The Valley (23 page)

One night around this time, Harry drives Millie, Barney and the rest of the gang to Skegness, suitcases packed with grass skirts and Sand Dance costumes. But when Harry walks out onto the stage to introduce the show, looking out from under the lights, he sees that the auditorium is less than half full. The promoter says he doesn't know where all the people are, but Harry does: they are at home watching the telly, or out at a modern dance where the music comes from a single organist. Driving home after performances he has seen the new dance halls turning out, and their crowds are larger and younger than those at the variety shows.

A few months later Harry disbands the troupe and decides to stick to his solo turns with comedy and singing, compèring, and drumming for singers. As an individual he can benefit from the changes because while the electric organs put some musicians out of work, they cannot always simulate drum rhythms that get people dancing in the way that a real drummer does, and the singers like to have a real kit behind them.

Harry's singing and jokes still go down well and he works almost every night that he isn't away with the glassworks lorry. Walking into pubs in the East Riding on the way to the coast he is accosted by men who have seen him doing the Hawaiian Hula act in the raffia skirt. Stopping off at a shop to buy cigs on the way home from Sheffield, he finds a shop assistant wondering if he hadn't seen him playing the washboard in a club in Rotherham. Despite this local fame, however, amid all the modernisation and increasing prosperity, his half-pint of beer trick remains a popular but unsolved Yorkshire mystery.

25 The Boy and the Dog

Beech Farm, Harlington, 1955

In her needlework class at school, Pauline befriends a girl who shares her love of clothes, patterns and fabric, and who has a talent for fitting sleeves that she particularly admires. Joan Benson, like Pauline, is shy. She lives on a farm in a village called Harlington, near Barnburgh. Some girls and boys from farms seem to think of themselves as better than other people, and certainly better than miners, but Joan is amic­able and self-deprecating; some of her great-uncles had gone from the farm to work in the pits, and she and her brother and sisters had been taught humility and respect. Joan confides to Pauline that when she leaves school she would like to be a dressmaker. If Pauline would like to come to her house to have tea, she says, they could sew together and talk about patterns, and – this is a big draw to Pauline – go to see the family’s cows.

Pauline visits one Sunday after dinner, taking the bus the two miles to Harlington. The Bensons’ farm, which is rented from the Coal Board, stands between the edge of the village and a railway line on which wheezy colliery engines push and pull long trains of coal wagons between the collieries. The stone farmhouse adjoins the granary, cowshed and barn. As Pauline walks across the yard she hears the rustle of animals and a hammer ringing on an anvil in the dairy, where two men are patching hessian corn sacks, one her dad’s age, the other taller and much younger with a cap pushed back to show a rag of curling black hair. When Joan lets her in to the house, Pauline notices how low the ceilings are and how dark and quiet the rooms. In some rooms she can hear the animals moving in the barn next door.

‘Have you brought some wellies?’ says Joan.

‘My dad doesn’t let me wear wellies because he thinks lasses shouldn’t get mucky,’ says Pauline. ‘Was that your dad and brother in t’ yard?’

‘It will have been. Did they say hello?’

‘No.’

‘That’ll have been them. They don’t say much.’

‘I quite like that.’

‘You’ll certainly like it here then,’ says Joan. ‘Come on, let’s find you some boots.’

After they have looked at the cows, Joan shows Pauline some fabric her mam has bought at Doncaster market, and they talk about people at school. At five they go to help Joan’s mam get the tea ready, setting out bread, a ham, tomatoes, fruit cake and cheese on a long white-cloth-covered table in the kitchen. With the Light Programme in the background and the kettle boiling on the range, Mrs Benson and Joan chat between themselves and Pauline listens. Outside the kitchen door there is a shuffling clump of boots, two low murmuring voices and a brushing of clothes to knock off straw. Mrs Benson turns off the wireless and Joan stiffens slightly. The door swings open and in come Mr Benson and Gordon, with the silent self-importance of men with their minds still on their work. Mr Benson washes his hands. Gordon waits, taking a pen from the sideboard and writing something on the calendar. Seeing Pauline he says, ‘Ayup.’

