The Valley (49 page)

‘My mam always sends you one!'

‘Aye, because she takes all my brass to buy 'em with.'

‘I hope you're going to give her a kiss to go with it anyroad.'

He gives a sigh intended to convey his decades of sufferance with these infinitely demanding women. ‘You never mind your kissing.'

Everyone laughs, but Lynda and Pauline can tell he senses a mild reproach in Lynda's words; the disapproval of a younger generation whose lives sometimes seem to consist of nothing but the giving of greetings cards and kisses.

At Highgate Club there is a long table covered with pies, tarts and sandwiches, and tin trayfuls of clinking, slopping glasses of beer and pop ferried from the bar to the tables. Horace Hemsworth makes a speech recalling the day fifty years ago he met Winnie and Harry when they moved into Number 34. (‘And now I'm seventy-one,' Winnie says to Pauline. ‘It doesn't sound real. I feel more like seventeen.') Horace compares them to Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, engaged eight days ago, and then proposes the toast with a glass of sherry. He nods to the waiting organist and drummer and calls up the golden couple for the first dance.

The floor then fills with dancers and couples swinging young children to the music. Harry strolls to the bar to drink with the men, and Winnie sits down with her daughters, granddaughters and nieces. Around the room distant relatives are reacquainted, old men with leathery hands ruffle kids' hair, and confused teenagers are introduced to second cousins, great aunties, and great aunties of second cousins who last saw them when they were children. Someone pulls together four generations – Harry, Roy, Gary and Scott – for a photo. There are requests for songs or a few jokes from Harry, but he refuses. ‘Time for someone else to have a go,' he says. As the hours pass, the dead are remembered. Muv, Walter, Jane, Amy, Clara, Danny and Millie. And Winnie recounts to her granddaughters the story of how she met Harry: ‘Miss Marjorie said to me, “You want to get yourself off dancing, Winnie, instead of sitting in reading. You don't know what it might lead to!” And I didn't!'

*

There is also talk that afternoon about the miners taking strike action. That weekend colliers from Wales are in Yorkshire, asking men to strike against the closure of Coegnant pit in Glamorgan. In a separate dispute, the NUM president Joe Gormley is considering a national ballot on strike action against other NCB-proposed closures across the country. This kind of clash has been expected since Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Party won the general election in May 1979. The suspicion that Mrs Thatcher is seeking revenge for the Heath government defeats had been strengthened in 1980, when the government legislated to end the NCB's state subsidies. Since then closure rumours have been blowing about the Dearne like fragments of lit paper in chimney smoke. In January 1981 the Yorkshire miners had voted to strike if the Government tried to close pits, and on the tenth of February, at a bad-tempered meeting between NCB executives and NUM leaders, Derek Ezra, the NCB chairman, let slip that he wanted to close between twenty and fifty collieries in the next five years. In response, Gormley had threatened the ballot, and requested meetings with ministers.

Miners had known there would be some closures and changes to the coal industry, if only because of the Selby superpit coming onstream. They now predict there will be mass redundancies and offensives against the union too, but what they really anticipate is more difficult to define. It is a strategic change; an attack on themselves as a group by people who dislike not only their trade union and industry, but also their ways of thinking, talking and living. ‘It'll not be about coal,' says Gary, ‘it'll be about putting us back in our place.'

At closing time the guests mill about outside the club, regrouping to go home or on to Barnsley Road to continue the party. There is a smell of earth in the air, and distant sounds of traffic; in the darkness beyond the village, Lucozade-coloured constellations of houses, farms and roads glitter. When a cool night wind whips in over the fields, people set off for Winnie and Harry's, straggling apart and mixing and merging along the narrow paths.

Outside the club, David tells Roy that he and Marie are going home. ‘Will you still be at Grandma's tomorrow, so I can come to see you?'

Roy, with his eyes on the crowds heading back to the house, says he doesn't know.

‘What about Monday? I could come after work.'

‘I just don't know, kid.'

‘Or Tuesday?'

