The Emerald Valley (10 page)

‘Mam?'

She jerked upright again impatiently, swallowing hard and sniffing.

‘It's all right, Harry. It's just that the doctor thinks his bed will have to stay down here this time. All this trouble with his breathing is playing his heart up – Vezey says he's shouldn't be doing the stairs.' She swallowed again. ‘He says he mustn't do the hill either.'

‘You mean … ?'

Charlotte faced him squarely. The tears had gone now, all of them, but her eyes were black.

‘If your Dad gets over this, he will have to take life very easy from now on. He won't be able to do any of the things he's used to doing, like his garden, or going down for a pint of an evening. He's going to be an invalid, you might say.'

‘But that will be awful for him!' Harry protested.

‘Yes, it will be, won't it?' Charlotte said. ‘And he's not an old man, Harry – he won't be sixty for another couple of years. And do you know what the doctor said? That he's
lucky
– lucky to be alive. Lucky to be in a state like he's in!'

‘Well, I suppose he is,' Harry said, thinking of men he knew who had succumbed to the chest disease before they were fifty even.

‘
Lucky!
' Charlotte yelled. ‘How can you stand there and say it? You don't know how short life is, my lad! It seems like only yesterday your Dad was young and healthy like you are – there's nothing in a year, nor ten years, as you get older. It just goes – gone! – before you can look round. And you'll be the next – especially if you stay in that filthy hole, carting coal. Oh Harry, can't you see that?'

Harry was staring into space and for him it seemed everything was coming together. The bosses who allowed terrible conditions underground to reduce a man to a pitiful heap of dust-clogged flesh and then discarded him when he was of no further use; the system that offered no real way out of the accompanying poverty; the attitude of the doctor and others like him to human beings they considered less worthy of decent treatment because of their station in life. Harry had known it already – known, as he had said, men who were thrown on the scrap-heap before they were forty – but because it had been other men and other families it had never seemed quite real before. Now it was James, his own father, who had lived through an agonising night to face a few more trying and pain-wracked years as an invalid, and suddenly the whole pattern was immediate and threatening. If it could happen to his father, then it could also happen to Jim, his brother. It could even happen to him. For a brief moment in time it seemed to Harry that he saw himself propped against the pillows in the steam-filled kitchen, struggling for breath, himself grown prematurely old in the dark, dust-filled seams.

His father had always accepted it as the way of things and Harry, trying to be a man like him, had adopted his views. Now, for the first time, he felt the injustice of it so sharply it was a physical pain, gnawing at him from within.

‘Something ought to be done,' he muttered.

Charlotte snorted.

‘All these years I've been saying that. Nobody ever seems to listen.'

‘I'm listening,' said Harry and as the pain seared upwards through his veins it seemed to mutate, spreading and taking into itself that strange, unidentified sense of purpose that had been sleeping for so long on the borders of his conscious mind.

He had always known there was something he wanted to do that was more than carting coal for a weekly wage; more than breeding fine, swift homing pigeons; more even than marrying and raising a family. And he had been confident that one day the ambition would crystalise so that he was able to recognise it.

Now, at the age of sixteen, Harry stood in the lamplit kitchen and knew the moment had come. Something had to be done to improve the lot of men like his father. Someone had to speak for them – fight for them. Suddenly the sense of purpose was burning in him more brightly than the anger or the pain.

He would do it. As yet he didn't know how, but he would do it. Harry clenched his jaw and narrowed his blue eyes. And when he spoke, there was a firmness in his voice that, for all his youth, carried conviction.

‘I'm listening, Mam! And I'll tell you something else. I'm going to make sure that people listen to me!'

For two days and two nights James fought for his life, breath by rasping breath. For two days and nights neighbours in the Rank watched the comings and goings of the family and the doctor, passing on the latest news of his condition together with the information that even if he got better, James Hall was likely to be bedridden from now on.

