The Valley (7 page)

Afterwards Millie brings him over to meet Winnie and Mabel, and a crowd gathers around them cracking jokes and catching at the Juggler’s elbow. Winnie tells Millie she was marvellous and Millie squeezes her hand and thanks her, and Winnie feels more confident and comfort­able in the crowd. Soon though, Millie is tugged away by some girls, and when Winnie looks for Mabel she isn’t there. For a moment she is alone among all the loud, chattering people, but then, suddenly, somehow, the Juggler is there looking directly at her, and she feels paralysed and unable to speak.

‘Now then, love,’ he says.

Many years from now, when Winnie and Juggler are married and have had their many wars and sieges in their home, when there is no more dancing in the Welfare Hall and Millie has died a premature death of a broken heart, Winnie’s daughters will say to each other and to their children at parties and on Sunday afternoon visits: ‘I don’t know why she ever married him. They were as unlike as you could possibly get.’ And yet, years after that, Winnie’s daughters will pass into her old lady’s liver-spotted hands a cracked, faded and freckled photograph of her late husband performing on stage, and she will write on the back, ‘Harry – how I miss him!’ And through rheumy yellow eyes she will look into space, far away, and remember, perhaps, this moment in Goldthorpe Welfare Hall in 1929, when the band was playing and Juggler first appeared out of the hot, smoking crowd and spoke to her.

‘Are they not talking to you?’ he asks. Cocky so-and-so, she thinks.

She laughs self-consciously. ‘I thought you’d be talking to our Millie about your singing.’

‘I’ve talked to Millie,’ he says. ‘Or she’s talked to me anyroad.’ He affects weariness, and indulges what will be one of his great passions in life, the aphorism. ‘Your Millie’s a lass of few words, but she doesn’t stint in using ’em.’

Winnie laughs.

‘Tha’s a right dancer, though,’ he says. ‘I’ve been watching thee.’

‘You never have.’

She notices how pink and clean he looks.

He winks. ‘Tha’s got to have four pair of eyes up there. Tha don’t know what tha’ll find in here.’

‘I enjoyed it,’ she half lies. ‘I thought our Millie was super didn’t you?’

Winnie thinks ‘super’ is a classy and up-to-date word.

‘That’s cos she’s had a right trainer.’

‘Has she? Who?’

‘Me.’

Winnie makes a show of stifling a laugh.

‘I’m opera-trained, you know.’

‘Are you?’

Harry tells her about his career as a tenor in the operas of Milan and Paris, and Winnie doesn’t know what to say, dare not say, ‘Get on with you.’ And then Millie comes back and he says, ‘Why didn’t you tell them about my operas?’ and Millie digs him in the ribs and says you daft ’apeth and Winnie realises it was all a joke, and the Juggler winks. He asks if he can walk her home. Winnie accepts on the proviso that Mabel comes too. The three of them go half way together, and then Mabel breaks off for her street. The Juggler looks less handsome outside and he has whisky on his breath, but he is funny. He cracks jokes all the way home. He mentions working as a miner, and says that he knows Walter Parkin. He tells her he is learning how to play the drums by practising on his mother’s sideboard, kicking the cupboard for the bass drum. When Winnie laughs he says it isn’t a joke. He is playing in Mexborough the next night, he says, but why doesn’t she come out with him the night after, to the pictures? She says yes. At the end of the street they pause. Her dad will be up waiting inside and she daren’t let him see her with a lad.

‘Right,’ says Juggler. ‘I’ll sithee.’

He leans in to kiss her, but she pulls back. ‘Awww, come on,’ he says. ‘Gie’ us a right kiss.’

‘I’ve to go home,’ she says, and walks away, her heart beating hard and fast down in her whalebone and elastic.

‘I’ll see thee outside t’ Picture Palace, half past seven!’ he calls. And then the ring of his segs on the pavement and the sound of him singing to himself fade away into the darkness behind her.

Outside her mam and dad’s house, in the gas-lit street, she is left with her spirit guide. The little gypsy girl will watch over Winnie when she is with lads – which, thinks Win, is fortunate. She has a feeling that if she is going to go out with Juggler Hollingworth, she will probably need some watching over.

