The Valley (65 page)

The following term a college teacher tells him that as he has worked with children, he can apply to be included on the local Social Services relief register of people who provide emergency help in children's homes when staff levels are low. He applies and, having passed his interviews, starts working night shifts at a home near Doncaster. Most of the children are alienated and angry, but if he tries to guess at their feelings, understand their motivations and talk to them in plain language, he finds he can talk to them. With some it is just a matter of trying to make them feel that they might be wanted somewhere. Some of the staff at the children's home urge him to work there full time but, as they explain, to work for Social Services he would need a diploma, and that would require study at a university. ‘Not sure I'd be up to that yet!' he laughs. ‘I don't think they'd let me in.' Still, he secretly sends off for a prospectus.

*

‘.
.
. Gary? Gary?' Ten o'clock at night, his dad calling. Drunk. In the last five years Roy has been drinking more heavily, and it is becoming clear that he is suffering from alcoholism. Sometimes when he drinks, he calls late at night, as if he has something important to say. It always turns out to be unimportant, or made up.

‘Gary! Do you want to talk to an old soldier?'

‘Dad .
.
.'

‘Father to son?'

‘Dad. Are you all right?'

‘Course I'm bloody all right!' His speech is slurred and irregular. ‘Come on, talk to your father.'

‘I'm here, what's up?'

‘What's up? What's up with you? Have you got a bloody job yet?'

This is how it goes. Twenty years of work, halfway to a new life now, and still this. The conversation will be pointless. ‘I've told thee. I'm working at a children's home. They've put me on a temporary contract.'

A confused pause. Roy has forgotten, of course. ‘
Children's home
?
What are you working there for?'

‘Because I like it, and I'm good at it. I want to make a career of something like that.'

‘Bullshit,' says his dad into the phone. ‘You want to get yourself a right job.'

Gary has thought a great deal about his dad since he began work at the home. His thinking leads to questions he cannot quite put into words.

‘It's not bullshit. It's helping people.'

Another pause. Then: ‘You're an untrustworthy bastard, you. I wouldn't have wanted you behind me in Suez, I'll tell you that.'

‘What?'

‘In Suez. You'd have stabbed me in the back as soon as look at me.'

‘.
.
. Dad? What are you talking about. It's me, Gary!'

‘I know who it is.'

‘But what have I .
.
.?' It is ridiculous. He is a grown man, his father is drunk, and yet Gary's reaction to the insult is to search his memory for an act that might have offended him.

‘I was shot at, you know. You couldn't trust any of 'em. You needed a good mate. Not somebody like you.'

‘I don't know what you're talking about.'

‘You don't know what I'm talking about,' he mimics. ‘You'd be a right help in the Army.'

‘Dad, leave it .
.
.'

‘You'd run away. I wouldn't trust you as far as I could throw you.'

Snap. With those words, Gary feels something inside him break. ‘You wouldn't trust me? Who are you to tell me about trust? Where were you when I needed you?'

‘I was there .
.
.'

‘No. No, you were bloody well not there. You weren't there for me or our David, and we've done all right without you. Leave me alone.'

‘Don't talk to me like that! Who d'you think you are?'

‘Dad .
.
. Dad, who do you think
you
are?'

‘I know who I am. I did my duty .
.
.'

‘Dad .
.
. I've had enough of this. More than enough. Shut up and goodbye!' says Gary. And seventy miles away, somewhere in the Midlands night, Roy hears the phone crash into its cradle, and he and his eldest son's relationship ends in the sound of a single, high-pitched electronic beep in the darkness.

*

It takes Gary three more years to find the confidence to apply to study for a social work diploma at university, and the process is interwoven with the break-up of his marriage to Elaine.

At home, he begins to feel different. Coming back after the shift at the children's home he wants to talk about the new world he is working in, but it doesn't feel right. A friendship with a woman at work called Heather develops into an affair, and he becomes aggressive with Elaine as a way of concealing and decoying the relationship. One Christmas, Elaine guesses about the affair and in the New Year Gary moves out. Dizzy with a mixture of self-hatred and relief, he crams his clothes into three bin bags and drives away from Grimethorpe with women staring out of their windows along the street. He stays with Margaret and Colin for a few nights, but when he tells his mam the truth she boils up in fury and tells him to leave. For several weeks he rents a mobile home on a caravan park, populated mainly by divorced and unemployed men. Living there, he puts his life in order then, jointly with Heather, buys a semi-detached house on a new development at the edge of Thurnscoe, behind one of the old pit estates.

In 1997 he begins a part-time diploma course at Hull University and gets a daytime field placement as a social worker in another former pit village in the Doncaster hinterlands. In his first week he is awed and nervous, though as there are two ex-miners there already he can hardly use his background to explain that. It is the process that amazes him, all the emails, memos, agendas and bottlecap-twisting meetings that press you under the circuits of talk and the weight of warm printer ink. He wonders what some of the men from Houghton Main and Grimethorpe would have made of it.

Gary keeps quiet, does as he is asked, and tries to mimic the ways staff interact with each other. He shadows case workers and then is assigned his own cases. These are straightforward at first: looking in on lonely old ladies, ensuring that women who have moved away from abusive husbands are being left alone, trying to arrange accommodation for the homeless. It is when he moves to the more difficult cases that he suddenly finds himself accused of being a snooping snob.

One afternoon he visits a man whose arguments with his wife are hardening into thumps on the walls and furniture. The woman is meek and anxious, so Social Services have sent her on an assertiveness course; now she can defy her husband, but he thinks the social workers are using her to hurt him. They live in a semi on an old pit estate. When Gary arrives, a group of shirtless boys is perching on a broken settee on the communal green, smoking and drinking cider, and somewhere a bass-heavy car stereo is shaking the air.

