The Emerald Valley (7 page)

There was no reply. His anger spent now, Llew laid his forehead against the doorpost, looking such a picture of dejection that for the first time Amy thought of him rather than of herself, briefly seeing the events of the day through his eyes. He did work hard, too hard, driving himself to build up the business against a certain amount of opposition from the locals, and today had clearly been long and tiring for him. It wasn't much fun for him to come home to this.

She crossed the kitchen to Llew, winding her arms around him and laying her head against his back.

‘I'm really sorry. And I'll try to put things right with Ralph Porter. Just tell me what to say and I'll go and see him and …'

Llew turned so violently that she was pushed aside and for once he made no attempt to pull her into his arms, as he usually did after a disagreement.

‘No! I'll deal with this now and you will stay at home where you belong. And Amy, if you ever attempt to drive that lorry again, I promise you I'll put you across my knee and spank you!'

Amy said nothing. Llew was not a violent man and he had never laid a finger on her, but she felt this was no idle threat. And with a twinge of shame that was almost foreign to her nature, she knew that she had earned every bit of his anger.

I wish I could have the afternoon over again so that I could do it differently, Amy thought. I would never have gone down Porter's Hill if I had known what was going to happen.

But in spite of everything there was one thing she had no desire to change.

Give her the chance again, and she would still drive the lorry!

In a shed at the end of the garden at No. 11 Greenslade Terrace, Harry Hall was watching his pigeons.

The shed was made of orange boxes and only just high enough for Harry to stand upright, but he didn't mind that. It was his own special place – his world which he had built with his own hands – and he enjoyed the feeling of privacy it gave him. Much to his mother's bewilderment he would stay here for hours, constructing new nesting boxes where the hen birds could sit on their eggs and then watching as they reared their young … the tiny, almost bald chicks which they fed with their own regurgitated food until they were big enough to take seed. Sometimes when there were too many chicks, he had to shake the eggs to addle them so that the birds sat in vain. When this happened he went to the pigeon loft less often, for it made him feel sad to think that their efforts would be to no avail, but he did it all the same. Restricting the number of young was a necessary part of keeping pigeons and Harry accepted it as a fact of life, even though at the same time it stirred in him a feeling of injustice. Some things had to be done. Addling eggs was one of them.

That evening in late April, however, the young pigeons had all hatched out healthy and well; there would be some fine flying birds amongst them and Harry hoped that he would soon be able to enter one or two for a race. The Flying Club was big in Hillsbridge – pigeon fancying was a popular hobby amongst the miners, for you didn't need to be a millionaire to take part in it – and several of the members were well-known for their success. Deep down, Harry cherished a dream that maybe one day he too would have a pigeon so fast and with a homing instinct so strong that wherever it was released it would return to the loft more quickly than any of its fellow competitors. That would show the old-timers, he thought, and the idea of shining at something – even pigeon fancying – was an attractive one.

At sixteen, Harry was something of an enigma to all who knew him. The youngest of the Halls, he had the same fair hair and skin as his brothers, the same blue eyes and stubby fair lashes, the same compact build. With the exception of Jack, they had all gone to work in the pits as soon as they were old enough – though Ted, always known as ‘a scallywag', had left now to wander round the country doing a variety of jobs and Fred, killed in France, would never set foot in the dark seams again. Harry had followed their lead without really knowing why. He had had the opportunity to stay on at school, for Mr Davies, the headmaster, had said he was sure Harry had the capability to gain a scholarship to the Higher Elementary at South Compton and Charlotte had encouraged – even begged – him to try. But Harry had not wanted to. With the same mulish stubbornness he had displayed ever since he was a small child, he had blankly refused and no amount of persuasion could make him change his mind.

‘I'm going to leave and go down the pit,' he had told his mother when she had come home after being summoned to the school for an interview with William Davies. ‘I told Mr Davies that when he had a go at me this afternoon.'

