The Valley (28 page)

*

Her labour begins on the evening of 3 July 1958. She is up all night, with Roy rubbing her back and encouraging her, but by the morning the contractions have faded away. Her mam takes Gary, Roy goes to work, and her dad drives her to the Montagu where she gives birth to another baby boy. Roy comes to see her after work in the evening, and he is gentle and kind, holding her hand, smiling down at the baby. He tells her not to worry and says he'll come tomorrow and bring her home.

The following morning, a Saturday, there is no sign of him, and no message. Margaret waits, and waits, and then a nurse says there is an ambulance going to Thurnscoe that can take her and her baby home if she likes. She gets back to the flat at half past twelve. Roy is sitting at the kitchen table.

With her senses and tolerance shot, her usual fear of confronting him falls away. ‘Where've you been? I thought you were coming for me?'

‘What's up with you? I was just going to come down!'

‘Were you hell,' she says. ‘I bet you've been out all night with them from Highgate.'

‘Them from Highgate' means Roy's family.

‘Aye, I went out for a drink. Then I came home, I got up and I was just coming down to fetch you.'

The baby cries in the basket. Roy and Margaret have a row. Roy storms out and doesn't come back for three days.

Margaret calls their new son David. He is a quiet baby, but nevertheless, with two children their one-bedroom flat now seems small. The boys' things fill all the spare space, and Margaret is up through the night feeding or soothing them. Roy recoils from her and the home, and soon he is staying away again, and irritable when he comes home. He takes off for days with no warning, and when he comes back he finds her upset and tired, but talks her round with stories about fantastic job offers that will make them rich. She lets herself believe him, but then a few weeks later he will disappear and she is alone with the boys again.

When she can, she takes Gary and David back to her mam and dad's house, but this makes Roy fume. Sometimes he leaves them all there and goes back to stay at Harry and Winnie's, until they run out of sympathy and tell him to look after his kids like a proper father. His moods darken. His attempts to be a kind, responsible husband never last the month and then he's off, staying out and blaming Margaret for her nagging when he returns. One night, when David is six months old and Gary is two, he turns violent again.

He comes back after being away for two days and enters the bedroom swaying. He holds a glass bottle of milk in his hand. Margaret gets out of bed and stands up to him.

‘Where the hell have you been? I've been worried here on my own.'

‘I've been working.'

‘Working! Boozing more like.'

‘Aw, give it a rest, love. I've been
working
.'

‘Don't lie to me!' She pushes him. He pushes her back harder, against the bed.

‘Shut it!' he says, and she sees him lift the hand holding the milk. Instead of hitting her with it, he removes the top, and pours the milk over her head, swearing at her as he does so. A few moments later he is gone.

Margaret sits on the bed, and looks over to the cots in the corner. David is awake and crying, and Gary is standing with his hands on the rail, watching the milk drip from his mother's body down onto the bedsheets.

30 Sexy Rexy

Barnburgh, Highgate and the Mecca Ballroom, Wakefield, 1959–61

Gradually, on trips to Scarborough and to the cinema, Pauline finds that she can talk to Gordon about things she cares about, things that other people find boring. He seems interested in her dog and in her story about Juggler Jane’s rosary, and he laughs when she tells him about a pompous man trying on a flat cap at Windell’s and finding a cockroach in it. She likes his stories about the farm, and the cows that come to the gate when you call their names, and some of the cranky people he delivers milk to, using his bike with a churn tied to the back. He is funny, but not a show-off. They get along and share their stories, and then one evening they go for a walk on their own, and just sit watching the rabbits in the fields for a while, and when she has cold feet afterwards she puts them on his knee and he warms them in his big hands. They go for more walks like that together, and go for a drive to Bridlington in the Wolseley. A few weeks later, on her eighteenth birthday, Gordon buys her a gold crucifix, which both of them know means they have moved from being friends to courting.

