The Valley (11 page)

‘Well. You
like
being modern.'

‘I don't.'

‘Yes you do. With your dancing and your .
.
. carry on.'

‘I can do old-time and modern dancing.'

This is a bad angle for Winnie. Harry frequently likes to point out that he is a serious dancer and not restricted to crazes or old styles.

‘We're not calling him Harry anyroad,' says Winnie.

‘We are.'

‘We're not.'

Harry walks over to the basket and addresses the slumbering infant. ‘We are, aren't we, kiddo? I'll be the master in my own house, won't I?'

‘It's our house,' she says. ‘And we're not calling him Harry. Or “kiddo”.'

At this point the argument is joined by Clara, who has come in from fetching more stout. Clara says she likes the name Harry as well, and she thinks they should carry on the tradition. Winnie tells her they are not carrying on the tradition, and the arguing wakes the baby, and Harry, exasperated, goes to the club for a drink.

They are still disputing the baby's name on the day of the christening as they get ready to leave the house. Amid the clatter and gathering and the sound of Roy Fox and His Orchestra on the radio, Clara points out that, given the indecision, Winnie will have to choose ‘Harry'. Winnie remains silent, thinking, thinking, thinking.

In the chapel, before the service, the minister asks delicately if they have a name. Clara smiles with a look of triumph, and Winnie says, ‘Roy.'

‘Roy,' says the minister. ‘And any second name?'

A second name! She hadn't thought of that. Clara will say Harry, and then just use that all the time.

‘Fox,' says Win. 

‘Roy .
.
. Fox?' says the minister.

Clara's mouth opens, and does not close.

‘Yes.'

‘Roy Fox .
.
. Hollingworth. Very well.'

Harry sighs. He does quite like Roy Fox's band.

10 They Only Spend It on Beer

Highgate, 1932–33

While Winnie has been nursing her baby, her father’s health has been deteriorating. The tuberculosis that makes the abscesses around his spine has spread to his lungs, causing him to cough blood, and his shrapnel wounds have opened and become re-infected, suppurating yellow pus under the bandages and poultices. On his left hip and right leg there are abscesses the size of his palm. Between them, Annie, Juggler Jane and the doctor have stopped the sores widening, but now the wounds grow deep, and are too painful for him to sleep.

The only Parkin child at home now is Sonny, Olive having married and moved with her blacksmith husband to mill country near Halifax. In the autumn of 1932, it is Sonny who helps his mam to carry Walter’s bed down so that he can lie in the quiet of the sitting room, and not have to climb the stairs. When Winnie calls to see him in his new room in November, his skin is a bloodless grey, his face cold but covered in perspiration; he looks like something that has been dug from the cold winter soil.

She stays with him for the afternoon, baby Roy in the pram, while her mam goes out to give a sitting. Waking from a doze, Walter recounts stories about when he was a boy working on farms, and about his horses, and about his long walk to Shirebrook to find work. He talks about healing and Spirit and meeting Annie, and then he is quiet again, drifting between alertness and a sort of waking-sleep state in which his eyes are open but he seems not to see or hear. When he brightens he talks to his daughter about the strike and the coal owners. ‘He said, “I’d like to see them eating grass.”
Eating grass
.’ Walter flinches as the pain bites at his insides. ‘T’ pits should be for t’ people, you know. There’s no need for all this .
.
.’

By ‘all this’ he means unemployment and poverty. In the winter of 1932–33, the South Yorkshire coalfield is at the lowest point of the slump; in some villages in the Dearne half the men are unemployed and many of those that have jobs are on short time, or drawing wages that will not support a family. They pawn their goods and borrow, and some have to go to the Public Assistance Committee, where committee officials ask questions betraying the belief that miners only drink away any money they get. In the areas where coal is easier to extract and there is less competition between districts, a man can live fairly comfortably on pit wages, but in others, fathers cannot afford shoes for their children, and whole families cram themselves into two or three rooms. Walter, like many miners, believes the answer lies in a minimum wage and the nationalisation of the pits; the mines for the miners. Some of the men had been saying this in Shirebrook when he first arrived there in 1903.

