The Valley (33 page)

‘Now?’

‘I’m afraid so.’ Gary scuttles back to the sitting room, followed by his mam and the suited men. The briefcase man asks Margaret what in the room is hers, and she points to the dining chairs, hearth rug and table. ‘Right,’ he says to the others. ‘Take t’ telly and t’ suite.’

The items are carried out and put into the van, and the neighbours come out of their homes to watch. They take the boys’ beds and the kitchen chairs, the clocks and the paintings of the Indian chiefs. When they have taken all they want, they close up the house, and Margaret, Gary and David walk away from the new bungalows and up the hill towards Thurnscoe, the repossessed bungalow shut up behind them. When she finds Roy at Winnie’s, he says he’s sorry, the bailiffs shouldn’t have come because he had the money for the mortgage arrears payment.

‘Roy says I’ve not to worry, because it’s only bricks and mortar,’ she tells her mam later. ‘He says, “You can’t get tied down by material things.” And I said, “It’d be nice to have a choice.”’

Margaret, Gary and David stay with Mr and Mrs White, and Roy avoids his wife and her parents for almost twelve months. It is during this time that Gary begins to form a strong attachment to Harry and Winnie and their home on Highgate Lane. He blames his mam for driving Roy away, but his Grandma and Grandad White and his mam’s brothers and sister tell him off for accusing her, and he comes to feel that he is not wanted in the house. When he and David stay at their Grandma Hollingworth’s, it feels like a comforting respite. He can talk about his dad without having to hear him called a bad ’un, and Winnie listens to him telling her about the cartoon characters on television, and then tells him stories about when she was a little girl. One night they have a little party in the sitting room with their friends and neighbours who can play some of the instruments. Gary and David get to stay up two hours past their bedtime, and their Grandad Hollingworth stands up in front of everyone and tells jokes. As he makes everyone laugh he winks at the boys, which makes Gary feel proud.

There are days when Roy comes to stay. He argues with Winnie and Harry and makes the boys promise not to tell Margaret that he is here. Sometimes he takes Gary to the motorway building sites, or to see Humpy Gascoigne at the scrapyard. The yard is strange and dark with dismembered cars all over, and in the main house there are always Christmas decorations on the walls and ceilings, whatever the time of year, so it is not long before Gary is asking to go back to Highgate Lane, where his grandma will give him bread and butter and Ovaltine to drink.

Gary tries to shelter David during these strange days spent with either their mam or dad at their grandparents’ houses. They make an unspoken pact to accept what is happening, and to not concede that there is something wrong with their family. Sometimes he has to cut in over David if he starts to tell the Whites something the Hollingworths have said about them, or vice versa. If, back at the Whites’ house, Gary lets slip that he has seen his dad, Margaret will bang her teacup down in its saucer, or poke at the hot coals as if she were stabbing the devil, and fire off questions about Roy: How long did he stay? Where does he live? Did he have anybody with him? The questions make Gary miserable, all the more so when his Grandma and Grandad White join in because once they have started on Roy, they start on the rest of the Hollingworths.

‘Shut up!’ says Gary. ‘They
aren’t
bad.’

‘Nay cocker, I didn’t mean .
.
.’

But he knows what they mean. He cries in a torment that they call ‘one of his rages’, and runs out of the house into the street, and David watches it all from the edge of the room, feeling afraid and wishing it would end.

35 Ask Your Mam

Highgate, 1966

Lynda is in one of the top classes at school, and her form teacher Mrs Buxton asks her if she would like to leave at Whitsuntide or stay on for another two years to study for O-level exams. Her mam says she should stay on, so she does. Most of her friends go to work in the sewing factory at Goldthorpe and most of the lads start at the pit. John is asked to attend trials at Bradford City Football Club, but it seems a long way to travel, and he doesn’t fancy going on his own.

