The Valley (16 page)

In the kitchen, Winnie is furiously sawing at the loaf and spreading the thick, uneven slices with dripping, while Millie takes platefuls of food into the sitting room. Alf comes in carrying a bucket of beer from the beer-off and sets it on the sitting-room table so that everyone can dip in glasses grabbed from Winnie's kitchen or sideboard. Through the doorway, Winnie watches Alf, and notices that he scoops up only half a glassful.

May asks Sonny to come outside to get some air with her. As they go out, two men May does not know, carrying brown glass bottles of beer, are waiting to be let in. ‘We've come for t' sing-song,' says one of them.

In the yard May and Sonny lean against a wall. Voices from the backings, silver stars. A toilet flushes and Reg Spencer from next door comes out, weaving slightly. Sonny affectionately tells him to get to bed.

‘Crikey, Sonny,' says May. ‘Hellzapoppin!'
Hellzapoppin
is the name of a film they saw just after Sonny came back from the Merchant Navy.

‘Mighty fine party,' he says.

Sonny says ‘mighty fine' a lot, it being a favourite phrase of his hero Bing Crosby.

Suddenly they hear shouting from a house in the next yard down. A man curses, a woman cries out, and there is the sound of something scraping on the floor. Sonny tells a startled May that it will be Arthur Copper laying into his wife, Peggy. He always gives her a good hiding on Saturday nights.

‘Somebody should stop him.'

Sonny sighs. ‘Whoever does, she'll go tomorrow morning and tell them to keep their noses out.'

Another cry, scraping, a bump.

May's eyes fill up. ‘Wait here,' Sonny says, and he opens the door and calls into the sitting room. ‘Juggler!' Stiltingly, clumsily the singing peters out. ‘Come and sort Arthur out. He's giving Peg some right hammer.'

‘What have I got to do wi' it?'

Harry is not known as a fighter, but he is sometimes asked to help out because he is tall.

‘She'll gi'e me hell in t' morning,' he says, but he is going now, with Alf following, steam rising from the heat of their bodies as they step into the night air. Some of the guests come out and peer over the wall as Harry goes into the next-door's yard and slaps on Arthur's door.

‘Gi'o'er Arthur! Leave her!'

A guilty pause: quiet in the yards, quiet in the backings, everything still beneath the stars.

‘Bugger off Juggler.'

Harry, followed by Alf and backed up by Sonny, pushes open the door. In the yellow-gold rectangle of the kitchen light, May can see a woman holding her face. She hears the rush and clatter of fighting as Harry seizes Arthur and Alf throws a saucepan of water over Arthur's head. The scuffling subsides and soon all anyone can hear is Harry telling Peggy to get to bed and leave her husband where he is.

Harry and Alf adjust their collars and ties as they go back to the party, and Harry complains that he has a wet patch on one of his best shirts. ‘Come on, Nance,' he shouts to Annie, ‘leave thy crystal ball alone and let's have a song!' and everyone follows in behind them, and says what a bad 'un Arthur can be when he's drunk. Harry and Annie sing ‘
Beautiful Green'
, and then he and Millie sing ‘
Till We Meet Again'
. Winnie sits on the sofa, somehow apart, watching. She always feels awkward at parties, unless she is making the sandwiches, or tidying up. She cannot banter; she likes to talk about things, but the men and women in the room don't really talk in the way that she likes, and so she just smiles, and tries to look content, as a lady in a novel might do. As Harry, Danny, Barney, Millie and her mam sing and lark about in the centre with everyone watching them, she looks on from the margins, moving her thumbs in circles around each other.

Alf comes back in from using the privy and sits beside her on the arm of the chair, and says what a daft lot they are, and what a wonder she is, making sandwiches for them all. And when she talks to him about the parties, and the tidying up there'll be to do tomorrow, Alf looks at her and listens. These brief conversations they have are her only ones that are not about the house and family, or making food, or ironing the costumes from the flaming trunk. They are as much an indulgence to her as the beer and the singing are to Harry, who is now in the middle of the room scolding Danny and Sonny for talking about work.

