The Valley (32 page)

John has the good sense, however, to behave himself in the vicinity of Winnie. He is wary of her, so the first few times he calls for Lynda at home he stands at the gate whistling rather than coming to the door, which Winnie likes (‘Look sharp!’ she calls. ‘He’s whistlin’ you again!’). When he comes in and sits down, forcing himself not to fidget, she is impressed by his shock of black, quiffed hair and smart clothes, and decides he is a good prospect. ‘Best-dressed lad to come to this house,’ she tells Lynda one night after John has gone home, ‘and a lovely straight pair of shoulders.’ She even allows him to sleep over one night after they have been to a party, on the condition that he stays in the back bedroom, at the other end of the landing to the one in which Lynda, Margaret and their friend Jenny are sleeping.

But then Winnie hears a rumour about him, a spiteful and suspicious scrap of gossip passed between the bored and the malicious in the backings and shop queues. He has fits; there’s summat up with him; he has to carry something called phenobarbitals. Warned ‘to watch that lad your Lynda’s on with’, Winnie stops complimenting John and is terse when he comes to the house. She tells Comfort what she has heard, and Comfort soon reports that she has seen him hitting Lynda one night when the kids were all standing around near the beer-off. This becomes Winnie’s excuse. Waiting until she and Lynda are alone in the sitting room, she says, ‘If he hits you now, he’ll hit you when you get older. I’m telling you to stay away, Lynda. Are you listening?’

‘But he was playing about, Mam! He’s always like that. He does this thing where he taps you on your shoulder and .
.
.’

‘Stop covering up for him. Tell him not to come to this house again, and if I catch you seeing him again, there’ll be trouble.’

Lynda senses there is something more to this, and she is right. John Burton has a mild form of epilepsy. He has had only a few seizures, but this is enough for the gossip, and the gossip is enough for Winnie, who has an almost superstitious fear of fits. She wants good lives for her daughters and, Lynda will come to realise, she is at times more protective of her youngest child than she had been of Pauline and Roy. Lynda suspects that her mam also fears the disrepute that John, as a boy who ‘has dos’, might bring to the family. Everyone including Winnie liked to say that they didn’t care what other people thought of them, but in a village where you had to rely on your friends and neighbours, public opinion could have serious practical consequences for your day-to-day life.

Lynda dare not argue for too long, but she feels like someone wrongly convicted of a crime. It would be one thing for her mam to judge a boy unsuitable because of his character, but it is quite another for her to judge him on gossip that is next to a lie. She cries. ‘Why would you believe Comfort and not me? I know him and I know he’d never hit me! We love each other.’

‘Love!’ says Winnie, bitterly. ‘How could 
you
 know what love is?’

And with those words, spat out like poison across the sitting room, Winnie abruptly closes the conversation. It will be fourteen years before Lynda reopens it.

34 Gary and David

Bolton-upon-Dearne; Flamborough, East Riding of Yorkshire; Highgate, 1963–65

By the middle of the 1960s the new motorways and widened roads being built across South Yorkshire have brought the Dearne Valley within a half-hour car ride of Leeds, Wakefield and Sheffield, and a twenty-minute drive of Doncaster, Barnsley and Rotherham. These roads and increasing car ownership encourage an influx of commuters’ families and property speculators, and in fields across the valley builders come to construct tracts of trim, modern bungalows and semi-detached houses in clean, warm orangeish brick. The new homes are coveted not only by city families seeking an affordable rural escape, but also by ambitious young local couples who imagine themselves relaxing in the wide back gardens, or showing off the fitted wooden units and serving hatch in the kitchen. These couples and families save for deposits and take out mortgages, and when their mams and dads come down to tea they tell their children how marvellous the house is, how superior to the poky holes that their generation had when they were first married. And after the mam and dad have been dropped back home in the husband’s car, the couple feel contented and proud because, even if the stairs are still uncarpeted and the front lawn devoid of grass, they are bettering themselves and getting on.

