Authors: Richard Benson
The Valley (6 page)
‘He reckons he’ll drive t’ miners back down their holes like rats. I’d give him rats! Like his fancy piece Lady Astor .
.
.’
‘Her that called miners the worms of the earth?’ says Winnie.
‘That’s what she said in’t it! “The worms of the earth, toiling underground.”’
Winnie shakes her head and trembles, the anger felt on her family’s behalf more potent than any she would feel on her own. The stories are not in the national newspapers, but then they wouldn’t be, would they? Officially recorded or not, they dramatise what the miners know to be true, and for Winnie they become History. It is the line about worms, the one supposedly uttered by a woman, that she will remember and pass down to her children and her grandchildren. Her father, who saved his commanding officer in the war, who was a healer, who did his best, though he could be cruel, dismissed as a scrap of blindness in the soil by a wealthy woman with a name like a perfume.
*
As they walk back through Goldthorpe, across King Street and Queen Street on to the High Street, men cluster on corners and police are in the side streets waiting to raid the slag heaps for scavengers. Some young men are in holiday spirit, idling and bantering, swimming in the brickworks ponds, playing football with their shirts and vests off, skins black from rubbed-in coal. There are men playing trumpets, and in a field on Barnburgh Lane, others organise pit-pony races, the animals having been brought up above ground while the pits stand idle.
It is the older men who worry most, dependent with their wives and families on the soup kitchens, the Distress Committee, and whatever they can steal or glean from the land. There are children with holes in their clothes, holes in their boots and, sometimes, with no boots at all, which makes Winnie glad the Parkins have only two little ’uns in Sonny and Olive. Their family is relatively comfortable with Winnie and Millie now both working and able to give their mam money. They have even managed to share some of their food with less-well-off neighbours.
Near the Parkins’ house there is a working men’s club known as the Union Jack Memorial Club, or less formally ‘the Comrades’. It was founded in 1919 by ex-servicemen, and Walter will go there occasionally for the conversation. The steward has banned for life some members who have accepted the coal owners’ new conditions, and the men have been ostracised and jeered at in the street. Walter doesn’t know what to make of it: ‘They should have talked to people, Winnie. People would have tried to help ’em, tha knows. If tha wants to get anywhere tha’s to stick together.’
Winnie does know. You have to stick together because if you don’t, they’ll make you eat grass and be a worm of the earth. She loves these conversations with her father. Some men think their daughters unworthy of politics and history, but in this respect, and so long as she agrees with him, Walter sees her as nothing less than his equal.
‘It’ll never be right ’til they nationalise t’ pits,’ he says. ‘T’ mines for t’ miners! Does tha remember when they used to say it in Shirebrook?’
She does.
‘We shall live to see it, tha knows.’
‘I know,’ she says.
They will not see it this year, though, or the next. By the autumn, the miners’ confidence is ebbing, and you can see people getting thinner from the scarcity of food. Clothes are looser, and gaps appear between waists and waistbands. More men go back to work and take the bans and the jeers. In Nottingham, where mine conditions are better and the coal is easier to extract, some miners form a breakaway group, the Spencer Union, and return to work. The coal owners and mineral rights owners stand fast, their leaders insisting that because Russian trades unions have contributed over a million pounds to the miners’ welfare organisations, the fight is against communist sedition.
In November, the Miners’ Federation agrees to go back to work on the owners’ terms. Walter had guessed this would happen in the late summer, but he is furious almost to the point of weeping. ‘All for nowt, Winnie. Again!’ Those who have organised the strike or spoken out against the owners are put on blacklists and not employed. Many pits go on to short time, closing down for two or three days a week. Some who cannot find work travel south to London or to the new car factories in the Midlands, leaving the women alone with the children. Some end up begging on the streets of Leeds, Sheffield and Manchester. Those who stay and find work have their wages reduced, so that wives and daughters who still have jobs come under more pressure to provide for their families. Millie and Winnie’s wages are now permanently eaten into by the household expenses, and so, in addition to the near breaking of her father’s spirit, Winnie now adds to the list of Churchill and Lady Astor’s crimes a lack of new clothes, a reduction in cinema visits, and the end of her hope of one day buying a gift for Miss Marjorie in return for all the inches and half-inches of exotic perfumes.