‘I know you did. That's why he sent for me – to try to get some sense into your head,' Charlotte had said impatiently. ‘He says it's a crime, Harry, to waste a brain like you've got. And he reckons that if you put your mind to it you could do every bit as well as our Jack.'

‘Be a schoolmaster?' Harry asked incredulously. ‘No, thanks!'

‘What's wrong with being a schoolmaster, I'd like to know?' Charlotte demanded. She was very proud of Jack who, now that he was properly qualified, had got himself a post in a very nice village down the county where open rolling countryside met sea.

When Harry only shrugged, she went on, ‘You don't want to be a carting boy all your life, that I do know!'

‘I won't be, don't worry about that,' Harry had replied.

Charlotte had snorted. Carting boys were the very lowest in the hierarchy of the men who worked in the narrow, dark seams beneath the green Somerset fields, and quite often they were still chained to their backbreaking work long after they could be termed ‘boys'. Their job was to shift the coal hewn at the face by the ‘breakers', dragging it by means of the infamous guss and crook through seams so narrow that they could only crawl on hands and knees.

When she had first come to the Somerset coalfield as a young bride, Charlotte had not known of the existence of the guss and crook, and at first when James had explained it to her she had laughed, certain he was ‘pulling her leg'. After all, she had thought, who in their right minds would believe that anyone could expect a lad to pull a sleigh full of coal by means of a circle of tarred rope around his waist and passed between his legs? It was too monstrous to be true! Then, when James had finally called in a young lad from further down the Rank who had recently started work as a carting boy, and pulled up his shirt to reveal a raw and bleeding band of flesh around his waist where the rope had cut into it, her amusement had turned to horror.

‘It's terrible!' she had cried in outrage. ‘It shouldn't be allowed! If the roadways aren't big enough for tubs and ponies, they should
make
them big enough!'

But James had merely shrugged. ‘It's the best way. And the lads soon get used to it. You don't know what you'm talking about, Lotty,' and she had been shocked by his easy acceptance, just as the politicians who fought in vain to get the contraption banned were shocked when their efforts were sneered at as ‘interference' by the very men forced to use it.

How could a man ever accept it? she wondered. The pain of the raw rub marks might ease as use – and the urine they rubbed in – hardened the skin, but the ignominy of being regarded as a human donkey remained. Now, faced with yet another of her children subjecting himself to it, she felt bitter and impotent.

‘Stop worrying, Mam,' Harry had advised her.

But of course she could not, and she had no intention of keeping her anxiety to herself either.

‘It's easy to get into, but not so easy to get out, Harry,' she had said tartly, her mind returning to the events of a few years previously when another of her carting-boy sons had tried to exchange his way of life. ‘Look at our Ted – when he tried to leave, the under-manager made all sorts of threats … told him that if he left he'd have to take his father with him. Of course I didn't know about it at the time – Ted saw to that, kept it to himself for the sake of his father's pride. And a good thing I didn't know, too – I'd have been down there quick-sharp and given them a piece of my mind.'

‘But Ted's not carting now,' Harry had said reasonably.

‘No, but if it hadn't been for the war he might be,' she responded. ‘They've got you where they want you once you go into the pits, Harry. Try to get away and they kick up hell's delight.'

‘They won't keep me if I don't want to stay,' Harry had replied. ‘You ought to know me better than that, Mam.'

That had silenced Charlotte. She did know him, of course, and knew that once he had made up his mind about something it would take heaven and earth to move him. Yes, come to think of it, she pitied the under-manager or manager even who tried to blackmail Harry into doing something he did not want to do. And she could not see concern for anyone else stopping him as it had stopped Ted. In Harry's world, what he wanted was the prime consideration. It was not that he was selfish, just that he took no account of anyone else.

So in this as in most things Harry had got his own way. Shortly after his fourteenth birthday he left William Davies and the Board School and secured himself a job at Middle Pit in the centre of Hillsbridge where his father and his brothers Jim, Fred and Ted had worked before him.