To the astonishment of his family it is with one such home that, in 1963, Roy Hollingworth comes good on a promise of a fresh start. He tells Margaret he has secured a mortgage on a pristine new bungalow in Bolton-upon-Dearne. ‘And you can stop working if you like, and stay at home and look after t’ lads. I can afford it,’ he says. ‘My problems are over.’

Since the end of his sentence two years ago, Roy’s problems have driven the family all the way across Yorkshire and back, and then left them briefly homeless.

He arrived home from prison one Friday evening, driven by a man in a Jaguar car. Gary had opened the door and hugged his dad as the driver took a holdall and two large paintings from the boot. ‘This is your Uncle Mick, Gary,’ said Roy, ushering him and the man with the paintings inside. Margaret brought a bottle of whisky and three glasses into the sitting room and Roy poured the drinks.

‘Look at these, lads.’ He took the paintings from Mick, and held them up for Gary and David to see. They were portraits of Indian chiefs with headdresses. ‘Your Uncle Mick’s painted these for you. There’s one apiece. I’m going to put them up over your beds, and they’ll watch over you and keep you safe.’ The boys loved the idea of their dad arranging for them to be watched over and sat looking at the Indians while the adults talked. The next day Roy put up the paintings in the boys’ new rooms, but they never saw Uncle Mick again.

Roy was relaxed and cheerful for two weeks, but then one evening he shouted at Margaret about the letters she sent when he was in prison, and said he had found out that she was working with the police. She admitted it, and tried to explain that she had not dared refuse them, but then he accused her of sleeping with a Goldthorpe policeman. Soon after that he came home with a knife wound across his face. He said he had been attacked at random in the street, but privately Margaret did not believe him.

They moved into a council house on the same street as Mr and Mrs White, and Roy found another job with a construction company. He was back to working away from home: when Gary was diagnosed with tuberculosis, it was a full week before his dad knew about it.

In the spring of 1963, the police turned up at the new house looking for Roy, but he was out. The next day Margaret came home from work to find Roy waiting for her. ‘Get your bags packed and the lads ready,’ he said with a forced cheerfulness. ‘You’re coming with me, up to Flamborough.’

‘What for?’ says Margaret.

‘For a little break. I’ve got us a lovely little cottage.’

‘For how long?’

‘We’ll see. However long we like.’

They put the boys in the car and drove through the night to a cottage in a remote, fishing village on high chalk cliffs to the north of Bridlington and stayed there for two months, spring into summer. Almost every day Roy took the boys walking along the sands between the white cliffs and the brown sea, and sometimes he sat with them in the cottage and watched films on a TV with a fuzzy reception. He took them to his pal’s garage in Bridlington and his pal showed them a German soldier’s helmet with a bullet hole in it. He and Margaret did not fight or argue even when Roy had been to the pub, and for a while it was like being in one of the normal, contented families on the television. Gary and David thought they would live there for ever.

Then one morning Roy told them to pack up their things because they were going back to the Dearne. By now someone else had moved into the council house, so Margaret and the boys moved in with her mam and dad, and Roy went to Winnie and Harry’s. Margaret did not know what would happen to the family and she didn’t dare to ask, but a month after they moved back Roy called round and told them about the bungalow. He and Gary began decorating it in the evenings and weekends, and a fortnight later they moved in.

Once they are established in the bungalow, Roy takes a job at Manvers for a short while so that the family qualifies for the miners’ free coal allowance, and then he resumes working on the motorways. The work is local, he comes home, and they have money. He rents a television, and buys a new, walnut-veneered sideboard and an up-to-the-minute radiogram that he demonstrates to the family and friends by playing his new collection of stereo LPs. Margaret sees pals from the factory who live in Bolton-upon-Dearne and makes friends with women in the other new houses. They take their children out for walks together and sit in each other’s kitchens drinking coffee.

