The Valley (17 page)

She looks up the road to see if she can see her dad coming back, but there is no sign of him. ‘I’m off in,’ she tells Alma, and says ‘ta-ra’ under her breath to the cow.

*

In the sitting room Winnie and Alf, who has come back early from the pub, are talking about Juggler Jane. ‘T’ closest I ever had to a real mam or dad,’ Alf is saying. ‘I feel strange without her, Winnie.’ He seems close to crying and Winnie looks almost as though she could cry for him. Since Jane died, they have been spending a lot more time together. Alf is bereft; Winnie, full of pity, seems to enjoy trying to help him.

The radio burbles in the background and there is a faint, bitter tang of coffee. Last week Marian Lawson had got some two-ounce tins of Nescafé instant coffee, looking modern and luxurious in their maroon and primrose tins. Nescafé (which everyone pronounces Nescaff, or Nescaffy) is far nicer and more exotic than Camp coffee, which is what Winnie has always bought. Winnie treats the Nescafé as a great luxury, using as little as possible, carefully measuring it out in a teaspoon, and shaking the tin after so none sticks to the sides. She and Alf are both sipping at their cups when Pauline comes in.

‘What you been doing, flower?’ says Alf.

‘Playing,’ says Pauline. ‘Hopscotch. And watching t’ cows in Benny Slater’s field.’ She is hoping someone wants to talk about the cows, but neither Alf nor Win seems interested. ‘Can I have some coffee?’ she asks.

‘Aye go on then,’ says Winnie. ‘While I do it, fetch your rosary and show it to our Alf.’

Pauline runs upstairs to her room, finds the rosary in its pouch, and tips it out. It slithers heavily then tumbles all at once into her palm. She imagines Granny Jane and says some quick words to the Virgin Mary on the beads, unsure if they are right or not, but liking the saying of them.

Winnie shouts upstairs to hurry her. Downstairs a small cup of Nescafé is sitting on the table.

‘Let’s have a look at it,’ says Winnie. The two adults pore over the rosary as Pauline drinks her coffee. When she has finished, Winnie tells her to go out and play. This always means the grown-ups want to talk privately, and she has no choice but to go outside again. This time she walks through the backings, past the allotments, and out onto a footpath through the fields on the west side of the village. She stops to watch rabbits running on the path ahead of her, and picks a little bunch of buttercups to take home, and then sits for a while thinking about the woman with the baby in the pram.

When she gets back to the house, Alf has gone. There is a little pile of plates and cutlery in the sink and the smell of coffee has been replaced by the trace of beer, meaning that her dad is home. He’ll be upstairs having a lie down on the bed. Winnie is sitting on the settee, staring into space. She looks at Pauline, but says nothing.

Pauline senses the absence in the room before she even asks.

‘Where’s my rosary, Mam?’

‘I’ve given it to our Alf.’

She is trying to sound aloof, but her daughter can hear the guilty embarrassment in her voice. ‘Jane was like a mother to him, and
you
don’t want it.’

‘I do want it.’ Pauline is not supposed to argue with adults, but this time she doesn’t care.

Winnie scoffs. ‘What you want that for?’

‘So has our Alf got it?’

‘Yes, I told you he has.’

‘Can I have it back?’

‘Don’t you dare ask him for it back. You’ll feel the back of my hand if you do.’

A feeling of unreality comes over Pauline, heightened by the jolly music on the radio. She nods and feels her lip wobble.

‘Don’t start that,’ says Winnie.

Pauline sits down and drops the flowers on the table. She knows the emotion she is feeling: it is hatred. Some people remember the first time they feel hatred as well as they remember the first feeling of love, and Pauline will remember this moment all her life. Relating the story to her own, grown-up children fifty years later, she will feel the same keenness as she does now, although it will be hardened off, and her lip will not wobble. By then, she will know that this is the point from which her relationship with her mother began to deteriorate. At the time it is the selfishness she loathes the most; she knows that her mother has taken the rosary because she wants to give a gift to Alf, and that she had to take from Pauline because she had nothing of her own to give him, and no one else she could take from. It is not Winnie’s abuse of power that Pauline dislikes so much as the weakness that gave her the idea in the first place.

