The Valley (69 page)

For the wake they drive to Highgate Club, back through the cold open countryside along the road that Harry had walked the night he lost himself on his way home. Over the sandwiches, tea and beer the talk is less of Winnie than of the past in general, and of the warm, cheerful, children’s-hair-ruffling nights here decades ago. Some people are disappointed to see the miners’ strike mural seems to have disappeared, but it turns out to be only hidden by a new ceiling that has been installed to reduce heating bills. Shared memories of the mural leads to a conversation about Muv, Winnie and Walter’s working lives, and about Winnie passing on Walter’s stories to her children and grandchildren. People reminisce, and laugh, and talk more about the old days and their families, and about who has died and who has got married and who has had kids, and about how tall all these young ’uns are getting. In the early afternoon the gathering thins out, couples and small groups drifting away to resume their daily lives on other stages beyond the club, the remaining mourners hugging them and saying goodbye and knowing that this will be the last time the family assembles like this. Goodbye, Sonny Parkin. See you later, David and Marie. Cheerio Jack and Pam and Brian, ta-ra Alwyn and Wendy, goodbye Gary and Heather. Goodbye everybody, take care and see you later; goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

At the end, Pauline and Gordon and their children walk back to 239 Barnsley Road with Lynda, John and Karl. Lynda makes cups of tea, and Pauline and Lynda talk about the house. Lynda and John will go back to their old home down the street, Lynda says, so there will be some furniture to move on. They discuss the sideboard, clad in white cards as if in mourning for the old queen, and soon to be moved on with her. Lynda has never liked it much, but had felt compelled to let it stay while ever Winnie was living.

‘I don’t know why she bought it off Roy in t’ first place,’ says Pauline, ‘except that he needed t’ money.’

Lynda looks surprised. ‘She always told me that he gave it to her. I remember her saying “Look at this that our Roy’s bought for me, Lynda. He buys me some
beautiful
things.”’

‘I think that’s what she wanted to believe. But really she bought it from him because he couldn’t keep up his payments, and that way he could pay them all off.’

Over the top of the cards the two sisters catch eyes in the mirror with the pink paper roses around it, looking at each other but also looking into the dark cave of mysteries that was their mother. They purse their lips and raise their eyebrows, then turn back to the room and drink their tea.

Outside in the winter afternoon the street lights are on, and the roads are getting busier. Pauline’s family leaves, Karl and his girlfriend Shara walk along the backings to Karl’s house, and then just Lynda and John are left, sitting with the memory-ghosts in the room where twenty years ago the family had gathered for the golden wedding party. In this room, and among this furniture at 34 Highgate Lane, Winnie had told Lynda her stories: Walter and Annie, the little gypsy girl, Millie, Sonny and Olive, Clara, Juggler Jane, Pauline and Roy, Alf and Harry. Winnie will be back with them all soon, says Lynda, back helping her dad or dancing with Harry and tightening clothes lines for Comfort and Nellie.

Lynda clears away the crockery and boils the kettle for another pot of tea, and somewhere high above the Dearne Valley the little gypsy girl greets Winnie Hollingworth and tells her to be glad because she is free now, and ready to begin the next, truer part of her life. The girl leads her to where Muv and Walter and Harry are waiting, and Winnie takes her place among the beloved and troublesome dead, ready for the mediums in their churches and assembly rooms, ready with her mother and father to pass down her knowledge to those who know how to ask, ready at last to understand and be understood.

Epilogue

In the years since Winnie’s death most members of the Hollingworth family still lived in the same places as they did at the time of the funeral. They are still friends and they still socialise together, although there have been no large-scale family gatherings at Highgate Club since the funeral in 2002. Some have died while others have new children and grandchildren, young people to whom coal is either unknown, or known chiefly as an element in school lessons about global warming.

Roy Hollingworth died in April 2003. When Alwyn told people at the funeral that he was too ill to travel, she was telling the truth. Living in the sheltered accommodation, the two of them had worked part-time at a local pub, but Roy’s alcoholism had run unchecked. In February 2003 he began to lose consciousness at unpredictable intervals, and was taken to hospital almost weekly – so often that when Wendy called Gary one night to say Roy was very ill and wanted to talk to him, Gary was not anxious, assuming that he would recover. Gary, who had not spoken to his father since their argument on the telephone, planned to visit him in two days’ time, but the following evening Alwyn rang to tell Gary that Roy had died. A blood clot on the lung, she said, although they both knew the real killer, and alcohol poisoning was recorded as the official cause of death.