Then on the third day, the fever began to pass, the tortured breathing eased a little and the globules of phlegm began coming up once more to hiss and crackle in the fire.

But before the news that James was improving could be passed into the grapevine of gossip, Hillsbridge folk had something else to talk about – something which affected each and every one of them – the growing threat of an all-out strike in the pits, perhaps supported by every working man in England.

‘Trades Unions Solid Behind Miners'ran a headline in the
Mercury
on the last Friday in April, beneath it the prophecy that the events of the day would be ‘of exceptionally grave importance to the coal industry'. There was also a reprint of a notice which had been circulated by the Warwickshire Miners'Association.

‘The Miners'Federation of Great Britain is engaged in a struggle to preserve your wages, working hours and general conditions. Every man in Warwickshire is expected to be loyal to the Federation and cease work after 30th April unless otherwise instructed by us.'

It spoke for all of them and summed up the crisis. Talks in London between unions and management, on which everyone had pinned their hopes, had ended in deadlock. Not even the Government had been able to do anything to help.

And the mining community in Hillsbridge sadly acknowledged that the struggle which could prove both long and bitter had begun.

The strike which ordinary people had believed deep down could never happen took hold with a sudden ferocity that startled, frightened … and inspired.

‘It's just like 1914 all over again,' said Charlotte – and so it was.

Then, thousands upon thousands of working men had rallied round to drive Kaiser Bill out of Belgium; now they downed tools without a word of protest to try to win a living wage for the miners. Trains and buses ground to a halt, newspapers ceased to appear, building sites took on the appearance of ghost towns.

‘We'm bound to win now!' was the optimistic feeling in the bar at the Miners'Arms, and it was left to cynics like Stanley Bristow to wonder aloud how long it would last and what it would achieve.

‘Stands to reason, they'll have to give in and play fair with us,' Ewart Brixey said triumphantly. ‘We've brought the country to a halt.'

‘But for how long?' Stanley Bristow asked. ‘Oh, they've all come out on strike now because their unions have told them to. But I don't see it lasting. The unions can't afford to feed all of them and their families for more than a couple of weeks. And when they've got no money coming in and the larder's bare, they'll all be back at work before you can look round – see if I'm not right.'

‘Get on with you!' Ewart scoffed. ‘The working men of this country are sticking together this time.'

Stanley shook his head sadly. ‘But it b'ain't their fight, Ewart. No man's going to see his own family go short when he's got nothing to gain from it. That's human nature. And 't won't last, I'm telling'ee.'

‘You'm bitter and twisted, Stanley, and you have been ever since the war when they had your horses,' Ewart said nastily. Until 1914 Stanley had been the proud owner of the livery stables, but the Government had requisitioned the horses he had treated like babies for service in France and Stanley had never got over it. Now, he planted his beer firmly on the table.

‘You'm right there, Ewart. Beautiful creatures, they were, and I'd trust them before I'd trust any man. My horses wouldn't have let you down. The unions will.'

‘Well, we shall have to wait and see about that, shan't we?' Ewart grinned round at the assembled company, wiping the beer foam off his chin with the back of his hand. ‘But I'll promise you this, Stanley. This time we b'ain't going to give in. That's right, lads, isn't it?'

The chorus of agreement filled the bar. The miners were determined this time.

‘Not a penny off the pay – Not a minute on the day'was their rallying call and they meant to stick to it.

At the moment they could feel only jubilation that most of the working men in the country were solidly behind them.

However, others in Hillsbridge were less pleased by the prospect of a General Strike.

Business men in the town knew that their profit margins, meagre as they already were, would be hit hard by a shortage of money amongst their customers; farmers worried over the spectre of thousands of gallons of milk having to be poured down the drain if there was no transport to take it away; and those who had need of buses or trains to take them to the city nine miles distant wondered if they could beat their leg-muscles into submission if they could beg, borrow or steal a bicycle. They felt sorry for the miners – who would not, especially when they lived in the same community and saw how badly they were paid for their back-breaking and dangerous work – but life for them had to go on. Many had clawed themselves a foothold on the ladder of survival by enterprise and sheer hard work; some were in debt for their trouble and faced ruin if the stoppage was prolonged.

