thing that will not let Harry move is a grey surgical corset, fitted at the Montagu Hospital, which he has to wear for three months. The corset holds his spine rigidly upright, and makes movement, and sleep, difficult. Occasionally Winnie says he is milking it, the accusations provoking a stream of complaints that end in imaginative threats against whichever idiots had reckoned to be tightening the bolts on the scaffolding.

Off work until October, Harry has still been spending odd mornings and afternoons down at Manvers Main, talking to his mates, and cadging materials for do-it-yourself projects. Goods from the nationalised pit yards are used in most home-improvement activities in the valley, one way or another: garden sheds are painted in colours from the pit stores, whole streets are wired with NCB electrical cable, and a generation of children is told that they had an ancestor so wealthy he had tools engraved with his initials: N.C.B. Hampered by the corset, Harry brings only small or light objects, transforming them with a little light work into items for the house and yard. A roll of rubber belt becomes a doormat, industrial brackets prop up radio speakers, a wooden crate turns into a new home for his chicks. Some of his curios are adapted for individual members of the family. When he brings home a six-foot-high, half-inch-thick sheet of white polystyrene foam, he tells Pauline it is for her.

‘I’m going to show thee summat after tea. I’ve a right idea. For thy feet.’

‘You can get it shifted, whatever it is,’ says Winnie, who wonders how a man who needs his crockery carried can undertake such elabor­ate handicrafts. ‘It’s dropping bits all over t’ carpet.’

After he has finished his tea and had a smoke, Harry tells Pauline to lay the polystyrene on the carpet, remove her shoes and stand on it. He then manoeuvres himself down to a kneeling position, marks a line around her feet with a knife, and cuts out the shapes. Finally he inserts the flat, white cut-out pieces of polystyrene into Pauline’s shoes.

‘There!’ He looks triumphant. ‘They’ll keep thy feet right warm when it’s cold.’

Pauline is always cold, and complains particularly of cold feet. In November, to save her from tonsillitis, Winnie bastes her in goose grease and makes vests from Thermogene wadding to wear under her liberty bodice.

‘But it’s not cold yet,’ Pauline says to her dad.

‘It will be in winter,’ says Harry.

Winnie shakes her head. ‘She can just wear them in t’ winter then.’

‘She wants to be wearing them in now.’

‘They’ll not wear in, Harry. They’re plastic.’

‘It’s
polystyrene
. It’s a material of t’ future.’

Pauline intervenes by placing the insoles in her shoes and walking around the room. The shoes are tight and her feet feel uncomfortably hot.

‘I love them,’ she says, to dispel the tension. ‘You want to try ’em, Mam.’

*

Pauline wears her new insulated shoes when she returns to Bolton-upon-Dearne secondary modern after the school holidays for her second year of senior school. Her futuristic footwear is in contrast to the pink, boned-cotton corset that her mam has made her wear since she started there. ‘All t’ other lasses’ll also be wearing them. It’s what you wear at that age,’ she says when Pauline objects, but what she really means is, you’re a woman now, and to be a woman you must tolerate discomfort. When Pauline asks other girls her age if they wear corsets, no one even knows what they are, so this becomes another thing to hide and worry about: underwear that feels Victorian, now offset by science-fiction shoes.

The contrast between the ideas of a restrictive past and a bright future based on novelty and innovation is experienced by Pauline not only in her own home, but also in the classrooms at school. For the girls of Bolton-upon-Dearne secondary modern in the mid-1950s, education is characterised by a struggle between two opposing factions of teachers. One is made up of approachable younger women who wear fashionably cut skirts and pastel tops, and who talk to you about topics that interest you, such as food and hobbies. To talk to these teachers is thrilling, if nerve-wracking, because, unlike other adults, they act as if your opinion is as valid as theirs. The other faction comprises older women who teach drier subjects such as science and geography. Some of them have taught your mam or your aunties in the old elementary schools, and are often said by your relatives to be right tartars. They wear thick, tweedy suits all year round and are greatly concerned with preventing contact with the boys who occupy half of the segregated school premises.

The leader of the tweedy Victorian group, and a strong influence on the atmosphere of the school, is Miss Grose, a short, squat woman who had briefly taught Winnie Parkin. Miss Grose teaches science in a room with wooden benches and stools, and concentrates almost exclusively on the topics of dinosaurs and the formation of coal from dead forests during the Carboniferous Period. The Bolton teachers often refer back to coal formation, presumably out of a sense of local relevance, though few children are interested, hearing quite enough about coal at home. What interests the girls most is the armadillo shell – curved so that the armadillo’s tail is in its mouth – that Miss Grose displays behind her desk. At the end of each term she allows her pupils to stroke it, providing a treat that many of them consider to be among the high points of the year.