Because Gordon cannot dance and Pauline dislikes pubs, they spend their evenings walking, or going to the pictures, or – their favourite – watching the wrestling at the Doncaster Corn Exchange. One of the goodies is a wrestler from Doncaster called Rocky Wall, and Pauline and Gordon like to go to cheer him on, and to laugh at the old ladies who jump out of their seats to abuse the villains who, behind the referee’s back, are twisting Rocky’s fingers. Everybody, especially the old ladies, loves the wrestling for the release it gives you, and for the clear distinction between the goodies and the baddies. The ring is one of the few places where you can count on seeing a villain get his comeuppance, and people take a lot of pleasure from that.

*

It is a different sort of wrestling that leads to Gordon and Pauline’s parting one Saturday night in March 1960, about a year after Gordon gave Pauline the crucifix. He suggests a ride in the car, which usually means driving somewhere, parking up and going for a walk, then going into Goldthorpe for fish and chips. In the past they have always driven along the main road running along the eastern lip of the valley, but tonight just outside Barnburgh Gordon turns off onto a narrow lane that goes up into trees along a rise called Melton Ridge. ‘I’ve not been this way before,’ says Pauline.

Gordon always knows where the little roads and tracks link up. ‘It brings us out in Goldthorpe,’ he says, ‘eventually.’

He slows the car, eases it over into a flat part of the verge and switches off the engine. To their left is a gap in the woods, and through the gap Pauline can see the land falling away beneath them, trees making black patterns in the gloom. She sees the lights of a colliery, and street lights of villages and towns reaching into the distance. What has he stopped for? she wonders.

Suddenly, she feels Gordon’s left hand come to rest on her right knee. Her body tenses, and in her mind she sees a series of scenes flash past: herself at home carrying an unplanned baby; women gossiping about her on the street; a shotgun wedding and a lonely and loveless marriage.

‘Take your hand off my leg, Gordon,’ she says.

‘Come on,’ he replies. ‘What will you do if I don’t?’

‘I shall get out of the car and walk home.’

‘Well .
.
. get out and walk then!’

She can tell he expects her to stay in the car. ‘Right,’ she says, and gets out, slams the door and sets off walking.

She is frightened because the road is very dark, and she doesn’t know where she is. After a few minutes she hears the car starting up, and it occurs to her he might drive home and leave her, but in fact he draws up alongside her, the headlights throwing her shadow violently forward and then out to the side. She keeps walking.

‘Come on,’ he says. ‘Get in.’

‘No.’

‘I’m sorry, love. Please get in.’

She would like to keep on walking but she has no idea how to find her way back.

‘I’ll get in if you take me home.’

‘Alright.’

‘And I mean
now
.’

She gets back into the car, and they drive in silence, down off the ridge and through the countryside, until they reach Highgate Lane. Pauline gets out without speaking and walks up the steps to Number 34. Gordon drives away, and that is that. No fall, no submission, knockout.

*

‘Flaming lads!’ says her friend Enid Morris when Pauline tells her about the Melton Ridge incident. ‘Come out dancing with us instead!’

‘Us’ is Enid (brunette, serious, conservative) and Alma Winder (redhead, often described as bubbly). They live on Highgate Lane and go dancing together at weekends. When they take Pauline out she is surprised to see how much rock ’n’ roll the band plays, and how wild the dancing is. The boys have narrow trousers, suede shoes and their hair combed up in greasy crests, and when they dance they throw the girls all over the place. This looks like good fun to Pauline but she has no idea how to do the steps, and so the next day she puts on loose clothes and walks down to Enid’s house to learn.

Enid brings a Dansette into the front room and, to the sound of Adam Faith, teaches Pauline to rock ’n’ roll. Hips, stockinged feet, heel and toe, lift the stylus back to the outside edge of the record and start again: by the time she goes home she is converted and euphoric, and her mam and dad’s sitting room feels stupefyingly dull.
Sing Something Simple
is on the radio, confirming the imminent end of the weekend. Harry is having a wash in the kitchen before he goes up to the club, Winnie is making boiled eggs and toast for tea, and Lynda is watching a ballet on TV.

‘Enid’s been teaching me to dance rock ’n’ roll,’ she says.

‘Rock ’n’ roll’s not dancing,’ says Harry. ‘It’s not music either.’

