The Valley (68 page)

69 From the Flames to the Winds

The Dearne Valley, 1997–2002

Months and years pass, residents at the hall come and go. Winnie’s bouts of delusion lengthen; always she is a young version of herself in her own house, with Walter and Annie and neighbours around her but no husband – or at least not one that she mentions.

‘Look who’s come to see you, Winnie!’ the assistants say when Lynda arrives.

‘Yes!’ she replies. ‘It’s my mam!’

When Lynda leaves, Winnie promises to watch out for her getting home. ‘I can see your house from my kitchen. I know when you’re in, because I can see your light.’

She is too frail to go far, but even if she had been able to travel through it, the surrounding countryside would now have seemed as illusory to her as her visions are to her family. In these years regeneration projects funded by local authorities, the European Union and the New Labour government are changing the look of the valley so rapidly that when Pauline and Gordon drive to see the old Manvers site one day after visiting Winnie, they lose their way and cannot work out where they are. Gigantic windowless warehouses and industrial units seem to be dropped from the sky at night, their fantastical, mystical quality enhanced by their desertedness; no one ever seems to see people either going into or coming out of them. More industrial landscape is reclaimed, and everywhere there are new roads, call centres, golf courses, houses, retail parks, and signs announcing development schemes. Thanks to hoardings erected by firms and agencies working on a re-landscaping project, Grimethorpe acquires what appears to be a corporate branding for a spoil heap. Among these new tidy monuments to shopping, service and leisure, disused industrial buildings, shut-up shops and stretches of closed-up terraced housing loom like elderly relatives at an eighteenth birthday party, hoping to be asked to join in, but suspecting that some of the organisers wish they didn’t have to be there in the first place. Leading off from main roads, old pit lanes are blocked off by concrete boulders, their lamp posts broken, railings down, surfaces cracked and whiskered with grass and thistles. Where collieries stood, commemorative winding wheels are planted into the earth like headstones.

In this way the future arrives unevenly, rudely, and, in some places, prettily. As for the past, the authorities seem unsure what to do with it. Where it cannot be hidden under concrete, it is cordoned off and neglected, preserved mainly in the loyalties and stories of the people.

Karl Grainger, Lisa Hollingworth and John Burton move to work at Kostal, a German car components factory on an industrial estate in Highgate. Lynda gets a job at Doncaster College’s Faculty of Business and Professional Studies, where she works for the Director of Higher Education, a former mining engineer who keeps his old pit lamp in his office. On her first day with him, he had burst into her office and shouted, ‘Where are those bloody minutes from this morning?’ and she had replied, ‘In your bloody office!’ He had done a double-take then said, ‘I think you and me are going to get on.’

In Leicestershire, Roy retires and, with his health damaged by barely controlled alcoholism, moves into sheltered housing with Alwyn. On the Yorkshire Wolds, Pauline and Gordon Benson have to sell off their farm when changing economic conditions leave it too small to be viable.

Gary Hollingworth still enjoys his new career in social work, though his caseload and the everyday strains of working in an office can be more challenging than he might have once expected. When he goes to see his GP about a series of throat infections, the doctor tells him he is suffering from stress and needs time off work. Gary is dumbfounded. ‘Inside I was seething,’ he tells Heather later. ‘I wanted to say, “Do you know what I used to be? Do you know what job I used to do?
That
was stressful.”’

Sometimes he dreams that he is back working underground at Grimethorpe, waking in the small hours ready to pick up his snap and set off for an early shift. The dreams come when he has new, knotty tasks at work, and in them he has to puzzle out problems in the pit that mutate when he finds a solution. One winter night, having spent much of the day discussing a new flexitime system, he dreams that he has changed his shifts from days to earlies. He rides the conveyors to the coalface and begins taking measurements, but then remembers that he shouldn’t be there because the pit is shut. He comes up to the surface, but then realises he has lost his lamp and self-rescue gear; he goes back underground to look for them but they are not there either, and now he panics. If the overman sees Gary’s lamp and gear somewhere on the surface, he will assume Gary has come out of the pit, and when the shift ends Gary will be left down there alone. He looks at his watch, but the face is covered in mud. He searches for the pit bottom but he cannot find it anywhere – and then, suddenly he is on the pit top, in sunlight, safe. For a moment he relaxes, but then he realises that everyone else has gone, and there are no gates. He darts around the yard looking for a gate or another person until he wakes up.

