The Valley (3 page)
Authors: Richard Benson
In the spring of 1909, a few days after Annie’s eighteenth birthday, they go for a stroll into the fields and this time share more than ambition and a common interest in the supernatural. Several weeks later, as they start out on another walk, she tells him she is pregnant.
‘Well,’ he says, after the shock fades. ‘We mun’ get married, Annie.’
Many years from now, Walter and Annie’s children will say he was an unusual father – strict, but exceptionally loving. They will remember their school friends envying them, and saying, ‘Your father’s lovely, I wish that he was mine.’ Walter seems to crave a family and now, in the early summer of 1909, after Annie has accepted his proposal, he talks about the child and where they will live with a keenness and care that she adores.
They marry at Mansfield Register Office in September 1909 and move into three-room lodgings eight doors down from the Weavers. Mrs Weaver, who was taught midwifery, physicking and laying out of the dead by her mam, and treats villagers for what they can afford to pay, helps with the house, and cares for her daughter. After his shifts, Walter trudges home, soaked in mud and water, hair plastered around his face, and warms himself against the banked-up fire, while Annie puts out his food. Later she boils water to fill the tin bath, and washes his back in the small, hot room.
One December Sunday, Annie goes into labour. Walter runs down the street to fetch her mam, and Mrs Weaver eventually delivers a baby girl. Annie has already decided the name: Gertrude, after one of Annie’s sisters, with the second name of Winifred. Gertrude is a name the girl will grow up to loathe, calling herself Winnie and switching the order to conceal it, but on Sunday 12 December 1909, it is this name that Mrs Weaver gives to the baby as she lays her on Annie’s breast. In reply, Gertrude Winifred gives a loud cry – a cry so loud, Mrs Weaver will later say, that she seems to be announcing her arrival not only to the fire-warmed room, but to the whole of Shirebrook, calling home her father, who has been sent out into the streets so that the women can have space inside the house.
Shirebrook; the Western Front; Oswestry, 1914–22
Four and a half years later, the young Parkin family is still living in the three rented rooms at 3, Ashbourne Street. Winnie Parkin, hazel-eyed and raven-haired like her mam, has started at Shirebrook school. Annie, twenty-three, has another daughter now, called Millie, after Annie’s own mother. Walter still works at the pit and rules the home with pious discipline. Fearful of the Weavers’ jollity, he hangs the walls with needlepoint mottoes: ‘Bless This House’, ‘Cleanliness is Next To Godliness’, ‘Teach Me What Is Good’
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the latter hung over the sitting-room table and silently indicated to command silence when the family is eating.
Shirebrook still has its bad reputation, but Walter and Annie see it improving. Two years ago British miners won a national strike for a minimum wage and since then there has been more money in the village, the shops, theatre and hotels full of men and women with payday pockets clinking. In June, the streets were cleaned and hung with flags for the visit of King George V and Queen Mary, and Winnie gathered with the town’s children to cheer them as they walked through the market place. Some people said the King looked tired. Soon afterwards the adults will look back and wonder if this had anything to do with the political events in Europe they read about in the newspapers through the summer.
A few days after that royal visit, Bosnian-Serb assassins shoot dead Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg in Sarajevo. On 4 August, Britain declares war on Germany. Thousands of miners make up some of the first new territorial units and in Leeds, the West Yorkshire Coalowners Association raises a miners’ battalion for the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. In Derbyshire, some colliery owners say they will give free rent and coal to the dependants of soldiers at the front; in some pits, colliers vote to have money stopped from their weekly wages so that it can be given to the families of miners who have left the pit to fight. In Shirebrook, miners and managers set up a recruiting station in the colliery offices. Underground, work slows because there is no imported timber for pit props. The local newspapers carry on their front pages Lord Kitchener’s Appeal to England’s Young Manhood
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a letter to the youth of Shirebrook, Langwith and Warsop Dale, urging them to join up.
