The Valley (22 page)

*

At half past six on the Saturday following their first meeting, Margaret White is in the sitting room at home putting on her make-up as she waits to be collected by Roy. Her father, Horace White, is in the room preparing to go out with his wife Hilda. Mr White is a miner and union man at Hickleton colliery, veteran of the 1926 strike, and the treasurer of Thurnscoe’s Coronation Club, a large working men’s club in the village. He and Hilda are committed Methodists, and known for their pious decency and neighbourliness.

‘You off to t’ pictures, lass?’

‘I am,’ says Margaret. ‘I think he’s taking me up Goldthorpe.’

‘Who’s t’ lucky fella?’

‘You don’t know this one. They call him Roy Hollingworth. He’s from Highgate.’

Horace wrinkles his forehead. ‘Hollingworth? Is his father called Harry?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ she says, ‘I’ve only met him once.’

‘Ask him.’

When she comes back that night her father is in the sitting room eating a supper of bread and gravy. Margaret tells him that yes, Roy’s dad is called Harry, but they call him Juggler. He does turns, something to do with Old Mother Riley and half a pint of beer, she doesn’t understand it exactly.

‘T’ Juggler,’ he says, nodding. ‘Be careful.’

‘Do you know him?’ She is interested in the warning, but not alarmed. Her father’s ways are not everyone’s, and he disapproves of a lot of people.

‘Half of Thurnscoe knows him,’ says Horace. ‘If t’ lad’s owt like his father he’ll be wide as wide. Just watch what you get into with him.’

24 The Man Who Came Second in the Bad Luck Competition

Bridlington, 1955

From the mid-1950s the higher pit wages and incipient, kitchen-transforming consumer boom began to alter the look of the Dearne Valley. There are new, modern estates of National Coal Board housing for the incomers from Scotland, Wales, the North East and Communist Hungary. There are brighter signs and windows on the shops, and new buildings in the pit yards. The pubs and clubs are renovated, modernised and expanded, and in Highgate the members of the working men's club raise money to have their wooden hut replaced by a low, modern brick building with a large function room and a detached house next door for the steward. It seems to be a time when money and power are being rebalanced, with the squires and the grand landowners slipping away. Lord Halifax has moved from Hickleton Hall to his estate in the East Riding and has let out the hall to a private school. To the Hollingworth children, Winnie and Harry's stories about people touching their caps when someone from the hall rode through Goldthorpe are like lessons from some disappeared dark world. This new generation's deference will be to the glamorous – to the bright-eyed and white-toothed pop stars, actors and presenters who enter their lives via the television screen.

As business remains brisk for Harry and his turns, the Hollingworths have ample money for home improvements. After admiring the new fireplace, Winnie and Harry wallpaper the house, and replace the solid internal doors with new ones with glass panels. They buy a larger television set, a record player with three speeds, and a kitchen cabinet that Winnie has seen in a TV programme about the Ideal Home Exhibition. She doesn't trust washing machines and won't have one in the house, but she does take possession of a two-tone Hoover Constellation vacuum cleaner for the green nylon carpet newly fitted in the sitting room. (In practice, she judges the Hoover to be less than adequate to the task of keeping the nylon in good order, and for the next two decades spends Friday afternoons on her hands and knees scrubbing the carpet with soap and water.) Harry, meanwhile, trades in the Daimler for a secondhand Hudson Terraplane, a sleek, American, tan-and-cream convertible with the steering wheel on the left. Parked on Highgate Lane it looks spectacular, or ridiculous, depending on your point of view. No one in Highgate knows how Clarry Basinger, who supplied it, got hold of an American model, but the Hollingworths and their friends agree it suits Harry. It is as if the car was meant for him, they say. As if it somehow found its own way from Hollywood to the Dearne Valley to find its true kindred spirit.

