The Valley (64 page)

‘Are you working at the moment, Gary?' asks the woman.

‘No. I haven't worked since I left Whitemoor.'

‘And is there any kind of work you're interested in?'

‘Yes. Yes, there is actually .
.
.' He takes a breath. ‘I'd like to try to retrain as a school teacher. And I wondered if you could help me, maybe?'

‘Oh!' she says. ‘And why do you want to be a teacher?'

‘Why?' He hadn't expected that question. ‘Well, because .
.
. because I'd like to work with people, and I've always wanted to teach children. To help them learn, you know. And I think I could do it if I had a chance, so what I'd like is to go to university, and study education.' He hears himself gabbling, and sees confusion on the woman's face. ‘I could pay my way through it. I'm not asking to be given owt.'

The confusion changes to a look of regret, and the woman gives Gary an apologetic smile. ‘I'm sorry, but we can't help you with that,' she says. ‘That's beyond what we would do, you see.'

‘What we have,' says the man beside her, ‘are things like –' he takes some pamphlets from the desk and passes them to him. ‘This .
.
. or this .
.
. '

The pamphlets are covered in pictures of men laying bricks and plastering. They are about training courses for builders.

‘I don't quite .
.
. why are you showing me these?'

‘Well, because this is what we're set up to do, really,' explains the man.

‘But I don't want to be a bricklayer! I've worked in the building trade, and I can go back and do that tomorrow. I thought you were supposed to help us retrain?'

They look at him across the table and the man says, ‘I'm sorry, Mr Hollingworth. We do mainly help with building jobs.' The woman suggests that maybe he could drive to a teacher training college and ask there.

‘Right. Thank you.'

He takes the pamphlets and walks outside. Alone in the pit yard he imagines arriving at a teacher training college and explaining to the receptionist that a lady on his retraining scheme had advised him to call in. For a moment, he holds to his chest the new ringbinder and A4 notepad he had bought for the meeting, and tries to think of the moment as the start of a journey to a new career. The interview had not been as encouraging as he had hoped, but then perhaps his ambition was greater than he had thought. Perhaps the woman's suggestion was as much as he could have hoped for, and becoming a teacher was going to be a long process that was now beginning.

But he knows he is kidding himself. He doesn't belong in a teacher training college or school, does he? If he did, wouldn't he be there, instead of pretending to himself that the advisors had taken him seriously? All of a sudden the idea of a new career seems a silly fantasy. But then he isn't going back to any building site either.

Having nothing to do for the rest of the day Gary drives to the Dearne to visit Winnie, going the long way round on the country roads. Verges are high with grass and cow parsley, and in the fields the rape is in flower. He passes railway cuttings and low iron bridges, and then the empty ruins of Manvers; littered with bulldozers and diggers, the site reminds him of images of Berlin at the end of the Second World War.

Across the bridge over the Dearne, and up into Highgate. Winnie is in the sitting room, reading a novel as thick as a breadloaf. As he knocks and comes in at the back door she wrestles herself up out of her chair and beams when she sees him.

‘Ayup, Grandma. I was just passing. I thought I'd call in and see you.'

‘Ayup, love. Have I to make you a sandwich?'

‘Go on then.'

Seated with her at the table, he eats the bread and tinned ham and sucks down the strong chestnut-coloured tea. She tells him about her health, and Lynda's work. British Coal is closing the area headquarters at Doncaster and giving staff the option to move to offices near Leeds. Leeds being too far to travel home if Winnie needed her at short notice, Lynda had requested a transfer to a South Yorkshire pit, but as none were suitable for wheelchairs, and British Coal would not adapt them, she is having to take her redundancy. ‘She doesn't think she'll get another job, what with being in t' chair,' says Winnie. ‘I don't know what she'll do.'

‘I don't know what any of us'll do, Grandma.' He tells her about the interview. ‘A bit disappointing really. I'd like to do summat .
.
. useful, if you know what I mean. With people.'

‘Aye, love. Like your grandad. He liked people.' She pats his upper arm. ‘Sometimes these things find you, you know.'

Winnie has never given Gary actual advice, just made him feel wanted and a part of something. It always works. She clears the crockery, and they sit for a while remembering things that Harry did when Gary was little, and talking about Roy, and recalling the days when Gary used to come and stay. Her memories seem clearer than her understanding of the present, but then, Gary thinks later, you could say the same about most people, in a way.

When he leaves he hugs her, and she is small but solid in his arms. Through her nylon pinnie he can feel the knitted cabling on her sweater, and beneath that the bony knots of her shoulders. He has a strange sense of there being something he would like to say to her, or perhaps ask her, but he doesn't know what it is.

On the way home he stops at Bolton-upon-Dearne cemetery, with its weather-scrubbed, smoke-blackened headstones standing at angles back through centuries: great-uncles, great-grandads, cousins, Hollingworths who may or may not be related, almost all of them coal miners from the early 1800s. Until now.

In Thurnscoe he stops and goes to the Cora for a drink, but the bar is half-empty, and when he tries to read a newspaper, he can't concentrate. He finishes his pint, and buys a bottle of red wine and a four-pack of John Smith's bitter from a shop and takes them home.

Elaine is out, and the house sounds and feels empty and alien. He drinks the beer watching a black-and-white Western on Channel 4, and after draining two cans, he goes up to his and Elaine's bedroom and brings down a small cardboard box containing the keepsakes that his grandad had given him when he was a boy. The brown leather wallet he used when he went out to the club, his old silver wristwatch, the gold-plated tie clip that he wore for best. Gary takes them out and looks at them as he opens the wine. When Elaine comes home he is asleep on the settee, the Western finished, the watch and tie clip in his hand.

