The Valley (21 page)

More than dinosaurs, coal or armadillos though, Miss Grose is interested in sex. She believes that all her charges’ failings can be attributed to their interest in boys, and particularly to their desire to look at the boys studying gardening in the plots outside her classroom window.

‘You’re not listening!’ she shouts at Pauline one day in her first term, after she has answered incorrectly a question about coal. ‘
I’m
not looking at the boys outside, and neither should you be!’

‘I’m not, Miss Grose,’ says Pauline. ‘I wasn’t even looking out of the window.’

‘Yes you were. If I catch you looking again, I shall cane you.’

In fact, no one was looking out of the window. Even the bored, forward girls are uninterested in these boys, standing in a pimpled hairy line, pink monkey hands slackly gripping their spade handles. It is Miss Grose herself who is interested, though not in the boys themselves so much as the threat they represent.

The leader of the pastel faction is Miss Bryant, a brisk, forthright young Yorkshirewoman who teaches domestic science with great passion. She speaks with enthusiasm about modern technologies for the home, such as vacuum cleaners and electric irons, and makes the learning of brass-polishing techniques seem like an adventure in the acquisition of knowledge. Miss Bryant summons up images of dream houses and makes the new efficient ways of cooking and cleaning sound somehow invigorating. Food rationing is coming to an end, and
Woman’s Weekly
runs stories about the attractive modern kitchens owned by housewives in America. One day, says Miss Bryant, we too will have such kitchens, and the skilful management of them will be a joy and fulfilment for which you will all be grateful.

Pauline is enthused by Miss Bryant’s vision, but her favourite subject is English, particularly when taught by Miss Senior – one of the modern teachers – in Pauline’s favourite room, the library. Overlooking the gardens, the library is dark and old-fashioned with floor-to-ceiling wooden bookshelves, long, waxed wooden tables and heavy chairs. Around the walls, the books’ variously coloured spines, each with its own little number taped to its foot, look well against the polished oak, as pleasing to look at as the American kitchens in their way. Week by week Pauline works her way through those she has heard of –
Wuthering Heights
,
Jane Eyre
,
Sense and Sensibility
– and her comments impress her teacher. One afternoon in late 1953, Miss Senior is reviewing the class’s essays about
Pride and Prejudice
. Outside there is slush, dirty snow, an unlifting wet, brown fog. The school gardens are dead and colourless. Here in the library the air is dozy with the heat from the big iron radiators, and the smell of camphor oil, soot and damp woollens condenses so thickly you could write your name in it. ‘And now, Pauline Hollingworth,’ says Miss Senior. ‘Well this was
very
good. Keep studying like this, you don’t know where it might take you.’

Pauline wants to ask what sort of places Miss Senior is thinking of, but instead she just says ‘Thank you’, and blushes from her scalp down to her polystyrene insoles.

She tells her mam that she likes school, but Winnie, always busy with the housework, has no time for it. It seems to Pauline that some of the women of her mam’s age resent their daughters for not having to deal with the hardship that they endured in their childhoods. ‘You girls don’t know you’re born,’ they chide, making it sound like an insult. Even among her peers, Winnie seems particularly old-fashioned – often deliberately, wilfully so. When Pauline starts her periods she is so scared that she thinks she must be dying. She washes her underclothes herself, but not thoroughly enough for Winnie, who complains about the blood, explains nothing, and gives her daughter a crude cloth belt to tie around her waist with some pieces of rag, torn for the purpose, to attach to it with safety pins. Her mam’s grumbling makes Pauline feel she herself is to blame. It isn’t until Auntie Olive comes to visit and hears Pauline asking her mam for rags that anything changes. Olive reprimands her sister for never having been up to date, and buys Pauline some sanitary towels from the shop on the corner. No one ever explains what causes the bleeding though.

*

Gradually the new spirit of pastel cardies and American kitchens and labour-saving electrical appliances enters some of the homes on Highgate Lane. When Peggy Copper walks out on Arthur in 1954, she leaves behind her Singer treadle sewing machine, and Arthur, lost and depressed, allows Pauline to use it to make clothes with fabrics that Winnie brings back from Doncaster market. For herself, and for friends on Highgate Lane, she makes clothes like the ones she has seen in films and Pathé newsreels: gypsy skirts in pinstripes, full skirts with material printed with airline badges, tops to go with denim jeans and bumper shoes. On Fridays she sits in the living room with Winnie and Comfort and knits youthful cardigans in the firelight. These garments are the beginnings of what the newspapers will call ‘teenage fashion’, but Pauline doesn’t know about that; she just thinks of them as pleasant, colourful things for young women who don’t want to wear corsets.