6 Courting

Goldthorpe and Bolton-upon-Dearne, 1929–30

Juggler Hollingworth of Bolton-upon-Dearne was sent by the Devil to test Walter Parkin and his eldest daughter; that, at least, is how Walter will come to see things, finding in this young man not only an annoyance, but also a challenge to his own fixed view of life. Throughout his childhood, through his working life and through the war, Walter Parkin had maintained one simple belief about human conduct. As he saw it, a person could either give in to baseness and chaos or they could work at making themselves decent. This principle held because, in his experience, the chaotic were not ambitious; pleasure-seeking brought neither income nor respect, and therefore there was a clear choice to make between pleasurable pandemonium and success. A question that had never occurred to him, though, was what if there was a middle way? What if you accepted the pandemonium and tried to make something decent out of it? This was the question that Juggler Hollingworth was asking. And, unfortunately for Walter, Millie and Winnie Parkin were rather interested in some of his answers.

The day after the dance, Millie tells the Parkins Juggler’s story. He is nineteen, from a family that has for generations beyond memory lived in Bolton-upon-Dearne, an old village of stone cottages and new brick terraces which lies on the river in the valley bottom. The eldest sons are always known as ‘Juggler’, the nickname going back to Harry’s great-great-great-great-grandfather, a smallholder who performed juggling and trapeze acts in a circus. The trapeze work died with him, but the eldest sons and grandsons had all supplemented their farm-labouring and coal-mining incomes with juggling, singing, telling jokes and playing the concertina in music halls and pubs.

The current Juggler’s father, who died last year, had been a concertina player, a comedian, a promoter of music-hall concerts, the founder of the amateur Bolton-upon-Dearne Athletic Football Club and a hewer at Wath Main colliery. He had given his son his love of music by teaching him the concertina and taking him to see his friends play in their works’ brass bands. Juggler’s mam, Amy, is head pastry cook in the kitchens of Hickleton Hall. His sister, Clara, two years his junior, works in the bar of one of the new golf clubs in Manchester. Since he was fourteen, Juggler has worked as a miner, first at Goldthorpe colliery, now at Manvers Main, a vast complex of mines, coal preparation plants, coke ovens, chemical works, brickyards, offices and railway sidings to the south of Bolton-upon-Dearne. As the wages do not meet his cravings for motorcycles, gramophones and gangster suits, he has pursued a sideline career in music. Aged sixteen, he climbed on stage at the Collingwood Arms in Bolton-upon-Dearne, warmed up with a set of jokes, and sang ‘
Because
’. The audience began by shouting that he was frightening the dogs, and then ended up applauding. He tried Bolton-on-Dearne’s other pubs, and then pubs in other villages. He bought a recording of ‘
Tiger Rag’
and had it played as his introduction when he walked onto the stage. Step by step, audience by audience across the valley, singing, joking, showing off, he charmed people.

At public dances he studied the new jazz tunes so that he could later pick out the melodies and rhythms. Drumming was the thing: his body responded to the beats, and anyway, drummers made money because they were in demand and with his father gone, his family were hard up. To the bewildered frustration of his mother, he taught himself drumming first by tapping on the crockery at the tea table and then, as he had told Winnie, by going to work on the sideboard. He designated parts of it as drums, and played them: a lower cupboard for the kick drum, an extended drawer for the snare. With his singing, he earned enough to put a deposit on a small set of real drums and began practising in the front room.

One night after a dance, he went to a party where everyone was singing around the piano, and here he met Millie Parkin. He knew Danny who was courting her, and knew that her dad Walter was one of them that was still poorly from the war. Millie stood out: she had a true, constant pitch, and understood the nuances of a vocal line. ‘Come and sing a couple of numbers with me,’ he said, and they went from there.

*

‘You want to go, Winnie! It’s only a bit of fun!’

It is a Saturday teatime, a few weeks after the dance at the Welfare Hall. In the sitting room of Walter and Annie’s house, Millie, not for the first time, is urging her elder sister to go out with the Juggler, who has again asked her to go with him to the pictures.

