The Valley (12 page)

Later that night, when Roy, Tommy and Juggler Jane have all been long asleep, and Winnie is reading a romance in the sitting room, she hears muffled sounds outside: laughter, singing and a fumbled scratching of keys on the door. In a burst of air and banter, Harry, Millie and Danny tumble in with a gang of comics and musicians, all of a-snigger and a-roar with booze. ‘T’ performance has gone down wonderful, my love,’ says Harry, ‘and t’ manager wants us back. Bring my champagne and cigars!’

He turns on the radio and sends one of the gang up to the beer-off near the crossroads at the top of the lane to have an enamel bucket filled with ale. Annie laughs, Harry turns up the radio. Winnie goes to the kitchen to slice bread and slather on dripping and bacon. Coats off, cigs lit. A musician called Ronnie takes his guitar from his case and plays tunes as singers take it in turns to stand before the range, which makes a sort of backdrop hung with wreaths of cigarette smoke. Their mate comes back from the beer-off with the bucket slopping full of beer.

‘We thought tha’d drunk thi’ sen lad!’ calls Harry. ‘Get some glasses, Win.’

Performers and hangers-on dip their glasses into the bucket and sing harmonies, one after the other – novelty songs, ballads, old-style music hall and modern dance numbers. Winnie sits quietly, with the gypsy girl watching her, until Harry tells her to get some more sandwiches made. In the kitchen, as she cuts the loaf, she hears him cajoling Millie back to sing ‘
Play a Simple Melody’
,
in which two singers argue over the merits of old-style music versus modern rag. In the middle, they break off into a mock argument:

Millie:
‘This is a lovely old song, and not rubbish. This kind of song will outlive all your raggy nonsense.’

Harry:
‘You’re fifty years behind the times: we want something with a kick in it! I’ll sing you a chorus that’ll make ’em sway!’

The party goes on until two o’clock in the morning. Down the road there are other gatherings. In the backings, carousing, screams and blazing rows that some of them listen to and laugh at outside the back door. Winnie wonders about bed; should she go, saving her energy but annoying Harry by deserting him at what is the high point of his week, or should she stay up, when he doesn’t really seem to notice her anyway, and make herself tired? In the end it doesn’t matter because he isn’t looking out for her. She just slips out as they take it in turns to sing in front of the range, and walks up the dark stairs, hearing behind her laughter and Harry and Danny singing ‘
Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries’
.

12 Swinging Down the Lane

Highgate, 1938

The financial arrangement between Harry and Winnie is that he tips up his whole wage packet for her, Roy and the house, and keeps the earnings from his acts for himself. Women think themselves fortunate to have a husband who tips up, so she lets him spend his showbiz money how he likes. From the cash he gives her she first takes the rent, keeping it in a tin on the sideboard until Mr Meanly’s man collects it on Thursdays. She then places a pound spending money in Harry’s drawer in the sideboard, and puts more aside to buy him his cigarettes (sixty Park Drive, sixty Gold Flake). Every once in a while Harry falls short in the week and borrows from the rent tin, and this makes Winnie curse him because it means her having to borrow from Millie, or a neighbour, just as they will have borrowed from her. The women are sympathetic and sanguine about this mutual lending from sideboard tins and drawers, but Winnie hates having to ask. In Highgate everybody knows everybody’s business, and she dislikes people knowing her husband lets her down.

To save herself the humiliation she learns how to balance her home accounts using the Monday-morning method. On Sunday nights Harry comes home from the club drunk enough to have little idea of how much money he has left. In the morning, once he has gone to work, Winnie goes into the passage where the coats hang and picks from the pockets his remaining notes and coins, taking what she needs for the house, with a little bit extra to keep in reserve. The secret is to guess how much he thinks he could have spent. Winnie is a good guesser, and in more than fifty years of marriage Harry Hollingworth will never know – or wonder – how his wife coped with the unexpected fluctuations he caused in her budget.

On a Friday evening in 1938, Harry announces one such fluctuation when, having returned from a solo tandem ride to Manvers Main to collect his wages, he places the envelope on the sideboard and informs her that this week it contains a few bob less than usual. 