Walter, a strong believer in duty, enlists among crowds of young men on 2 September 1914. It is a hot day with a hot atmosphere in the market place outside the recruiting office at Mansfield Town Hall. There is a summer crowd smell of sweat, warmed stone and mud. Journalists interview officers and new recruits. There are already rumours of entire British battalions having been wiped out in the fighting and of a German spy arrested in the town. The crowds cheer as the men go in to sign up, and the new recruits
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miners, clerks, farm labourers, young managers and tradesmen
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turn to grin at the spectators.
This mood lasts through to the winter, the public resolve only hardened in mid-September by news of the first Shirebrook man to die in action: twenty-one-year-old Alf Whitehall, who worked at the pit and whose family live on Church Hill. Alf is killed near the Franco-Belgian border on day two of the first battle of the Aisne. No one feels his death should be in vain; a sound victory for the Allies here, it is said, will more or less end the war. From the town and the villages and the outlying cottages, young men keep coming to enlist.
Walter Parkin joins the Leicestershires and is then transferred to the Lincolnshire Regiment. He travels to Grimsby to train with the 3rd Reserve Battalion, and regularly writes home to Annie enclosing money: ‘Don’t worry lass, spirits high, it’ll be done with soon.’ He ends every letter the same: ‘Kiss the children for me, and remember me to all at home, xxxxx.’
As Private Parkin No. 14171, he sails for France in February 1915, part of a group sent to replace the depleted British Expeditionary Force. For the first few weeks he moves between reserve positions and holding trenches at Le Tilleloy, and then in March, his unit moves up to the front for the battle at the village of Neuve Chapelle. In the middle of the battle the Lincolnshires are ordered to charge, and Walter says a prayer, climbs out of his trench and advances with his comrades towards the German lines. Amid the bullets and shells he feels a hard blow to his chest and goes down. He ought to be hurt but – not really: studying his chest he sees a brass button of his uniform with a hole punched raggedly through it and there, lodged between it and the jacket, a bullet. Men pass him. Others are dead and dying around him.
A few days later two letters arrive at 3 Ashbourne Street, one from the War Office explaining Private 14171’s injury, another sent from a hospital in France.
My Dearest Annie
I am writing to you from Rouen where I am knocking about in a hospital. I am alright except for a slight wound in the chest. I will be off back in about a fortnight’s time, so don’t worry, lass .
.
. Another mate of mine was left on the battlefield and we came off best in the end. I have got the bullet and button. I will send them on for you. I don’t think we shall be long before we are back again, if we go on as we are doing now. They will soon have to give in.
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.
Walter
Days later the bullet and the button arrive. Annie takes the trophies to Mr Wilkinson’s hairdressing shop so that they can be displayed in the window, and then receives a visit from a journalist.
Mansfield Chronicle
, 25 March 1915
Saved by his Button
Shirebrook Soldier’s Experiences: Shot in the Chest
Knocking about in hospital at Rouen after having been shot in the chest, Pte. Walter Parkin of the 2nd Battalion Lincolnshire Regiment writes to his wife a most cheerful letter, and also sends as a memento the button that has saved his life. Accompanying the valuable metal, which has been pierced through, is the deadly bullet, with spiked lead, and the two will doubtless be kept by Mrs Parkin, who resides in Shirebrook Marketplace, and handed down to children’s children as family heirlooms. The souvenirs are to be seen in Mr Mark Wilkinson’s shop window in King Edward-street, Shirebrook.
Yesterday (Wednesday) morning Mrs Parkin received a second letter, in which her husband stated he was going on alright, and would keep writing, as he had little else to do. Referring to the encounter in which he was wounded he remarks: ‘I suppose you will have read about the big charge that has been made. I was amongst the leaders in that, and we had a lively time of it, I can tell you, but it was a surprise packet for them.’ Continuing, he spoke of the button, which he hoped had been received, as his friend, and added that the bullet came to stay with him after it had done the damage. A pal of his had said that if a bullet was for you it would go round corners to get at you, and it was no use trying to get out of the way. He hoped for better luck next time.
