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Authors: Richard Benson

BOOK: The Valley
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Harry ‘Juggler’ Hollingworth (
far righ
t
) and friend ‘Lanc’ (
third righ
t
) with workmates at Manvers Main Colliery in the Dearne Valley, South Yorkshire,
c
.1948

‘The Worst Village in England? I am sitting down to write this article in numb despair, for the mining community I have to describe is so repulsive that many who have never been near it will refuse to credit the story .
.
. Love of literature, love of the beautiful, seem almost entirely absent from the minds of the people. Women have not even self-respect enough to spend money on dress.’

The Christian Budget
, 8 November 1899

 

‘In a field of coal it is usual to put down a series of bore-holes for the following purposes: –

(a) To obtain a correct section of the strata passed through

(b) To find the depth of a seam or seams from the surface

(c) To find the thickness, quality and number of seams

(d) To ascertain the chemical qualities of the coal, and also the nature of the roof and pavement

(e) To ascertain the inclination of the strata and the number and size of “faults” in the field.’

George L. Kerr,
Practical Coal Mining: A Manual for Managers, Under Managers, Colliery Engineers and others
, 1900

 

‘It’s been said that in the Durham and Northumberland coalfield, when you’re a kid in a pit village, you don’t get “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” or “Little Red Riding Hood” as a bedtime story. You get Churchill and the ’26 strike and the betrayal of Thomas and the railwaymen and things like that. And it’s this I want to focus on, because it’s this manner of carrying history, of awakening a deep curiosity in it, setting the starting-blocks of learning, which is truly the miners’ history. It was, after all, the way we the miners carried our history in recent years before we could read or write.’

David Douglass, ‘The Worms of the Earth: The Miners’ Own Story’, in Raphael Samuel
(ed.),
People’s History and Socialist Theory
, 1981

Part One

1 The Healer

Shirebrook, Derbyshire, 1907–09

The stone church is heated by a small coal-burning stove, and made shadowy by paraffin lamps turned down low. It has a faint smokey smell which mingles with those of furniture polish, damp clothes and soap-scrubbed skin. The congregation – housewives, shopkeepers, coal miners, farm labourers, domestic servants, shopgirls, the sick and the retired – are of mixed ages, dressed nicely, but many of them look thin and tired and poorly. They sit on mismatched wooden chairs, murmuring among themselves and looking forward at the four men and two women before them.

Each of the men and women stands behind a single chair and has on the floor beside them a towel and basin of water. They smile kindness and comfort at the crowd with the self-conscious spryness of athletes limbering up. They are making themselves receptive and putting out their magnetisms, Annie Weaver knows that, but the dead are hardly difficult to reach in here. In the audience, seated beside her mam, Annie feels them whispering and pressing in on her, nagging, insistent and irritable. You don’t really get to choose when they come, and they turn up at all hours, many of them with good reason to be cross. Their messages and their history; sometimes she can barely breathe for them, all the shot soldiers, cholera victims, dead babies, the women lost in childbirth, the men lost in the pit. Three of them had gone down the shaft last month, Bill Limb, Bill Phillips and Arthur Burton, at half past five in the morning, when the cage broke, tilted and tipped them out to fall a hundred and fifty yards in the darkness. Their wives and mams might be in tonight.

When people die suddenly or unjustly, instead of passing into the spirit world they drift about trying to understand what has happened, getting angrier and sadder until they find someone to help them cross over. Annie tells the people at sittings and séances, ‘Don’t worry, those who have passed are forgiving and want us to be at peace.’ But often it is a lie. The dead want to understand and be understood like the rest of us.

‘Our healers channel energy from Spirit to wherever it is needed. And so I now invite you to pray as I call upon Spirit to send healing to those of us in need .
.
.’ The prayer is led by Mrs Stone, the church president, who tells the people to settle themselves before coming forward. Then members of the congregation slowly, deferentially, move up to take their turns under the hands of the healers. Annie, here tonight as an ordinary member of the congregation, not as a medium, waits for the youngest of the four men, dark-haired, earnest and kind-looking. This is Walter Parkin, aged eighteen, two years older than Annie and a neighbour eight doors up in the row of cottages on Ashbourne Street. Tonight is the first time he has tried to heal in public; the women who organise the Shirebrook meetings are keen on young male healers, and want Walter to have a try-out, just to see. No judgement, they tell him. Healing depends on how the healer and the hurt get along, not the healer’s powers alone.

Walter, like the others, talks to his subject, then, standing behind them, gently lays his hands on their shoulders and closes his eyes. Some fall asleep and then wake with a frightened and embarrassed start, but Walter is unperturbed. It helps people in different ways, he explains to Annie once she has come forward to sit in his chair. Her ailment, as Walter knows, is a dead thumb. Two months ago she pricked it on a rusty pin in the house where she is in service, and the pin poisoned the blood. Now the end is numb, swollen and black, like a ripened damson. Walter puts his hands to the curve of her neck and says, ‘Close your eyes. Tha might feel faint, so tell me if tha suddenly feels hot or cold . . .’

He places his hands on her shoulders and holds them there to establish a connection. He closes his eyes and channels spirits who in the earthly sphere were doctors, surgeons, healers – spirits whose beneficence give them the power to heal. He moves his hands back up to her neck and she feels his rough thumbs and index fingers above the edge of her frilled collar. There is a tingle as the energy flows into her. And then they are silent in the darkened room with all the people whispering around them. Some of the onlookers fall asleep, but beneath Walter Parkin’s hands in the shadows, Annie Weaver is wide awake.

