The Valley (15 page)

By spring the government is able to lift restrictions on electricity use, but coal stocks remain low. Shinwell meets the leaders of the new miners’ union to ask for more coal in return for his reduction of their working week from six to five days in 1946; production increases, but the country’s factories and mills and workshops still struggle to find enough supplies.

In June, Shinwell and Attlee come to speak to the Yorkshire miners at their demonstration in Barnsley. The demonstrations are vast gatherings where mining families march with their union branches and colliery bands and listen to speeches, then enjoy themselves at a gala afterwards. This year’s will be the first demonstration since the start of the war, and Winnie and Harry Hollingworth go to celebrate nationalisation and to respect the dead, nine men having died in an explosion at Barnsley Main colliery in May and five others at Manvers Main two years before that.

Roy, now in his final year at Bolton-upon-Dearne secondary modern and determined to escape the pit, refuses to go with them, but Pauline, a schoolgirl with small liberty bodices and tight brown pigtails, is excited, and squeezes between her mam and dad as they ride on the crowded bus into Barnsley. The day is bright; Pauline looks out at the countryside, with its scattered farms and villages, and at the roads crammed with buses and cars full of men, women and children. They, like the Hollingworths, are wearing their good new clothes from Whitsuntide. The women have freshly waved hair and the men hold their caps on their knees.

In Barnsley the streets are packed with families, men carrying banners, men fixing banners to frames, colliery bands in clean, colourful uniforms with polished silver buttons, warming up on trumpets and horns and drums. Pauline hears the different accents in the conversations around her – Scots, Welsh, Geordie, Lancashire – and looking at the banners she recognises some of the colliery names and images of historical scenes and past miners’ leaders. The banner from Manvers Main carries the words ‘Six Hour Day: Superannuation – Security – Stability’ and a picture of a well-dressed man paying in money at the pensions allowances counter at the post office while a girl buys stamps. It reminds her of when her dad takes her with him to the pit to collect his pay on Fridays, and sits her on the counter while he waits.

Harry goes to join the men from Manvers, and Pauline and her mam watch the procession from a spot on the pavement near Market Hill. Soon all Pauline can see, up and down the street, is a river of people, men’s caps bobbing up and down, the beautiful red and gold banners bellying out like the sails of ships: Highgate, Goldthorpe, Manvers Main, Barnburgh, Hickleton, Wath, Dearne Valley,
Peace, Love and Unity, Unity is Strength, All for Each and Each for All.
When her dad goes past, she calls out and waves to him, but at first he cannot hear her over the boom of the bands’ drums. Then he sees them, and waves back. They follow the procession through the hilly streets of swarthy houses, factories and scrub patches to Locke Park, which has fountains, statues, and an ornate observation tower. They find Harry waiting for them by the Manvers banner, and the three of them approach the bandstand, where Manny Shinwell and Clem Attlee will give their speeches.

Manny, talking into a heavy microphone, his voice amplified through speakers around the park, flatters the miners, criticises the Conservative Party, and says he needs all people gathered there to help produce more coal for all the people of Britain. Then Clem moves to the microphone and begins laying into communism and the Soviet Union. He repeats what Manny has said about the miners, and says the nation’s economy is built on coal, and Britain needs the miners’ help. ‘No one of us can carry on without depending on the work of other members of the community,’ he tells them. ‘It is the duty of every one of us, in whatever sphere of activity we may work, to give our best if we expect that others should do their fair share .
.
. You in the great mining industry are now working not for private profit but for the nation. You have the incentive of your earnings, but you have besides another powerful motive. You are at the forefront of the new society which we are building. What you will do now will be a great example to others.’

Harry, Winnie and Pauline join the long, loud applause.

In the future, Pauline’s parents will reminisce about this day and the speeches in Locke Park. They will recall being moved by Clem’s appeal, and by the feeling of connection with the other Yorkshire miners, and by a sense of atonement for the 1920s and ’30s. Winnie’s will be the purer and more straightforward recollection because even in 1947, Harry is sceptical about nationalisation. His wages have gone up, he says, but it’s the same old gaffers in charge, and some of them are awkward devils. ‘It’s your pit now,’ they say if he asks them a question, ‘so why don’t
you
tell
me
?’