‘Ayup,’ replies Pauline, thinking he might say something else to her, but feeling relieved when he doesn’t. As the men sit down to eat, the kitchen reverts to a cowmuck-scented silence that is broken only when Gordon or his parents say something about the farm, using words that sound like parts of a foreign language. Pauline is quite glad of their indifference to her. Once she gets used to it their silence makes her comfortable, because no one expects her to say anything.

After tea Joan asks if she wants to look at film magazines for a while, but first comes what will prove the highlight of the visit.

Pauline asks if she can use the lav. ‘Just down t’ passage,’ says Joan. Pauline thinks this means out of the door at the end of the passage, and she has to come back to be redirected.
It is
inside:
the first inside lavatory that Pauline has ever seen. The little room, with its white pan and washbasin and hard black plastic seat, is so cosy and clean it feels like a facility in the house of a millionaire. The seat is warm against her thighs, and there are no cobwebs in the corners. When she tells Joan how smashing it is, Joan shows her the upstairs bathroom, which to Pauline is as glamorous as the homes of the stars featured in Joan’s film magazines.

‘T’ farm’s right peaceful, Mam. I loved it,’ she tells Winnie later. ‘And they’ve got inside lavs that are out of this world.’

*

Even more than cows, Pauline loves dogs. On her fourteenth birthday her Auntie Millie buys her a black-and-white collie-cross pup that immediately becomes her joint best friend. With Harry’s help Pauline teaches the pup, which she calls Wendy, to fetch the
South Yorkshire Times
and the family’s slippers from around the house. She takes her with the dogs belonging to her dad and neighbours for long lolloping hikes across the valley and surrounding hills. She walks along the railway embankments, and by the streams, and down on the low land where the Dearne flows slowly and floods in the spring; she walks through the old stone-cottage villages, and past the farmyards and new pit estates and allotments; in the sun and rain she walks by the railway bridges, the embankments and the mountainous spoil heaps that some people call the Yorkshire Alps. Miles and miles every day she walks, letting the dogs off the lead in the open, and gathering them up again at the roads. Sometimes she walks a route that brings her near to Beech Farm, and she will see Joan, or Joan’s older sisters Eileen and Bernice paying a visit, or Joan’s father and brother Gordon working in the fields, and they will ask her to stop and rest for a while, and give her a cup of tea, and the dogs some water. In this way the dogs and the countryside and the farm become part of the same pleasure for her, a small escape of green lanes, footpaths and open land that she prefers to the cinema and television. It would not be a great pleasure for everyone, but for her it is when she feels most like herself.

In the summer holidays Joan invites Pauline and Wendy to stay at the farm for a week. Everyone is busy with the harvest. During the hot, bright days Joan and Pauline go out into the stubble cornfields to stack sheaves, and in the fields all around them, reaching up to the horizons, men and women are cutting corn, stouking straw and forking the sheaves into trailers, and driving the tractors with their trailers full of ashy-golden grain and straw. In the middle of the day the roads quickly fill with men on foot, on bicycles and in cars, and with buses carrying more men who look out from the windows at the people working in the fields: these are the Barnburgh miners travelling to the pit for the afters shift, and soon afterwards, coming around the bends the other way, are more men, some with black faces, others washed and in suits, a returning army marching and riding in vehicles, coming off the early shift and going home or up to the Coach and Horses in Barnburgh village. They pass and the land falls quiet, the day bending again to the crops until darkness falls, when at the late shift-change time new columns of men come and go under the red, low-hanging harvest moons.

Gordon is often with Pauline and Joan, and Pauline comes to like how quietly self-absorbed he seems when he is chucking around the sheaves or when, in the yard, he is running his hands over the animals to greet them or to check their health. Sometimes he teases Joan, and early one evening at the end of the week, when he, Pauline and Joan are working in a barley field half a mile from the yard, he calls to Pauline as she stands up a sheaf in a stouk only to see the whole arrangement collapse.

