Netherwood (3 page)

New Mill, Long Martley and Middlecar. These were the three collieries owned by the Earl of Netherwood and mined by his men. They were small pits by some standards – just over six hundred miners at each of them – but they were productive, yielding half a million tons a year of fine quality coal to help stoke the fires of industrial progress. The third earl, Wilfred Hoyland, had named the collieries back when they were sunk,
and nobody knew where or what he was thinking of, except that by leaving Netherwood or Hoyland out of the matter he hoped to distance his family from any socially ruinous associations with industry. Of course, everyone knew anyway and rather despised him for it, and in any case his efforts went unappreciated by subsequent Earls of Netherwood, who had the good sense to recognise the truth of that old Yorkshire maxim: where there’s muck, there’s brass.

Certainly Teddy Hoyland, the present earl, saw no conflict between his status in society and the fact that his vast fortune was increased daily by the efforts of the eighteen hundred men and boys employed at his collieries. And the mining of coal was truly a profitable pursuit. When his father died in 1878, Teddy had inherited a legacy of dazzling proportions; a private fortune of £2.5 million, a mansion in London’s Belgravia, a small, sturdy castle in Scotland and twenty thousand acres of the West Riding of Yorkshire, with Netherwood Hall at its heart. His prestige and position were unassailable and he saw no reason on earth to curtail what his wife considered a vulgar compulsion to speak openly about business matters. In the countess’s view, one’s wealth was a given, and the source of it neither interesting nor relevant, but Teddy Hoyland was proud of his collieries and proud of his men and, broadly speaking, he was liked and respected by them for his fairness and decency. It has to be said that Lady Hoyland was less of a favourite, though this gave her not a moment’s unease. A true daughter of the aristocracy, she was entirely defined by her impeccable pedigree and found there were quite enough people of her own class and position to provide diversion without having to bother much about those at the bottom of the heap. Even the county set, those neighbours and acquaintances whose situation was less grand than Lady Hoyland’s but nevertheless whose lives ran along the same lines, didn’t get much of a look in. Clarissa preferred the stimulation of
London society: the attack, feint and parry of cocktails in Cheyne Walk or dinner in Devonshire Place. Still, the countess was known to have a heart; it was she, after all, who forbade the Netherwood Hall kitchen staff to throw away leftover food after supper parties and banquets, and ordered instead that it should be distributed among the needy of the town. This was a mixed blessing, since devilled eggs, sole
bonne femme
and chocolate parfait, while all individually delicious, were not necessarily as palatable when slopped together in the same tin. Her motives were good, though. And her beauty and elegance, when she did deign to appear in public in the town, always caused a stir of excited interest, as if a rare and endangered bird had flown over Netherwood.

I
n Eve’s kitchen, Clem had taken off his cap but left his coat buttoned and his scarf tightly wrapped. He eased himself into a chair, exhaling audibly with mingled pain and relief as his arthritic knees adjusted to their new situation. Eve filled an enamel mug with stock from the pan of stewmeat on the stove and handed it to the old man, who inhaled the beefy vapour appreciatively.

‘Champion,’ he said.

‘There’s no bread yet,’ she said. ‘It’s only just in.’

‘Never mind, lass. This’ll warm t’cockles.’

‘Well sup up – you’ve folk to wake, I’ve things to be gettin’ on with, and Arthur needs ’is brew,’ said Eve. She opened the door of the range to check the loaves and the kitchen was suddenly full of the aroma of freshly baking bread.

‘’E’s a lucky bugger is Arthur,’ said Clem. He applied himself to his fortifying broth; it was scalding hot and he took it in tiny, delicate sips out of necessity, not good manners.

‘By ’eck that’s grand,’ he said, to himself. Then, to Eve: ‘They’ve started wi’ buntin’ out there.’ He tipped his head in the general direction of outside.

‘Aye?’ said Eve. She leaned her back against the stove and
folded her arms, settling in for a chat. The warmth seeped through her woollen layers.

‘Aye,’ Clem nodded. ‘Fireworks an’ all, they say, and ten bob for all of us.’

‘Never!’ said Eve.

This was everyone’s subject of choice these days: the preparations for Tobias Hoyland’s coming-of-age on Saturday week. The oldest son of the Earl and Countess of Netherwood, and heir to the great Hoyland estate, was a familiar figure to all of them, largely, it has to be said, on account of his fondness for pale ale. He wasn’t the type of local figurehead who could be depended on to give his time opening a village fête or laying the foundation stones for a new library, but the landlords of the three Netherwood public houses wouldn’t hear a word against him, and his excesses certainly provided the town with an infinite supply of mirth at his expense. Now though, there wasn’t a soul who didn’t wish him well since the news had got about that, to mark the greatness of the occasion, Lord Hoyland planned to include every last one of them in the celebrations. In the summer, six months hence, the park and gardens of Netherwood Hall would be thrown open to all tenants and employees, however lowly, for a jamboree of epic proportions, and now here was Clem, at Eve’s kitchen table, telling her that bunting was being strung up, as if the fun was starting already. They’d had some for the king’s coronation last year – red, white and blue flags hanging like lines of jaunty washing between the gas lamps – but it hadn’t felt right then. It had been eighteen months after the queen’s death, but there’d still been a subdued air, as if her famous disapproval of Bertie must be considered even when she was gone. But the coming-of-age of Toby Hoyland – Lord Fulton, to use the heir’s historic title, though no one ever did – was another matter. A proper shindig, funded from the earl’s deep and plentiful coffers. It was something to look forward to.