The Welfare Hall, Goldthorpe, 1929
Three years later, on a warm summer evening, Winnie Parkin and her friend Mabel Stocks are walking down the hill towards the southern edge of the village, where the Miners’ Welfare Hall – built in 1923 with money from the miners and colliery owners – proudly stands in wide green parkland and playing fields, near a working men’s club that Dearne people call ‘the Jungle’.
Both aged nineteen, they are going to their first public dance. Mabel, plainer and shyer than Winnie, wears a simple drop-waist dress she has made herself. Winnie’s beaded frock has been handed down from Miss Marjorie, like her lipstick, rouge and scent. Tonight’s dance, like Winnie’s new wavy hairstyle, is Miss Marjorie’s idea. For a year she has been urging Winnie to get her nose out of her historical romances and to stop bothering so much with ‘spirits’, and to get off dancing. Up until now she has put it off. Winnie prefers going to the pictures, attracted by the cinema’s lush, warm, exotic interior, the way you don’t have to worry too much about how you look, and the cheapness. Most of all she likes Rudolph, who seems to her the acme of modern manhood. All the women like him, Winnie, Miss Marjorie and the girls at work – and they have a song they sing, which feels a bit risqué.
In Blood and Sand
he’s simply grand.
In the Sheik
he’s simply great
He is a hero –
Rudolph Valentino!
Winnie has seen all of Rudolph’s films. She even saw
The Son of the Sheik
during the lockout, when she was supposed to be giving all her spare money to her mother. His bashfulness and nobility set the tone for Winnie’s thoughts about romance, and when he died unexpectedly in August 1926 she felt bereft, as if a world without Rudolph was one in which she could love no man at all.
The following year, however, her sister Millie announced her engagement to Danny Lunness, a miner and bantam-weight boxer from Goldthorpe. Millie is a year or so younger than Winnie, and Winnie knows that eldest daughters have to be careful because when the younger ones marry quickly, they end up stuck at home looking after their mams and dads. This is why the next time Miss Marjorie brought up the subject of dancing, Winnie said, ‘Would you show me how to do that make-up again?’
*
Millie, who likes dances, suggested the one at the Miners’ Welfare Hall because she was on the bill. She performs with a young amateur singer-comedian from Bolton-upon-Dearne known as the Juggler, and he had asked her to do a couple of songs with him and the band. ‘You’ll have to come and meet him!’ she told Winnie. ‘He’s a good sport, but he’s as daft as a brush.’
Winnie preferred thoughtful and intelligent men to ones who are daft as brushes, but perhaps you have to put up with that at dances, she thought. She had said she would go, and now here she is, walking with Mabel past the long rows of houses with their crimson bricks and grey net curtains and open doors where the women stand talking, to the hall. Even from a hundred yards away they can hear the bassy sounds of the music. Winnie shudders.
‘It’s loud in’t it?’ says Mabel.
‘Isn’t it just?’
‘I’m not keen on that music.’
Winnie isn’t sure herself. ‘Come on,’ she says. ‘We might as well have a look now we’re here.’
They walk up the path to the pillared front of the Welfare Hall and into the foyer where they pay a man at a booth. Winnie can already smell the sweat, candlewaxed floor and cigarette smoke from inside the hall. She suggests that they hang their coats in the cloakroom and go to the Ladies Room to put on more powder before they go in, and Mabel agrees. They both take their time.
When they push through the heavy swing doors into the hall, the music and the faintly sickly smell hit them like a wall. The men are wearing gangster suits and pointed shoes and some of the younger ones have an almost sinister look with centre-parted slicked-down hair and eyes emphasised by the deliberate leaving on of coal dust on the rims. The younger women have bobbed hair and deep red lips, low-waist dresses and bare legs. The band is playing jazz dance music and in the middle of the dancers some people are performing strange moves and waving their arms. Winnie once read a magazine article about Rudolph Valentino and his wife holding a Charleston contest at a party at their house in Hollywood; the article had shown you how to do it, and made it seem glamorous. This dancing does not look much like Rudolph Valentino’s party though. It looks ridiculous.
