The Valley (25 page)

He tells her to go to the Labour Exchange to ask for a job, so she puts on a red twinset and her best black skirt, slips her school report into her handbag and walks up to the Ministry of Labour building next door to the Comrades Club. The main entrance is through a panelled wooden door, and leading off the long, lino-laid corridor inside is another door marked ‘School-leavers'. Pauline pushes it open gingerly. Down one side is a line of wooden counters, behind which stand men in suits: opposite some of the counters, young lads looking for work lean forward and speak in awkward voices. Pauline walks up to a man who has no one speaking to him. He is fiftyish with a tweed jacket, collar and tie, and sharp nose. He seems ancient.

‘I've come to see about a job,' says Pauline.

The man writes down her name, age and address, and asks what kind of work she is interested in. Pauline says she would like to be a kennel maid; she has decided this at home, having read about kennel maids in
Our Dogs
.

‘Righto,' says the man, and takes a box file down from a shelf. He nods slowly to himself as he leafs through the papers inside the file, and finds her a job as a kennel maid at Brandon Park House in Suffolk, accommodation provided, start next week. ‘Just ask your dad to sign these forms to say you can go, and bring them back to me,' he says. ‘Thank you, Miss Hollingworth, and the best of luck. Cheerio now.'

She smiles as she walks back through Goldthorpe and across the railway bridge, thinking how lovely it will be to be among dogs all day, and how her dad will think she has found a good job. If the unnerving prospect of living somewhere new comes into her mind, she pushes it down into her coat pockets with her fists, and rehearses the new-job speech she will give back at Number 34.

When she gets home her dad is in the sitting room, trying to get a tune out of a trumpet. ‘I'm going as a kennel maid to Suffolk, Dad!' she says.

‘No, you're not,' he replies. ‘Suffolk's too far off. Anyroad, thy mam wants thee here to help her in t' house.'

Pauline has no idea where or what Suffolk is, but she would live at the North Pole rather than upset the Labour Exchange man. ‘But I've told them I'll go, Dad.'

‘Well then tha'll have to go back and tell 'em that tha can't.'

‘Can't
you
tell them?'

He doesn't answer. When she goes back to the Labour Exchange, the man shouts at her. ‘Young people,' he says. ‘All these opportunities, and they don't want to know.'

The man does not mention any other jobs, and Pauline is too afraid to ask again. Unsure of what to do next, she spends most of August at Beech Farm with Joan and Gordon. She feels happy when she is there, but she knows that it is an avoidance, a means of putting off her adult life. What to do about a job? Would she be allowed to have another offer, having turned one down in the way she did? She likes the idea of Marks and Spencer's in Doncaster, working in a shop being the next best option and Marks and Spencer's the best shop. But how did you get a job there? People she has asked, people who know other people who work there, say you just go in and ask if they have any vacancies. Ask! They make it sound like something everyone does all the time, which persuades her that her shyness makes her an oddball – a square peg in a round Marks-and-Spencer's-shaped hole.

*

In early September, Winnie takes Lynda on a coach trip to see Blackpool illuminations, and sends a postcard home addressed to Pauline, who has stayed back to look after Harry and the dogs.

 

Dear Pauline,

Margaret Hanson's mother is on this trip, and Margaret works at Windell's in Thurnscoe and she is leaving on Friday. Go straight down and see if you can get the job.

Mam

 

Pauline knows no more of Windell's in Thurnscoe than she does of Suffolk, nor has she any clue how someone goes to see if they can get a job, but she is not going to disobey her mam. She puts the skirt and twinset on again, stuffs her school report back into her bag, and hurries off to the bus stop.

