The Children's Book (15 page)

Olive Grimwith persisted in Olive Wellwood, not least because of the steady presence of Violet Grimwith, who had been little at the time of the disasters, and nevertheless felt the pull of roots, wanted to remember
things
, would say suddenly “Do you remember bread and dripping on Sunday? Do you remember greasing pit boots?”

It was Olive who, when she could not avoid it, could remember Peter and Petey, Lucy and Dora. Or so Olive thought.

The storyteller was not Lucy, who taught them their letters, and tried to teach them manners. It was Peter, who came home for his tea, his clothes stiff and black with coal dust, his eyes and lips red in his coal-black face, his fingernails broken and engrained with jet. He took Olive on his knee, after his bath, and told her tales of the world underground. He told her about the living creatures down there, the soft-nosed ponies who trundled tubs of coal along the tunnels, the mice and rats who whisked in and out of the ponies’ nosebags, ate the miners’ snap and chewed their candles, if they were not careful. He told her about the bright yellow canaries, trembling and hopping in their cages. They were a living alarm-system. If they suddenly fell dead, it was a signal of the approach of one of the invisible terrors, choke damp, white damp, fire damp. These were gases released from the deep slumber of the coal by the hammers and pickaxes of the miners, or by the collapse of a section of pit-props. For the coal, Peter Grimwith told his daughter, had once been living forests—forests of ferns as high as trees and brackens as fat as barrels and curling things that were scaly like snakes. And they were sunk and compacted into ancient mud. You could find the ghost of a leaf, millions of years old, or the form of a thirty-foot dragonfly, or the footprint of a monstrous lizard. Most wonderful was the idea that their vegetable death had only been suspended. The three damps were the exhalations of the gases of their interrupted decay. He told her the names of the dead plants which now smouldered and flared in their kitchen grate. Lepidodendron, sigillaria. He told her the scientific names of the gases that were the “damps.” Carbon dioxide, which smothered you fast. Carbon monoxide, which crept up on you, peacefully so to speak, smelling of violets and other sweet flowers. And methane, “which is what comes out of the back end of cows, Olive,”
which was the fire damp. There were tales that rats sneaking off with smouldering candles had sparked huge explosions. “Perhaps you could put a match to a cow, Olive,” said Peter, and Lucy said “Hold your tongue, that’s not a nice thing to tell a girl.”

There were stories too of invisible inhabitants of the mines—beings known as knockers who could be heard tapping, a creature called Blue-cap, who was clothed in a flaring light-blue flame, and sometimes helped to push the tubs, a mischievous bogle-thing, called Cutty Soams, who delighted in cutting the soams, or traces, by which the ponies and the workers pulled the tubs and trams. You did well to put out a ha’penny for them, if you knew they were there. His tales of kobolds were as practical and as vivid as his tales of rats and canaries.

He brought home in his pocket, from time to time, a coal with a fernleaf apparently incised in it. And twice he brought one of the “coal-balls” for which the Gullfoss mine was famous. A coal-ball is a preserved knot of once-living things, compacted together, leaves, stems, twigs, seed-pods, flowers and sometimes even seeds, millions of years old. Olive Wellwood still had these petrified lumps, but she showed them to no one.

Edward, a big boy like his father, had gone cheerfully down the mine, or so Olive thought, if she thought about it, for she had never “known” Edward, who was too big to notice her. Petey, on the other hand. Petey. He was a year older than she was, and took after the mother, rather than the father, a slight little person, though wiry, with his mother’s fine mouse hair. (Olive’s raven abundance came directly from Peter.) He was a boy who wrote poems, and knew the names of flowers and butterflies, and said to Olive that he knew he must go down the mine, but it was not what he wanted. What? Olive whispered into his ear, in the dark, in bed, where they clutched each other for warmth and comfort. What do you want? And Petey said, it’s hardly worth me thinking to want anything, since I can’t have it. And Olive said,
I
would think, if I was a boy. And Petey said, isna that t’same thing, really? Tha knaws tha mun be a girl, an I knaw I mun go down t’pit.