Among the older women it is Nelly Spencer who is the first to embrace the domestic vision that has so enthused the likes of Miss Bryant. Nelly’s parsimony might have been learned in the austerity of the twenties and thirties, but it means that in the 1950s she is able to buy the new household gadgets as soon as they arrive in Goldthorpe’s shop windows. Her clothes are always current, and when the new kitchen units come to the shops of Doncaster and Barnsley, she is the first to have one. Electric irons have been in the stores only a few days before Winnie enviously beholds a smart, Morphy Richards model in Nelly’s kitchen.

Most prized of the modern household items are the trim new fireplaces which replace the dirty black ranges in sitting rooms. Once you have one of the new gas cookers a range is no longer necessary, and with a fireplace sitting rooms look impossibly tidy and clean. Winnie thinks it wouldn’t even be worth asking Mr Meanly for one, but Nelly says, with her chuntering up-beatness, ‘You want to get one, Winnie. We love ours. We’ve just had one put in, you know.’

‘Have you?’ says Winnie.

‘It looks grand. I brought Comfort round to have a look t’ other day and she were lost for words.’

‘I wish I knew how you did it, Nelly. I should love to not get so mucky cleaning that thing.’

‘Do you want me to show you?’

Winnie feels suddenly naïve, a girl in the presence of a woman. ‘How do you mean?’

‘I mean I’ll show you how to get a fireplace out of Meanly. Has Harry got a hammer?’

The following day, Nelly Spencer is on her knees before Winnie’s range, its large grate pulled out, and a blanket spread over the oven bottom. Above her head she has Harry’s ball-peen hammer tightly gripped in both hands.

‘Look out,’ she says, and brings the hammer down hard. It makes a muffled crack. She strikes again, again and again. ‘Once more for luck.’ And then like a conjuror she whisks away the cloth to reveal the range’s shattered base.

Winnie’s mouth is open, and her voice is small when it comes out. ‘What have you done, Nelly?’

Nelly explains that landlords are bound to replace fixtures that are irreparably damaged, and no landlord is going to replace a range when he can have a modern fireplace cheaper. ‘Tell him you dropped t’ grate on it,’ she says. ‘Act helpless.’

23 Roy and Margaret

Thurnscoe, 1954

On a warm, light summer evening in 1954, a seventeen-year-old girl called Margaret White is wiping the counter in Thurnscoe’s market café, and exchanging loaded glances with a young man seated at one of the tables. Margaret, slim, dark-haired and diffident, works at a sewing factory in Goldthorpe but is helping out at the café to cover for a friend who has gone to Blackpool for the week. Nervous of serving people when she started, she has after a couple of evenings come to enjoy taking their orders, slipping the correct plates before them and chatting as they settle their bills amid the steam, smoking fat and cigarette fumes. There are plenty of tips, food if you want it, and, after six o’clock when the young men and women replace the market traders and shoppers, the chance of a bit of fun. The man at the table, Sid, has just asked her if he can walk her home when she knocks off, and she has accepted. ‘It’s great for getting to know people,’ her friend had said about the job, and she wasn’t wrong.

Sid sits alone with a cup of tea near a table at which two loud young men are eating bacon and eggs and telling jokes. At quarter past eight, fifteen minutes before she finishes work, he pays her and tells her that he’ll meet her outside. The two loud men watch him go, and as he leaves one of them gets up and comes to the counter. He is tall, lean and dark-haired, with heavy-lidded brown eyes and a cocky smile.

‘That were smashing food, love,’ he says. ‘How much do I owe you?’

She tells him and he passes her a ten-shilling note.

‘I bet you cooked it, didn’t you? I thought as much. You want to be a chef or summat.’

‘Give over,’ she says, smiling.

‘I’m not kidding, I’m serious. What’s your name?’

‘Margaret.’