‘It’d better not do,’ she shouts from the kitchen, where she is frying fish for the family’s tea. She thinks he is joking.

‘I’ve just had to take ten shilling out.’

She looks at him sharply and takes the fish off the heat. Ten shillings will leave them short on the rent. ‘What for?’

He lays bravado on his embarrassment. ‘Never mind what for.’

‘I do mind what for. How will we pay t’ rent?’

‘Have a guess.’

‘Damn you, Harry!’

In his thoughts this scene has been played out with Winnie enjoying the excitement and anticipation. He had not thought about the rent. He’d wanted to tease his wife, not start an argument with her.

‘It’s on t’ road outside,’ he says, trying again. ‘Go and have a look.’

Parked on the lane is a large, highly polished BSA motorcycle. Not yet over the purchase of the tandem, Winnie is already wondering how much she will get from his pockets on Monday morning, and who she will have to ask to lend her the rest.

‘What do you want a motorbike for?’

‘To get about to do turns,’ he says. ‘We’ll go a lot further on that than on t’ tandem, and we can carry all t’ kit in it.’

‘How?’

‘I’m going to make a sidecar.’

‘You’re going to make
what
?’

‘A sidecar.’ He shakes his head, despairing at her lack of vision. ‘It’ll not be much of a job. I’ll put t’ drums or t’ costumes in it, and Millie can go on t’ back.’

‘Millie! Why should our Millie go on t’ back?’

‘She can go in t’ sidecar if she likes! It doesn’t matter, does it?’

‘And how will you fasten a sidecar on?’

‘With wood. I know somebody who’s got some railway sleepers I can cut up.’

Is it reasonable to build a sidecar and fasten it to a motorcycle with part of a railway sleeper? Winnie has no idea.

‘Where did t’ motorbike come from?’

‘Clarry’s.’

‘Clarry Basinger? I should have flaming known!’

This casts a new light on the purchase. Clarry Basinger is a short, thickset man who dresses in expensive, double-breasted suits, smokes cigars and owns a secondhand car business opposite the junior school. He arrived in Highgate with motor cars, petrol pumps and garages some time in the late 1920s, and sells the popular British cars and some flashier models bought from colliery managers and businessmen. Many people think he is a flattering, overly persuasive salesman of whom it is best to be wary. Harry, however, thinks he is terrific.

‘It’ll not go if he’s sold it you.’

This riles Harry. ‘Course it goes! Once I’ve got t’ sidecar on, tha’ll see it does. And I’ll get my drums and your Millie in it, and we can get to some right places and earn some brass.’

‘Millie won’t fit in there with a drum kit.’

He looks from the motorcycle to his wife, and from his wife to the motorcycle. ‘I am trying,’ he says, ‘to get on in life. Nowt comes from nowt, tha knows.’

*

The payments on the motorcycle are less of a drain than Winnie expects. Once he has built and attached a vast sidecar to the motorcycle Harry does get more work as a turn, with bookings in Wakefield, Leeds and Sheffield, where some venues pay top rates. As well as that, there is more overtime to be had at the pit. The collieries are increasing production and taking on more men to meet the growing demand from the steel mills. Everyone says it is because there is going to be another war with Germany. Lord Halifax has taken over as Foreign Secretary and had talks with Hitler, but no one thinks he’ll do any good. The government plays down the chance of war, but in the Dearne everyone sees more coal trains on the lines, and more steel coming back, and they know the steel is for new tanks and guns. Terrible job, they say, but at least it means work and money. 

Harry studies and passes the exams to become a colliery shot-firer, a job that requires intricate calculations of charges, fuses and air pressure, and that pays better and is less tiring than working as a hewer. He likes it because, while it is a promotion, it doesn’t mean he has to tell a lot of men what to do; positions of authority do not appeal to him, and anyway, he thinks, they could be difficult to maintain when you appear on stage producing half-pints of beer from under a dress.