*

After everyone has had their time and the service is over, Annie and her mam drink weak tea poured by the organising ladies, and talk to Walter. The chatting afterwards is part of the appeal – that and the chance to get touched up in the dark, according to the unbelievers. For Annie Weaver and her mam, who are sociable, it is a high point of their week, the only time they get to leave Annie’s eight younger brothers and sisters at home with their father or a neighbour looking in. It is a chance to talk to people. Since the Weavers came to Shirebrook, Annie and Walter have had only a few short conversations on the street and in chapel, but she would like to talk to him more. ‘You did very well, Walter,’ she says.

‘Thank you,’ he replies, a little stiff and nervous.

‘I’m sure my thumb feels better.’

He smiles. There is a lull, so her mam asks about his lodgings, and about how he finds the village. He has come from a village near Sheffield, twenty miles north, to seek his fortune in the pit. When Walter was twelve, his father, who laboured in the Sheffield collieries and on the land, abandoned his wife and seven children to sail to Australia. Walter’s mother had taken up with a man from the village, a miner called George Shaw, moved him in and had three more children with him. Walter kept himself to himself and went to work on a farm. One day he came home to find his mother and George packing the few things they owned into boxes and bundles. ‘We’re going to Doncaster,’ she said. ‘You mun’ look after thyself now, Walter, tha’s old enough.’ He was fourteen.

George Shaw went to work as a shaft-sinker, digging at one of the new, deep, modern coal mines being sunk near the boom town of Doncaster. Working in the shafts is wet and filthy work, with water pouring down on you, and the risk of collapsing walls and dismemberment by excavating machinery, but it pays better than farm work. Walter asked around, and when he heard the new pit at Shirebrook needed men, he set off walking. He was taken on by the Shirebrook Colliery Company to help maintain its 600-yard-deep shafts, which in practice meant standing on the roof of the cage that lowers the miners to the pit bottom, checking brickwork and water seepage. The shaft men are rough, but Walter reads books and doesn’t care to drink away his wages. Having found decent lodgings in one of the miners’ cottages beside the market place, he ignores the new public houses, hotels and shebeens, and seeks comfort and company in the chapel.

Many among the chapel congregation are also spiritualists, and for some people, these two go together with membership of the union and the Labour Party. For Walter Parkin these beliefs make sense of what he feels. They are assertions of his right to see the world how he sees it, and his right to be treated fairly. It seems to him that you can accept life’s brutality and chaos, drinking your wages or abandoning your family, or you can try to make something of yourself.

‘And that’s what t’ healing is, to me,’ he says to Annie Weaver and her mam over half-drunk cups of tea in Shirebrook’s spiritualist church this April evening. ‘Bringing help from them who can provide it to them who need it.’

The Weavers came here last year, Annie’s father having moved from another Derbyshire village to find work at Shirebrook’s pit. Like Walter, Annie has found that having the sight helps her make friends, and now the two of them compare abilities. He says healing is a thing everyone can do, they just need to open themselves to a feeling in their hands and arms, not just to the thoughts in their minds. Annie is a clairvoyant medium, able to take information from the distant and the dead, though she doesn’t show off like some. Mrs Andrews, who trained her when she was a girl back in the Weavers’ old village, said everyone could contact Spirit if they tried, and communication was just a matter of being receptive.

Annie does not foresee the future; she dabbles with tea leaves for fun, but thinks it’s a cheap gimmick. She has two spirit guides: a gypsy girl and a Red Indian chief. When the chief comes to her she shakes her head and shoulders as he settles the feathers in his headdress. Walter is guided by a passed friend, a lad who used to work on the farm with him and who died in his teens.

When her mam tells Annie she is leaving, Walter says he will come with them and they make their way down the muddy, gas-lit Main Street and King Edward Street. The town of Shirebrook, spreading out from the colliery that towers in its midst, sits in a five-hundred-acre building site known mockingly in neighbouring settlements as the Muckyard. Along its teeming, rutted, coal-scattered roads are new and half-built lines of miners’ cottages, corrugated-iron shacks and grey tents pitched in rows as emergency accommodation for newcomers where the cottages peter out into fields. On higher ground above all this, good new houses built by the colliery company glow like beacons with the electricity generated at the pit. Everywhere in the lower streets there is the smell of soot, mortar and frying potatoes.

The women walking home discuss methods of removing soot from curtains and yard-hung washing, and gossip about the Main Street shops as they pass by. They discuss Popple’s Drapers, Sam Brown the bootmaker and Mark Wilkinson’s hairdressing shop, where Annie and all the fashion-conscious Shirebrook girls go. When Annie talks to Walter about subjects such as her hair, or her work as a maid, he listens, and then he tells her about his father in Australia, and the conversation runs easy between them. When they reach Ashbourne Street he says, after bidding the women goodnight, ‘Well, perhaps I’ll see thee at chapel, Annie?’

And Annie replies, ‘Yes, Walter, I think you will.’

*

The Weavers are a lively and sociable family with a tidy house and a well-used upright piano in the sitting room. On sunny Saturdays, Mrs Weaver makes her husband wheel out the piano so she can give the street a sing-song. Annie, who loves a sing-song, soon discovers that she lacks Walter’s rectitude; nevertheless, they are well suited in their spiritualism and their desire to improve themselves. She quietly adopts some of her employer’s wife’s clothes and manners, and enjoys the gratitude of people when she brings them messages from their passed friends and relatives. Annie and Walter’s powers distinguish them in the village, which is populated by people who have come from far away to work in the pit and want to talk about the mothers and fathers and grandmothers and grandfathers they have left behind on the farms or the spent pit villages. With so many incomers bereaved and nostalgic for their old lives, Annie and Walter’s gifts bring them modest status and admiration and give them hope of the better life. And so, at chapel and at the small stone spiritualist church, and on walks around the village with Annie’s sisters, Annie and Walter become friends, and then begin courting in the autumn of the following year.

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