The Valley (31 page)
Authors: Richard Benson
‘Shall we have a song, then, Juggler?’
‘Aye, come on then.’
And Harry sings ‘
Simple Melody’
as she slowly slips back into unconsciousness.
This is a lovely old song, and not rubbish. This kind of song will outlive all your raggy nonsense .
.
.
Millie sings and waves to the end of her life. She dies in the front room in October at the age of fifty-two, and for the second time in the year the family walks to the church and cemetery in Bolton-upon-Dearne to reunite a wife with her husband.
The following year, Sonny and May leave the valley to live in Newmarket, and with Annie, Millie and Sonny gone from the valley, and her son and eldest daughter gone from the house, Winnie and the gypsy girl adapt to a world that is rapidly changing. In her mid-fifties, Winnie begins wearing spectacles and dyeing her hair, and she uses facepacks made to her mother’s recipe of witchhazel and oatmeal to keep her skin taut and clear. Her relationship with Harry, who is now losing his hair and becoming a little slower in his movements, becomes more equable. She keeps her mind open to the new music and programmes on the TV, and to the latest fashions and long Beatles haircuts on men. It is she, not Lynda, who decorates Lynda’s bedroom walls with posters from
Jackie
magazine, and it is she more than anyone who, in the coming decades, will keep her home open to the new generation of Hollingworths as they make their way in a world that is both familiar and different.
Highgate, 1961–64
Lynda Hollingworth is different to how her older sister Pauline had been as a young girl: in some ways she is a practically minded tomboy, in others she is away with the fairies. She likes riding in the glassworks lorry with her dad; she wants hobnail boots so she can make sparks fly like the lads do; she has progressed from dancing on her dad’s feet to watching ballet on television, and from there to dancing up and down the backings on her own pretending to be in
Swan Lake
. Dolls she considers dull, preferring to play at ‘offices’ using old office equipment that she keeps in a shoebox – used envelopes, stamps, rubber bands, pens, a stationery catalogue and a carbon copypaper receipt book that her dad once brought for her from work. In this game the shoe box becomes a desk, such dolls as she owns a queue of people with paperwork to process, and she the woman in charge of processing it: sign, tear, stamp! At other houses children dress up or play with toys, but at Lynda’s you dance or pay money off your payment books, and devise new, efficient filing systems.
As she gets older, Lynda dreams of real offices, finding herself far more stimulated by the idea of office work than by the knitting and dressmaking that so interest her sister. One Friday evening in 1960, when she is eleven years old, she has a sitting-room epiphany when she comes downstairs to find Pauline, her mam and Comfort knitting in the firelight. Pauline has her hair in rollers, Comfort and her mam are gossiping, and their needles go clicketyclicketyclicketyclicketyclickety. Her dad is adjusting his tie in the mirror before going out.
‘Look at Rudolph Valentino here,’ says Winnie.
‘Look at t’ flamin’ wool factory, click, click, clicking,’ says Harry. ‘It’s May. Are you cold?’
‘It’s no good waiting until t’ weather changes to start knitting you jumpers, is it? If I do you’ll be moaning because I didn’t get on with them sooner.’
Lynda sees him roll his eyes, and imagines him thinking of the fun he will soon be having in the club. Looking at the knitters and then back at her dad, she thinks he has the best of this set-up, and no mistake. If she could she would go out with him instead of staying here with the clicketyclicketyclicketying. She has an urge to snatch the needles from the women’s hands and fling them out of the window.
‘What’s up, Lynda?’ says Winnie, noticing that her daughter seems to have entered a trance.
‘Nowt,’ says Lynda.
‘You mean nothing.’
‘Nothing, then.’
Lynda has in the past sat down to sew with her mam and Comfort, but tonight she says she won’t bother. She goes back upstairs in search of better things to do, and spends the evening reorganising the contents of her shoe-box desk, and thinking of the equipment she will buy when she earns money of her own.
*
When she is grown up, Lynda will look back on her childhood and say she felt part of a generation that seemed more impassioned and less parochial than their parents, and people younger than her will think she is talking about the politics, pop music and fashions of the 1960s. She is, partly, but she will think there was somehow both more and less to it than that. Her keynote memory is of all the mams and elder sisters taking their satisfaction from duty and decorousness while she and her friends just wanted to laugh and dance.