Pauline will remember another moment from that Saturday, one belonging just to her and her dad. It is four o’clock and the park is washed in the soft, mellow sunlight of late afternoon. They are walking across the green on their way to catch the bus back to Highgate and her mam is a few yards ahead of them. They come to where a brass band is playing and they pause to listen. The tune is slow and dignified. When Pauline looks up at her dad she sees tears running down his cheeks.

‘Why are you crying, Dad?’ she asks.

He laughs a half-laugh. ‘I always cry at a brass band, love,’ he says. And then he puts an arm around her shoulder and they turn to go, the music lingering in Pauline’s mind until they board the bus to go home.

16 When God's Not Looking

Highgate, 1948

Despite the bleakness and hardship of the post-war years, the Mother Riley Roadshow thrives. Audiences in the small theatres and clubs may be pinched, but besides food they are hungry for laughs, knees-ups and the cheap romance of American pop songs. Harry adds new acts and buys fresh props and costumes and a new enormous leather suitcase to keep them in. On weekdays after school, Pauline pulls the suitcase from the cupboard at the top of the stairs and in the grainy landing light extracts gaudy fabrics and exotic paraphernalia: maracas, two ruby fezzes; a
camisa de flamenco
in emerald green satin with black cuffs, and a pair of black satin trousers; heavy Hawaiian grass skirts that are worn by a man and woman with pan lids over their chests in a song routine with Barney on guitar. Propped against the wall beside the suitcase are silver-topped walking canes, a shepherd's crook, and a washboard that Harry plays with thimbled fingertips, accompanying himself as he sings his own adaptations of jazz and music hall standards.

The washboard act is one of several that he also performs solo, and with these turns as well as the troupe, the singing, comedy and drumming, Harry is out entertaining three or four nights a week, sometimes a couple of times on the same evening. Millie, despite having had her fifth child, a daughter named Anne, in 1947, still sings with him. The fees mean that he is among the most well-off men in Highgate, and this is not something he seeks to hide. One weekend in the spring of 1948, Winnie, Pauline, Roy, Millie and Danny, Clara and Ernie are summoned to view Harry's latest acquisition from Clarry Basinger; a black, highly polished, nine-seater Daimler limousine, complete with running boards, dicky seat and glass partition with a speaking tube between driver and passengers. Second-hand, and possibly once owned by one of the old coal owners or industrialists, it symbolises to Juggler not only his own success, but also the modern pleasures of comfort and mobility that, he believes, can be had by anyone with hard work and verve. He celebrates by putting everyone in it – Pauline in the dicky seat – and driving them to Bridlington, talking to them through the chauffeur's speaking pipe all the way there.

The Daimler replaces the motorcycle and sidecar as the Roadshow's and the family's main form of transport. On a roll, he begins bringing home other new things, clothes, animals and musical instruments, as if determined to fill the house. On Fridays he calls at Goldthorpe police station to ask if they have stray pets that need looking after over the weekend, and he comes home with a carful of creatures and a different instrument borrowed from musician friends. This means that on most Fridays, Winnie struggles into the house with her shopping to find Harry in the sitting room playing a stilted version of a popular song on, say, a trombone, or a piano-accordion, before an audience of cats, Bonzo the dog, sundry mongrels and terriers, and a box of chicks beside the Yorkshire range. He greets Winnie with a long hoot on the trombone, which makes her even more cross, because it is a trick he always has over her – diffusing tension with a joke so he seems the easy-going one and she the trouble-causer. The dafter, the more successful, he becomes, the more she comes across as the stick-in-the-mud. ‘Give it a rest, Harry!' she says.

‘Take no notice of her!' he says to the animals, and kisses Bonzo, or perhaps a stray Yorkshire terrier, on the lips.