‘I appreciate a good cook, you see, Margaret. I need feeding up, because I’ve just come back from Army training. I’m off serving Queen and Country and I want looking after but I haven’t got nobody, rotten i’n’t it? Haven’t you got a pal?’ He winks at her.

‘Sorry.’ She hands back his change.

‘Oh heck. I’m going to be all on my own again, and that’s my reward for fighting in that horrible desert.’

‘Oh dear,’ she says. ‘You’ll find somebody.’

‘What time they make you work till then?’ He takes half a crown from his change and lays it flat on the counter. ‘I’ll leave you that.’

‘I’m just knocking off now.’

‘Have I to walk you home then?’

‘No thank you! Somebody’s walking me home already.’

‘Well, tell me if you change your mind. I’ll be outside.’

Margaret watches him go out into the twilit market place and light a cigarette. She turns to one of the girls behind the counter and they raise their eyebrows at each other. ‘By gum, you’re doing well tonight, Margaret,’ says one.

‘I am, aren’t I? I think I’d better get off home before it gets out of hand!’ Margaret slips off her apron and takes her cardie from a peg. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow then.’

‘See you tomorrow. And watch that Sidney!’

Sid and the man from the Army are both standing near the door. When she steps out, the Army man darts in. ‘Can I take you home then, love?’

Sid looks from the man to Margaret.

‘No, I’ve told you. This man’s taking me home.’ Margaret looks at Sid. She notices the man’s friend inside, still at the table, watching them through the glass door.

‘You’re never going with him!’ he says, mock appalled. ‘Come on, change your mind and come with me.’

Sid says, ‘I’m taking her,’ but he sounds unconvinced. Margaret looks at them both, not knowing what to do. The man from the Army unsettles her, but she feels attracted to him and impressed by his interest in her. Later she will say he seemed so keen and insistent that she just gave in.

‘Come on pal,’ he says to Sid, ‘hop it. She’s coming with me.’

‘Who do you think you are?’

‘Never mind who I think I am. I’m telling you to get lost. Now scram.’

Sid looks from Margaret to the stranger.

‘Blow this,’ he says. As he walks away, the click of Sid’s shoes on the pavement is loud against the background café noise.

‘Looks like I’ll have to take you home then, Margaret love.’

‘Sharp out of t’ trap, aren’t you?’

‘For you I am. I’m serious, I just feel something for you. Can’t explain it.’

Margaret’s parents live on John Street, a tidy, narrow roadway lined with solid, brick terraced houses close to the market place. ‘Let’s have a walk round t’ village,’ says the stranger. They stroll away from the railway line and new pit houses, down through the old Victorian buildings, and past allotments, cemetery, cricket pitch and church. The night is warm and the conversation flows easily.

‘I think Margaret’s a lovely name,’ he says. ‘It really suits you.’

‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘What do they call you, then?’

‘Fox,’ he says. ‘No, don’t laugh, I’m not kidding. I’m Roy Fox Hollingworth.’

*

Roy, now twenty-one, has been back in the Dearne Valley for a month. After leaving Highgate Lane the previous year he completed his National Service and enlisted as an Emergency Reserve soldier, which means that periodically he has to travel to camps for weeks of training. In between he wanders, turning up now and again to tell Winnie he has been working in the Midlands, say, or is living in sin with a girl in South Wales. He never stays for long. Harry cracks jokes about his son’s obsession with the Army, and Roy, cocky, bulled up by the training and the travel, gets angry. Having been abroad and served the Empire he thinks he is due deference, not mockery; but then mockery’s typical of this place, he says, storming out of the house and slamming the back door behind him.

This time Roy has settled back in his old room, and taken a job at Highgate pit to tide him over. Pit work is generally easy to come by and Roy is particularly valued because his knowledge of tanks and cranes makes him good with the new machines. The only drawback is his dad, chuntering at the tea table about his own pit accident, declaring the job too dangerous and a dead-end. Roy has to absorb this scolding respectfully because if he argues, Harry will find reasons not to lend him his car, and Roy needs a car to impress Margaret when he takes her out. He is tanned and confident, and speaks with the assurance of a TV show compère in an accent that is being smoothed by travel. The big car complements his style, and he likes to be seen in it.