It is just past 4 a.m. He gets up, and goes to the window to look out at the snoring and frost-webbed village. No one about on the streets, no lights on in the houses, no late drinking lights burning in the windows of the clubs. The valley keeps the same hours as everywhere else now, he thinks, the old miners labouring away their night shifts in the dream-pit, the grandmas watching from their kitchens for their mams’ lights in the darkness.

*

Wednesday 12 December 2001. A cold and dry late afternoon in the valley, shops and houses speckled with Christmas lights, the roads busy with shoppers and people returning home from work. The news is full of talk about economic downturn, the war in Afghanistan, 9/11, and David and Victoria Beckham’s social life. Lynda Burton is looking forward to escaping it; as she drives through the dusk towards Bolton Hall, she imagines her and John’s coming Christmas holiday in Tenerife, and the thought cheers her. She plans to tell her mam about it later. Even though Winnie will struggle to distinguish the Canary Islands from Skegness, she will at least look and smile at the leaflets about the hotel, looks and smiles now coming to her more easily than actual conversation.

When Lynda finds her mam in the lounge she is seated in a chair by herself. She wears a fine pale sweater and woollen skirt taken by a care assistant from the pool of clothes that morning. Her wedding ring hangs from a chain around her neck, her fingers being too thin to keep it on; denuded and widowed, her hands occupy themselves pleating and rolling the hem of the sweater.

The sister, a stout, jolly local woman who has befriended Lynda, says, ‘Look who’s here!’ but Winnie manages only to glance up, smiling like weak milky tea, and say ‘Hello!’ Nowadays Winnie doesn’t even see her mam, and for the last six months she has not put more than three words together at a time. Always a master of silences and brevity, she now begins her exchanges with properly formed words, but then fades through murmuring ‘mmms’ to silence. Tonight Lynda thinks she looks more vacant than before, but her alertness fluctuates and it is hard to tell. In full health, a single movement of the eyes could reveal her state of mind, but now she seems a different woman altogether. This is why Lynda feels less distressed than she would have expected to. She feels sympathy for the small, weak woman in the chair, of course, but more than that, she is baffled and sorry at her mam’s transformation into this stranger who, but for her appearance, is unrecognisable.

On the seat of an empty chair beside her lie two white rectangular envelopes, slit open along the top.

‘Who’s been sending you cards then, birthday girl?’ says Lynda.

‘Yes,’ says Winnie, smiling.

‘Is one from our Pauline?’

‘Mmmm.’

‘John and Karl say happy birthday as well. They’re both still at work.’

‘Mmmm.’

‘We’re going to have a bit of cake, aren’t we?’

‘.
.
.’

Today Winnie is ninety-two years old. Lynda has come early so as to be at the birthday tea.

In the dining room she sits next to her mam among the other residents, and helps her to eat her chicken casserole and mashed potatoes. After the plates are cleared, two carers bring before Winnie a pink-and-white birthday cake decorated with nine candles, and ‘Happy Birthday’ is sung to her.

‘Are you going to blow your candles out, Winnie love?’ asks one of the cake-bringers. ‘Have you got enough puff?’

Winnie stares into the flames and shakes her puff-less head. The woman herself blows out the candles, making a small cloud of smoke like an extra white head at the table.

Lynda cuts up a slice of the cake for her mam, but she seems wearied by eating, and so they trudge back into the lounge. Lynda talks about Tenerife, and Winnie dozes. Her head ticks forward and then she wakes, startled.

‘Are you tired, Mam?’ asks Lynda.

‘Yes.’ Her voice is minute and shy, like a speck of dust confiding in someone.

‘Shut your eyes then, and go to sleep. I’m not going anywhere.’

For a moment Winnie’s eyelids close and she seems to be sleeping, but then she opens her eyes and looks at Lynda. ‘Thank you,’ she says, and falls asleep.

