The Valley (67 page)

That morning, as Lynda stops by the pale-blond wood reception desk, she sees Kirsty, a student she knows. Wearing a sack-like dress, with silver rings through her bottom lip and eyebrows, Kirsty is talking to a knot of office staff and students about Goldthorpe pit being knocked down. ‘I drove past it this morning,’ Lynda says. ‘There looked to be enough men there to knock all of Goldthorpe down.’

‘I bet there did,’ says Kirsty. ‘It’s sad, don’t you think, Lynda?’

‘Yes, I do really.’ Lynda is mildly surprised. She would not have expected the pierced and artistic Kirsty to have any interest in old collieries at all. ‘When I was a bit older than you, I knew t’ name of every pit in t’ Doncaster area. If you said t’ names of all t’ pits in South Yorkshire, it used to take you five minutes to get through them all.’

As if, she thinks, that will make any sense to you. As if .
.
.

‘My dad knew all t’ Donny ones,’ says Kirsty. ‘He used to say all t’ names for me. “Askern, Bentley, Brodsworth .
.
.” I could still remember if I tried. He worked at Broddy.’

‘Broddy,’ says Lynda. ‘My dad used to sing at a pub there. They used to call that t’ Queen’s pit, you know.’

‘Yeah, I know. My dad said all t’ kings and queens had Brodsworth coal, because it burned t’ best.’

‘So they did,’ says Lynda. ‘So they did. I wonder what t’ Queen burns now, though?’

68 Where is Everybody?

Highgate and Bolton-upon-Dearne, 1996

A hot, airless Sunday afternoon in August 1996: dogs asleep in the sunshine, children out in the yards, gardens caged by the long shadows of wooden fences. In the garden of 229 Barnsley Road, John is weeding the dry and cracked vegetable beds, and Lynda is reading a Penny Vincenzi novel. Winnie, now eighty-six, has come to the back door of the house and is glowering vengefully at her daughter.

‘Lynda,’ she snaps. ‘What have you done with my fan heater?’

Lynda looks puzzled. ‘You haven’t got a fan heater,’ she says. ‘Not unless you count that really old thing.’

‘It’s not old.’

‘It’s
quite
old, Mam. You bought it in t’ 1960s when Nelly Spencer got hers.’

‘Don’t you tell me what’s old and what isn’t. What have you done with it?’

Earlier that afternoon Winnie had called on Nancy, and Nancy had shown off a new fan heater that cooled her house. Heat-flushed and envy-stricken, Winnie came home to root for her heater in the cupboard where it had once been kept. ‘I’ve had every last thing out, and it’s not there,’ she says. ‘Where is it?’

Lynda and John exchange guilty glances. The heater is not there because during a spring clean approximately five years ago they had noticed how rotten and frayed its cables were, and thrown it away. John stands up, and draws the fire. ‘I threw it out, Winnie, because it was dangerous. It could’ve caused an accident.’

‘You did
what
?’

‘I threw it out. I’ll go up Goldthorpe tomorrow and buy thee a new one.’

She stares at him. ‘You have no bloody business throwing any of my stuff out. You’re always the bloody same. You do it to cause trouble.’ Swearing; she is spoiling for a fight.

‘Don’t be so daft, Mam. Me and John’ll get you a new heater tomorrow. Why don’t you go into t’ house where it’s cooler, and stop being silly?’ She forces a matey tone, but it is like throwing sugar on a fire.

‘You would stick up for him, wouldn’t you? I know you, I know you both. You’re bad ’uns. But if you want me to go, I’ll go.’

She locks herself in her bedroom and refuses to come out for the rest of the day. The next morning she leaves the house on her own, but Nancy brings her back after seeing her step out in front of a car at the crossroads. The car had almost hit her, but far from being thankful she is raging against the driver, Nancy, Lynda and everyone in Highgate.

‘Ring our Pauline, and tell her to fetch me now!’ she instructs Lynda. ‘I’m going to stay with her, where I’m wanted.’ However, the last time she visited Pauline Winnie had torn into Gordon over a perceived rudeness, and after an argument Pauline had driven her home early. ‘Tell her I’m not having her again,’ Pauline had said. ‘Not in harvest time. She can stay where she is.’