In the Dearne there are still lots of pit jobs, although the money isn’t as good as it was. Harold Wilson, who wins the general election in 1964, says mining will be a special case for his Labour government, and that rather than buying more cheap oil from the Middle East he wants to increase British coal output. However, coal sales decline and oil sales increase, as had been the case since the late 1950s. Railway steam engines are being replaced by diesel models; power stations are being fitted with oil-fired boilers; and industrialists, business owners and families continue the shift from coal to oil that had been given an impetus by the Clean Air Act of 1956. The government begins to close mines, reduce the workforce and hold down wages. By 1965 in some coalfields the number of mining jobs is half what it had been in the nationalisation year of 1947. Some politicians warn that unless action is taken to attract new industries this could lead to mass unemployment in mining areas, but most of these warnings go unheeded by those with the power to act on them.

In Scotland, South Wales and the North East, where pits are closing, more families pack up and move south, some of them into new estates of National Coal Board houses in the Dearne Valley. The Dearne is in a coalfield that has fewer closures because the NCB believes it to have potential. Output is increasing. In 1961, Highgate and Goldthorpe – known in the local press as the ‘family pits’ – break production records, digging out double the national average of coal per man. There is upgrading and amalgamation: a new power station and a coalite plant in Grimethorpe, just north of the valley; new tunnels to join up Highgate, Goldthorpe and Hickleton collieries, and more to link Barnburgh, Wath, Kilnhurst and Manvers. In Highgate, parents tell incredulous children that if you go into the garden and dig down to a pit tunnel, you’ll be able to walk nearly all the way to Sheffield. In the shops, yards and clubs people joke to each other that their villages are so undermined the whole place will one day just sink down into the earth and be buried.

Non-pit jobs are also plentiful in the West Riding, and the sense of prosperity and faith in the future is given solid form by the new buildings in town and city centres. Doncaster gets an Arndale Centre, much of Barnsley’s town centre disappears under brutalist concrete and Goldthorpe acquires a boxy modern building with a broad rectangular awning for the Co-op. For the teenagers there is a new youth club in Bolton-upon-Dearne that makes an alternative to Rocky Wall’s café. Lynda can talk to John there, but not for too long because she is afraid someone will tell her mam. Someone always tells her mam in the end, and her mam always listens, particularly if they’re telling her about John Burton.

She sees him a few weeks after he has been taken on at Highgate pit. He tells her about being stone-dusted, a ritual in which new lads are stripped naked, covered in machine oil, and rolled in the stone dust from the machines. ‘It’s alright,’ he says as she shudders. ‘It’s just getting t’ oil off after.’ John had started on the haulage, but after having a mild seizure he had been reassigned to the lamp room on the pit top, which he prefers. The job is sociable because you get to see all the men going on and off their shifts, and they say he has a knack for the work. Lamp-room men prepare, or ‘spot-up’, each helmet lamp for a shift by placing it in a long box and tuning the beam to a set mark. It is an important job because the miners below ground get used to the focus and intensity of the light that they use to see with, so inconsistent spotting-up is irritating and hazardous. John’s quick mind and agility make him precise and efficient, and some of the men ask specifically for his lamps.

Hearing about John’s work makes Lynda feel young and inexperienced, a schoolgirl to his adult. She changes the subject to her admiration of his new high-collared white shirt and jeans, bought from a boutique in Doncaster, which is the sort of place he can afford to shop now. He goes to serious men’s outfitters as well, he says. Mr Morris, one of the travelling Jewish tailors who make Harry’s clothes, is making a three-piece suit for him. Other boys and girls in the youth club join in the conversation about shops and boutiques where they spend their wages, and Lynda suddenly feels conscious of her homemade dress. As the weeks pass, she thinks more about having less money than her friends, and when she is at the youth club or at Rocky Wall’s, she feels more and more self-conscious. When she mentions her embarrassment to her mates, they tell her to come and get a job at their factory, earn some money. What is she going to do with O-levels anyway?

She isn’t sure, really. Because when she tries to imagine the future she sees John Burton. Forbidden John Burton in his best mohair suit.

She gives a week’s notice at school and begins work at the Co-operative sewing factory in Bolton-upon-Dearne.