‘Aye, ten bob for us all. Well, every ’ousehold, like.’

Clem drained his mug and wiped his mouth on his coat sleeve where, by the looks of the oily slick, he’d wiped it many times before. He sighed deeply then stood up to leave.

‘Best get on,’ he said. Then: ‘Bad business at Grangely today, ey?’ He was speaking to Eve’s back because she had turned to fill the big brown teapot with boiling water, but she stopped what she was doing and looked at him over her shoulder, puzzled. The Grangely miners were on strike, but there was nothing new in that – they’d walked out weeks ago. She felt sure Arthur would have told her if something new was afoot.

‘What bad business?’ she said.

‘Aye, a poor do. It’s evictions day. They say there’s nigh-on four hundred bobbies drafted in to chuck ’em out.’

Eve stared at him, horrified.

She said, ‘You must ’ave that wrong.’

Clem shook his head. He reached for his cap and pulled it low over his ears and brow so that he had to tilt his head back to see Eve from under the peaked brim.

‘True as I’m standing ’ere,’ he said. ‘They say there’s plenty o’ folk goin’ up to watch.’

‘Are they sellin’ tickets?’ Her voice was suddenly harsh.

‘Nay, lass …’ said Clem. He hadn’t meant to wipe the smile off her face.

‘They should be turned away, if they’re not there to ’elp them as needs ’elping,’ she said. ‘Those folk need kindness, not curiosity.’

She made no attempt to hide her bitterness – couldn’t, even if she’d wanted to. She’d seen it all her life in the coalfields; strangers gathering at a scene of misery or misfortune, travelling miles, some of them, to watch the afflicted. Bad news always spread so effortlessly. When a firedamp explosion had killed sixty miners up at Middlecar pit last month, there were so many onlookers and journalists that for a full hour after
the bodies came up, the wives of the deceased couldn’t be found in the crush.

‘Aye, it’s a bad business,’ said Clem, again. ‘Anyroad, best be off.’ He was uneasy now, anxious to be on his way; all he’d intended was to pass on a bit of gossip. He walked to the door, then turned and tipped his cap at her. ‘Good day, lass.’

‘Quiet, mind,’ called Eve as the door closed but she said it absently, without conviction, then, standing idle for a rare minute in her warm kitchen, she reluctantly allowed her thoughts to journey into the past.

Eve was a Grangely girl born and bred, and when Arthur found her twelve years ago at the chapel dance, people had warned him off her because everyone knew that nothing good came out of Grangely. Arthur knew it too and yet there she had been, proving otherwise.

In Eve’s home town, miners and their families lived cheek-by-jowl in squalid housing, built in haste from cheap, yellow brick which fifty years on had taken on the colour and the smell of the coalface. The town was owned by a syndicate of Birmingham businessmen who paid other men to run the pit, and who probably couldn’t have picked out Grangely on a map. It was a place riddled with misery and sickness, a bad beginning for a child, a bad end for an adult, but what saved Eve was an extraordinary resolve – formed in childhood, hardened in adolescence – to rise above it. Her feckless drunkard of a father had hanged himself out of self-pity when the death of his wife left him with sole charge of five children, and Eve, at thirteen, took over. She sent twelve-year-old Silas to the pit in place of his father and tried to raise the little ones herself, then watched helplessly as they died of typhoid, one
after the other, with such terrifying speed that for days afterwards Eve kept forgetting they’d gone and, remembering, would be stricken with new grief. She and Silas would sit together of an evening and plan a future away from the leaden, hopeless grind of Grangely, though neither of them knew quite how bad it had been until they had escaped. When she married Arthur – relief flooding her body as she repeated the vows and heard him do the same – Silas upped and left, heading on foot for Liverpool where he hoped to find work at the docks or on a merchant ship. He was sixteen by then, sharp as a tack and all but penniless. He promised her a bunch of bananas from the West Indies if he ever got there, but they never came; at least, they hadn’t yet. She liked to imagine him somewhere hot and exotic and the fact that she heard nothing from him sustained the possibility that she still might.

These memories of another world were as indelible as etchings on glass, but they were fainter now than they once had been and were losing their power to cause Eve pain. She had learned to relish the small details of her life, and she did so now: the warmth of the range that she leaned against, the comforting smell of new bread and beef gravy. These everyday blessings were plentiful but none the less precious for that, and she offered up a prayer of thanks for her own good fortune. Then she poured a mug of hot, strong tea for Arthur and climbed the stairs to wake him.