The Valley (56 page)

‘Aye,' he says. ‘And back out again.'

*

Three weeks after the clotting is diagnosed the nurses sit her up. They increase the angle by a few degrees each day until her back is straight and she can be lifted from her bed into the grey and chrome wheelchair. She should be all right, says Dr McCraig. They'll have to watch her, but she should be all right.

She is moved to the main ward, back with Nelly and three other pale, paralysed women in casts and braces, and taken to the gym for physiotherapy. Her first exercise is the lassoing of her feet with the waistband of her jogging bottoms so that she can pull them on, a previously thoughtless job now transformed into a humiliating puzzle. The therapy gradually improves her balance, but it also makes her sharply aware of the disconnection between her mind and her unwilling body. It seems to her that this disconnection is the basic problem she must overcome. Her mind is used to commanding a responsive and easily led body; now the body has stopped listening, her mind is next to useless. She decides her best hope is to bypass the thinking, logical brain, and to try to learn to think and feel with her muscles and bones. If she could work her body from her spine, she might be able to move her legs; there were different ways the body and mind could relate to each other, after all.

The gym's Oswestry Standing Frames remind her of stories about her Grandad Parkin, and his convalescence in Oswestry after the war. Walter and Annie had used their minds to heal other people; did that mean you could use your own mind to heal yourself? On the adjoining men's ward is a young amateur motor-racing driver who is partially paralysed having broken his neck in an accident. They discuss Lynda's ideas about healing and he lends her a book about psychosomatic medicine. She reads it, and feels emboldened. At night she lies still and tries to conjure her consciousness down to the base of her spine.

*

Sitting in her chair in a corridor one day, she hears the air ambulance helicopter land in the hospital grounds. Staff hurry in a man on a gurney; his face is dirty, and he is wearing orange NCB overalls. A day later, he is brought to the ward and allocated the bed nearest Lynda's. For twenty-four hours he lies drugged-up and semi-conscious. When he comes round she says hello.

‘What's up wi' you, then?'

He sighs and half whispers in a mild Scots accent, ‘I've broken my back, among other things. What about yourself?'

‘I've lost the use of my legs because of a spinal injury. An old blood clot leaking into my spinal fluid. What have you been doing?'

‘I work at Manton pit,' he says.

Manton is in Nottinghamshire. Its 950-foot shafts are known for being among the deepest in Britain. ‘I was doing a safety inspection in the shaft. They winched me down, but the cable snapped and I fell.'

‘That's awful. How long did it take them to get you out?'

‘About half an hour,' he says. ‘But I wasn't timing it.'

‘Did you say you worked at Manton?'

‘Aye, why?'

‘I work at Hickleton pit, near Doncaster.'

His face flickers with apprehension.

‘We're on strike, though,' she says.

‘Oh,' says the man. ‘I see.'

The man's name is Murray Clarke. He is an undermanager at Manton and has examined the shafts throughout the strike, maintaining them so the pit would be workable when the men go back. The issue divides miners, even striking ones. Some say if the safety inspections are not carried out there will be no pits to go back to, others that if the undermanagers refuse to do them, it will force the NCB's hand. Murray says the NUM can't win; Lynda replies that if the management supported them they couldn't lose.

‘We're not going to fall out about it lying here, are we?' he says.

‘Yes, Murray, we are. Lying here or anywhere else.'

‘Well, I can't agree with you. And I don't really think you and me'll matter much now we're in here anyway.'

‘If I said I was going back to work now, I'd get sick pay and me and my husband wouldn't be struggling while I'm stuck in here, would we? We're making a difference because we're sticking together with other miners. It's unity that makes a difference.'

‘So you'll lie there suffering just because you think it means that you're in the right, then.'

‘Yes I will. And I'll suffer for as long as it takes.'

The argument becomes heated and ends with Lynda telling Murray not to talk to her. The silence lasts for days, and the two of them lie in their beds, or move around the wards in wheelchairs, ignoring each other. Then one evening Karl and Lynda borrow Murray's wheelchair and return it covered in ‘Coal Not Dole' stickers that Karl has brought with him at visiting time.