Winnie does not object to the young Lynda’s interest in laughing and dancing and offices, but she is strict. She slaps Lynda’s legs for a word out of place, and thumps her in the back if she complains about having her hair brushed. If anyone from outside the home criticises Lynda, though, her mam is onto them like a terrier on a rat. When a primary school teacher pulls a knicker leg over a cheek of Lynda’s bottom and smacks her in front of her class, Winnie marches up to school and threatens the teacher so furiously that Lynda fears she might commit murder. This is how it works, she comes to realise, protection and control; in the home, your mam fights against you, out of it she is on your side.
By the time Lynda goes up to secondary modern school in the summer of 1960 she has watched dozens of ballets on the television, and is keen to try formal dance. In her first lesson at the new school her dance teacher, Mrs Buxton, instructs the girls to make pairs, think of a story together, and tell that story through their performance. Lynda and her friend Margaret make up a tale about a fairy bewitched by a tree, and Margaret, who isn’t keen on dancing, lies down pretending to be a log. Lynda flits about to the music playing on a Dansette, but when Mrs Buxton lifts the stylus, Lynda carries on dancing. The bemused teacher tells her to stop because there is no music and Lynda replies, ‘But I hear it in my mind, Mrs Buxton, I hear it in my mind!’
In Lynda’s second year the school governors remove the walls and railings that keep the boys apart from the girls, and the school introduces mixed classes. During the day, Lynda and her friends are indifferent to the change, while the boys welcome it because it means they can look at the girls through the gym windows, and climb up drainpipes to watch them in the showers. It is to life outside of school that it makes the most difference. Previously, the only boys the girls knew were those they had been at primary school with. Now, having mixed lessons and mixed break times, boys and girls recognise one another when they meet in the street, and are generally less afraid to acknowledge each other’s presence, or open a conversation. For the first time in Highgate, large groups of boys and girls from different villages can now play and pass the time together in the parks and outside shops.
On some evenings after school, a group of boys from Lynda’s year walks down from Goldthorpe to the Highgate beer-off to buy bottles of Coca-Cola and lemonade. They stand on the steps outside, swigging from bottles, bantering with Highgate kids about pop music, football and bird-nesting, and coolly recounting their adventures in the wild country on the village edges. The Goldthorpe boys have chased the White Lady, a ghost that stalks the Hickleton colliery spoil heaps between Goldthorpe and Thurnscoe. They have sneaked into the old warehouses to jump across open lift shafts. They have slid down the spoil heaps on lengths of discarded belting, and even dived to the bottom of the forbidden brick ponds in Bolton-upon-Dearne. They are braver and cockier than the Highgate Lane kids, so the Highgate Lane kids congregate respectfully and listen to them, and the more daring ones ask to go with them on their next ghost hunt or spoil-heap slide. Lynda listens, and gets the same feeling she used to get from seeing boys making sparks with their hobnail boots. ‘I’ll come with you,’ she would like to say. ‘I’m not scared of ghosts. Some people in my family regard them as personal friends.’
One of the Goldthorpe boys, John Burton, a particularly witty and well-dressed youth known for never refusing a dare, likes to stand on the top step of the beer-off and sing Elvis Presley songs as if the step is a stage. He does ‘
Heartbreak Hotel’
, ‘
Hound Dog’
and, to mellow the mood and tempo, ‘
Don’t Be Cruel’
. Elvis is the pinnacle, he says. Yes he was better before he went in the Army, but he’s still way out in front, as a musician and as a man.
Lynda finds it exciting when John talks like this, and comes to the front to get a good look at him. One night as he’s preaching she catches his eye. ‘Our Pauline and her fiancé are taking me and my mam to see Cliff Richard at t’ Doncaster Gaumont,’ she says. ‘She’s been to see him before. She says t’ lasses scream that loud, Cliff can’t hear himself sing.’
John is unmoved. ‘Cliff Richard’s rubbish. He just copies Elvis.’
‘A lot of people like him.’