It is partly to celebrate the acquisition of this outlandish vehicle that in the summer of 1955, Harry takes the family away for the weekend. The destination, as usual, is Clara's caravan in Bridlington. He lowers the Terraplane's roof, packs in Winnie, Pauline and Lynda, Clara and Ernie and their daughter Clare, his mother Amy, and Bonzo the dog, and sets off in an ebullient mood.

‘What's tha reckon to t' car then, Ernie?'

Ernie is wedged between Winnie and the maroon leather-trimmed door on the Terraplane's mono front seat.

‘It's alright,' shouts Ernie above the noise of the wind whistling in everyone's ears.

‘It's American. Fit for a king, or a millionaire.'

‘I hope you've got a palace at t' other end,' yells Clara from the back. ‘I don't know how we're all going to fit in t' caravan. There's seven of us, and it only sleeps four.'

‘I can't hear thee.'

Winnie rolls her eyes at Clara, and Ernie begins to reply, but is cut short by Bonzo jumping across him and trying to leap out.

The next morning, after sleeping with varying degrees of success in the caravan, they are all eating bacon and eggs outside when a bleary Harry mentions that he has seen a poster advertising a talent competition at Bridlington's Spa Royal Hall. The winner will go on to some Yorkshire region heats, and the winner of those to the national final in London.

‘We'll maybe go to watch 'em,' says Clara. ‘There might be a star of the future.' Some of the family nod, others groan.

‘It'd be nice,' agrees Winnie. ‘Will it be dear to go in?'

‘Never mind going to watch,' says Harry. ‘I'm entering.'

*

The Bridlington Spa Royal Hall is a lavish, glass-domed Edwardian dance hall that, with the adjoining Spa Theatre, overlooks the beach at the southern end of the town. The competition involves about thirty performers, mostly singers, of ages eleven to over fifty. The judges, one of whom, according to the rough-papered programme, works in showbiz in London, are dressed in evening wear; the male contestants are mostly in dark woollen suits, some of them shabby and shiny at the knee, and the younger women have on sweaters and full skirts puffed out with nylon petticoats. A confident girl from Hull does a passable version of Dinah Shore's ‘
Sweet Violets'
. Most of the men imitate Al Bowlly or Bing Crosby. There is a poor contortionist from Bridlington, and several ventriloquists.

The compère, a man called Peter, is dressed well and smarms on the girls: he asks one young brunette, who is about to tapdance, if she has a fella, which makes Winnie and the others sitting in the velveteen chairs down to the left of the stage tut. When Harry walks out under a wobbling spotlight at about a quarter past three that afternoon, he keeps his comedy mouth shut and plays it straight and as smooth as Nat King Cole. The lack of nerves throws Peter slightly, and Harry comes off looking good. He has brought his good suit, and he looks a cut above the other performers, and knows it.

‘And what are you going to sing for us this afternoon .
.
.
Juggler
?'

Peter tells the audience about this name, which has been explained by Harry in a quick chat backstage.

‘I'm going to sing a song which is a favourite of mine, Peter. It's a well-known song that's been sung by a lot of truly great singers, and it's called “
Because”
.'

The clapping and the cheers from the Hollingworths down in the stalls subsides and Harry nods to the pianist. At the end of a fluent intro, Harry, voice smoked and sweetened with nicotine and VapoRub, places his arms by his side, and sings.

 

Because, you come to me with naught save love,

And hold my hand, and lift mine eyes above .
.
.

 

The audience applauds his big notes. By the time he approaches the end, most people are smiling in approval, and he finishes them off with a pleading stare into the white spotlight:

 

Because, God made thee mine, I'll cherish thee,

Through light and darkness, through all time to be,

And pray His love may make our love divine,

Because – God – made – thee – mine!

 

The applause is among the loudest of the afternoon. He smiles; the gap is safe to reveal now, the mouth's ugliness sanctified by its voice. Applause, applause – bow. ‘Thank you.' Applause, bow quicker. Peter sidles on.