Windell's on Lidget Lane used to be the village pawn shop. Old Mr Windell had fought the Irish in the uprising during the Great War, and returned to Thurnscoe with haunted memories and a deep suspicion of Irish people. He had married, and set up the pawn operation with his wife in the late twenties, when many villagers relied on pawning to get through the week. The shop had prospered, but as wages grew in the 1950s pawning decreased until it was hardly worthwhile, and when Mr Windell handed the business down to his son Jack, Jack turned the shop into a haberdashery. It now sells clothes and fabrics for men and women: shorts, blouses, Wellington boots, wool trousers, pinnies, tea dresses, cotton, calico, wool and more. Piled to the ceiling with up-to-date clothes and pretty material, the shop likes to think of itself as a genteel outfitter and drapers, but its balance sheets also rely on a steady income from miners' work clothes and flat caps, sold out of cardboard boxes laid on the floor.

Jack Windell is in his early forties, tall, slim, and well dressed in navy blue blazer, collar and tie, and slacks. He nods slowly as he listens to Pauline's story about her mam's postcard and Margaret Hanson's mother, and asks to see her references.

‘I haven't any references because I've never had a job before. Will this do?' She takes the brown envelope containing the school report, and offers it across the counter, arm trembling over the yarns and cotton.

‘This looks first-rate!' he says. ‘Can you start on Monday?'

Pauline's shifts are nine until six, Monday to Saturday, with a half-day Wednesdays. Jack pays her £2 1s a week and says he will put up the wage a little each April. Every Friday she hands over all her wage to her mam, and Winnie gives her back five shillings for herself, from which she has to pay the bus fare to and from work. Most girls that Pauline knows pay board, but she is at the highest end of the payers.

Jack Windell spends most of the day in his office at the back of the shop while Pauline and a girl of about her age called Marjorie Swift work at the front. Jack shows her how to serve people, and how to correct the broader parts of her accent and dialect, because a broad accent holds you back and makes people think you are thick. When she says, ‘I aren't going,' or ‘I waited while half past seven,' he says, ‘Where's your grammar, Pauline?' and she says, ‘She's dead!' and they laugh, but she remembers what Jack has taught her and gratefully corrects herself.

She likes some of the customers, especially the younger women who come in to buy fabric for dresses. With regular customers Pauline discusses new fashions, dress patterns and sewing techniques, and she begins to advise them on the shop's stock, and to make suggestions about new orders to Jack.

Selling the men's clothes is less pleasant. She is put in charge of pit pants, the blue trousers that miners wear for work, and has to keep the high piles of them neat and topped up with the weekly deliveries that arrive from the warehouses in boxes as big as her. Pit pants are manageable once she learns to judge the sizes, but her other menswear specialism, flat caps, can be an ordeal. Windell's trade in the caps is brisk. They sell about half a dozen a week, more in the winter, and for ease of access Jack keeps the various sizes and patterns in the cardboard boxes they arrive in, laid out on the flagstone floor. Like most other shops in Thurnscoe, Windell's is infested with cockroaches, and while the insects tend to avoid the pit pant towers, they do crawl into the flat cap boxes. Every time Pauline opens a box, or takes out a cap for someone to try on, several cockroaches scuttle out across her hands and up her lower arms.

‘Oh dear!' Jack exclaims the first time he sees her leap back, wincing, from a cap box. He waits for the customer to leave before talking to her, and she anticipates sympathy. ‘Remember not to let them see if the cockroaches come out, Pauline. Try to get yourself in between them and the box. If one runs up your arm, just flick it off without them seeing.'

*

Pauline tells Gordon Benson about the cockroaches, playing up the story because he wears flat caps. By now she and Gordon have become close friends, and she is relaxed in his company. Sometimes Pauline, Gordon and Joan meet on Sundays to go to church, or to walk along the criss-crossing paths in the countryside looking out for animals or with Gordon commenting on the progress of crops in the fields. In the evenings they go out into the fields to watch the rabbits and hares playing in the dusk.

One day the three of them are in the farmhouse kitchen after a family tea. They have cleared the table and are washing plates, putting away the willow-pattern crockery and sweeping the flagstones. Joan unlatches the back door and steps out into the yard to take food scraps to the cows. As Pauline wipes the tabletop she catches Gordon's eye. Both of them blush. She moves towards the door. ‘I'm off to see what your Joan's doing,' she says, but Gordon darts across to the doorway and stands in front of her, blocking her path with his hand on the latch.