Pauline is so disgusted and furious that she barely speaks to her mam for a month. When she awakes early one morning, when her dad is on earlies at the pit, and comes downstairs to see her nightgowned mother slipping into the front room – the room that contains Alf’s bed – she thinks nothing of it beyond being reminded that her mam has taken the most beautiful object she has ever seen.

*

Pauline does not give up the idea of finding the spirit rosary and one afternoon, when her mam has gone out to the shops and the house is empty, she pads carefully into the front room to look for it. She is nervous. Alf’s man’s clothes and possessions seem so big and smell so unpleasantly of hair oil and feet that she is soon put off, and decides to search her mam and dad’s room instead. She hunts on the dressing table and lifts layers of clothing folded on a chair. She opens up the wardrobe and looks onto the top shelf, timidly because this is one of the domestic frontiers of adulthood, like the
News of the World
and the club. Nothing.

Checking the net-curtained window every few minutes for her mam coming down the street, she looks under the bed and in the bedside cabinet, and then turns and crouches before the chest of drawers in which Winnie keeps her clothes and underclothes. With her heart beating hard she eases out the middle drawer and parts the blouses with her hand. There is a postcard of Bridlington in one corner, but that is all. In the top drawer just stockings and underwear, and in the bottom sweaters, a couple of scarves, and – wait, there in the back corner, what is it? A brown paper bag, which can’t have the rosary in, can it? Whatever it is seems the wrong shape. Pauline takes out the bag, gently and quietly, and looks inside. Loosely coiled at the bottom, like a small, short snake, is a dark red rubber syringe. She does not know what it is, but thinks it must be secret. Is it to use on Winnie, or on one of the family? Is it a secret from her dad as well? She feels that she should not have seen it; she places the bag as she found it, worrying that she has not remembered exactly how it was, closes the drawer and slips out of the room. She is halfway down the stairs when she hears her mam coming in the back door.

*

Weeks later, Pauline is playing on her own in the sitting room on a dull Saturday afternoon. Winnie tells her to go out to play in the yard, while, unusually, she brings the tin bath inside and begins heating the water. Pauline has a child’s sense of wariness in the disruption of routine and does not ask why her mam is having a bath on a Saturday afternoon. She sits and reads a book beneath the kitchen window, and then goes out to play in the yard. After what seems a long time for a bath, she hears Winnie stirring inside, and then the sound of water coming through the pipes, and then sees some light steam coming from the angled lead pipe that draws the kitchen sink into the yard grate. The water must have been very hot, and Winnie must be tipping the water down the sink in jugfuls, which is unusual.

When it comes out of the pipe, the steaming water is a light, cloudy pink. The kids crowd around it.

‘It’s blood!’ shouts one of the girls. ‘It is! It’s blood!’

Pauline also thinks it looks like blood but, mortified by the attention and embarrassment, she says no, no it isn’t, her mam’s dyeing some curtains inside. This works. The children disperse, and she goes in.

Pauline notices her mam seems dazed, and her face and arms are a pale grey colour. Winnie sits down in her chair and stares into the fireplace, without saying a word.

18 Get It Out of My Face

Manvers Main Colliery, 1948

One morning in June 1948, Harry is out in one of the underground districts of the Silkstone seam at Manvers Main, wiring up explosive shots to blast away rock for the advancing roadway. Labouring in dim, shadowy electric light, and stripped topless because of the heat, he and his small group of men can hear as they work the dense, crumpling sounds of explosions and rock falls from other shot-firing in different parts of the mine. The first time Harry heard the noise he was a teenager, and thought it meant the pit was collapsing and he was about to be buried alive.

Talking about the women in the clubs, who is on the fiddle, the glass-backed devils on this shift, Harry waits for his mate to bore holes into the wet rock with a heavy, shoulder-mounted drill.

‘Did tha do Mother Riley a’ Sat’d’y then, Juggler?’

‘Aye.’ Juggler is serious and shy sometimes when asked directly about his act.

‘Did tha drink that half-pint of beer?’