‘When tha's at t' pit tha talks about boozing, and when tha's boozing tha talks about t' pit! Can't tha talk about summat else for a change?'

‘Can't tha get thy dress on and pull us half a pint of beer from up it?' says Danny.

Sonny drains his glass and he and May say goodbye to everyone and move towards the door, to cheers and jeers from the room. As they leave, Winnie is talking to Alf again, while Harry and Danny, centre stage in front of the range, have recommenced ‘
The Whiffenpoof Song'
. When May turns back to shut the door she sees Alf moving closer to Winnie, so close that their knees are touching, as Harry sings the last words in his ugly but beautiful gap-toothed tenor:
‘God have mercy on such as we! Baa baa baa.'

The party ends at three. The next morning, Peggy Copper comes round and tells Juggler to mind his own flaming business.

17 The Likes of Us

Highgate and Thurnscoe, 1948

One day not long after the party, another, older visitor comes to 34 Highgate Lane.

It is a Saturday morning. Harry is out on the allotment and Winnie has gone on the bus to Doncaster with Comfort Eades, chasing stories of meat in the shops. In the sitting room, Roy is listening to the radio and seven-year-old Pauline is trying to get him to play with her. Pauline has a compendium of games that her mam gave her for Christmas. In the heavy, green cardboard box are enough boards and counters to allow for a hundred different games (there were also playing cards but these have been thrown away by Harry because of their association with gambling, which he will not allow in the house). She loves the boards: they are thick, glossy and elegantly bound at the edges, and she wishes the family could all sit round together and play, but no one ever has the time. She has devised many ways of playing snakes and ladders, Ludo and draughts, on her own, but now she tries Roy again.

‘Gi’o’er, our nip,’ he says, ‘I’m reading.’ He always calls her ‘our nip’, because she is younger than him. She hates it because ‘nip’ is what people who were in the war call the Japanese, and the Japanese were cruel.

‘
Please
.’

‘Gi’o’er whinin’.’

‘I only asked you to play with me.’

Looking annoyed, he gets up and comes over. As they work their way through the box, he cheats, surreptitiously moving counters and dice. Eventually Pauline notices and complains, and Roy, affecting to be hurt, goes back to sit beside the radio. She puts all the pieces back into their box and sits on her own at the table, staring at the distemper on the walls.

She is still staring when she hears the back door open, and a rustling noise, and then her great-grandmother Juggler Jane comes in the room. Jane says it is just a social call and she will stay and have a warm while she waits for Winnie to come home. Moving to stand in front of the remains of the fire, which Roy was supposed to keep going but hasn’t, she looks into the embers and absently fingers the beads of the rosary at her waist. The beads make a tiny clicking sound, and as she works through them the crucifix jerks about against her skirts. Pauline watches, transfixed.

‘What are you doing with them beads, Granny Jane?’ she asks.

‘I’m getting ready, love,’ says Jane. ‘I’m just getting ready.’

Roy, making a show of irritation at their talking, gets up and goes out, and Jane turns to look at Pauline. She smiles down on her, and notices the little girl’s eyes on the beads.

‘Do you like my rosary, love?’ she asks.

‘Ooh yes.’

‘It’s for talking to t’ spirits. Would you like to see it?’

Pauline’s mouth stays open, and she nods.

The old lady unfastens it from her waist, loops up the long black length, and puts it carefully and deliberately into Pauline’s hands.

‘Take care of it, won’t you?’

Pauline silently takes the rosary and touches the beads one by one, saving the crucifix until last. Jane watches her again, and puts a hand on her great-granddaughter’s head.

‘I love it,’ says Pauline.

The front door opens. Winnie is back, bags empty. ‘There was only horsemeat,’ she says. ‘We thought we’d rather not bother.’

‘Look, Mam,’ says Pauline, and shows her the rosary.

‘I was just showing it to her,’ says Jane.

‘Right,’ says Winnie, with suspicion in her voice. ‘It’s beautiful.’

*

A few weeks later, in the middle of a rainy night, there is a knock at the door of Juggler Jane’s cottage. She rises from her bed and on the doorstep finds a girl of about fifteen clutching a thin coat around her and shivering. Jane knows her as the granddaughter of an old friend who has moved up the valley to Thurnscoe. She asks her in.