‘What are you doing, you daft 'apeth?' says Pauline. ‘Let me out.'

‘Not unless tha gives me a kiss.'

‘– you what?'

‘– tha 'eard,' says Gordon. He looks as if he is about to laugh.

Pauline grins, bounces up onto the balls of her feet, pecks him on his stubbled cheek and then ducks down under his arm and slips out through the door.

‘What've you been doing?' asks Joan.

‘Me?' she replies. ‘Nowt!'

No one mentions this again, but afterwards something changes between her and Gordon.

The three of them go out more, driving in Mr Benson's Wolseley to watch Westerns at the cinema in Goldthorpe. Gordon wears his charcoal suit and Brylcreems his hair, and buys Black Magic chocolates for them to share during the film. Pauline lets Joan sit in the middle seat, because it would feel strange to sit beside Gordon in the dark.

There are evenings when Gordon drops Pauline off at home and she walks in to hear Harry and Winnie, and sometimes Roy, shouting at each other in the sitting room. They argue about Roy staying at the house, about Roy being a good husband, and the arguments turn into personal rows between Harry and Winnie. No one ever talks to Pauline or Lynda about Roy though. Pauline was not even invited to his wedding, and no one had told her Margaret was pregnant; she only realised when Margaret turned up at their house looking a strange shape.

The arguments make her feel like an outsider trapped in her own home. She goes back to the front door and opens it, and stands on the doorstep to watch the trains travelling through the darkness. She imagines being the driver or the man shovelling the coal into the fire, engrossed in their work, joking with their companions, loving their train in the way men loved things like trains. She would like to get on one of the trains and go somewhere else, but she doesn't know how she would do that, or where she would go.

How did you get away?

Who did you have to ask to do that?

28 The Accident

Barnburgh, 1957

June 1957. Harold Macmillan newly Prime Minister, Elvis Presley newly King. The British military is testing nuclear bombs in the Pacific, and the Paymaster General has ended the petrol rationing introduced during the Suez Crisis. ERNIE is picking the first Premium Bond winners, and Diana Dors is divorcing her manager. The kids at the dances are wearing winged spectacles and A-line dresses, bobby socks, beetlecrushers and Tony Curtis hair.

There is a heatwave across England and in the sweltering, smokey Dearne Valley the mothers are stripped to their corsets to do the housework and waiting to slap the wet heads of sons who have been swimming illegally in the brickyard ponds. Under the cloudless mid-blue skies the girls tan in the parks, and the farmland toasts, the soil dusty and the grass so tindery that the firemen are stretched by the blazes lit by sparks from trains. Through the hot nights, men and women congregate in the yards of Highgate Club and the Halfway Hotel. In the backings the summer carousers shout and sing into the small, happy hours.

Half-past ten on a Saturday night and there is singing outside the back door of 34 Highgate Lane. The singing is always outside the back doors because the front doors have the steep steps that are troublesome to a man at half past ten on a Saturday night. ‘
Gentleman songsters off on a spree, damned from here to eternity .
.
.
’

Three men, drunk on beer, are serenading Winnie, and Lynda, who has woken up and come downstairs to have hot milk by the fire. Winnie is sighing and is about to get up from the fireside as Harry, Sonny Parkin and Danny Lunness stagger in through the door, laughing.

‘My sweet!’ says Harry to Winnie, who wrestles off his hug, pulls down the front of the kitchen cabinet and saws thick, irregular slices off a bread loaf to make dripping sandwiches. With clumsy grace he plants a kiss on Lynda’s head, then goes back into the kitchen as Danny comes into the living room. Lynda is delighted to see her uncle, especially late at night with this secret pass to the shadow world of the grown-ups. Danny takes half a crown from his pocket and pushes it into her hand and makes a joke about drinking hot milk: that’s what he’s been having tonight as well, he says.