Marie, standing to the side of the two men, looks puzzled by this tall, greying father-in-law whom she has met for the first time tonight. He has spent much of his conversation with her explaining that Margaret is a born trouble-causer.

David tries again. ‘I just thought it'd be nice to talk while you're here.'

‘Don't worry about it, kiddo.'

David gives up. ‘See you when I see you then.'

‘Aye, okay. See you when I see you.' Roy turns and jogs to catch up the gang walking back. David will not see him for another four years.

Back at the house Winnie ignores her daughters' commands to rest, and constructs foot-high stacks of chicken and tinned-pork sandwiches. Harry goes into the front room to put on some music. Earlier in the week he ran cables from the record player through to extra speakers attached to the sitting-room walls. When a record ends he dashes into the front room to change it and Winnie tells him to let somebody else choose one. ‘Somebody else might not know what they're doing,' he says and she tuts and shakes her head and the guests laugh. It is at times like these, hamming up her wisdom and patience in the face of her husband's buffoonery, that Winnie's mastery of the marriage appears almost complete.

It is a joke but in other ways, not a joke, and one that Harry seems to accept.

Later, when some of the guests have left and the house is calmer, Harry goes into the front room to put on a Mario Lanza album, and Lynda sees her mam slip in after him. Through the half-closed door she watches as Winnie and Harry dance sedately in the firelight, their embrace close and their bodies moving in time as Harry leads. Winnie's eyes are closed and Harry is looking down at her white curls. When the song ends she moves back an inch to look up into his face. He meets her look and holds it, and then leans forward to give his wife of fifty years a long and lingering kiss.

*

That summer, Marie Hollingworth gives birth to a baby girl, whom she and David name Lisa. Marie's mam and sisters take it in turns to help her while David is at work, but when he comes home he takes over, cooking, changing the nappies and, when he is on afters, doing the early morning feeds so that Marie can sleep.

It is still the custom that when a new mother first leaves the house she must go directly to a church and have a vicar say a prayer of thanks for the child, and so one afternoon when Lisa is a week old, David and Marie lay her in her pram and walk to St Hilda's in Thurnscoe. The church is cool and dark after the bright sun outside, and as the vicar says the Prayer of Thanksgiving after Childbirth, words weighted and delicate as the young mother and father both feel. 
We thank thee and praise thy glorious Name, That thou hast been pleased to bless this thy servant and bestow upon her the gift of a child .
.
.

David is not religious, but he does see his child as a blessing and he is a tender and diligent father. Some Saturdays, when the weather is fine, he and Marie rise at four, pack a picnic and take a train to the banks of the River Wharfe where they fish all day, listening to the quiet of the water and the birdsong, watching their little dark-haired daughter as she learns to crawl, and then to walk on the riverside grass. Every Sunday morning he puts her into the pram and takes her out, past the colliery and up the slope towards Barnburgh, where he calls for a pint of beer and sits watching her sleep, before walking back to the house where Marie is cooking Sunday lunch.

When David thinks of his own dad, it is only with greater incomprehension than he felt before Lisa's birth. Hadn't Roy felt the way David feels? Had he just been too lazy? Best not to wonder, he supposes.

‘Does it upset you,' Marie asks him one evening, ‘when you think about your dad and when you were little, like our Lisa?'

‘To be honest,' David says, ‘it doesn't, not really. It just makes me think – ' he picks up Lisa and puts her on his knee. ‘It just makes me think that no matter what happens, I'll never let her go through what I went through when I was a kid. That's about all you can do, in't it?'

51 All About a Cabbage

Highgate, 1982

If John Burton’s relationship with his father-in-law has been thawed by his rescue in the backings and John’s song at the Union Club, it is thoroughly warmed in the early 1980s by the council’s installation of a new fireplace in John and Lynda’s house. The Rayburn is one of the coke-burning fires that have become popular because, unlike coal, they do not produce polluting smoke. The lit coke can be sealed behind a metal plate for a slow burn, or left open to blaze like a conventional fire. Harry finds it hotter than his and Winnie’s Parkray with its closed, glass-windowed door, and that heat now brings him round on autumn and winter evenings to, as he says, ‘get a warm’.