‘We've customised it for you, Murray,' says Lynda.

‘That's not right! It's not even mine, or yours.'

‘I know! And there's nowt you can do about it, is there? Because you're laid there and you can't shift any faster than me.'

After that they become friends, and do physio together. Murray regains some strength, but Dr McCraig tells him he will never walk again.

Lynda is due to leave for home just before Christmas. She spends the remaining weeks exercising in the gym, with John encouraging her, or trying to get her mind and body into their new alignment. The week before she is discharged, Dr McCraig comes to look at her legs. ‘Try to wriggle your toes,' he says, with no real expectation that any wriggling will take place.

Trying her new technique of thinking in her limbs rather than with her brain, she focuses on moving her feet. The doctor looks surprised. ‘How long have you been able to do that?'

‘What?'

‘Wriggle your toes.'

‘I didn't know I could.'

‘The toes on your left foot are wriggling, which is interesting,' he says. ‘We'll look at that when you come back for physio. Happy Christmas.'

57 Riddling Ashes for Coal

Thurnscoe; Goldthorpe; Thurcroft, South Yorkshire; Kiveton Park, South Yorkshire, November 1984

After the battle at Orgreave, relations between striking miners and police in South Yorkshire change. There are more and more police vehicles on the roads, until it seems impossible to travel anywhere without passing convoys of them: Black Marias, minibuses, armoured coaches, sometimes fifty, sixty or seventy at a time. On picket lines police rattle shields, wave pay packets, threaten to call in riot squads. Many of the men being bussed into work wear hoods to obscure their faces, and the men on strike say, Aye, of course they do, because they’re not miners. The common belief remains that they are stooges brought in so the Coal Board can say men are working.

In the front room of 239 Barnsley Road, Harry, having abandoned the television, works the dial of his radio, picking up police frequencies and hearing the fuzzy disembodied voices of an invading army. He and Winnie compare it to the strike of 1926, and remark that this 1984 is like the adaptation of George Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-four
they had watched on the BBC thirty years ago. Both support the striking miners, though Harry is less sure about the cause. When Gary calls in with Scott one Saturday morning, he tries to win his grandad’s approval by describing the places he has been on picket duty, and numbering the jobs and pits that the strike will save. ‘Well, it’s up to you,’ says Harry. ‘But I’ve told thee before what I think. If it were up to me I’d shut all t’ lot of ’em.’

Talks between the union and the Coal Board are on, then off, then on, then off. Mrs Thatcher makes a speech in which she says that, having defeated the enemy without (Argentina), Britain now has to defeat the enemy within (the striking miners). Some other unions come out on strike in support, but not to the extent that the NUM members had hoped. Pits in some areas are still working, and Coal Board representatives have secret meetings with working miners – as yet a minority of the national membership – to discuss breaking and ending the strike. David Hart coordinates the campaign and organises legal action against the NUM from a suite at Claridge’s.

In August, with the TUC’s September conference looming, the Coal Board renews its efforts to get striking miners back to work. More men claiming to be from the NCB visit families they know to be in heavy debt and flash wads of £10 notes, offering them as incentives to break the strike. If the men are not in, they work on the wives. ‘Tell him to get his sen back to work, love,’ they advise, like the husband’s best pal trying to make him see sense. ‘You tell him. He’ll get looked after, and it’ll all be over soon anyroad.’ At the same time more police flood the Dearne villages. Some of them, mainly officers from distant forces, burn £10 notes in front of miners and say come on, keep it going, you’re paying for my kitchen extension, you’re paying for our holidays. Some of them work on the women. When Marie’s twenty-year-old niece Sandra walks past police officers standing outside the Station Hotel on her way to catch the bus to work, they shout at her, ‘Oi slag! You fucking a miner then, love?’ and call her a whore. After a week of it Sandra asks her boyfriend Chris, a miner at Hickleton Main, to walk her to the bus stop, but then she worries all the way to work in case they have beaten him up.

