The Valley (54 page)

Midsummer is approaching, and the valley now knows that the strike will be long and not withstood by just tightening belts for a few weeks. In the banks and building societies and post offices, tellers pass the last of the savings accounts across the counter; in the back rooms of electrical goods shops, shopkeepers make stacks of washing machines, television sets and video recorders from rental agreements cancelled by mutual consent; along telephone wires, worried voices bargain down bill payments.

David and Marie worry because they have not long ago taken out a mortgage to buy their house from the NCB, and Marie painstakingly budgets, using a calculator borrowed from a neighbour. Fortunate in having an understanding manager at the building society, she works through the mortgage accounts, the gas and the electric, negotiating payments down to £1 weekly. Finally she calls Rediffusion to collect the rented television and video, and British Telecom to cut off the phone. ‘It’ll be like being back in my mam’s front room,’ she says to David. ‘At least we’ve still got t’ record player. We can sing our way through it.’

On Queen Street, Gary Hollingworth comes home one afternoon to find two bailiffs in his house with a repossession order. It is half expected; the mortgage is unpaid, and while some building-society managers allow striking miners to suspend their payments, his has insisted on a full monthly payment by the start of July. Elaine takes Scott and Claire inside to pack up their belongings, and Gary pleads for time. The bailiffs give them two hours’ mercy. Without being asked, their neighbours, who have been watching repossessions on the street for the last two months, file out of their homes for a familiar drill, collecting furniture to store in their houses until the family has somewhere else to live. Gary uses the phone at Kenny’s to ring the union offices at Hickleton pit yard, and four hours later someone has found them a pit house in Grimethorpe for a reduced rent for the duration of the strike.

At 229 Barnsley Road, Highgate, Lynda Burton sees through her kitchen window a Yorkshire Electricity Board meter-reader coming down the backings, and wonders momentarily if he is coming to cut them off. The odd-job work for Mr Tulley has been paying for their food, but there is barely enough money for bills, and every morning when she wakes up Lynda thinks first about Karl’s new school uniform, and the gym kit and the bag and the books. Sitting at the kitchen table counting pennies and twopences into greasy little stumps, she thinks of her mam. Winnie could afford to lend a little money, but they are still not speaking and Lynda is too angry and proud to ask. When Karl goes to Winnie’s house she feeds him, but otherwise, for the first months of the strike, the woman schooled in solidarity by her father saves all her pit-bred obduracy for her daughter ten doors down the street.

Winnie yields on the afternoon that the meter-reader calls. As Lynda walks back into her kitchen after showing him out she sees Karl just returned from Winnie’s house and, on the table, a £10 note.

‘Grandma sent it round for you. She says it’s for t’ electric bill.’

Lynda feels shock, and then relief. She is grateful for the money and for the armistice it signifies. At the kitchen window she watches for her mam, and when Winnie comes walking up the backings on her way back from the shops, Lynda steps out to her.

‘Ho, Mother!’

She stops, and turns to face her daughter.

‘Thank you for that money. And don’t worry, I’ll make sure you get it back.’

Standing alone on the path with her shopping bag in her hand, Winnie looks subdued, her eyes avoiding Lynda’s. It is as if, having gained power, she now doesn’t know how to put it to use.

‘I don’t want it back. I just thought it’d help you out.’

‘No,’ says Lynda, not knowing what to say. ‘I’ll pay you back when this strike’s over.’

A pause; then her mam simply says ‘all right’ and turns to walk home with her feelings tucked in tightly about her, soft side in, like a bird’s wings, or a cloak that, if she could pull it in tight enough, would make her invisible.

*

At the start of the school summer holidays, Roy sends petrol money so that Gary can drive Scott and Claire down to stay with him at the caravan. They set off one Sunday morning in the Skoda, passing roadblocks and convoys of police vans heading north. When they get to Hinckley, Roy hugs the children, and Gary puts their bags into the caravan, and they all walk down a lane hung with green leaves and laced with cow parsley until they get to Roy’s local, where he is taking them for lunch.

