The Valley (9 page)

‘Are you sure about this, love?’ he says.

‘I think so.’

‘Do you only think so? Because you can still not marry him and stay with us, you know.’

‘No,’ she says, looking at him, ‘I’m sure.’

Walter nods without speaking, his breathing is uneven. ‘He’ll be a trial for you. He might be a good lad underneath, Winnie, but he’ll be a trial for you. Tha’ll have to be strong tha knows. Tha’ll have to master him.’

She says nothing and, feeling tears welling up in her, looks down. She senses that he is right, but she does not know how to be strong with a man, let alone master one.

*

The wedding party is small, just the Hollingworth and Parkin families, Winnie’s friend Mabel and a mate of Harry’s called Lanc. After the signing and the rice-throwing at Doncaster, they cram themselves into two cars and ride back to the Parkins’ where Annie and her daughters have prepared a wedding breakfast of cold roast chicken, a boiled ham, salad and hard-boiled eggs. Lanc, a tall, gangly miner from Lancashire, is instructed by Millie, eight months pregnant but organising everyone nevertheless, to fetch a crate of beer. As they eat and drink, Harry takes two spoons and taps out jazz beats on the crockery, occasionally crooning lines from songs, and Millie joins in.

After an hour of awkward knee-plate eating, the two of them stand up before the range and begin singing whole songs. The younger guests sing along and Harry cajoles Annie (‘Come on, Nance, gi’e us a tune as t’ mother of t’ bride!’) into a duet of ‘
You Made Me Love You’
.

At the end of the afternoon Millie, flushed and enormous, tops everyone with a solo performance of ‘
Till We Meet Again’
, and then Winnie and Harry kiss and shake hands with their guests, and walk together to the house where they have taken lodgings. Their rooms are in a dark, damp three-bedroom terraced house in Goldthorpe owned by Mr and Mrs Skelling, a couple in their fifties. Short of money, the Skellings have let out their front room and a spare bedroom, leaving themselves with three rooms to live in. Embarrassed by her poverty, Mrs Skelling speaks to Winnie and Harry with a spite that reminds them of their inferior status. When the newly-weds arrive, she gives them no congratulations, speaking only to remind them of some house rules, and to warn Winnie not to make a row when they go upstairs.

Even on her wedding night Winnie is losing out to music. Harry has bought, by mail order, a self-assembly crystal set so they can hear some tunes. He sits on the lumpy horsehair sofa with the circuit diagram laid out on the thin rug, trying to connect wires and junctions, and keeps telling his new bride that he’ll soon be done. At nine o’clock he goes to get help from Lanc, who lives in the next street down and has made crystal sets before. An hour and a half later, Winnie climbs into the iron bed on her own and listens as her husband brings into the gas-lit sitting room downstairs strange electronic noises, snatches of American music, and foreign voices from far, far away in the night.

*

Marriage is uneven, a change for the women who leave work, but for some men little more than the swapping of housekeepers. The unevenness is clear to Winnie on the first Monday of their married life. Harry usually works early or day shifts (six in the morning to two in the afternoon), avoiding ‘afters’ (two until 10 p.m.) and nights (ten until 6 a.m.) so that he is free in the evenings to perform in the clubs or go to the pub. He and Winnie are woken for the day shift by the knocker-upper, a man crippled in a mining accident who makes his living scratching the morning windows with wires bound to the end of a long wooden pole. It is half-past four, and the house is cold. Rolling over and out of bed, Winnie puts her feet down on the damp lino and pulls on the cardigan and woollen coat that she has left on a chair. Along the landing and down the stairs, treading quietly for fear of waking Mrs Skelling; in the kitchen she lights a taper from a gas flame, then returns to the bedroom to light a candle for her husband.

Back down she goes to the Skellings’ living room, where the range is, and takes a poker to rattle the fire that has been left banked and smouldering to warm the house. White ash falls to the hearth and Winnie feels the warmth of the glowing tangerine-coloured coals on her face as she shovels the ashes into a zinc pail. She takes the bucket outside. It is a dark February morning. Along the street there are lights on in some kitchens and smoke from chimneys joining with the hearthsmoke clouding the low belly of the valley as the men who have work rise for early starts at shops and glassworks. Standing there in the darkness, she will say later, Winnie Hollingworth feels for the first time like a married woman with wifely duties.