*

In the spring of 1966, through friends she has made at the youth club, Lynda meets a lad called Kevin Gould. Kevin is the same age as her, well dressed, blond and handsome; the consensus in Highgate and Goldthorpe is that he looks a bit like Adam Faith. He is also mature for his age and capable of carrying off a conversation with her parents about his future plans that make him seem capable and ambitious without being a show-off. Winnie likes him very much. ‘You and Kevin sit in t’ front room, if you like,’ she says when he comes to visit. ‘Put some of your records on, your dad’ll not mind if you use his record player.’ She even allows them to close the door.

He comes most Saturday afternoons. Winnie gives them fruit cake and bottles of fizzy fruit-flavoured green drink that Harry brings back from his delivery journeys, and they sit on Winnie’s new, orange crushed-velvet settee listening to the Dave Clark Five, Manfred Mann and the Beach Boys.

One day they are halfway through a Dave Clark Five album when Kevin says, ‘Your dad’s not your real dad, is he?’

Lynda makes a what-are-you-talking-about face.

‘Yes. Of course he is.’

‘That’s not what I’ve been told.’

‘By who?’

‘By Bruce Phillips.’

Lynda feels her certainty leave her with the sudden pop of a stylus lifting from an LP. Bruce Phillips’s family live on Highgate Lane. Bruce works in a garage that has opened up on the corner of the lane and Barnsley Road. A few weeks ago Lynda had walked past the forecourt, and seen him and Kevin in conversation. Lynda had heard Bruce say, ‘She’s a bastard, her.’ At the time she had not understood what he was talking about.

‘What did Bruce say?’

‘He just said to me, “Her dad’s not her real dad.”’

‘Well,’ she declares, ‘he is so far as I know, so Bruce can mind his own business! Shall I put another record on?’

On Sunday, after she and her mam have had their roast dinner, Lynda is lying in front of the fire, Winnie sitting on the sofa crocheting a blanket. Harry’s dinner is being kept warm in the kitchen until his return from the club. Lynda knows that if she is going to ask the question it will have to be now, when she and her mother are alone.

‘Mam, is Dad my real dad?’

Winnie abruptly looks up from her crochet hooks. A moment passes.

‘Yes he is,’ she snaps. ‘Why are you asking me?’

‘Somebody said summat to me about him not being.’

‘Who?’

‘Somebody at school. They told Kev, and he told me.’

‘Who at school?’

‘Bruce Phillips.’

‘Tell Bruce Phillips to keep his mouth shut then. And stop talking like that.’

Lynda hesitates. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes I am. Don’t ask me again.’

The following evening, after Lynda arrives home from work, Winnie goes out with one of Muv’s sisters visiting from Shirebrook. While she is gone Margaret Westerman, a neighbour and the wife of the Highgate club steward, comes round, knocking and then letting herself in at the back door. She enters the living room where Lynda is watching television, but does not take off her coat.

‘I’m not stopping, Lynda. I’ve just come for a word with you.’

‘Oh. All right.’ She cannot think what Margaret might want to discuss, especially when
This Is Your Life
is on.

‘You haven’t half upset your mother saying what you said to her.’

Oh, right, she thinks. That.

‘Why, what have I said?’

‘What you asked her yesterday. When I came in this morning she was stood at t’ ironing board crying her eyes out.’

Crying? Her mam? Something inside Lynda snaps. How is
she
the one being blamed? She fixes her visitor with a cool, even stare. ‘Are you going to tell me what’s going off, Margaret? Because I’m sad if I’ve upset my mam, I really am, but it’s me that’s been told my dad isn’t my real dad and I want to know the truth. Are you going to tell me?’

Perhaps Margaret had forgotten how old Lynda is, or perhaps in her day girls hearing rumours about their father were made to be quiet. Whatever the reason, sympathy overwhelms her resolve.

‘It’s not for me to tell you. You’d better ask your mam.’

*

In the end, Winnie sits on the settee knitting her thumbs, and tells Lynda the story, from Alf first coming to the house with Sonny, to him begging her to go away with him. ‘He was just always that kind to me, you see. He used to come up and ask me if I was all right and he’d rub my arm, or just put his arm around me, and it was nice. Then one day when he was staying in t’ front room, I went in to see to something, and he was there, and we got talking and one thing led to another, and .
.
. that’s when it happened.’