And so, as it is harvest time, she stays, but in the days that follow her forgetfulness and erratic behaviour of recent years grow worse and more frequent. She goes to bed at eight in the evening, then comes back downstairs five hours later, fully dressed (‘Look, Mam!’ says Lynda. ‘It’s dark outside, can’t you see?’ ‘Where?’ she asks plaintively). The crockery she once immaculately washed and wiped is left half clean, marked with traces of egg yolk or spots of dried gravy. Almost every time she goes out, she leaves the gas on. She pees on the bathroom floor and Lynda, not wanting to ask John, has to climb out of her wheelchair to scrub it out.

Sharing recent memories of what they now understand to have been early signs of dementia, Lynda and Pauline also recount past conversations that had made them wonder about their mother’s honesty, and in the course of these confessional, venting night-time telephone calls they prick out inconsistencies going back twenty-five years.

For five years Winnie has told Pauline that she, a poor old lady, pays the household bills, while John borrows money from her. No, says Lynda, she pays for the gas and electric and we pay the rest, and John has never taken so much as a promise from her purse.

For twenty years she has told Lynda that Pauline is cold to her when she visits her at the farm, and that she has never helped her with money. ‘But I always thought we were good pals!’ says Pauline. ‘We paid for their holidays, and we bought them no end of bits for the house.’ Bits for the house: for twenty-five years both Pauline and Lynda have been buying household ornaments, furnishings and clothes for their mother and, when their mother never displayed or wore them, assumed that she had gifted them to the other sister. From this assumption each has deduced that the other sister was their mother’s favourite, despite the relative shortfall in generosity. Only now, with Winnie no longer interposing between them, do they realise that the gifts were not passed on to the other sister at all. Most likely, they guess, all those knick-knacks, all that china and all the woollen blankets and clothes and £5 notes to help with the bills have been offered up to Roy.

At the end of the summer Trisha Brant, a friend of Lynda’s who works as a care assistant at a care home in Bolton-upon-Dearne, invites Winnie to spend a week at the home so that Lynda can have a break from worrying during the day and getting up to her in the night. Winnie seems willing – keen even – to go, and so one Saturday morning in September, Lynda helps her to pack her small red suitcase, puts her in the car, and drives her down the hill for her break.

Three days later, Trisha phones to tell Lynda that Winnie is on her way to hospital after suffering a stroke.

*

When Lynda arrives, she finds her mam semi-conscious and paralysed down the right side. Lying in the high hospital bed she looks too small, like a child’s doll surrounded by full-size furniture. If I pulled back the sheets, thinks Lynda, a good gust of wind could whisk out of the window and carry her away with the dead leaves to Harry. She holds her left hand and feels its delicate bones and tiny swags of cold thin skin.

‘What are we going to do, Mam?’ she whispers. ‘Tell me what I need to do to make you better.’

*

In fact, Winnie makes a good stab at a recovery. She regains the full use of her body, and at times is as alert as she was before she went to the care home. In rushes of clarity she tells Lynda she will be alright because the gypsy girl is helping, watching over her until it is time to go. Lynda does not dismiss the idea, and she can find it in herself to believe in the little girl guarding her mam, but she knows that spirit guides cannot pick old ladies up from the floor if they fall when their daughters are at work, nor turn off the gas if the ladies shuffle out of the door with the rings still burning. Winnie, it will be found, is in the early stages of leukaemia and Parkinson’s disease. Lynda cannot look after her all the time, and the council’s social workers cannot provide enough care to make it work; in the end Barnsley council move her from the hospital to a permanent place in the home, the costs to be borne by the council and the DSS.

Bolton Hall was originally a large, stone, gothic-revival house, built in 1830 by a doctor who lived in the village. In the 1980s low-rise, wide-corridored accommodation was added to turn it into a home for elderly people suffering from dementia and physical disability, and now it is a clean, decent place, staffed mainly by women who live in the village, and know the residents’ children, if not the residents themselves. At times it can seem like a pastel-painted doll’s house version of the old streets; in the reception area on the first day, Winnie and Lynda meet Comfort Eades, wrinkled and bright as a shrunken winter apple. Comfort invites Winnie to come to see her in the West Wing, but Winnie seems unsure of who Comfort might be.