In the room, someone clears away teacups.
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire
comes on the television. A carer dims the lights. Lynda eases her mam’s right hand into hers, and watches her sleeping.

Thank you
, she thinks – strange. Harry had said the same to John just before he died, but Winnie does not appear to be dying. Distant and feeble she may be, but she is still absolutely present. Lynda has many times watched her drift towards the horizon as if to disappear, but she always sails back and re-anchors herself in a way that seems inevitable.

She will not wake again today, though. The sister comes and asks if they should put her to bed, and Lynda agrees. She leans over and kisses the thin white crown of hair. ‘Happy birthday, Mam,’ she says.

‘Thank you’ are the last words Winnie Hollingworth says to a member of her family. On 8 January, Lynda receives a phone call in her hotel room in Playa de las Americas. Winnie has been taken to Barnsley hospital because the sister at Bolton Hall saw a lot of blood on her pillow, and guessed that she had had a haemorrhage. In fact she had only cut a gum, the stain’s size down to the thinness of Winnie’s blood, which is now so short of platelets that a small nick can bleed for hours. ‘So it’s no problem,’ says the nurse. ‘She’ll just have a transfusion and she’ll be fine. No need for you to worry at all.’

The transfusion revives Winnie sufficiently for her to sit up in bed and eat her meals by the evening, and so it comes as a surprise when the following morning – the morning of Lynda’s fifty-third birthday – Lynda calls to hear the nurse answer in a tone of professionally restrained urgency. ‘Are you the daughter that’s in Tenerife? We were just going to call you. Hold on a minute, I’ve got the doctor here.’ There are rasping and knocking sounds in the earpiece as a telephone handset is passed from one reluctant hand to another.

‘Mrs Burton?’ It is a man, as urgent and concise as the nurse had been. ‘Your mother’s breathing is very shallow. We’re going to put her on different medication. If you ring us back in two hours, we’ll let you know how she is.’

Lynda is alone in the room, John out running errands for their return journey tomorrow. The nurses have called Pauline, but there is a dense fog up on the East Yorkshire Wolds and, assuming her mam will recover, she is waiting for it to lift before she leaves for the hospital. Lynda thinks they will not have called Roy.

Before calling the hospital Lynda had begun to pack, and there are two suitcases on the bed looking upwards, open-mouthed, to the ceiling. While she waits she packs again, with that small, calming feeling of executing a single task competently as circumstances develop beyond her control.

She feels guilt at having left her mam, but tries to push the feeling away because she is sure the new medication will work.

Then, only fifteen minutes after she had put down the receiver, the telephone rings again.

*

Winnie’s funeral takes place at Barnsley’s municipal crematorium on a cold, overcast morning in January 2002. The cortège arrives early, so in the grounds family and friends gather among wintry dregs of ice and dead leaves, their murmured conversations mingling with the caws of rooks and the distant noise of lorries on the main road. All of Winnie’s children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are here, all except Roy; Alwyn, who has come with Wendy and her husband Steve, says he is too unwell to travel, an explanation that causes looks to be exchanged between some of the mourners. Although Lynda and Pauline do not yet notice, friends and neighbours swell the waiting congregation to the same size as the crowd that had gathered for Harry a decade and a half earlier. By the time they have filed into the cream-and-crimson chapel, with its uplighters and light wood and sprays of white flowers, people are standing in rows two and three deep at the back. It is unusual these days, the vicar will tell Lynda later, for someone of ninety-two.

The vicar had not known Winnie – Lynda has had to stress that he should at no point mention the name ‘Gertrude’ – but he has talked about her with her family and other acquaintances and, he says, in these conversations two qualities always were mentioned: her capacity for hard work, and second, her privacy. He tells the mourners, ‘She was a private person, and someone whose home was of the utmost importance to her,’ and when they sing the last hymn, ‘
All Things Bright and Beautiful’
, it seems to Pauline, seated at the front near the coffin, that even though the hymn is very well known and commonly heard, its lyrics could have been addressed to Winnie because, for better or worse, she had understood the greatness of the small things of home.