Petey went down the pit, as he must, and because he was little, was set to watch a gate, as a trapper. The tunnels’ ventilation, and the containment
of fire damp, depended on a series of low gates that were operated by small boys, squatting in holes scooped out of the pit-wall, holding a string, which they pulled, to let the trucks pass. They sat for twelve-hour shifts in the dark, under the low roof, waiting for the sound of approaching trucks. Petey told no one how frightened he was both of the dark, and of the shifting narrowness of his hole, with miles of earth, and coal, and stone pressing on it, and somehow on him. But the night before he went down the first time he gripped Olive tightly and said “What if I canna? What if I darena?”

And Olive had an imagination of herself, asked to go down there, and of how she would begin to scream and flail in the descending cage, howling to return to the surface. For she could not imagine bending her neck under that threshold, creeping willingly into that dark. They held each other and trembled, and there were tears on both faces, hot and wet.

When he came up, the first time, Petey said, it wer non sa bad. But the next morning, Olive could feel him rigid with terror.

He got used to it. He had been tugging his string in the dark just under a year, when far above, the bed of the River Gull trembled, quaked and boiled with bubbles, which were observed by an interested farmhand. This man saw, to his amazement, the river begin to pour away from both sides, through a gaping chasm under its banks. He began to run. He understood that the earth between the bed of the river and the roof of the mine had given way, and water was pouring into the workings. He ran two miles to the pithead, and men went down with messages, and others came back, who had managed to sidestep the rolling torrent, which was filling up tunnels and shafts, cutting off communications with outlying passages.

Petey’s little hole filled up. Olive did not know if it filled up fast or slowly, if he had tried to escape, or been immediately overwhelmed. Bodies of boys—six of them, and seven men—were sucked along and spat out by the coil of filthy black water. A rescuer fell into an unexpected pothole and was also drowned.

There was a service in the Chapel and a collection for a memorial stone near the site of the disaster. Peter Grimwith seemed smaller. He walked hunched, looking at the ground. He took Olive on his knee still, after tea—she was almost too big—but he had little to say, no stories, no pocketed secrets. Lucy did not weep in front of the other children. She was pregnant, she coughed perpetually, the rims of her eyes were
scrubbed and red. She too, despite her swollen belly, seemed to be shrinking.

Six months later the whole village was shaken by a series of booms and cracking sounds. They knew what it meant, they lived in dread of it. Everyone left what he or she was doing—a pie half-covered, a boot half-cleaned, the newspaper squares torn up for the ash pits—and went quickly, a few running, most walking fast, very fast, to the head of the shaft, where flames and cinders and hot grit were flying in the evening air. Men came up, and tried to say where the damage was, where men must be trapped. Olive stood holding Violet’s hand, because Violet had grasped her. She would have preferred to have no human contact,
not to be
, to be in abeyance altogether. Not knowing was intolerable. He was alive, he would come up, they would cling to him and weep. He was dead. They would bring up his body. Or not, if it was consumed, or buried too deep in the treacherous carbon swamp.

They never found him, nor any of those who had been working with him. The waiting was as long, and as bad, as could be imagined.

Once Olive woke at night with the idea that Peter and his mates were still alive down there, in a pocket of air behind palaces of rubble, waiting for rescue that couldn’t, and didn’t, reach them.

These two stories were folded away in the oiled, roped package. The knots were sealed. The woman walked across the moor, in the wind, with the closed, calm parcel, containing the obscene things.

When Lucy took to her bed and began to die, with the new baby who refused meekly to take milk, or begin to live, Olive stood by her bed, still as a stone. Violet was wonderful. She made beef tea, having begged the beef from the neighbours, she spooned it into Lucy’s cracked lips, she wiped her face, she stroked her hands, she bent over and pulled back the red eyelids, peering under and in. Lucy’s sister, Ada, came from Batly and urged Lucy to live. Auntie Ada and Violet were not friendly to Olive. Stir your stumps, cried Ada. Violet whimpered, and shook the dying woman, compulsively. The person who saw how it was with Olive was Lucy herself, who said in her own mind, struggling less and less often to consciousness, she’s taken too much, she’s all done in. But she found she couldn’t lift her hand to beckon to Olive, or get her mouth to form words. Her last real emotion was anxiety over Olive’s
stony stare. Don’t be hard, she wanted to say, and couldn’t. Well, if I can’t, I can’t, she said to herself, and closed her eyes for ever.