She is happier in her room, with its pale yellow wallpapered walls and the smell of air freshener. Here Lynda decants her clothes from a case into a small pinewood chest of drawers, and arranges framed family photographs on its lace mat-covered top. On the small bedside table, Winnie places a single photograph of Harry.

When Lynda visits her mam in the evenings she finds her sitting in the lounge, a long rubber-tiled room with high-backed chairs around the walls. Seated in the chairs the residents either roost mutely, or chat while their eyes search the room for a younger person who might play the piano for them. In her first weeks Winnie belongs to the former group, keeping herself apart, and twisting her thumbs together as if by concentrating hard enough she could knit the past back out of the air and turn the world inside out, with herself at its centre rather than its edges. ‘You’ll have plenty of people to talk to, Mam,’ enthuses Lynda. Winnie doesn’t answer, then asks if Lynda’s mam knows that she is here.

Away from her familiar setting, Winnie suffers more memory lapses and her mind seems to deteriorate. Some evenings, Lynda finds little sign of a mind at all. ‘Is my dad any better?’ she snaps in the middle of a conversation about the home’s food.

‘You what, Mam?’

‘Is he any better? You didn’t ought to go out and leave him like that.’

‘Is who better?’

‘Don’t act daft! My
dad
.’

‘Who do you think I am, Mam?’

‘You’re my mother.’

‘Mam .
.
. Mam, I’m Lynda.’ Winnie stops and looks down, as if trying to remember where she is. ‘Lynda, your daughter.’

‘I
know
.’

Lynda asks if she is sleeping well. In response, Winnie looks out of the windows and points. ‘That’s where our Lynda lives, look. Anyway, where is everybody?’

Still, her decline is not yet relentless. As Christmas passes and the new year greens over, she recoups her strength and the skeins of her composure. Tiny as a pepperpot in her floral chair, pink scalp showing under hair faded to the colour of clear fishing line, she remembers some of her visitors’ names, and introduces the staff to the gypsy girl. To exercise her memory, Lynda and Pauline bring from Winnie’s sideboard old photographs and newspaper clippings. On the reverse of pictures showing people unrecognisable to the sisters, Winnie writes names and dates in tremulous blue ballpoint pen: Young Juggler Jane is found at a fair in the 1930s, and fourteen-year-old Amy Leather spotted posing in a backyard with her multitudinous family of Welsh Methodists. The man in a black dress and curly wig, playing a washboard and collier’s dudley on a stage somewhere in the 1950s, is known to all of them, and it is now that Winnie adds the caption, her copperplate swoops and loops inscribing flights of longing for the daft ’apeth with half a pint of beer up his frock:
Mother Riley. Harry – how I miss him
.

The actual presence of old neighbours and local people of her own age yields little solace or entertainment for her, but she does appoint herself their judge and disciplinarian. ‘Look at him, causing trouble!’ she will say of a woman several chairs down who is complaining to one of the staff. ‘All he ever does is moan, he wants to think himself lucky and shut up.’

This transformation of women into men – usually bad men in want of a good hiding – is her favourite spell, but she will also upbraid female residents guilty of unladylike behaviour. In the spring a pallid, wild-haired woman from Wath comes to live at the home and is seated beside Winnie at meal times. During the meals the woman swears loudly and randomly, bloody this, bugger that, bastard the other, over the mince and mashed potatoes. The cursing awakes in Winnie the bitter censoriousness instilled by her father.

‘Shut your filthy mouth,’ says Winnie.

‘Bugger off, you silly cow,’ says the woman.

Smack. Win punches the old lady in the mouth with a bony, loosely bunched fist. Hot tea spills across the table, and when it drips onto the woman’s lap she shrieks.

‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you,’ says Winnie, and turns back to her food.

‘Your mam seems right quiet, but she’s feisty when she wants to be, isn’t she?’ says the home’s nursing sister, when she tells Lynda about the punch.

‘Yes,’ says Lynda. ‘I suppose you could say that.’