Unlike them, however, he had felt no thrill of pride at entry into the world of men as he walked down the hill on that first morning with his bottle of cold tea, a cognocker of bread and cheese in his bait tin and a couple of tallow candles to light his way underground. He had no illusions about the life he was going to lead, for a while at least. He knew – without even having set foot in the open-sided cage that would carry him below – of the narrow, faulted seams where ceiling was floor and floor ceiling, the heat that made men work as near naked as they could and the stale dust-filled air, freshened in some places only by a hand-driven fan known as a ‘Blow Georgie'. He knew about the diseases of the chest, the asthma and bronchitis that affected the older miners, for he had grown up with his father's rattling cough and seen him spit evil-looking phlegm into the fire from the time he could crawl. And he was aware too that the weekly wage, though riches to him, was barely enough to live on for a man struggling to keep a wife and family. But in his dogged way, Harry refused to allow himself to be put off by any of these things. Any work experience was better than none in these days of high unemployment, he reckoned. And it wasn't going to be for ever. As he had told his mother so forcibly, he had no more intention of remaining a carting boy than he had of becoming a schoolmaster. It was a stepping-stone, he felt, though at the moment a stepping-stone to what he was not quite sure.

Sometimes he thought about it as he lovingly tended his pigeons in their loft made of orange boxes, trying to identify the restlessness within him. What
was
it he wanted to do? There was an urge deep inside him so sharp that he sometimes felt he was hovering right on the brink of knowing, a sort of breathless anticipation and a stirring of excitement. He could remember feeling a little this way when he had been a child, rushing into the garden on a spring morning, smelling the freshness of the dew-wet garden, seeing a cabbage-white butterfly dance by, hearing the hens clucking contentedly in their coop at the end of the Clements'garden. The world had been there, new and full of limitless promise, and without being quite sure what he wanted from it, he had revelled in the feeling that whatever it was, he had only to decide and it would be his.

The same held true now. Harry got up with the dawn and spent most of the daylight hours far beneath the earth. He found himself accepted into the mining fraternity as his brothers had been before him, hearing for the first time in his life the conversation of men used to the company of other men, joining in the card schools and sending betting slips to the bookie, collecting his meagre wage at the end of the week and spending some of it on ‘scrumpy', the rough cider they sold straight from the barrels in the Miners'Arms. And all the time he was conscious of waiting … waiting for something to show him the way …

‘Harry! Harry – are you in there?' His mother's voice, loud as the pit hooter when she wanted it to be, carried up the garden and Harry pushed open the door of the pigeon loft. He did not want Charlotte to come barging in and disturbing the birds.

After the dim light in the shed the evening sunshine made him blink and he stood for a moment shading his eyes, a compactly built young man in an open-necked shirt and a pair of rushy-duck trousers, his bright fair hair covered by a smart blue cap.

‘What's up, Mam?'

Charlotte came near enough to speak without shouting.

‘It's your Dad, Harry. He's not at all well.'

‘I could see that at teatime.' Harry said. It was true – he had noticed the way James was hunching and wheezing, eating next to nothing – ‘not enough to keep a bird alive'as Charlotte described it – and leaving the table long before the others had finished to sink exhausted into his chair by the fire.

‘You could see how poorly he was, couldn't you?' Charlotte said anxiously. ‘And now, if you like, he's talking about going down to the Miners'Arms. I've told him there's no sense in it, but he reckons he's got some runner beans he promised our Jim and they ought to be put in this weekend. South Compton Fair Day,' she added by way of explanation, referring to the local street fair that had been held every year since being granted a Royal Charter centuries ago, and which was used by many local people as a gardening almanac.

Harry said nothing. He knew what was coming.

‘I told him if he'd forget about being so silly, you'd run down for him,' Charlotte went on. ‘You needn't stay if you don't want to – I'd rather you weren't going in pubs at your age – but I don't want your father struggling up and down that hill and that's the truth.'