The violence gets worse as late summer gives way to autumn. Working and striking miners attack each other. There are stories of catapults and petrol bombs and besieged police stations; the
Barnsley Chronicle
says local police officers have found crates of petrol bombs ready for use. Some police seem to treat their work as a sport now, a private battle between themselves and the pickets. They adopt the tactic of damaging cars so that pickets cannot travel. A story circulates: a car carrying four men, including two brothers, is stopped on its way to Warsop colliery at four in the morning. Instead of it being turned back, police in riot gear pull one of the men out of the car and smash in the car’s back window sending glass over the passengers in the back. One of the brothers and his friend get out and the police tell the men to run, and then chase them for more than a mile. When the miners get back to their car, every window is smashed, the side mirror is off, the roof is damaged and the left-hand side kicked in.

One tactic that has been used since the start of the strike, and one that has become more common, is for police to arrive in large numbers and block off streets and wasteland near the collieries so that the police at the colliery gates can use charges to drive the pickets into villages. The retreating men will then find an unexpected bank of uniformed or riot-geared police blocking their way; often they end up in some backings. The police will then charge in, beating men in the street and in gardens. The noise and the speed of it all are awful to see, and people from mining and non-mining families open their house doors to urge men inside, and the police pursue them.

To the families of men on strike, the television coverage of the chasing and the fighting seems to only ever tell one side of the tale. There are pickets who have attacked policemen, but the news rarely shows the truncheon beatings, or the pale faces among the miners whom no one knows, and who are always where the trouble is. On the television news interviewers now ritually ask Arthur Scargill to condemn pickets throwing stones and beating policemen, and Mrs Thatcher compares the miners on picket lines to the IRA. When Scargill says he won’t condemn his pickets because the government won’t condemn the police, he is criticised in the press, but the striking miners ask what else he can say, when stories and rumours like this are going around?

In all the negotiations and the debates, the argument comes back to the union leadership refusing to accept pit closures on economic grounds, and the NCB saying they are being unrealistic. But while this, and the unemployment that will result from closures, are the political issues that can be articulated simply, there is a belief in the Dearne Valley that the government’s chief aim is to weaken the union – and that weakening the union is the decisive step to diminishing the gains that mining people have made through the twentieth century. Closing a colliery could close down a social system, and to Lynda, John, Gary and David Hollingworth at least, it feels as if the government and the police want to attack those systems as much as they want to close coal mines.

*

The TUC promises more support, and there are more court actions against the NUM challenging the union’s claim that the strike is official. The government sequestrates funds and assets of the South Wales area over an unpaid fine for disrupting road hauliers’ business. As he sits in a debate at the Labour Party conference in Blackpool’s Winter Gardens, Arthur Scargill is served with a writ to appear in court. A week later, Lord Justice Nicholls in the High Court fines the NUM £200,000 and Scargill £1,000 for contempt. The fines are ignored, and Nicholls orders the sequestration of the NUM’s assets, though the sequestrators have difficulty locating the money, much of which has been moved abroad. By November, the union will have had all its funds sequestrated and become the first trade union to be placed in the hands of a receiver by the High Court.

But there is a boost for the strike from the NACODS men. Hitherto they have not gone on strike, but have continued to refuse to cross picket lines except to do essential maintenance. If they breached the strike it would be impossible to work with the men afterwards, and anyway, many of them object to working when NUM members are out. When the Coal Board sends a letter to NACODS members insisting that they cross NUM picket lines or lose their pay, they respond by voting to strike themselves, demanding assurances about the future of the industry and offering to act as go-betweens in talks between the NCB and the NUM. This worries government ministers because pits cannot operate without NACODS; if they walk out, every pit in the country will come to a halt and the coal supply to the power stations will be cut off. Having previously opposed the involvement of the state arbitration service ACAS, the government now relents and the NUM, NACODS and the Coal Board begin talks.