One of these was Llew Roberts, but for him the problem was even more complex, for he found himself torn between loyalty to his wife's family and his own strong instinct for self-preservation. With everything in and around Hillsbridge at a standstill, Llew knew he could not rely on his usual customers to keep his two lorries busy. If the pits closed there would be no need for new pit-props, and when the strike became general he assumed the quarries would shut down too, so that the stock of stone or gravel to haul would soon be exhausted.

But that would not stop the bills coming in. The rent on the yard still had to be paid and the instalments on the new lorry, not to mention the cost of the damage Amy had caused by her attempt at driving. Llew seemed to have forgiven her for that now, but she felt guilty that she had added to his problems – running a business meant that money had to come from somewhere or all too soon the creditors would move in – and then the years of dedication and sheer hard work would count for nothing.

‘I can't afford to have the lorries standing idle for long,' he said to Amy as they prepared for bed on the night the announcement of the General Strike was broadcast.

They had listened to it on the crystal set in the dining-room, their anxiety heightened by the deliberate calm of the announcer whose words had come, by virtue of the wonder of radio waves, direct into their home:

‘The miners are on strike. The TUC has ordered other vital industries to join them from Tuesday …'

And then, no less awesome, the broadcast message from the Prime Minister himself: ‘Keep steady. Remember peace on earth comes to men of good will.'

‘Keep steady!' Llew said now, echoing the words. ‘It's all very well for him; he doesn't stand to lose everything he's worked for.'

‘You don't know that. He might – if they bring the Government down,' Amy said.

She was sitting on the stool in front of the dressing-table to brush her honey-coloured hair as she did every night. In the mirror she could see Llew perched on the edge of the bed, frozen in the attitude of unknotting his tie. From his inactivity she knew he was worried. Usually Llew was so tired he dropped his clothes where he stood and fell into bed in a matter of seconds.

‘Well, I'm sorry, Amy. I can't concern myself about the Prime Minister,' he said vehemently. ‘It's
me
I'm worried about. I've got to keep those lorries busy or we'll be in a real hole.'

‘But how can you if nobody's working? The pits – the quarries …' She waved the brush at his reflected image. ‘There won't be anything to carry.'

‘You're wrong there,' Llew said. ‘There's bound to be things to be carried. More than usual. It's just finding out what and where.'

Her nose wrinkled. ‘More than usual? What do you mean?'

‘People must eat. Supplies will have to be moved about. And with the railways on strike and the big transport companies …'

‘Llew – you don't mean you're going to
blackleg
?' Amy said, shocked.

His head came up. ‘Have you got any better suggestions?'

‘But you
can't
!' Amy protested. ‘It wouldn't be right! The whole point of sticking together is that if things get desperate enough the Government will force the owners to give in.'

‘I can't help it, Amy. If I don't have my usual work, I must take what I can get. I can't afford
not
to. Others will, you'll see. There'll be those that come out of this richer than they were before; there always are.'

‘But it's our
own
people this strike is about!' Amy turned on the stool, her eyes blazing blue fire. ‘My Dad, my brothers –
they're
the ones who've been exploited all these years. And now at last everybody's pulling together to try to get something done about it. You can't undermine that, Llew!'

‘I need the money. The business needs the money. I can't see it go to pot, Amy. Not now!'

He stood up to unbutton his shirt and she flew at him.

‘You can't make money at their expense!'

His face darkened as it always did when his temper was barely under control, eyes narrowing, nostrils flaring. ‘I don't want to have to remind you of this, Amy, but we would owe less money if you hadn't run the new lorry into Ralph Porter's car. I'm going to have to foot that bill myself – and I don't have a money-making bush at the end of the garden!'