‘That means nowt. People like all sorts of rubbish, it doesn’t make it good.’
She could just back away, but this idea is new and intriguing to her. ‘What else do you think’s good then?’
‘Ah well,’ he replies, standing down from the step. ‘Let’s have a think.’
That evening Lynda and John agree that the Beach Boys and Motown artists are good, and decide that they’re not really sure about the Beatles. the next day they add other names to the list, and as they talk more at the gatherings on Highgate Lane they become friends.
At first they don’t tell each other much about themselves
,
but
this changes after an incident at school one day in 1964, when Lynda is in her third year. She and John are in the same class. The form has just come into its classroom for morning registration when the teacher, Mr Brown, notices John standing by the doorway, repeatedly opening and closing the door. Mr Brown asks him what’s the matter. John stops moving for a moment and says, ‘They’ve got my boots.’ Mr Brown asks who has what boots, but John just repeats himself, and carries on opening and closing the door.
A boy shouts out, ‘He’s having a do, sir!’
‘I didn’t ask your opinion.’
‘But he is, sir.’ Others join in. ‘He has dos. He goes in trances if somebody upsets him, and he’s having a do now because somebody’s pinched his football boots.’
Mr Brown tells John to calm himself and to look for the boots in the cloakrooms. When he comes back empty-handed he is wan and subdued, and for the rest of the lesson sits hunched over his desk, staring downwards in silence. At breaktime his friends rag him; some of them make jokes about Storthes Hall. John tries to shrug it off, but Lynda, watching, sees that he is slightly discomposed. She elbows in and tells the boys to shut up. They jeer back at her, but with the moment broken they drift away.
She finds John standing alone near the school gates. ‘Ayup,’ she says.
‘Ayup.’
‘Don’t take any notice of them going on about you and your boots, you know,’ she says. ‘They’re flipping idiots, most of ’em.’
‘I won’t. They’re alright, they’re only kidding. It’s just my mam I’m bothered about. She’ll be right upset because she just bought me t’ boots.’
‘Just tell her what’s happened, she’ll understand. I’m sure they’ll turn up.’
He nods, and they stand silent for a moment, thinking. ‘Thanks, Lynda,’ he says.
*
Later that year, Rocky Wall, the wrestler from Doncaster, buys a small shop at the bottom of Pit Lane in Highgate and converts it into a coffee bar. For the young people of Goldthorpe, Highgate, Thurnscoe and Bolton-upon-Dearne this is a wondrous development, easily eclipsing the White Lady and the open lift shafts. Occasionally presided over by Rocky himself, and dominated by a huge jukebox and the smells of coffee and boiling milk, the café attracts them in garrulous, gaudy perfumed crowds, the girls in mini skirts, knee boots, bobs and beehives, and the boys in winklepickers, turtle necks and kiss curls. They listen to the music, dance, shoot pinball, spill frothy coffee over each other and ask Rocky about the bouts they’ve seen on the television, but mostly they just talk. Suddenly it seems there is such a lot for them to talk about – not least who’s in the café, what you did the last time you came, and when you’ll be coming again.
Lynda and John become closer. When Rocky Wall’s café opens they go as part of a large group, but then John begins asking beforehand when she’ll be arriving. By the time Lynda is fourteen, they are meeting there early every Friday evening to have hamburgers and chips for tea and to listen to the new singles that Rocky has put on the jukebox, so they can decide if they are good or rubbish. Sometimes they stay in the café until it closes at ten, sometimes they career round the new roller-skating rink in Goldthorpe, and on other, warmer, nights they just gather outside the beer-off. He tells her jokes and makes her laugh, and instigates mischief whenever they are with a group. On Bonfire Night it is John who works out that if you throw a Roman candle into a length of pipe closed at one end, it will shoot out like a rocket from a rocket launcher; when they go to Skegness Butlins with a group of mates, it is he who befriends the waiters and ends up jumping into the pool with them, fully clothed. It is as if life lived at the speed chosen by other people is too slow for him; he moves rapidly, like a finch, his speech quick as a whip. Bored by a slow conversation, he amuses himself by tickling your ear, tweaking your hair, tapping your shoulder and darting to the other side when you turn around.