Auntie Ada’s husband, George Mablethorpe, had had an accident in the pit five years earlier. His hip had been crushed by a fall of rock. He sat at home and mended things—boots and shoes, broken china with invisible rivets. There was a son, Joe, who worked down the pit and brought home some of his wages, but the family’s income, and standing, were precarious. Ada was a dressmaker. She sewed pit clothes in heavy cloth, servants’ uniforms, skirts and petticoats. She set Violet, who was good with a needle, to helping her and learning her craft. Olive was good with books, but not with a needle. She had won a scholarship to the high school, and Peter had been proud of her. Auntie Ada let her go on going to school for a year. When she came home at teatime she worked. She scrubbed the wooden closet seat. She knelt on the cement floor to scrub it and she scrubbed the floor, in its stink. She cleaned boots, she peeled potatoes, she polished knives, she scrubbed the front doorstep. Auntie Ada decided she couldn’t be kept in clean pinafores and tidy boots and took her away from school. She didn’t like Olive. She decided to send her into Service. That way, she would not need feeding, and could send back some of her earnings.

Olive went first to be a housemaid for the owner of a vegetable shop in Doncaster. She wore a black stuff uniform and a heavy pinafore, and an ungainly starched cap like a helmet. Her legs were too thin for the black cotton stockings which hung in folds round her ankles. She was an object of disgust to herself, and her employer felt her presence as baleful. She was sent back to Auntie Ada, and said not to give satisfaction. Auntie Ada bent her over her own sharp knees and beat her with a hairbrush.

She was sent off again, after consultation with the minister at the Chapel, to be maid of all work to two maiden lady schoolteachers in Conisborough. The Misses Bean had a bookcase full of books, and were genteel. Olive had to pretend to be two maids—a scullery maid enveloped in a mob cap and a thick apron, a parlour maid who brought tea in a starched lacy crown and a frilly apron, with a bib. She hated these clothes. When she looked at her face in the mirror in the morning she imagined a lady, in a ball-gown and a coronet sort of thing. She was growing prettier, and could see it.

If Olive had been nicer, or more pliable, or more pathetic, the Misses Bean would have discovered that she had been made to give up a scholarship, and might even have lent her some books, or sent her out to lectures or evening classes. But she continued to look haughty and baleful, and they continued timidly to criticise her ironing, or darning, or silver-polishing. There was a day of hideous embarrassment for all three of them when Olive came into the breakfast-room and said she would have to give notice, as she believed she was dying.

“Dying of what?” asked Miss Hesther Bean.

“Of an issue of blood,” said Olive, quoting the Bible, cramped by her first period, bleeding profusely, completely uninformed. The Misses Bean could not bring themselves to explain. They sent for next-door’s Cook, who explained, roughly, not kindly, and showed Olive how to cut up, and wash, strips of old sheets.

She told herself stories. She had told stories to Violet, when they were little. “There was a green cow and it
would not
go into its shed, no matter how hard it got hit. It
would not
, because it didn’t want to, and they got dogs to bark at it, and they got ropes to pull it, and, and, and, they put hay for it in its shed, but it
would not.”
“Why wouldn’t it, Olive?”

“I dunno,” said Olive, whose vision of the cow’s extremity was clear, but who saw no reasonable outcome.

She lived in two stories when she was in Service. One was conventional enough. There was once a noble lady who had been stolen from, or had to flee, her true home, and was living in disguise, in hiding, as a kitchen maid. Riddling the ashes, after all, was what such heroines had to do, they were all smeared and bleared with ash on the path to their epiphany in ball dress and jewelled slippers. There was need of a prince, and she looked for him, as maidens did in folk-magic, swimming out of the darkness behind her candlelit face in the mirror (she was going to be beautiful, that was something, the ugly duckling was qualified to be a swan, the ash-girl to be a bride). Only there was no substance to the shadow. There were words. Handsome, dark, dangerous, wild (she read romances). But no solidity. He was faceless. And worse, he did nothing,
so there was no story, only the significant ash-riddling. Once she found a real little jewelled pin in the ashes, hot gold, with tiny blue stones and enamelled leaves. She took it out, and hid it behind a brick in the wall of the backyard. It was a talisman. But the magic it would work was not yet brewed.