‘Getting a warm’ means first toeing aside Lynda and John’s sheepdog Sam, then sliding up the metal plate to increase the airflow to the fire. Once he has admired the look and feel of the glowing coke, he turns to stand in front of the hearth with the heat cooking the backs of his thighs. Soon, other people in the room can smell his trousers heating to the point at which it seems they must be beginning to burn.

‘You’ll scorch, Dad!’ says Lynda.

‘I know!’ he replies. ‘And tha’ll not shift me.’

John, Lynda and Karl wait for him to give in. Rocking on his heels on the hearth he ignores their looks, and only at the point when he seems about to burst into flames does he step away. ‘It’s a right fire, that,’ he says.

‘Tha’s not meant to keep it turned right up tha knows, Harry,’ says John.

‘Turned up!’ says Harry. He is appalled by the idea of controls on a fireplace, but still falls into conversation with his daughter and son-in-law about fires and the best kinds of coal. They move on to gossip from Highgate and Goldthorpe, and in this way their friendship slowly proves like a breadloaf in the warmth.

Harry has slowed slightly, as he acknowledged to the journalist from the
South Yorkshire Times
. He has packed away the drums (Winnie complained they took up too much space, but playing on his own hadn’t been the same in any case) and now he spends more time watching television and complaining about the new programmes. ‘Them’s not comics,’ he will say to Karl as they watch a satirist from the sixties, or one of the new ‘alternative’ comedians. ‘They’re too daft to laugh at. See what’s on t’ other side.’

When Harry says he is too tired to manage all of his allotment, John begins helping him. They plan and plant cabbages, carrots, potatoes, cucumbers, chrysanthemums, and as they work through the year’s damps and breezes and sun-warmed days, boots sinking in the dark earth, backs dipping and rising together, they become friends in the way that men often do when they grow and make things together. But with the flowering and the harvest comes a family dispute.

One day in May, John notices Harry digging up the last of their spring cabbages. It occurs to John that he has not seen Lynda or Winnie cook any of them. Looking around he notices that far more vegetables of all kinds have been dug up than have been eaten by the family. And then he remembers seeing Tony Grainger leaving Winnie’s with heavy, lumpy-looking carrier bags.

It takes only two weeks of watching to spot that Winnie is asking Harry to take the vegetables John has planted so that she can give them to Tony as gifts.

The day John realises he asks Lynda to tell her mam to stop it. He has limits and he isn’t going to grow food for Tony.

First she tries her dad. ‘Don’t tell me,’ says Harry. ‘Tell your mam.’

When Lynda tells her mam, dropping the request into a casual conversation in Winnie’s kitchen one Saturday morning, Winnie snaps, ‘That’s our Karl’s dad.’

‘Maybe it is. But I’m with John now, and John doesn’t want to grow stuff on that garden for Tony. So forget it.’

‘Right then,’ says Winnie. Her face is like cold flint. ‘If that’s it you can get through that door and not come back. Stay away, and don’t darken my doorstep again.’

Don’t darken my doorstep
?
The doorstep is only five doors away from mine, thinks Lynda. But she still dare not answer back. ‘Fair enough, Mother,’ she says, and gets through the door as instructed.

Lynda cannot fully understand Winnie’s reasons for wanting to give food to Tony. What she does understand is her mam’s desire to maintain control. Winnie believes she has a crude, practical hold over Lynda, because Lynda has no one else with whom she can leave Karl when she works. However, unbeknown to Winnie, this has changed, because John has a new shift pattern that enables him to collect Karl from school.

Lynda does not feel the need to apologise, and so they stop speaking: days, a week, months, though Karl still visits. One day Lynda is walking down Barnsley Road with some shopping when she sees Winnie, red vinyl shopping bag in hand, trudging towards her. Lynda fixes her gaze on her, thinking to speak as they pass, but Winnie keeps her head up and looks straight ahead, ignoring her on the street. The same thing happens when they pass in the backings, and Harry falls in behind her.