The man opens the front door with no greeting. He is five foot eight, heavy, an ex-miner judging by the black specks and blue scars on his neck. Gary can guess the story: redundancy money spent, no job and no idea what to do, sense of inadequacy taken out on the wife. The man looks hostile, but he defers to Gary. In the chaotic sitting room where two of his children are watching television, he admits to being difficult to live with. ‘I suppose now tha's going to tell me how to live my life?'

‘No,' says Gary, ‘I just wondered if we could have a talk.'

The man answers the first questions comfortably enough, but he knows he is being accused of something. When Gary suggests there may be some problems with the children's school attendance, the man's face reddens and his movements become abrupt. His chest is visibly rising and falling.

‘There might be things we could do that would help you get on top of your situation. I can see it's difficult.'

The man gives a dismissive growl. ‘You can't see owt. 'As tha got kids?'

‘Yeah, I've got two.' You have to be careful with personal details, but Gary wants the man to trust him. From inside the house there is the sound of children running up the stairs. Something heavy falls over. The man shouts at them. Turning back to Gary, he redoubles his attack.

‘Aye, and tha were born wi't silver spoon in thy gob. See, when tha goes home, tha'll go in a nice car, to a nice house and a nice view. But when I'm in t' house, I have to sit and look out at that.' He gestures at the net-curtained living-room window and, beyond, to the green and the tired-looking houses.

At the mention of the silver spoon, Gary feels a tingle of indignation. He has a passing urge to dump his bag on the doorstep and go. ‘You've got your cushty job,' the man is saying. ‘You know nowt about what it's like living here.'

‘Oi, mate, I haven't always done this job, have I? I used to do summat totally different, and probably not what tha'd think either. I'm trying to help thee, if tha'll just listen for a minute.'

‘Oh aye, I'll bet tha's trying to help me! What did tha do, push a fucking pen?'

‘No,' says Gary, and tells him.

They end up sharing old pit stories and later sit down together in the man's front room, and Gary works out a care plan. He encourages the man to make the decisions himself, and to talk about himself and his family. As he talks, the man clasps and squeezes his tea mug, and the mug looks small and delicate in his meaty, tattooed hands. He thinks people look down on him for being unemployed, and he sees schemes for kids and women and everyone else, but nothing for men like him. He had been to the retraining people as well, and had no more luck than Gary. Everybody was moving on, but he was stuck here, trying to get whatever jobs were going in warehouses or supermarkets.

Gary knows that in some ways, seen from the outside, there was no great tragedy to the man's life. The man had lost a job, but he still had a house, a family that loved him and a wife who supported them with her wages. He had friends and he had maintained his interests. What he had lost was evident from the things he didn't mention, at least not in the present tense – work, workmates, social life, politics. With the redundancy he had signed away his idea of his value and his bond to the rest of the world, and for some people those things could be as hard to replace as a home. This didn't excuse anything but, Gary realises, if he is to stop frightening his wife, it would help him if he could start to replace those ideas.

*

As the years pass, Gary settles into the work, both in the field office and at the children's home. The manager at the field office is impressed with his abilities as he deals with problems from domestic abuse and truancy to mental health and homelessness, and he is promoted, and then seconded to cover for the assistant manager of a Wakefield office. At home, he and Heather decorate the house and buy the trappings of modern, comfortable lives. Claire has taken her degree at Nottingham University. Scott marries his girlfriend and in 1998 has a baby son, Reece, making Gary a grandfather.

When he looks back at the changes in his life since leaving Whitemoor, Gary Hollingworth will recall no great epiphanies, nor any determining mentors. He will, however, think back to the pit yards of Houghton Main and Grimethorpe, where stubborn older miners had taught him the need for ingenuity and tact, and, more often, to the parts of his childhood spent at Number 34 Highgate Lane. There, he comes to believe, his grandma and grandad had seeded his desire to help other people by demonstrating how help could be given. Their stories about history had been a part of that, because the stories had connected him to people and ideas that gave him an identity, and that identity had helped him explain himself. Winnie and Harry Hollingworth had shown him how a lonely person could be made to feel wanted, and how that person could change their idea of themselves by being listened to and taken seriously. Those methods could not solve everyone's problems, but they could usually be a start, just as they had once been a start for him.

67 All the Places

Thurnscoe; Rossington Main Colliery; Goldthorpe Colliery; Doncaster College, 1992–95

At five in the afternoon on Tuesday 13 October 1992, David Hollingworth is sleeping in bed before a night shift when he is woken, as usual, by a Michael Jackson song playing in Lisa’s bedroom. He sighs, smiles and pads across the landing to the bathroom, squinting against the electric light as he fills the sink with water. ‘Sorry if I woke you up, Dad.’ Lisa tries to hush her voice as she talks to him through the door; her mam keeps the house quiet when David is on nights, and tells her off if she forgets.

He opens the door. ‘You didn’t, love, I was getting up anyroad. How’ve you gone on at school?’

Eleven now, she is in her first term at Dearnside. ‘All right,’ she says.

‘What’ve you been doi
–
’

‘
LISA!’ Marie is shouting up the stairs. ‘Have you woken your dad up with that music?’

‘No, she hasn’t,’ he shouts back, and Lisa darts back to Michael Jackson singing ‘
Black or White’
. ‘I was already up. Can you put t’ tea on, and I’ll come down and watch t’ news?’