Happiest to have Roy around again is Gary. Aged seven, he is sensible to what is and is not normal in families. At school there is another boy who doesn’t have a dad, but his father was killed at the pit so the other children don’t ask questions about him. They ask a lot of questions about Gary’s dad though: Is it true that you a’nt got a dad? Why doesn’t your dad live with your mam? Why does your grandma always pick you up from school? Gary learns to lie and to remember what he has said. ‘Yes, but he works away from home’; ‘He’s rich, and we have to travel around’; ‘He’s in the Army.’ Some boys who live on Highgate Lane, or near the Whites, stare at him doubtfully when he recites his stories, but he stares back at them until they look away. Now his dad is at home, Gary hopes he’ll take him to real places that he can describe to the doubters at school.

‘Do you want to come and give me a hand on site today?’ Roy says one Saturday morning, standing in the kitchen in his overalls.

‘Course!’ says Gary, and they drive out of the valley, past canals, fields, woodland and long spoil heaps that Gary imagines to be volcanoes, to a mud wilderness of gouged earth, yellow bulldozers and cranes. Men are steering vast machines back and forth over the dark brown soil. Gary and his dad get out of the car and pick their way through the mud to a bulldozer.

‘Are you drivin’ or shall I?’

Gary grins, ‘I’ll drive!’

They share the seat. His dad starts the roaring, juddering diesel engine, then lets Gary rest his hands on the levers as he lowers them to set the blade. When the bulldozer advances the soil bulks up violently and wonderfully and then falls away to the side.

After a while they stop and go to have a sandwich at a caravan where other workers are eating, drinking tea and smoking. The men talk about the motorways and how they’ll be a waste of money because no one will use them. ‘You’re wrong, everybody’ll use them,’ says Roy. ‘In ten years’ time everything’ll travel on them, you watch.’ He tells the men that he is proud of Gary’s bulldozer-driving, and Gary moves closer to him, and blushes. His dad is always in a good mood in places like this, talking to other men. Gary thinks if his mam would stop picking at him, he would not go away so often. He thinks that if he could make his dad proud enough, he would stay with them all the time.

But after they have lived in the new bungalow for a few months, Roy and Margaret start arguing again, this time about money. One day at home he hands her a five-pound note for groceries and tells her to bring back some change.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean get up there and do your shopping, and bring me some bloody change back from yon fiver.’

‘I only asked what you meant, Roy .
.
.’

‘You’re not only asking, you’re trying it on. Get to those bloody shops, and bring some bloody change back, that’s all.’

Angry, she spends the lot. When she gets back with her shopping bags, Roy is listening to an LP on the radiogram. ‘Where’s my change then?’

‘There wasn’t any.’

‘What?’

‘I needed it all. You want feeding, don’t you?’

He leaps up from his chair, and snaps off the record.

‘What are you going to do, Roy? Hit me again?’

He walks out of the room, and snatches a jacket from the hall. David cries and runs to his mam. Gary runs to the window to see his dad storming away down the path.

This becomes the routine every time Margaret asks for money.

Roy stays away more often, and when he does come home he drinks heavily and is belligerent. After a while he sells the radiogram and the LPs to Pauline, and when she and Gordon come to pick it up with their car and trailer he asks them to take the new walnut-veneered sideboard up to his mam and dad’s. He’s gone off it, he says; it doesn’t suit the bungalow. As Gordon and Harry heave the sideboard down the passage at Number 34, Winnie exclaims over it as if it were a bowl of diamonds. ‘Isn’t it a lovely surprise, Pauline?’ she says. ‘He’s a smashing lad sometimes, our Roy. He’s good to me.’

*

Easter 1964: the school holidays, Roy away working. Gary and David are reading comics in the sitting room when they hear their mam arguing with someone at the front door. Gary goes to the hall to see four men in dark suits, one with a briefcase, standing outside. Behind them is a large van. The man with the briefcase is closest and he is talking to Margaret as a schoolteacher talks to a naughty pupil. Margaret is crying. ‘It’s mine,’ she is saying. ‘A lot of it’s mine. I bought it from t’ club at work.’

The man confers with the others, then turns back. ‘You tell us what’s in your name, and we’ll leave that and take t’ other.’