In the kitchen the flames of the fire lick at the bottom of the kettle. From a caddy decorated with Indian coolies, she spoons tea into a teapot, and fries creamy-fatted bacon and brown eggs in Mrs Skelling’s beaten black frying pan. She can hear Harry padding about upstairs, pulling on his clothes. As the bacon cooks she makes food for work, or snap: black tea to cut through the dust in his throat, bread slathered with pork dripping for bulk and energy. She seeks out the brown salty jelly in the dripping bowl and layers it evenly over the plain grey fat before topping it with a second slice of bread, so that he will have some moistness and salt to savour against the grime and dirt. Then she puts it into the snap tin, a metal canister shaped like a sandwich which will be fastened to Harry’s belt, snapped shut to protect the contents against the dust and the wet.

As she mashes the breakfast tea, Harry passes her on his way to the kitchen, wearing his vest and trousers, carrying his shirt, pullover and jacket. At the sink he splashes his face with cold water and pats it dry on a rag hanging on a hook near the tap.

‘Here you are, love,’ says Winnie, setting down on the sitting-room table tea, bacon and eggs and thick slices of bread, curved and uneven because she cannot cut the loaf straight. She will have her breakfast later, bread and margarine, the protein being reserved for the man. 

‘Thank you, my sweet,’ he says, and takes from his jacket pocket a bottle of whisky.

With the salty steam of breakfast rising in his face, Harry pours a tot into the cap and then into his tea. A few men take a medicinal whisky like this at the start and end of the day, though Winnie’s father never has. She stares as he slips the bottle back in his pocket, smells the hot alcohol across the room, and sits down and tries to ignore it. Harry begins cutting and forking the food into his mouth, and then as he chews, taps out a rhythm on Mrs Skelling’s cruet set with his teaspoon. He doesn’t seem to stop drumming except to drink or dance. After a week, Win will ask him to stop. After two, she will beg, and after three they will fight.

From outside come the sounds of slamming doors and men’s voices and hobnail boots in the road. The early shift is going to work. Harry swallows the last of his tea, takes his snap and steps out of the back door, immediately cheery as he greets another miner in the street. They join a march of men walking down the road in the dark towards the pits at Goldthorpe, Highgate and Manvers Main. Winnie turns back inside and climbs the stairs to bed for two hours more sleep, for her and the baby. She will rise again at half past seven for breakfast and then to start cleaning the house.

*

A fortnight after they move into their lodgings, Winnie finds out that she is not pregnant. She feels a sense of mild anticlimax, her main thought being that now they might be able to have a child when they’ve saved enough money for a deposit on a rented house of their own. Harry has already had a rise, with the married man’s rate set at thirty-two shillings and sixpence a week. If he earns money from his singing or drumming he spends it, or adds it to the savings for the house deposit. As the winter passes into spring and then summer, it is this thought of their own home that sustains Winnie against Mrs Skelling’s contempt.

In the evenings Harry listens to dance tunes on the radio, and then goes out to a pub or a club to see a turn. On some Saturday evenings, Winnie goes with him and they might meet up with Millie and Danny, if Annie is able to look after Brian, their baby boy. She no longer sees Mabel or any of her other friends, unless she bumps into them in the street, her day-to-day life consisting chiefly of servicing her husband and the home. To her sisters she seems more at ease working than sitting, eager to be cleaning or cooking even when she is resting. When there is no cleaning and cooking to be done, she crochets, knits, or makes rag rugs in such volumes and with such speed that she has soon covered the floors of half the houses in the street. The finer, more imaginative part of Winnie’s life is lived elsewhere, in the historical romances she gets from the library and in the spirit world.