Already in the pub are Alwyn, Wendy and her husband Steve. The other people at the bar make a fuss of Scott and Claire, and Alwyn chats with Elaine, Gary with his dad. Roy buys the drinks and everyone seems happy, in a Sunday pub lunch way. They order roast dinners, and go to sit at a large wooden table by a window.

‘Where’ve you been all weekend, anyway?’ says Roy, as they start eating. ‘We thought you’d be here on Saturday.’

‘I’ve been picketing in Nottinghamshire,’ replies Gary, sitting across the table from his dad.

‘
Picketing
?
’ says Roy, making it sound perverse. ‘What do you want to go picketing for?’

Gary pauses. Please don’t do this now, Dad, he thinks.

‘I go because I’m fighting for my job. For t’ right to work.’

‘Fighting for your job! That’s not a job, working in a pit.’

The other adults glance at Gary, and then at Roy. Gary absorbs the insult.

‘It’s a good job, and I’m providing for my family.’

Roy sneers.

‘Dad, if all t’ pits get closed all at one go, what do you think’ll happen to t’ villages?’

‘They’ll all have to find right jobs, and it’ll do ’em good.’

Roy, the former shop steward, believes the unions call too many strikes. He voted for Mrs Thatcher in 1979 and became an enthusiastic supporter during the Falklands War. Last year he had walked into a pub where a man was arguing that the Falkland Islands should be given back to Argentina and ended up punching the man to the ground.

‘And this chucking bricks at bobbies,’ he says, ‘it’s a disgrace. They should birch ’em.’

‘What about bobbies beating up miners, and riding their horses into us? We get chased for doing absolutely nowt apart from being there.’

‘Chased? Who chases you?’

‘Coppers. T’ other day there were three of us in a car, and they were parked up stopping people. They never flagged us down, so we drove past. Next thing we knew there was a car with a load of them in behind us.’

‘Why didn’t you just stop?’

‘There were four of them. They could’ve got some reinforcements and given us a good hiding.’

Roy gives a dismissive hiss. ‘Give over. I’ve told you, get yourself a proper job and stay out of trouble.’

Gary feels his skin tingling. It is not just that he disagrees with his dad – he knew he wouldn’t approve of the strike – but he wants to try to make him understand why he is taking part in it. He tries again. ‘We’re fighting for our communities, for them!’ He looks at Scott and Claire. ‘Can’t you see that?’

‘
Communities
,’ says Roy, as if communities were fairy places. ‘All that’s long gone, Gary. And you’re using them’ – he gestures towards the children – ‘to justify kow-towing to Scargill.’

Gary looks down at the table. He is aware that some of the people at the bar have gone quiet and are staring. ‘I don’t want to talk about it any more, Dad.’

‘I’m not surprised. Scargill’s playing you all for a right bunch of mugs.’

‘I think he’s doing an all right job. What else can he do?’

‘He can stop trying to mine coal where there isn’t any. He’s like Hitler. He’ll not achieve anything when he’s done.’

‘Dad –’ says Wendy.

He acknowledges her and grins, to imply he is joking. ‘Maggie ought to get all t’ unions together and shoot ’em.’

It sounds to Gary as if his father is talking about him, but at one remove. ‘What? Do
I
want shooting then, Dad?’ He is hardly listening to Roy now. ‘I’m on strike to try to save our jobs and communities. That’s all. You can’t even understand it. You can’t even understand what I mean, because you’d rather listen to stories in t’ newspapers and on t’ telly from people who don’t know what they’re talking about, than try to understand me.’

‘Don’t tell me what I can’t understand.’

Gary bolts down the rest of his food, and then goes outside. He does not speak as the party walks back to the caravan, and says only a few words to his dad when he and Elaine leave. As he drives home the angry pulse in his body persists for many miles. And then, as it quietens, he feels the lifting of a hold that Roy had had over him, and his father’s power begins to shrink away like the backs of the roadsigns in the wing mirrors of Gary’s car.