‘Tha didn’t stand yon up very straight. I shall gi’e thee t’ sack!’ He stands grinning, smug because he is getting through his sheaves at twice her speed.

Pauline feels a wave of self-consciousness, but then something makes her shout back. ‘It’s you sticking your nose in and putting me off. Get on wi’ your own.’

Gordon laughs and wipes his face. The warm air is cooling and they can feel the heat coming off the baked soil.

‘You tell him, Pauline,’ says Joan.

Pauline is privately irritated that the sheaves have fallen, but her self-consciousness has lifted from her. She likes doing the work outside, working as a team; it is hard, but she always feels good afterwards. It is very unlike housework.

She re-stacks the stouk, and moves up to where Joan is working on the next one.

At the end of the week Pauline goes home, but she continues to visit the farm over the summer and, when the new term begins, on afternoons after school. On wet days Mr Benson finds her and Joan boring catch-up jobs to do, sweeping the yard, greasing machinery, or weeding the farm’s vegetable garden, but when it is dry and clear they are out in the fields with Gordon. The three of them become close friends, and Gordon’s teasing intensifies.

‘Tha’s leant yon sheaf up all cock-eyed!’ he says, striding towards her in the strain and swelter of the field one day in September 1955.

‘Oh, not you!’ she says. ‘Sling your hook!’

‘Tha wants to watch it, or I’ll get thee.’

‘I’d like to see you try!’ she says.

26 By the Light of the Silvery Moon

Thurnscoe, 1955–56

The summer he meets Margaret White, Roy Hollingworth stays in the Dearne for four months, living at his mam and dad’s, working at the pit and taking the lovestruck Margaret out in Harry’s car. In the autumn he goes off to train with the Army – so he says – returning the following January when he calls for Margaret and takes up their courtship where he left off. There follows a period when he comes and goes with little warning, staying in Highgate for two or three weeks at a time and making a fuss over Margaret when he is there. They go dancing, they go to the pictures, they go drinking, and everywhere Roy seems popular and charming. He seems to know lots of people, and he makes everyone laugh with his stories and jokes. He may not call for her for weeks on end, and he may never say exactly where he’s been, but she likes him very much, and because her questions often irritate him she doesn’t like to ask why when he says he just can’t be tied down to one place at the moment.

One night in the spring of 1955, when Roy is back after ‘seeing a man about a good job down south’, he and Margaret go out with another Highgate couple that he knows. The four of them go to the Halfway Hotel and stay until last orders. Harry has taken the car to drive to a pub he is performing at, so Roy and Margaret set off to walk back to Thurnscoe, past the school and the dog track and then into open fields.

Roy has a brooding silence on him.

‘You’re quiet,’ says Margaret.

He snaps, like a man who has been waiting for the opportunity. ‘I should think I am.’

‘Why, what’s up?’ She takes his arm in hers, but he is unresponsive.

‘What were you talking to Stanley for all t’ time? You’ve hardly said a word to me all night!’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Don’t bloody come that.’ With sudden violence he shrugs her off, and she stumbles into the dew-wet grass beside the path.

‘Come what?’

He says nothing.

‘Roy?’

‘Awww –’ He slaps out and up with his right hand, and hits the side of her face. Margaret reels into the grass, stops, holds her burning cheek. ‘What are you doing?’

‘You made me look like a damn fool tonight.’

‘I don’t know what you mean .
.
.’

He hits her again, grabs her arm, and pulls her away from the road. As she falls he drags her up again.

She sees he is drunk. They are near to a gate in the hedge, and he pulls her through and into the field, right in so she cannot see the road. She pleads with him to let her go, but instead he starts hitting her, face, neck, ears, torso, arms. He swears and calls her a bitch. She hits the ground and covers her face. He bends over her and slaps at her head. Then, staggering, cursing and panting, he reels away back towards the gate. Across the earth, level with her ear, she hears his rough steps receding.