The young mother listens to Walter reminiscing until he drifts out again, and then she just sits, with her father and her son sleeping near her in the dwindling light. Dusty net curtains twitch like anxious ghosts in the window draughts. Outside she can see the empty lane and fields tufted with dead brown grass; in the room the firelight catches the brass handle of the ornamental dagger on the wall. She puts coal on the fire and watches the landscape outside grow dark until her mam comes home from her communion with the dead.

In December, as the diseased abscesses deepen and night sweats grow worse, a doctor comes to examine Walter and finds that the tuberculosis has spread beyond his lungs to his other organs. The healer has passed beyond the help of doctors and Spirit now; an old man, Annie she says to Winnie, just forty-three but a bleeding old bag of bones.

By the end of January, he is alternating between half-mad feverish gabbling and tired, sunken-cheeked stupefaction. Annie sits up with him through the nights, sleeping in the day when Sonny or Winnie can relieve her. In the late, lamplit hours of 6 February 1933 she is alone with him when he falls into a deep unconsciousness, and she listens to his breathing grow erratic and watches the skin of his fingers and scalp lose its colour. Finally she feels his spirit move and pull away from his body.

Annie closes her husband’s mouth and draws down his eyelids, sends Sonny to tell Millie and Winnie the news, and then lays out the corpse of the young man who, twenty-five years ago in a stone church, had laid his hands upon her for healing. First she undresses him and washes him head to toe, wiping the old scars and badly mended bones, and then she pulls some cotton wool from its package and shapes it into stoppers that she inserts into each nostril and, shoving her hand beneath his body, his anus. There is more lifting and shoving as she cuts, folds and puts on a cotton-cloth nappy, and then slips over that a pair of clean long johns and a nightshirt. Almost done now, Walter. She binds his chin, enfolds his arms over his chest, and puts his prayer book under his right arm. Finally she takes from her purse two dark pennies which she rubs on her cuffs and places on his eyes. Then she kisses him and goes upstairs to sleep.

In the morning she will withdraw the money they had saved and order for him an oak casket with polished brass handles. Later, friends and sons-in-law will bear him past the houses with curtains drawn, down the hill to the Bolton-upon-Dearne graveyard at the bottom of the valley.

It is almost eighteen years to the month since he sent the letter about the bullet.
Keep your spirits up. They have not broken mine, as heavy a fire as I have been under, and I don’t think they will. Kiss the children for me, and remember me to all at home.

11 The Magic Half-Pint

Highgate and Skegness, 1936–38

‘Right. Are you ready?’

It is an autumn night in 1937. In the sitting room at Number 34, Highgate Lane, an expectant crowd has gathered: Winnie, Juggler Jane, Danny, Millie and their new baby daughter Pamela, the children, Roy, Tommy, Brian and Barbara. In the passage Harry is calling to them as he waits to make his entrance.

‘I said “Are you ready?”’

‘Yes!’ they all shout, they are ready. Get on with it!

The door opens, and Harry walks in wearing a curly ginger wig, a long satin skirt like Jane’s, a shawl, and a hat with ribbons tying under the chin. Below the hem of the skirt his audience see the frills of a pair of bloomers. He is carrying a bottle of whisky and his gait is deliberate and slow.

Winnie sighs in mock embarrassment. Millie, Roy and Tommy laugh, and Jane, sucking at a clay pipe, looks nonplussed. The clothes are not old-fashioned to her, though she is puzzled as to why her grandson is wearing them.

‘Mother Riley!’ says Millie, and Harry smiles.

‘Aye,’ he says, ‘but watch this.’

He walks across the room, pauses, and licks his lips, then he brushes back the ginger curls of his wig, puts his right hand under his long black skirt and produces from somewhere near his thighs a full half-pint of bitter, which he drinks off in one.

His audience is speechless. Roy breaks the horrified silence. ‘How did you do that, Dad?’

‘Do it again, Uncle Harry!’ says Tommy.

‘You’re not really going to do that in front of people,’ says Winnie. ‘Are you?’