Some people stand watching the dancers, while others do a sort of jog-cum-foxtrot around the edge of the dance floor. Winnie looks at the band, her eyes searching for Millie. When she sees her sister is not yet on stage, she and Mabel sit down at the side. The singer introduces a new song and the windmilling Charleston lot drift off the floor as new dancers partner up. When the foxtrot begins, a man comes over and asks Mabel to dance. Winnie sits alone, looking at the band and the other women in their frocks.
The man brings Mabel back, and a second man, his friend, takes Winnie off to dance. He feels hot and smells of shaving soap, and he holds her too tight and pushes himself against her. The girls at work talk about this sort of thing; it is exactly what she had worried about. She smiles thinly and moves her body away, holding her partner at length by extending her arms until he takes her back to her seat. As she sits down Millie comes through the crowd with a friend in tow, a friend who is wearing full flapper get-up. Winnie can imagine what her father would have to say about
that
.
‘This is my big sister,’ Millie says to the flapper. ‘She doesn’t like dances much, do you, Win? But she’s come to hear me and Juggler singing.’
‘I don’t
dislike
them,’ says Winnie. She is anxious not to seem a stick-in-the-mud, but no one is listening. The band’s handsome singer has announced the interval, and the flapper is squealing at Millie.
‘You next. It’s your big moment!’
‘Aye, better go and get myself sorted out,’ says Millie. ‘Juggler says I have to swallow some VapoRub.’
‘Vicks VapoRub?’ asks Winnie, bewildered.
‘Yes, he says it improves your voice. He’s got some funny ideas, but most of them work. See you later anyway, I’m off backstage.’
A few songs into the second part of the evening, the singer steps up to the microphone and says, in a broad Barnsley accent that contrasts with the American one he sings with, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I’d now like to introduce a new double act who’ll be singing a few numbers for you t’neet. Some of you may have heard them before – they’re a young local pair, and I hope you’ll gie ’em a right warm welcome. Ladies and gentlemen, Millie Parkin and Harry Hollingworth – also known as the Juggler!’
‘Isn’t
that
t’ Juggler then?’ says Mabel.
‘It doesn’t look like it,’ says Winnie.
Both had assumed Millie would be joining the singer from the first half, but hearing their confusion, a man beside Winnie laughs and says, ‘Nay, love,
this
is
t’ Juggler,’ and points to the stage where Millie is standing in the spotlight with another, younger man who is not like the first singer at all. This man has slicked-back, centre-parted hair and is dressed in a wide-legged gangster suit. He is tall and broad-shouldered but his facial features look as if they could belong to various comic cartoon characters. His pale brown eyes are heavily lidded and topped by heavy, dark eyebrows that make him appear sleepy. Sticking out like giant handles, his ears seem too large for his head. His forehead is high, accentuating his height. When he opens his mouth to smile, he reveals a wide gap where his upper front teeth are missing (‘Kicked out by a pit pony,’ Millie tells Winnie later on).
Stepping downstage, he winks at someone in the audience and spins off three quick gags. Millie makes a joke about his looks and he frowns theatrically; more laughs. Then she says, ‘For God’s sake, Juggler, sing!’ and the band starts ‘
Home in Pasadena’
, and Juggler steps forward. He presses his arms flat against his sides to make himself taller and straighter, half closes his eyes, and then opens his near-toothless mouth.
The voice that comes out of the strange face is a tenor as sweet, rich and strong as the sponge at the bottom of a sherry trifle. Winnie is amazed at its tunefulness, and senses the amazement of the others in the hall. When Millie’s voice comes in, mixing with his, she thinks they sound wonderful, like singers you might hear on the radio. And as she watches she finds that although she feels thrilled and impressed by her younger sister, she cannot keep her eyes from drifting back to the gaping grin and heavy-lidded eyes of the Juggler.