Netherwood (5 page)

For his part, Arthur had dreamed of Eve long before he met her. He told no one this, not even Eve herself because it sounded soft, but he had seen her, in precise detail, and it was the only dream he ever remembered having. His unconscious mind had summoned her and she had stood before him and lifted her hand up to his cheek and caressed him softly, and the image of her face – the shape of it, her features – had stayed with him as clearly as if he had her photograph in his waistcoat pocket. So when he saw her for the first time, he recognised her at once. Their engagement had followed so swiftly that folk had talked, but he had known that Eve was his intended. Their union was meant to be.

His faith in fate had been well rewarded, although the casual observer wouldn’t necessarily have thought so had they chanced upon the scene in Eve’s kitchen that morning, as Arthur brought his fist down on the kitchen table, making spoons and crockery bounce on the oilcloth surface and overturning the jug of milk, as if a small earthquake had struck in the bowels of Beaumont Lane.

He rarely lost his temper and more rarely still lost it with Eve, because when he did his anger swelled and heaved within him like a separate entity, more powerful than himself, and it alarmed him. But today she had maddened him, going on and on as he ate about the evictions at Grangely. Had he heard about them? Of course he had. So why hadn’t he said owt? Because there’s nowt to say. Nowt to say about thousands of men, women and bairns cast out into the street on a January
morning? Eve, fire in her eyes, had spat the words at her husband, challenging him to claim indifference.

‘It’s colliery business,’ he’d said. ‘They mun go back to work if they want to keep a roof over their ’eads.’

‘Ha!’ Eve, hands on hips, stalked the brief distance between table and range as if the small room could barely contain her. ‘Go back to work? Twenty-five weeks of strikin’ and near-starvation for no gain?’

Arthur pushed his bowl aside. ‘Nob’dy said it’s fair, Eve,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry for ’em, like you. But it’s a plain fact – them ’ouses are for working miners. If you ask me, they’re lucky not to have been turfed out before now.’

‘If you ask me,’ Eve spat back at him furiously, ‘those miners are ’eroes, and if you can’t see that then you’re no better than the buggers who own that ’ell ’ole.’

She knew she’d gone too far, even before Arthur smashed his fist on to the table top, and if she’d been swift with an apology he might not have reacted so violently. The whole wretched row could have been defused and reduced to a difference of opinion. But Eve was never swift with a sorry; sometimes it didn’t come out at all, no matter how badly she wanted to say it or how clearly a situation demanded it. She knew, of course she did, that between Arthur and the profiteers at Grangely Main lay a world of differences; she knew he was as loyal to his peers as he was to her, that he would lay down his life for a colleague as readily as he would for his children. But today, in her fury, she chose to take him for a company yes-man, a craven wage slave. It was unjust but, for a fleeting moment, profoundly satisfying.

‘Oh aye,’ she said with a sneer. ‘You can chuck your weight about at ’ome right enough. But there are two lots of strength, Arthur. Strength of body and strength of mind, an’ it takes a real man to stand up for ’is rights an’ the future of ’is bairns.’

How in God’s name had this started, thought Arthur. Not twenty minutes ago she was rousing him from his bed with a cup of hot, sweet tea and now she stood before him like one of the three furies. He pushed back his chair and got to his feet, leaving the table in disarray. His snap tin was on the sideboard, already packed by Eve with bread and beef dripping and an apple. One of them had to stop this, and he reckoned by the look on her face that it had to be him. He picked up his snap and dropped it into the pocket of his jacket. She watched him, hiding her anxiety that he would leave for work without fighting back, but unable to be the first to break the silence. He turned to her and his face was dark with the struggle to stay calm.

‘Everything I do,’ he said, quietly, ‘everything, is for you an’ t’bairns.’

‘Aye, an’ Lord ’oyland,’ said Eve, prolonging the bitterness even as she told herself to stop.