The three girls, and Sonny and their mam, are eating a meat and potato pie which has a good deal more potato than meat. Walter is in bed; it is one of his bad days and he is unable to walk or stand beyond a stoop. Now infected by tuberculosis, his body is slowly wasting. He periodically lapses into episodes of weakness, pain and fever as abscesses form around his spinal cord. He now works as a dataller, one of the men employed on a day-by-day basis to do whatever job is assigned to them, usually maintenance of the tunnel roofs. When he grows poorly he has to stay in bed. The only relief comes when the abscesses burst through the skin, leaving open, running sores.

The uncomfortable truth is that their father’s sickness allows the three girls freedoms they wouldn’t otherwise have had. With him distracted and ineffectual, Winnie has been able to get out to the dances, Millie to court Danny, and Olive will soon be off to become one of the mill girls, with all their brashness and good wages.

‘Get yourself off, Win,’ Olive says. ‘Enjoy yourself for once!’

‘I don’t know .
.
.’ Winnie feels her father’s wishes pressing on her even when he is not with her.

‘So long as you’re back in for nine,’ her mam says. ‘You know what your dad’s like.’

‘I’ll be with them anyway!’ says Millie.

‘That’s what worries me,’ says Winnie.

She knows what her mam really means: mind your dad’s well and in a good mood when you tell him who you’re going out with. Walter has recently been appalled by Millie’s account of the Juggler dressing in a white swallow-tail coat and hiding in stone chest tombs at night so that he can climb out and scare passers-by by pretending to be a risen corpse. ‘Ever so funny,’ she said, ‘because everyone thinks Bolton graveyard floods, and t’ water brings up bodies and skeletons from t’ graves. Juggler calls it the Bog Hotel.’

In the end Winnie agrees to go to the pictures with Juggler, and a few days later they go up to the cinema with Millie, who sits next to them and spends more time cracking gags with Juggler than Winnie does talking to him. He says he knows 150 jokes at any one time; he updates them with new ones he hears, and drops the ones that have gone out of favour. Millie says they’ve all heard each one 150 times, and Juggler laughs, and Winnie can’t keep up.

She could be jealous, but instead of competing with other girls in wit, sauce and sexiness, Winnie takes a superior role of wise, soft matronliness. It certainly works on Juggler, who cajoles her and Millie to the pub afterwards, Winnie tugging at her sister’s coat sleeve, Millie shushing her while Juggler tells stories and smokes cigarettes. Winnie sips at a half-pint of stout, and he keeps looking at her: her dark bobbed hair as black as her drink, the down-angled eyes, the smartness. She enjoys his interest. If she had imagined the man she would marry it would surely not have been a man like this – a comic and a livewire so different to herself – and yet, she likes him. She likes being with someone who is well dressed, and who knows all the other men in the pub, and she likes the daftness that is in such contrast to her disciplined home.

He is keen, too keen she thinks, and she breaks it off. Harry (he has told her to call him that) says he doesn’t care, but her sudden withdrawal piques his interest. In the meantime, he keeps up his singing, comedy and drumming with bands, arriving home at midnight then rising at four for his shift. A range of abilities keeps you in work, he says. He works three or four nights a week, carrying his drums on the buses. Travelling home late at night, he sits among the tired, blackened miners and mill lasses, backchatting when someone recognises him, ignoring conductors who chuckle at his baggage, and otherwise shutting his eyes, clinging to the drum cases, and rehearsing his lyrics and gags.

His only enemy is a Bolton-upon-Dearne policeman known as Dog Uller. Policemen, regarded with suspicious hostility by some people in the Dearne since the 1926 lockout, either redeem themselves with blind eyes and words to the wise, or they persecute. Dog Uller, in his late twenties, fat and officious, persecutes. He tells anyone who will listen that his beat is so safe, his public so cowed, that he can leave his gold watch on the wall outside the Collingwood Arms and no one will take it. He drinks in the Collingwood and it is in the pub’s tap room that Harry, also a regular, commits a misdemeanour against the policeman that reaches the ears of Walter.

‘Now then, Dog,’ says Harry one evening not long after Winnie breaks off from him, his hand locked on a straight glass of Barnsley Bitter. ‘Anybody pinched thy watch?’

‘Shut it, Hollingworth.’

Dog Uller is not a man to banter in the bar. Everyone is laughing. Everyone knows the gold watch brag, and thinks it absurd. Harry makes a show of looking at his wristwatch.