His chief interest remains the Mother Riley Roadshow. They perform most Fridays and Saturdays, and sometimes Harry asks Winnie to come with them to watch. ‘Let Danny or your mam look after Roy,’ he says, ‘come wi’ us and enjoy yoursen.’ But Winnie won’t go, or at least not more than once or twice a year; she likes to see her husband on stage, but the crowd’s rowdiness and the drinking put her off. She feels awkward among the musicians and singers and boozers, and doesn’t know how to act in their company. Some nights she feels a sort of jealousy towards them, and regards them, even Millie, as show-offs.

One night, when the troupe has been playing in Sheffield, Harry does not return home. Winnie does not sleep and then worries all the next day; when Roy asks where his dad is she says he’s had to go away somewhere. He turns up in the late afternoon, dark-eyed and grumpy. There was a problem with the bike, he says, and the venue manager let them stay at his house. Then he changes the subject by telling her with some excitement that one of his distant cousins, who did a couple of turns with the troupe and left for London, is now working as a stand-in for a theatre actor in London.

Winnie does not care about his cousin. She is suspicious, but she also worries that she is overreacting, so she doesn’t argue. She doesn’t argue when he stays out the following week either, but then it becomes two nights, or all day and night on Friday when he is due home with his pay. They argue about his absences. He gets angry, and she asks her mam to come to stay, which makes him behave for a few days. When Annie leaves he lapses into the unfaithful spouse’s random, inappropriate nastiness in the home and nothing is too minor or insignificant to decry. He complains about Juggler Jane cooking in the house, or about the food Winnie makes, or, one Saturday tea time when she brings fish and chips, the bluntness of the knives and forks. ‘What’s the matter with you, Harry?’ she says, bewildered and fed up.

‘You,’ he snaps. ‘You, going on wi’ your damn .
.
.
questions
.’

*

A Monday morning in April: a washday. Winnie rises at six after seeing Harry off to work. In the kitchen she lights a fire in the small fireplace in the corner, fills a large steel cauldron with water and puts it over the fire to boil. As the water warms, she brings into the small kitchen dolly tubs, a washboard and a peggy-leg, and then cooks eggs and bacon for breakfast. She hustles Roy and Tommy and, once the children are out of the house, she brings downstairs big armfuls of soiled laundry, then strips the bedding and brings that down too. Having already laid Harry’s pit clothes – the old black clothes and underwear he uses for work – in a separate pile, she begins sorting the whites from the rest: her bloomers, handkerchiefs, Harry’s underpants, Roy’s other school shirt, all with their individual imprints, ruts and blooms of dirt. She is sorting and dropping them to the floor like the skins of dead days and nights when she notices a mark on the front of one of Harry’s shirts. It is dark red lipstick, smears rather than lip prints, near to where the collar would fit. She feels her heart quicken and her fingers tingle. She finds and works through the others. No, no .
.
. hang about. Here, the same lipstick. 

Pursing her lips, she renews the washing with clenched vigour, bunches up a mound of whites in her arms and dumps them in the boiling cauldron with a cup of soap powder. The air fills with the fatty, raw chlorine odours of Rinso and Dolly Blue whitener and an under­lying faintly acrid smell of dirty laundry. In the yard, Nelly is briskly pegging sheets to her line. Damn Harry! It is so typical. Sometimes these days it seems people are quite willing to accept this sort of thing. People feel everyone should be allowed to have a bit of fun, but pinching husbands – it might be one woman’s fun, but to a wife it was the loss of her livelihood.

Using washing tongs, she fishes out the clothes and sheets from the cauldron and drops them into the dolly tub. She peggy-leg pounds them in the tub’s convex, grey, corrugated torso, and then scrubs them on the washboard. A rinse in the second tub, and then she wrings everything through the mangle – quick quick quick because it all needs to be done by three. As she is viciously pegging the sheet corners to her line she wonders what to do. The sheets and clothing can be cleaned; if only there were cauldrons and chemicals that might wipe clean her husband’s soul and boil away these women! She enjoys putting Harry’s shirts through the mangle.

More sheets go out to dry, mangle-smooth and blue-white, like sails billowing in the harbourish yard; as there is no wind or cloud they are not yet flecked with soot or black dust. Next she is kneeling and scrubbing the kitchen, efflorescent with its wet washday scents and miasmas. By the time she has finished and has begun to fold the early drying parts of the laundry for ironing, she has had an idea.