‘I like it.’

‘Gi’e o’er,’ he says. ‘It’s kidology.’

‘Gi’e o’er yoursen, Harry,’ says Winnie, in the stout voice she has begun using as she approaches middle age. While her husband sticks with the music of his youth, she has opted to keep up, and is all for rock ’n’ roll. ‘It’s only t’ same as when you used to do t’ Black Bottom and t’ Charleston, and wear bell bottoms.’

‘Them were proper trousers, not hosepipes – ’

‘Drainpipes, Dad.’

‘I’m not bothered what they call them, I’m talking about what they look like. Anyroad, you needn’t think you’re going up that Astoria, because you’re not.’

The Astoria is the dance hall at the top end of Goldthorpe, and some of the bands there play almost exclusively rock ’n’ roll music. Working on the village logic that suggests the further away people in a settlement live, the more vulgar and corrupt they are, Harry regards the Astoria as a seat of depravity.

‘Who said I was going to t’ Astoria?’

‘There’s lasses going in there wearing next to nowt, and half of them lads are thugs. If you think I’m having my daughter going with that lot on a Saturday night you’ve another think coming.’

‘We’re going to Highgate Club. There’s a dance on.’

Highgate Club’s large function room hosts dances, or ‘so-called dances’ as Harry calls them, where bands play a lot of rock ’n’ roll.

‘Well, just don’t come crying to me when somebody drops you and breaks your neck,’ he says.

*

The dance at Highgate Club gets off to a bad start when the man on the door laughs at Pauline and asks her if her dad knows she’s here, and she has to ask Reg Spencer to sign her in. Inside, as soon as the quickstep is announced, a man in his mid-twenties asks Pauline to dance and holds her so tightly she can feel his hipbones. Afterwards Alma says, ‘Don’t be frightened to give ’em a slap if they get wandering hands, Pauline. Men today have got it on the brain,’ which makes Pauline nervous. When the lead singer announces the rock ’n’ roll section, she dances with Enid while Alma accepts a dance from a man in a blue suit who throws her up in the air then half-drops her.

When the girls regroup on the chairs down the side of the dancefloor, Alma says to Enid, ‘I see they brought Sexy Rexy with them tonight.’

‘Sexy Rexy?’ says Pauline.

‘She means him, there –’ Enid indicates a man across the room, standing with a group of lads Alma had said hello to earlier. ‘That lad with t’ black hair, who came wi’ ’em tonight. They call him Rex Jackson. He’s from Wombwell.’

Rex Jackson from Wombwell is in his early twenties, with hair that tumbles in curls over his eyes, and a languid way of leaning against a wall. He is good-looking and well aware of it.

‘What do they call him Sexy Rexy for?’

‘Cos they all fancy him I suppose. Are you going to go and ask him for a dance?’ says Alma, laughing.

‘No, I’m flipping not,’ says Pauline. ‘I think he’s horrible. I’m sticking with Enid for tonight.’

*

1960 turns into 1961. In the yard behind Number 34 the last air-raid shelter is knocked down and the ground is made into a garden. All the fellas are trying to buy
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
,
while all the girls are staying in to watch
Coronation Street
. Pauline passes her driving test, and because she finds the Terraplane too large to drive, Harry part-exchanges it at Clarry’s for a meek little Austin 7. In the Austin, Pauline, Enid and Alma pursue the cause of rock ’n’ roll around the Yorkshire coalfields: Thursdays at the Danum Hotel in Doncaster, Saturdays at the Mecca Ballroom in Wakefield, Sundays at Wath Pavilion, Friday night for a bath and putting your hair in rollers.

At the Mecca, Pauline meets her first date since Gordon Benson, a shy man called Albert who works at Waddington’s games factory (‘On t’ Monopoly line, mostly,’ as Winnie boasts to Nelly and Comfort). Pauline gets as far as going to Albert’s house for tea, but is put off by his mother, who takes her down to the cellar to show her dozens of boxes of soap powder and tins of fruit that she is hoarding in case nuclear war breaks out.