Harry repeats the trick, and then explains that it is part of a new act based on Arthur Lucan’s Old Mother Riley character. In the last few years Harry has become popular as a drummer, comic and singer, well known in the valley for his ad-libbed version of ‘
All of Me’
, but he has been trying to think of ways to increase his bookings and his fees. Seeing his first Old Mother Riley film has given him an idea: a ribald South Yorkshire take on Lucan’s act, but with the beer gimmick. If that works, he will add his version of the Sand Dance, which has become popular on the back of a craze for Egyptiana following the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, and for which he has bought fezzes, fake moustaches, long white nightshirts and sandals. To the two copy acts he adds a third one of his own. For this nameless character, Harry tapes pitmen’s metal Dudleys to his body, and wears women’s stockings with dripping tins pushed inside them. Over this he wears a floral-print dress and finishes off the look with the application of foundation, lipstick, eye make-up and rouge, and sometimes the ginger wig. The effect is more frightening than anything else, but when he takes his drumsticks and plays the Dudleys and dripping tins as if his whole body is a drum, the audiences will go wild.

Roy and Tommy want to see it all now. Winnie says he’s barmy and she won’t be able to show her face again in Highgate, but privately she thinks his ideas are good, and a part of her likes the idea of a husband who is popular and acclaimed.

Harry will never tell anyone how he carries the half-pint under his skirt, but the trick and the Mother Riley take-off appeal to promoters. With Millie often performing with him, he is booked for bigger clubs around Doncaster and Barnsley and moves up the bill, adding the Sand Dance and the Dudley drumming as he goes. Winnie welcomes the extra money because pit wages are low and the chances of being made unemployed high; that autumn the Jarrow Marchers pass through Barnsley, and King Edward VIII goes to mining villages in South Wales and says that something must be done to get the people work. For Millie the fees make up for the loss of earnings after Danny retires from professional boxing and shifts to training lads in the Bolton-upon-Dearne gymnasium. It is she who will be doing the travelling now, says Harry, and she had better get ready because this act is going places.

*

‘Skegness?’ says Winnie one Sunday morning in June 1938, as a hungover, late-rising Harry eats a breakfast of bacon and eggs, the radio humming fuzzily in the background. 

‘There’s nowt wrong with Skegness,’ says Harry. ‘You like it.’

Skegness is busy and booming, with a Butlin’s holiday camp just opened and new gardens, baths and a boating lake on its foreshore pulling in East Midlands families with money to spend.

‘I do like it,’ she says, ‘but I don’t disappear off to it on a Saturday night, though.’

‘More’s t’ pity.’

‘Shut up, Harry. Who’s booked you?’

He tells her the name of the pub. ‘Twenty-five bob.’

Winnie catches herself. Twenty-five shillings is a lot, even after it’s been shared out with Millie.

‘How are you going to get there?’

Feeling optimistic that the Skegness booking will be a success, Harry has already purchased a secondhand tandem from a couple in Goldthorpe. Millie, though doubtful at first, has decided she is game.

‘Our Millie’s as daft as you are,’ Winnie says when Harry confesses.

‘It’s ambition,’ he replies. ‘Tha’s got to start somewhere.’

After lunch on the Saturday, Harry and Millie pack their costumes and props into bags, tie them to the tandem’s frame, and set off at a wobbling pace along the road that leads to Doncaster and then to the open flat country and the sea. It is a fine, warm day and they reach the town in five hours, stopping off at a pub on the way for a pint of bitter and a half of stout. The act goes down well and they are offered a repeat booking. As they cycle home through the warm, dark countryside, they sing their songs and make plans, and the next morning Harry tells Winnie that he was right: Skegness will be only the beginning of the venture.

Harry talks to some acts he knows and pitches them to promoters as a music-hall troupe called the Mother Riley Roadshow, with him as compère and Millie as vocalist. After a few weeks of rehearsing and plugging they get a foot-of-the-bill booking at a theatre in Rotherham, and Harry paints posters, drills the acts, and grows anxious and irritable with Winnie until the afternoon comes when he can get on the tandem and set off towards the bright lights of the city to the south.