After returning to the lines, Walter is for some months settled in his unit’s routine of holding the established trenches in the Neuve Chapelle area, four days at the front, four in reserve, four at rest. In February 1916 he is allowed home on a week’s leave, but by early summer he is moving down with his battalion to the Somme, where there is to be a major new British offensive. Walter is among a group of men leading a charge. His role, for which he has been specially trained, is to throw himself down onto the barbed wire so that the rest of the infantry can run around and over him and breach the German defences. He gets through the first few weeks, but his battalion suffers so many casualties that for a while it has to withdraw to recover in order to assimilate new men and munitions.
Walter is promoted to lance corporal and learns in a letter from Annie that he is father to a baby girl named Olive. ‘Kiss her for me and remember me to all at home,’ he tells his wife. His mam writes to say that his father has died in Australia and that she has now married George Shaw; they will stay in Highfields, near Doncaster, and Walter must come to see them, she says. Indifferent to his father, and reasonably well disposed towards George Shaw, he seems untroubled by the news and his letters home remain cheerful. He is less confident of an early return though. His battalion, with men and officers who have survived with him, and replacements for the dead and injured, has moved north to Ypres in Flanders and are readying themselves for another offensive.
In Mansfield the newspapers carry lists of the dead, their tone sombre in contrast to the optimism of the sunny days of September 1914. An emergency legal dispensation allows women to labour in the pit yard so the government can call on more men from the mines to replace casualties at the front. Annie takes in some older children whose mothers now go out to work, and supplements Walter’s wage by helping her mam with midwifery and laying out the dead. She makes a little from spiritualist sittings, but people tell her to be careful; the war has created an easy market for fraudulent mediums, and up and down the country police forces are raiding meetings. There are stories of mediums being taken away and charged with fraud
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witchcraft even
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and so gatherings are more often held covertly, in an obliging person’s front room, or in public rooms that have officially been booked for non-spiritualist purposes.
Nevertheless, Annie uses some of her money to buy from another medium a small, green-tinged crystal ball and uses it to try to help the wives and mothers find their sons on the battlefields. Sometimes, when the children are asleep, she takes it from its black satin bag and looks through the crystal and across the sea and the mud for Lance Corporal Walter Parkin.
*
At dawn one autumn morning in 1917, on the front line at Passchendaele, a lieutenant with the 2nd Lincolnshire Regiment leads a contingent of men in a surprise attack through the wire and across a stewing bog of limbs and bones towards the German lines. Among the first up is Walter. The group reach the twisted loops of barbed wire protecting the opposing trenches before the Germans begin shooting. The men thud and splash over and around Walter as he braces his back and flattens down the coils. Once they are across, he gets to his feet, takes his rifle and moves towards the German lines. As he does so he sees in front of him his commanding officer, Lieutenant Smith, entangled with wire barbs sticking into his flesh and his uniform.
Crouching low to avoid fire, Walter moves to him and kneels, pulling and cutting. He tells the lieutenant to be still, pulls and cuts some more, and feels the splatter and percussion of grenades exploding nearby. Walter moves the last of the wire and Lieutenant Smith rolls free. Ahead, the British are going down under fire and retreating in disarray. Lieutenant Smith barks orders to retreat. Bullets are whizzing and phutting; arms, legs, hands and feet all over the place. Men hurry back but there is a blast, and Walter is caught. He will not remember much of what happens; he will recall only the struggling, his clothing in a mess, the barbs ripping his skin, his back cut and bleeding, and then the loss of consciousness.
Walter’s cuts and wounds become infected and he is sent to England for treatment. ‘Don’t be downhearted, lass,’ he writes to Annie from hospital, ‘look after the children.’ From his own hospital bed, Lieutenant Smith pens a recommendation to the regiment’s commanding officer for Walter to receive recognition for his valour. Once the CO has had Lieutenant Smith’s account verified, Lance Corporal Parkin is awarded the Military Medal, which is announced in the 28 January 1918 edition of the
London Gazette
. The medal, suspended on a red-white-and-blue ribbon, is a heavy silver disc bearing the King’s head and on the reverse the words ‘For Bravery in the Field’. It is almost as wide as Winnie’s palm
.