‘Aye, for ’im an’ all,’ said Arthur. ‘For ’im as provides me with a good living and puts a decent roof over us, and cares for t’sick and t’needy in Netherwood. ’E deserves my loyalty, and I’m not ashamed to say it. But them up at Grangely, they ’ave bad bosses and they mun act according to their lot. The only thing they’ll get from railing against their miserable lives is more misery.’

He pulled on his cap and tied a plaid scarf snug round his throat. He felt the pleasure of being in the right and it made him generous towards his feisty wife.

‘There’s nowt to be done about it, Eve,’ he said. ‘It’s a bad do, but not our business.’ He opened the back door to leave. ‘I’ll see thi at two.’

‘You won’t,’ she said, far from ready to make her peace. ‘I shall still be at Grangely. Them folk need as much ’elp as they can get.’

He turned back, goaded into delaying his departure for
work. Until she said it, Eve had no real notion of going anywhere, but now she’d uttered the words she wouldn’t retract them. She cursed her quick tongue, silently. She’d have to take Ellen with her, and there was work enough here at home to keep a small army occupied. But there was no backing down now, not for Eve Williams. She’d committed herself to an eight-mile walk – four miles there and four back – in mid-winter with a child strapped to her hip, just to shock her husband out of his complacency. She expected him to protest now, to raise objections, to attempt to forbid the fool’s errand but he just stood for a moment, letting the cold into the kitchen and regarding his wife with an expression she couldn’t read.

Then he said, ‘Why?’ and Eve heard herself give him a pious earful about duty and compassion, yet still her husband wouldn’t be drawn.

‘If tha’s got to go, then go,’ he said, maddeningly. ‘But take care o’ thissen.’ He pulled the door to and was gone. Eve listened bleakly to his receding footsteps, then she heard Lew Sylvester’s greeting – ‘Ey up’ – as he fell in with Arthur, then they were too far away to be heard.

Arthur had had to strike once himself, ten years back, in 1893, when the earl’s miners all walked out – many of them without conviction – in support of the Great Coal Strike. They were out for months, reliant on soup kitchens and handouts, but it wasn’t memories of the deprivation or the hunger that had stayed with Arthur, it was the shame he felt when four platoons of mounted troops rode through Netherwood, called to defend Lord Hoyland and his family from the insurgents. There was no need, of course; there was nothing personal in the strike action, at least so far as the Netherwood
miners were concerned. So although the dragoons and lancers held their positions on the great lawn of Netherwood Hall for almost three months, they never saw action. At the end of the strike the earl had written an open letter to his employees, and Arthur had hung his head at the words: ‘I am at a loss to understand why you would lay my pits idle,’ he wrote. ‘I had expected the loyalty of my men to match that of mine to them.’ There were, of course, employees of Lord Hoyland who were unmoved by the admonishment, but not Arthur. The day the pits were re-opened and the miners returned to work – all of them forbidden by the earl to join a union or ever again withdraw their labour – was one of the happiest days of his life.

Arthur’s shift began at 5am and his home in Beaumont Lane was ten minutes’ walk from New Mill Colliery, but he always allowed twenty minutes for the journey in order that he could take his time. He hated to rush anywhere, and wherever his destination, Arthur would undertake the journey with his customary unhurried stroll. Plus, just as he hated to rush, he also hated to be late. He’d worked for Lord Hoyland since he was a lad and he had never yet failed to clock on, not once in over thirty years. Indeed his punctuality had become a matter of honour and – since the strike – a manifestation of Arthur’s deep-rooted loyalty to his employer. There were younger men at New Mill who muttered among themselves about long hours and low pay, but they didn’t have an ally in Arthur and would fall silent if they saw him coming. His deference to the master was increasingly out of step with the times, but there were few men at New Mill with the stomach to tell him. Arthur Williams commanded respect among his colleagues.