Gary and Scott, and Lynda and John, attended the funeral, but Pauline and David did not. Waiting in Roy’s flat before the service, Gary felt that the rooms looked strange in a way he could not understand, and it was only as people left for the crematorium he realised why; in the entire home there was no object or decoration that was personal to Roy, not even a photograph. It was as if he had succeeded in leaving the minimum trace of himself as he passed through, elusive in death as he had been in life. When Gary looked for a keepsake to have in memory of his father, he couldn’t find anything.

Roy was cremated wearing his Royal Tank Regiment uniform, which was decorated with a General Service Medal and Canal Zone clasp. Alwyn died the following year. Wendy lives with her family in Burbage, near Hinckley, and runs a property business.

Margaret and Colin Greengrass lived happily together in Thurnscoe for the rest of their lives, moving to a bungalow in the village in 2000. Colin died in 2011, and Margaret in 2013.

My mother, Pauline Benson, still lives in the village in the East Riding. During the sale of the farm she and Gordon retained a plot of land on which they built a new house. Using an old shed they had kept, they then made a new yard and, with their youngest son Guy, they used the yard to run a straw merchant business. Their daughter Helen is a primary school teacher in Hull. Gordon, my father, died in 2009, while I was writing this book.

Lynda and John oversaw the sale of 239 Barnsley Road, and moved back to their first house down the street. In 2006, Lynda took a new job helping to organise colleges into a network that made it easier for people in Yorkshire to get access to education. The job was partly based at Hull University, and if John had a day off when Lynda was commuting to meetings he would accompany her, eating breakfast among the students in the cafeteria, then walking around the grounds until her meetings were ended. Lynda retired in 2009. Shortly afterwards she became the voluntary secretary for the Dearne Valley Big Local, a group, part of a national scheme, that works to restore the sense of community in the area. John still works at the Kostal components factory in Highgate and until 2008 he also worked as a volunteer at a local home for disabled people. Karl works as a process engineer at the IAC car components factory in Scunthorpe, and lives with his partner Nathalie in the Dearne village of Broomhill.

Dr Ravichandran never explained to Lynda how she had walked when her condition ought to have prevented it. Nor did any doctor comment on her theory that she had a kind of consciousness in her bones and muscles that could move her limbs. However, in 2011 scientists working with a paralysed man at the Frazier Rehab Institute in Louisville, USA, discovered that the human spinal cord could direct leg movement without input from the brain. The scientists and doctors used epidural electrical stimulation of the man’s lower spinal cord to mimic signals that his brain should have sent telling the legs to move; having received those signals, the cord’s own neural network took sensory input from the legs, and directed the leg movements needed to stand and take steps. With assistance, the man could make walking movements on a treadmill.

Gary Hollingworth became a senior social work practitioner, and moved to a new post in Wakefield in 2004. He is still married to Heather, and he still has dreams about working at the pit. Scott lives in Swinton, just south of the Dearne Valley, and works as a civil engineer. Claire lectures in animal care at Wakefield College, and lives in Grimethorpe.

David was made redundant from Rossington colliery when it closed in 2006, ending the Hollingworth family’s last connection to the coal industry. After a period of unemployment and retraining, he took a job at Kostal. He and Marie still live in Thurnscoe, and David still enjoys fishing. Lisa lives with her partner Kevin in Bolton-upon-Dearne, and is a receptionist at Kostal.

Coal production at the Selby complex ended in 2004. At the time of writing, there was one working deep mine in South Yorkshire, at Hatfield. In 1945 there were sixty-seven. Since the decline described in the latter parts of this book, regeneration work and the efforts of local people have restored much of the Dearne Valley’s economy, and its natural and built landscapes. It is increasingly popular both as a location for businesses and as a place to live. In July 2006 Goldthorpe’s Welfare Hall was refurbished and reopened as the New Dearne Playhouse. The Coronation Club, the Unity Club, the Union Jack Memorial, or ‘Comrades’ club, and Highgate Working Men’s Club all remain open.