‘My nan’s sent me,’ she tells Jane. ‘It’s my mam, she’s having a baby and my nan dun’t think she’s right.’

Jane tells her to go back home, and says that she will follow. She puts herbs and bandages into a bag and walks through the rain in to the woman’s house, where she delivers the baby, and walks home again. Not long after this Jane falls ill. When Winnie takes Pauline to visit her in the cottage they find Jane lying quiet and pale in an iron bedstead in a cold room dimmed by drawn primrose-yellow curtains.

The following week, Jane dies peacefully at the Montagu Hospital in Mexborough. She leaves behind a brown paper parcel with a note in her will saying it is to be given to Pauline. Inside the paper is a smooth leather pouch, and inside that, the spirit rosary. Pauline tips it out and runs it through her fingers; it feels cool and old and important. This is the only thing she has ever been given by someone who was not her immediate family, the first object besides a toy that she has owned in her life. She thinks of a prayer for Juggler Jane and then pretends she knows enough people to have a separate prayer for each of the lovely, black beads.

*

One Sunday about a month later, Pauline is outside with the other kids from Highgate Lane. They are playing at the top of the lane, on a wide apron of concrete and asphalt in front of the beer-off, the chip shop and Sal Brown’s sweet shop. Some of the children are eating toffee, because on Saturday Sal had somehow acquired a full slab to sell. It tastes like margarine, but everyone eats it anyway and imagines it tastes pleasant.

Pauline has a small waxed bagful and is fending off her friend Alma Taylor. ‘I’m not giving you any, Alma. Your mam got all them bananas at Mrs Wilde’s shop, so don’t come cadging off me.’ She walks away a little and looks at the cows in Benny Slater’s field. You were only allowed to have two bananas but Mrs Taylor had somehow got four, to the irritation of the other women in the street. Alma says Pauline is a misery, and then chalks out a hopscotch cross.

‘I love them cows,’ says Pauline.

‘Chewing like you,’ says Alma. She is pleased with this observation, but Pauline ignores it.

‘I’d love to live on a farm.’

‘
Tchaw
!
’ said Alma, as if living on a farm was like living on the moon. ‘It’d smell.’

‘I wouldn’t be bothered about smells,’ said Pauline.

‘But
you’d
smell.’

‘I could have a bath.’

‘Not every flipping night you couldn’t. Come and play hopscotch.’

Pauline spins on her heel slowly and walks over to join the game. As she waits for her go, a young woman pushing a big blue pram comes down the street and leaves the pram outside the beer-off while she goes inside. Pauline thinks the pram is beautiful and walks over to admire it. She looks in at the baby, a girl of about six months old in a soft woollen suit, and watches the rise and fall of her body as she sleeps.

The bell clangs. The woman steps out of the shop, adjusting her shopping bag.

‘Get away from that pram!’ she shouts.

It takes a moment for Pauline to understand that the woman is shouting at her. ‘I’m sorry,’ says Pauline, not knowing what else to say.

‘I don’t want the likes of you round my baby,’ says the woman.

Some people in Highgate have very clear ideas about their status in relation to other people, particularly with reference to where they live. They can distinguish not only between individual streets and the top and bottom ends of villages, but also the ends and sides of each street. The streets have their own complicated and subtle social geography. Barnsley Road has higher status because it is a main road, and its residents include shopkeepers and Mr Legget, who sets broken bones at the Montagu Hospital. Highgate Lane considers itself respectable, its people believe that the common residents, if there can be said to be any, live only at the other end of the street to themselves.

So ‘the likes of you’ comes as a shock to Pauline, because via books, radio and comics, the phrase connects her to miscreants and criminals. And when someone like this woman, who you assume has a sort of authority by virtue of living on Barnsley Road, makes that sort of comment, the feelings you have are complicated. You ask yourself, if you appear like that, does it mean the unpleasantness is in you, somehow? This is one reason that your appearance and cleanliness is important; it makes you feel less vulnerable.