The truth was that Arthur was unusually content. Even as a ten-year-old lad, when he first started at New Mill, he had felt part of an endeavour that was almost noble and certainly supremely worthwhile. He arrived with honour already
conferred upon him by his father, killed in an explosion six years previously and still spoken of with reverence at the colliery. Arthur had imagined he would be sent down the mine, but his first job had been on the surface, at the screens; he stood at steel conveyors in a dimly lit and dusty hut and sorted lumps of stone from the piles of coal, throwing them into wagons which then carried the unwanted muck to the stacks outside. The iron plates of the belt squealed demonically under the strain and the dust was sometimes so thick that he couldn’t see the boy next to him, but Arthur was stoical. Every day though, he asked the overman when he could go down, and every day received the same reply: ‘Soon enough, lad, but tha’ll rue the day.’

At twelve he got his wish and was given the job of trapper, waiting for coal wagons and opening and closing the wooden doors that controlled the flow of air underground. Other boys shivered in the dark passages, whimpering when their lamps were accidentally extinguished, longing for the time when their shift would end and they could be carried back up to the surface of the earth, but not Arthur. It was as if he had a bright ember of self-sufficiency burning at his core to sustain him. At the end of his first underground shift, he stepped into the cage next to a boy taller and older than himself but whose face was rigid with trauma.

‘’Ow’s tha got on?’ said Arthur.

‘Shockin’,’ the boy said. ‘’Ow about thee?’

‘Aye, shockin’ an’ all,’ said Arthur, to be kind. But he hadn’t meant it, not at all. The subterranean sounds and smells didn’t startle him, just as conditions underground didn’t faze him. All these years later, he still walked to the pit with purpose and walked home with satisfaction, and there wasn’t a job at New Mill that Arthur couldn’t turn his hand to. He was a miner now, of course, a hewer of coal, pitting himself against the earth, hacking at the seams until they yielded their treasure,
unwillingly, lump by lump. And he enjoyed the effort of it, even when he was blinded by mingled sweat and coal dust and his arms ached to the marrow of their bones; he liked the camaraderie too, the dry Yorkshire humour of his workmates, their bluntness, their dependability. But all of this he barely acknowledged to himself, let alone shared with anyone else.

C
ertainly Arthur wouldn’t have let on to Lew Sylvester or Amos Sykes, the two men who generally worked alongside him. Just as, this morning, he wouldn’t let on to them about his blazing row with Eve. It was a private matter, nobody’s business but his own. Nevertheless he felt a throb of disquiet when the subject of the Grangely evictions came up on their way to work. Amos had joined Arthur and Lew, as he always did, on the corner of Brook Lane, and as they clomped their way through the sleeping streets of Netherwood, Lew said, ‘What about them poor bastards at Grangely then?’

‘Aye,’ said Amos. ‘Poor do.’

‘It’s all over now.’ Lew’s voice sounded foolishly gleeful. ‘Waste o’ bloody time that were.’

Amos shot him a withering glance. The local radical, he saw possibilities in the Grangely strike that reached far beyond regional concerns. Lew’s ill-informed fatalism disgusted him.

‘It’s folk like thee that’re a waste o’ bloody time, lad,’ he said now. ‘Grangely men mun stand firm, stick to their guns. They mun say what needs to be said.’

His vehemence was met by silence; Lew wasn’t equal to a response, Arthur wasn’t in the mood. This was usually the
case. Amos – clever, widely read, politically well-informed – could be impressive when his dander was up, but his intellectual energy rarely found a satisfactory outlet; he was a soapbox orator without a crowd. He knew Arthur’s views well; they were commonly held in Netherwood where the earl gave his workers little to kick against. But Amos had travelled the country. He had taken part in miners’ rallies in Nottingham and Durham, had once heard Keir Hardie speak in Merthyr Tydfil, and, while he was forced to keep a low profile in his own region, he was on nodding terms with Ben Pickard, the great tub-thumper of the Yorkshire Miners’ Association. These were good men, god-fearing men, and they spoke from their hearts about strength through unity and the rights of the working man. Like an apostle of the Lord, Amos longed to spread the truth of their message, but here he was, walking to work with Lew and Arthur, and one of them wasn’t worth the argument while the other didn’t want to hear it. Amos blazed silently and chewed the inside of his cheek.