‘I’m not telling thee how I do it, so don’t bother asking.’ This is how everyone begins trying to get it out of him.

‘We shall be finding out one of these days. We allus find out, don’t we lads?’

‘I’ll find thee out if tha don’t get yon holes cleaned out. Shut thy rattle and get some work done.’

Harry checks for gas with his safety lamp, then takes greenish-brown sticks of explosive from a box and pushes them into one of the holes. Then he adds a detonator with a long lead and uses a rod to push that and the explosive to the bottom of the hole, leaving the lead hanging out. When he has filled all the holes like this, he connects the leads in a circuit and, with the nonchalant attention to detail of someone dealing with danger that they can control, connects that circuit to a roll of electric cable. He takes the men down the roadway to set them as sentries, checks again for gas, and connects the electrical cable to an exploder. From somewhere in the pit comes the muffled crump of other shot-firing, and the roof and floor shake around him.

‘Firing!’

Harry crouches down in a hollow in the tunnel wall, winds the exploder’s handle until its green light illuminates, and pushes down the plunger.

*

While Harry is waiting for electricity to pass through the cable to the explosives, Winnie is at home, perhaps at that moment serving Alf Hollingworth his breakfast at the table in the sitting room. She has not begun her affair with Alf flippantly. She has been married almost twenty years, but feels haunted by her father’s prediction that she would struggle to find happiness with Harry. She had wanted not only to love her husband but also to nurture him, and even if he couldn’t love her the same way she would have liked to feel that she was helping him. At this time, however, she feels ignored and taken for granted. And then into her home, via the brother she so loves, had come a man who talked to her and flattered her. Though he is so much younger than her – thirteen years – the attraction is founded less on lust than on a sort of romantic compassion. The gypsy girl understands and says she is right to feel as she does. This is a romance such as you might find in the cinema, or in books.

*

‘Misfire,’ says Harry. ‘
Damn
it.’ He winds the detonator and pulls up the handle for a second try. Nothing. Must be a wire broken somewhere.

As he calls ‘misfire’ the sentries’ bodies relax. Harry delicately uncouples the wires from the detonator so that the explosives cannot go off. He walks through the darkness, his helmet light dancing a white dot on the tunnel sides, feeling the cable for damage as he goes. Sweat with its fine suspension of dust drips into his eyes. From somewhere in the pit come more muffled booms and the noise of machinery. He reaches the blast face, and begins checking the leads in the circuit.

There is a bright white light, then nothing. He awakes to feel a hard surface behind his head. It is the floor, rattling with men’s boots running, getting louder. Dust swirls. Raising his hand to his head he feels hot wetness.

‘Juggler!’

The explosives have detonated. The men’s voices sound distant behind the high-pitched hum in his ears. His skin burns, his torso, head and arms hurt and, worse than anything else, his face feels as if it has thousands of hot needles sticking into it. The men gather around him, frightened, their lamps shining on him.

‘Clean my face,’ he tells his mate. ‘Get it out of my face, whatever you can.’

The blast has driven stars of rock and coal into his pale face and body. The men clean him with water from their Dudleys, carry him on a stretcher to the pit bottom and take him to the surface in the cage. Bright sunlight on the scurry from shaft side to first-aid room; a black police car and an ambulance waiting. All around and above are gigantic, smoking pipes, headgears, elevated cableways carrying muck to the muckstacks, and piles of timber and steel girders. There are coal prep­aration plants, coke ovens, railway sidings, science labs and office blocks, and, amid all this, run the small, insignificant black figures carrying Harry Hollingworth on a stretcher. The pit doctor calmly tidies him up, and then he is loaded into an ambulance and sped away to the Montagu Hospital for treatment.

There is an inquiry into every serious accident at a colliery, but the management at Manvers will never establish what detonated Harry’s explosives. Perhaps he had not pulled the wires far enough from the detonator and they had sprung back and touched. More likely, Harry will think, someone didn’t realise he had gone to check the circuit and reconnected the wires, but would not admit it to the investigators. With no conclusive proof discovered, Harry Hollingworth’s injuries enter history as a mystery, a riddle or, in official language, ‘Cause Unknown’.