*

The story of how Gary Hollingworth eventually finds his new career begins a few weeks after he is asked to paint Highgate Club in the autumn of 1992.

So as not to be unemployed he does some work for a painting and decorating firm in Darfield. The wages are low and the job boring, and he misses the old intimate camaraderie you get working in a group with a single, urgent purpose. Sometimes he even misses the awkward, aggressive blokes who made out they couldn't stand him. He begins drinking more at home in the evenings, bottle of wine, Elaine in bed, him flicking between TV channels on the settee downstairs searching out sitcoms and dramas that he liked when he was young, or those set in the sixties and seventies, like
Heartbeat
. He's in decline, he thinks: he is thirty-four after all. He doesn't understand why he keeps thinking about the past and his childhood, why he feels so out of step with the present.

The boss sends him and two of the other men to paint Highgate Club. The steward, Barry, son of Winnie's neighbour Margaret Westerman, tells them where he wants the creams, whites and dark blue, and gives them a warning: don't get so much as a splash on the mural or he and the committee will bloody well string them up. The mural is above the bar, a large, black and white picture painted by a local man in 1984. Titled
Our Struggle 1984–85
, it is a collage of scenes and public figures from the strike. Gary volunteers to paint the walls around it and he works on the edges with small, slow brushstrokes and daydreams himself into the scenes. Then he imagines he hears an organ and drums, and sees Juggler on the stage. The music stops and Harry looks up at him and says, ‘What's tha doing, Gary love? Is tha back painting and decorating?' Before he can answer, the boss comes into view, taking Harry's place.

Gary thinks he is going to moan about him taking too long to paint the edges, but he just stands at the bar contemplating the mural. ‘Take your time, mate,' he says. ‘Somebody took some time and care over that, once. It doesn't want spoiling.'

Gary begins to look for work at places where he thinks his technical knowledge might be useful, but the interviewers always say he has more experience than they need. At an air-conditioner factory he tries to explain the connection between the products and pit ventilation, but ends up trying to describe colliery airlocks and gas containment systems. He and the two interviewers end up laughing about it, and he apologises.

He takes a temporary job with a team of miners working short-term contracts at Selby. Short-term contractor teams are British Coal's big idea. Managers use them to avoid dealing with the NUM, but lots of the contractors are pro-union, and gung-ho about disputes because they have had their redundancy money and have nothing to fear. British Coal now employs management consultants to sit in pit canteens talking to the men about how everyone could work better together, but Gary doesn't notice relations changing for better or for worse. What he does notice is the worsening quality of work: low air pressures, bad air doors, holes for pipes hacked in the doors. Nobody bothering, nobody checking, because everybody knows they'll be away sooner or later. Some of the pits are friendly, others hard to work in because the full-time men won't cooperate with contractors, and accuse them of having sold their jobs and betrayed the next generation.

He stays on the team for eight months and then, thinking to improve on the skills he already has, he enrols on a part-time course in engineering at a college in Doncaster. Someone he meets on the course mentions that the local further education colleges need more people to teach health and safety regulations to apprentices, and that they like ex-miners because of their attention to detail. He calls some colleges, and two weeks later begins working part-time in the Dearne Valley. He takes a class of sixteen-year-old boys, mostly apprentices employed by local builders working for their City and Guilds. Gary has no idea how to teach a class of boys, so he talks to them as he had talked to the younger lads at Grimethorpe, as an equal. The boys want to learn and they listen and ask questions. By the end of the first lesson they are sharing anecdotes, even cracking jokes. When he walks out of the classroom he briefly closes his eyes and breaks into a smile as wide as the valley itself.

As the weeks pass he notices a boy who is always on his own and not involved in the other boys' banter. Thin, nervy and reluctant to make eye contact, he usually stands or sits towards the back or side of the classroom. His work is fine, a little above the average in fact, but he neither asks questions nor offers answers, and when Gary invites him to talk, he crosses his arms and shrugs.

At home Gary thinks about the kid, and one afternoon at the end of the class he stops him with the excuse of a question about a worksheet.

‘And how's t' class going for you, mate?'

‘S'alright.'

‘Are you getting what you want out of it?'

‘Yeah.'

‘What are you hoping to do once you've finished?'

A pause: the long, drifting pause of someone who dislikes thinking about themselves or the future. ‘Depends if I get a job,' he says, and with his hands tucked inside his sweatshirt cuffs, he crosses his arms across his body and looks away.

It might have been that any teacher in the college would have noticed the boy's behaviour, and intuited that his problems ran deeper than simple shyness. But Gary knows how loneliness and worry sit in a teenage boy; their troubles might have differed, but feelings of anxiety and unbelonging at home can give someone a certain look. It might also have been that somewhere in Gary's mind, something about the kid connected with the memory of two little boys locked in a caravan in the North East of England, looking out of the window at the other caravans being taken away, and wishing that someone would come.

That night he lies awake thinking about the boy. Should he mind his own business? Is he getting carried away with the teaching?

The next time he is in the college, he plucks up the courage to ask one of the secretaries. ‘Excuse me,' he says. ‘Could I have a word with you please? It's about one of the students.' The secretary arranges for him to meet the college counsellor, a soft-voiced and purposeful woman who thanks him and promises to talk to the boy.

‘We can try, can't we?' she says. He admires how she says ‘we'.

Although Gary never knows, nor asks, what the problems are, the counsellor later tells him she has met the boy and his family, and thinks she may have helped them. When Gary asks if the boy is all right, she says she can't discuss it. ‘But let's just say it's a good job that you mentioned it,' she adds. ‘Thank you.'