56 Because You Don't Know My Wife

Highgate; Stainby, North Yorkshire; the Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle-upon-Tyne; Lodge Moor Hospital, Sheffield, August–December 1984

In August, Lynda and John find work at the Blacksmith's Arms, an old run-down pub on the edge of the North York Moors. A Highgate neighbour, Alf Horsman, has retired from the RAF and bought the pub with his wife. For the summer holidays they employ John to rebuild the walls and Lynda to serve at the bar, and put up the family in one of the guest rooms. It is a faultless retreat. Looking from her bedroom window over sunlit moorland seventy miles away from the tensions in the Dearne Valley, Lynda feels as if she has escaped into one long sunlit, heather-scented episode of
All Creatures Great and Small
.

A fortnight after they move there, Alf gives Lynda a lift to the Dearne so that she can collect her wages from the Goldthorpe pub. While Alf does some business in Doncaster, Lynda borrows his car to drive to Highgate to visit her mam and dad. Passing the groups of uniformed police offi­cers, and men in jeans and T-shirts milling about at the end of the pit lanes, she feels thankful to have been away from it all.

Driving back to Doncaster after collecting her money she feels happy, and thinks about John and Karl enjoying themselves up on the moors for the rest of the summer. And then, suddenly, she feels a shock of pain in her spine so intense and severe, with cramps like carving knives stabbing into the root of her back, that she has to pull over to the side of the road. The pain subsides enough for her to drive back to Doncaster, but by the time Alf gets her home, she is writhing in the passenger seat.

It lasts all night. In the morning John calls out a doctor who says yes, backache can be a terrible thing, and prescribes strong painkillers. By the afternoon she is delirious from either the pain, the painkillers or both. When she wakes the next morning she tries to sit up, but she sways and slumps down, too dizzy to move at all. John has to carry her to the toilet, and when he lowers her to the seat her body pitches forward like a sack of water, and he has to catch her. As he carries her downstairs, she loses control of her bladder.

An ambulance takes her to Northallerton Cottage Hospital where a kind nurse fits her with a catheter and a radiographer X-rays her back. A doctor comes and says a disc in her spine has moved and she must go to the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle-upon-Tyne to be examined further. At the infirmary she is laid on her side so that long needles can be inserted into her spine and more pictures taken; the neurosurgeon, a tall, white-haired gentleman in his sixties called Mr Strong, finds a blood clot on Lynda's spine and tells her he will need to operate right away. She replies that if it means the pain going away, for all she cares he can chop off her legs with an axe.

She signs consent forms, and then she is being wheeled down to theatre. She is tired and delirious again. John is beside her for part of the way and then he is gone, and Lynda hears a nurse saying, in a Geordie lilt, ‘Haven't you got lovely eyebrows, do you pluck them yourself?' And it seems very important, this conversation about eyebrows, but she can't keep track of it, and now the nurse is saying, ‘Don't worry, you know, Lynda, you'll be alright. Miss Walker is here and she's the anaesthetist and she's very good, and Mr Strong is the surgeon, and Dr Good is helping .
.
.'

And Lynda says, ‘Good .
.
. Strong .
.
. Walker.'

‘Yes, that's right, pet,' says the nurse. ‘Dr Good is helping, Mr Strong is the surgeon .
.
.'

‘No, that's what I'm going to be. A good strong walker. A good strong walker .
.
.'

And then everything goes dark.

For two days afterwards she sleeps in the deep, dreamy pillows of anaesthesia and morphine, surfacing occasionally in the clean, hushed brightness of Newcastle General Hospital's intensive care unit to see faces she recognises. Sometimes it is the spirits: Clara, Harry's dead sister, comes to her bedside. ‘They're coming to take my legs off me, Aunt Clara,' Lynda tells her.

‘No, love,' says Clara. ‘Nobody's coming. You're all right.'

‘
Yes they are!
' insists Lynda, losing patience with the dead woman. ‘You're wrong. ‘They're coming, and they're going to take my legs away.'