Acknowledgements

I was able to write this book only because of my extended family’s generosity and willingness to share and record details of their lives, and I am deeply grateful to them for the time they afforded me, and for their patience in helping with my questions, revisions and fact checks. In particular Lynda and John Burton, Gary and Heather Hollingworth, David and Marie Hollingworth, Karl Grainger and Pauline Benson spent what must have seemed to them many long hours remembering and explaining and re-explaining to me. Other family members who helped me with interviews and answers to questions were Anne and Malcolm Askew, my father the late Gordon Benson, Guy Benson, Helen Benson, Claire and Bob Blake, Alan Blow, Amanda Bouskill, Eileen Bullock, Joan Chambers, Kevin Dunkley, Carol Goulding, Tommy Goulding, Jack Graham, Joyce Graham and Janet Graham, the late Margaret Greengrass, the late Pam Gundry and Jack Gundry, Lisa Hollingworth, the late Millie Hollingworth, Scott Hollingworth, Tommy Hollingworth, Wendy Hollingworth, Brian Lunness, the late May Parkin and Heather Wargen. The steward and members of Highgate Working Men’s Club, the Unity Club and the Coronation Club, Thurnscoe were helpful, good storytellers, and very good company.

Equally patient and understanding have been the staff at Bloomsbury Publishing. Michael Fishwick and Anna Simpson were incredibly kind, supportive and helpful, and my copyeditor Kate Johnson helped me indescribably, and taught me a great deal about books and writing in the process. Thank you too to Laura Brooke, Katie Bond, Alexa von Hirschberg, Oliver Holden-Rea, Alexandra Pringle and David Ward.

My agent David Godwin and the staff at David Godwin Associates have been sturdy props and good friends.

Dan Johnson helped me with research, and was a great companion and source of insights. Laura Smith also helped to research certain areas. John Threlkeld at the Barnsley Chronicle and author of
Pits: A Pictoral History of Mining
was very generous in helping me with fact-checking. Other people advised me on specific subjects. Jolyon Lawson, proprietor of the coal merchant F. W. Lawson Ltd in Driffield, East Yorkshire, explained the differences between the different forms of coal. Miles Templeton of pre-warboxing.co.uk sourced the historical records of Danny Lunness’s boxing bouts. Chris Baker of fourteeneighteen research helped me with Walter Parkin’s experience in the First World War, and Jane Hewitt helped with general family history research. Dr Sarah Thornton diagnosed and described medical conditions. Alan Petford, Edward Royle and Sara Crofts of the Chapel Society helped me to visualise the interior of a turn-of-the-century spiritualist church. John ‘Jock’ Marrs, a veteran of the Korean War and editor of britains-smallwars.com, told me about life as a soldier in the Suez Canal Zone, and this information and the stories on the site were important sources for me when writing about Roy’s military experience.

The Shirebrook Local History Group, headed by Ian P. Hill, was welcoming, enthusiastic and learned. I was very lucky to meet the late Mr Harold Daniels, then its oldest member, who recalled attending the spiritualist church with one of Annie Weaver’s younger sisters, whom he was courting at the time. He told me that the girls used to trick their boyfriends into going by agreeing to accompany them to the pub on the condition that the young man would later accompany them on an as-yet unspecified date. The boys would always protest, but the girls would reply, ‘I’ve been to your church, now you come to mine.’ The story confirmed that Walter’s interest would have marked him out as unusual among the men of his age.

Many people helped me to improve my understanding of spiritualism, and to find the building that housed the church in Shirebrook where Walter and Annie’s relationship began. Annie Blair of the Spiritualist Association of Great Britain, and the mediums Alan Acton and Richard Neville, described the processes and nature of Spirit when I needed clarification, and Leslie Price and Paul J. Gaunt of the
PsyPioneer Journal
filled in historical sense and detail. The congregation of Mansfield Spiritualist Church, particularly Jean Stevens, welcomed me at their healing services, and John Stanford’s memories of spiritualism in Shirebrook were invaluable. Sharon Brailsford of the Shirebrook Local History Group helped to extricate me from an awkward situation when I unintentionally trespassed on a farmyard in my excitement at having discovered the former spiritualist church.