Seeing Harry tend to himself in private, watching him fussing and preparing to go out, is a shock to Winnie, more than the tots of whisky at breakfast. In public Harry seems casual about everything, but he makes it a cardinal point to always enter his home clean. Some of the men come and go in the old suits that they wear in the mines, but Harry always changes and washes at work. When he needs a bath, he doesn’t use the tin one in front of the fire, but goes to Manvers Main which, unlike Goldthorpe and Highgate, has modern baths and showers. He spends hours at the kitchen sink, scrubbing his hands with a nailbrush, intricately working at the fingernails: nail plates, beds, folds, cuticles, lunulae, all scrubbed, scraped and wiped as if the hands were a second face to be presented to the world. For Winnie, who likes Harry’s smooth cleanness, witnessing the scrubbing and preening spoils her pleasure in him. Her father, himself a clean man and fond of the adage about cleanliness and godliness, had not troubled to that extent; Harry’s self-regard feels like vanity and seems to carry him away from her.

9 The Boy Who Came Back from the Dead

Highgate, 1932

One morning in the early winter months of 1932, Winnie Hollingworth is walking up the hill to a big, bay-windowed house, home to the Goldthorpe doctor. In her bag she carries a small bottle of urine, and money scrimped from the last fortnight's housekeeping to pay for a pregnancy test. When she goes back for the results the following day the doctor says, yes, she is pregnant, due mid-September, and she feels a mixture of relief – because she has taken longer to get pregnant than a lot of other lasses – and worry about where she and Harry and the baby will live. Mrs Skelling is not a woman to welcome babies.

Harry, who likes children, is pleased, although no more wordy in his pleasure than most other men in South Yorkshire. ‘We shall have to be having a bigger house then,' he says, and goes to look at the rental advertisements in the
South Yorkshire Times
.

They work out that by taking in a lodger they can afford to rent a three-bedroom house in Highgate, the small pit village that almost abuts, and rather looks down upon, the Barnsley end of Goldthorpe. The house they look at, 34 Highgate Lane, is in a long and haphazard turn-of-the-century brick terrace that runs down the valley side towards Bolton-upon-Dearne. At the front it looks over a tussocky grass cowfield, a farmyard and a concrete mission church; behind the houses are large shared yards with privies, and, behind the privies, the backings – a set of narrow alleys along the house backs on a grid of brief, treeless streets. At the top of Highgate Lane the terrace ends at a crossroads where the lane crosses the main Doncaster to Barnsley road, and here a group of buildings form the village hub: an old, high-windowed junior school, a fish and chip shop with pink and white stucco walls, a grand Edwardian pub called the Halfway Hotel and, alongside that, a bitumen-painted wooden hut that houses the working men's club.

Number 34, up eight brick steps through a little front garden, is dry, warm and solid, and Harry tells the landlord, Mr Meanly, who is waiting as they look around, that they will take it. On the walk home they laugh about his name. ‘I hope it's not Meanly by name, meanly by nature,' says Winnie who, perhaps as a consequence of concealing the name Gertrude for two decades, thinks often about the power of words to shape people's destinies.

‘T' rent he's charging for two walls, I should say meanly i'n't half of it. Twelve flaming shilling a week!'

‘What about finding a lodger, then?'

‘Don't worry about that,' says Harry. ‘I've got an idea.'

They move in in the spring, helped by Millie, Danny, Olive and Sonny. A young man called Horace Hemsworth, himself newly moved in around the corner, brings them some pork pie and cake as housewarming gifts. Over the following months they gradually add to their furniture pieces from relatives, and items bought from the pawn shop and the Co-op, Harry dutifully lifting and placing them, and Winnie ordaining the layout, arranging the geography of the home.

The front door opens into a hallway or, as everyone calls it, the passage – a prestigious thing to have because most of the neighbours' front doors open directly into their front rooms, and a garden and a passage put distance between you and the street. The first door off the passage leads into the front room, to be used only on special occasions, and it is here that Winnie puts her best furniture. At the end of the passage is a flight of steep, narrow stairs rising up to the landing and bedrooms, and a door that leads into the sitting room. The kitchen is reached through the sitting room, both of these rooms having windows that look out from the back of the house. The kitchen and sitting room belong to the life of the backings and the communal yard, the passage and front room to the street and the wider world.