*

One Saturday a few weeks after the purchase of the Daimler, Harry is out drinking at the club and Winnie is in the sitting room. She has vis­­itors. Her mam has come up to spend the evening with her, and Sonny's wife May has joined them while the men are at the club. May, twenty-three, is demure and keen to be recognised as a woman of good taste. She doesn't say as much, but she feels like an outsider in the Dearne Valley. To her it seems a crude and frightening place, full of men who walk around in their vests and women who speak to each other harshly. The backings, with their untidiness, slanging matches and gossip, are like a little vision of hell, though of course Sonny is separate from that, his sobriety and mildness all the more striking for their rough setting. When she is with him, she feels protected and able to enjoy the one Dearne quality she admires: its sense of fun. Without Sonny she feels vulnerable and it is this vulnerability she feels now, as the sudden cries and shouts of people walking in the backings make her wince, and she notices Winnie watching her. (‘I sometimes think our May does it for effect,' Winnie tells Annie later. ‘
I
don't think it's noisy.') It is half past ten at night, the hour of coughing men, banging privy doors, barking dogs, buckets of beer, cheerful insults, laughter in the yards and drunks singing ‘
Bread of Heaven'
. ‘
Guide me,/O Thou Great Redeemer,/Pilgrim through this barren land .
.
.'

Sonny comes in, beery but still quite sober, and sits on a chair at the sitting-room table and tells them who he has seen at the club and what the men's gossip is. Winnie jumps up and hides
Psychic News
under a cushion because when Harry catches her reading it, he laughs, and when he's had a drink or two he never stops. She puts on a pinny over her brown, crêpe-de-Chine dress and goes to the kitchen to prepare the bread and dripping, and listens to Sonny telling May that he hasn't seen Alf, because Alf went off to watch Juggler do a couple of songs at a pub in Bolton. ‘I saw our Millie though,' he calls to Winnie. ‘She said she'd come round with Danny a bit later.'

‘A bit later?' says May. ‘It's a quarter to eleven!'

Minutes later there is an eruption in the kitchen and the sound of two men, wheezing with laughter, falling through the door and collapsing on the floor. The yellow bone-handled knife from the dripping clatters onto the lino beside them. It is Barney and Eric Roe, one of the singers.

‘Ayup Winnie,' says Barney. And Eric says, ‘Sorry about that knife.'

And then Danny is coming in, stepping over Barney and Eric with a drinker's over-carefulness, and starting to sing ‘
The Whiffenpoof Song'
. ‘
We're poor little lambs who have lost our way 
.
.
.' Barney and Eric, still on the floor, harmonise. Then Barney grabs his guitar and begins to accompany him. ‘
We're little black sheep who have gone astray –
'

Winnie tenses slightly. Sonny, her brother, the gentleman, recognises this in her and comes into the kitchen and puts a hand on her shoulder, while joining in the singing.

‘Lovely voices,' May says to Annie, thinking these men, they talk so roughly, they are so proud of their hard and filthy work, and yet when they sing it is as if their sweet, soft voices transform them; as if the brass bands, the harmonic male voice choirs and the musicians are part of a kind of spell.

In the silences between lines, through the open door comes more shouting in the backings as the men make their way home:
‘Gentlemen songsters off on a spree! Damned from here to eternity!'
The sweet tenor of Juggler Hollingworth, oiled with Vicks VapoRub and pumped loud and clear with adrenaline, cuts through the sour, smokey air of the yard, and elicits cheers from the men on the floor, and from Millie who comes in behind him.

‘Hello, Millie,' says May.

‘Ayup, May love,' says Millie, entering the sitting room. ‘You should've come wi' us tonight, we've been wi' a right crowd.'

‘Give us a kiss, my love,' calls Danny, as Millie is called back to the kitchen.

‘Get off me you drunken swine,' says Millie.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, my lovely wife!' says Danny.

The sitting room is full: the troupe, friends, family, neighbours, a couple of turns they've met, and Roy who has crept downstairs from his bedroom. Every now and again someone mentions the troupe's new chauffeur-driven ‘
lim-o-zeen
', and Harry, standing in front of the range in his new, bespoke suit and pointed shoes, promises to take people out for rides in it. He shouts into the kitchen to ask where the flaming beer's got to, and then as someone begins to play the piano, he invites Annie to stand up and give them a song.