The handclapping fades. Peter's arm is around Harry's shoulders and he is asking the judges for their scores out of ten. No cards, they just say them: 8, 8, 9, 7. ‘That's the best so far!' says Peter. ‘Can anyone catch the Juggler from the Dearne Valley?'

Harry steps into the wings and watches a reedy tenor doing an Ink Spots number, an awful ventriloquist, and a lousy facsimile Rosemary Clooney. Victory seems to be in the bag for the Terraplane King, but then a light-brown haired, thin teenage girl from Pontefract steps up and, after being breathed over by Peter, announces she will sing ‘
Amazing Grace'
.

She is very good. The audience knows it, Harry knows it, and when she finishes he claps from the wings.

‘9, 9, 7, 7.'

‘A tie!' says Peter. ‘And just one more turn to go, can we bear the thrill?'

The last act is a soprano from Leeds, who sings flat. The judges award fives and fours. Peter comes back out. ‘Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. And now please let's have a big round of applause for all our contestants out on stage!'

The contestants, except for Harry and the girl, who is called Wendy, are ushered off and Peter hams up the tension. They've never had this sort of thing before, ladies and gentlemen, and they'll try to settle it by getting the acts to sing again. ‘First, singing for the second time and looking for that big money prize, the multi-talented
Juggler
!'

His performance is as good as the first. The audience claps loudly and cheers. Win says to Pauline, ‘I wish your Auntie Millie was here, they'd walk away with it.' Harry wipes sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief.

Wendy, trembling, sings again and matches him. The judges huddle. Harry begins to look uncomfortable. He makes to say something to Peter, but Peter moves down to confer with the judges, and ladies and gentlemen this is extraordinary! The judges have come up with a tie again!

The audience oohs as Peter seems to want them to, but then Harry steps forward.

‘Ayup – '

Peter, still babbling into the mike, doesn't hear him.

‘Ayup, Tommy Trinder,' he says. Laughter from the audience. Compared with Barnsley on a Friday night, it is like making babies laugh. ‘Come here – ' he takes Peter's arm. ‘Gi'e it to Wendy.'

‘Just a minute, Juggler,' says Peter.

‘Just a minute thysen. She's a better singer than I am, and I've been doing it years. She's only a lass. Come here, love – '

In the spotlight, Wendy is wide-eyed and visibly shaking. Peter says something about it being the judges' decision, but Harry leans into Peter's mike and says, ‘I, The Juggler, officially concede to this worthy winner,' and pecks Wendy on the cheek. He leads the applause, and the audience joins.

Afterwards in the foyer Harry is with the family, Lynda clinging to his legs. Peter smarms over, ‘Thank you, Juggler. I'm not sure what we'd have done without you.'

‘They should give me thy job,' he says.

Peter laughs a smarmy laugh.

‘He's not kidding. Tha wants to see what he can do wi' half a pint of bitter,' says Ernie.

Peter looks as if he is wishing they would go.

‘Come on,' says Harry, swinging up Lynda into his arms, ‘I'm due on at t' Palladium in half an hour.'

*

The Spa Royal Hall will have its own spotlight in the family's memory, remembered as a passed-on opportunity that could have led to greater fame and riches. ‘Your dad and Auntie Millie could have gone a long way if things had been different,' Winnie would sometimes say to Pauline and Lynda years later, and the idea would become an article of faith among the children, grandchildren, nephews and nieces. Harry, however, is content with the part-time circuit in the North of England. Brought up in the age before television, he does not aspire to national audiences. The local one, within scope of a bike ride, feels enough; and anyway the North is where the ready money is.

His appearance in the Bridlington talent show comes at a time when popular entertainment is changing, though. Harry will continue drumming, singing and doing comedy on his own for decades, but in the mid-1950s he notices that the troupes and variety acts are falling from favour. The boom that has put new money in his pocket is also bringing new technology into homes, pubs and dance halls and, thanks to that technology, the old dance bands are beginning to lose out to pop groups, electric organs and performers who remind audiences of acts they have seen on TV.