The Valley (45 page)

‘Yes I will. I’m going to use it to get a job, aren’t I?’

‘I doubt it. Who’s going to employ
you
?’

He doesn’t want me out of the house, she thinks. He doesn’t want to be on his own. ‘Somebody will. People always want secretaries, why not me?’

‘Because you’ve got a son, stupid. No one’s going to employ a woman who’s got a kid.’

And because he has said this, she begins to doubt herself.

Tony becomes more miserly with the housekeeping money he gives her, and by the end of the week she is emptying vases for pennies and tuppences to buy a pound of mince for a plate pie. Aside from the family allowance she has no money, and almost no possessions. If she complains, Tony gets angry, and if he feels like it, he’ll hit her. One day when she pulls away, he yanks at her hair so hard that she looks up to see a clump of it in his fist.

She reaches her limit one weekend in May. He eats his Sunday dinner in silence, staring straight ahead to show he is fed up with her, and at the end of the meal she snaps inside, the way she did when Margaret Westerman came to see her. After clearing up the kitchen, she takes Karl upstairs, lifts a suitcase down from the wardrobe and calmly packs it with her clothes.

Tony walks in and looks at the case with unthreatened surprise. ‘Where are you going?’

‘I’m leaving you.’ She hears in her own voice the tone of detached conviction that comes from having had enough.

He cocks his head back and smiles. ‘You’ll be back.’

Ignoring him she puts Karl’s clothes and toys into carrier bags, manoeuvres the pushchair, suitcase and Karl out of the house and walks up the street to the bus stop for Highgate Lane.

A few days later, Lynda drives with Tony to the divorce courts in Harry’s white Rover. They travel in near silence. On the way back Tony says, ‘I wish I’d treated you better, love,’ but she knows his pity is really for himself. Men! Even at the very last, their sentimentality and remorse; she has had enough of it to last her the rest of her life.

‘Well,’ she says, shooting him a sideways look. ‘It’s too late now, cocker! Shall I drop you off at your house?’

That night, lying in bed at Number 34, she thinks about her mam. How did she manage her marriage? For all that she went through with Harry, his other women and his staying out, things that a lot of women wouldn’t tolerate now, they must have had something. Forty years they’d been together; you couldn’t live with someone that long and not have something. Whatever her dad had done or not done, he had always come home in the end, he had always paid her the money and they had stayed together. Lynda had had better chances in life than her mam, yet she always made the wrong choices. And now here she was, twenty-eight, on her own, and living with her parents.

*

Harry has retired from the glass factory, where he spent his last few years driving a forklift in the warehouse. Still in demand as a drummer, he has, to Winnie’s vexation, taken over her pristine front room and set up his drum kit permanently so that he can practise during the day. ‘It’s worse than when we were first married, and he used to play all t’ furniture,’ Winnie shouts to Lynda, straining to be heard over the din. ‘You’d think he’d have had enough of drumming by now.’

Harry has not had enough, not yet, and he spends the afternoons, sometimes with Karl beside him, looking straight ahead through the netted window, beating out memories in quickstep, foxtrot and lingering blues time, as other people might take out old photographs to reminisce over.

As for Winnie, aside from the dispute over the drums, these early years of her husband’s retirement continue the more jocund period of her life. She books herself and Harry on holidays to Spain, and in the autumn they stay at Pauline and Gordon’s farm, Win looking after the house and Harry driving the tractors during the potato harvest. Her hopes of being rescued by Alf are folded away like old love letters. She has a little boy to love and look after in Karl and, in the Seels’s farmhouse, a work world offering variety and friendship. In her nylon pinnies with sweets in their pockets, with her white hair and her scent of Yardley’s April Violets, she seems the very essence of the composed and contented English grandmother, and she finds that that role suits her more than any other. ‘I don’t know why but I find it easier with my grandchildren than I did with you three,’ she tells Pauline, the admission part of a new willingness to open up about the past. It is in these years that she will tell her daughters about Walter beating her across her bare back, and the walk with Harry that led to her suspected pregnancy, and marriage.

Her one remaining source of anxiety is Roy. He still turns up at her house sporadically, sometimes alone, sometimes with Alwyn and Wendy, sometimes staying long enough for Wendy to enrol at Dearneside school. During his stays he does not see David, but he does visit Gary, Scott and Elaine, and on family evenings around the fire in Winnie’s sitting room he entertains everyone with stories about the interesting people he has met on his travels. To his mam he is caring and flattering, and she will think if only he could settle, if only he could overcome the debt or problem he faces at that particular time, then he would become a good man, and she could put from her mind thoughts of the police and crime. When the moment comes, as it often does, for him to ask her for money, she will collect her wages from Jane Seels, or take cash she has hidden in the sideboard for him. She also passes on gifts that she has received, and even her own ornaments and household goods, all with a hopeful love and the belief that their auras of kindness and domesticity will make them talismans.

He will always leave suddenly, and if he is working on the roads she may not know where he is for months. In the summer of 1977, though, she is pleased to hear that, having completed a motorway spur at Hinckley in the Midlands, he has befriended a local farmer who has allowed him, Alwyn and Wendy to live in one of his fields, in their caravan. It is a permanent arrangement, and Roy is happy. Winnie wishes he would choose a more substantial home but thinks the fixedness will be good for him, and feels optimistic as she crochets winter blankets for them.

*

Equipped with her new course certificates, Lynda applies for office jobs, but the interviewers are prying then dismissive. ‘If you’ve got a kiddy, Mrs Grainger,’ they ask, ‘how will you go on if you’re sick?’ She tells them she lives with her mother who looks after him during the day, and they look as if they’re listening but the following week a rejection letter arrives in the post. The cost of food and Karl’s clothes outstrips her unemployment payments and maintenance money. She forces herself to keep looking at the jobs sections in the papers and writing application letters, but then even when she gets an interview, there are the same jaundiced questions about Karl. Her mind rewinds and replays Tony’s prediction – ‘Who’s going to employ
you
? No one’s going to employ a woman who’s got a kid’ – and flips from self-doubt to determination and back again.

One morning, as if it is feeling Lynda’s difficulties and pain itself, Number 34 cracks open – literally. Winnie notices it first, waking up beside Harry one morning with a strong, cold draught on her face and shoulders. The window is closed but the curtains are billowing; coming fully conscious, she lifts her glance up above the window to an eight-inch crack of sky between the wall and the ceiling.

Such ruptures in the fabric of houses and other buildings are not unusual in the Dearne, where subsidence caused by mining means that stretches of yard, road, park and field sag into craters and hollows wide and deep enough to flatten slopes and lower hills in the landscape. Buildings sited on slumping land lurch on their twisted foundations, and their residents awake, or return home, to find roofs askew, chunks of wall fallen to the ground, and windows popped out of their frames. Mining engineers and surveyors design workings to reduce subsidence, but no one is ever shocked to discover a new hole in their garden, say, or a gap between their wall and ceiling.

A council housing officer offers Winnie and Harry a new home at 239 Barnsley Road, in a row of good 1920s houses with views over the main Doncaster–Barnsley road onto open farm fields. The house is at the end of the row, next door but one to a farmyard. The officer shows them a small garden with a brick wall at the front, and at the back a long garden and large shed, all belonging solely to the house. Beyond is a narrow lane with allotment sheds and greenhouses facing onto it, and the allotments themselves. The neighbour on one side, Nancy Woodson, a shy lady who has never married, is an old school friend of Winnie’s sister Olive and is already on friendly terms with Winnie herself. So, a better house than Number 34, really; if anything they are grateful for the crack. They accept it, and go home to begin packing.

In a few days’ time, after the sideboard has been emptied, the drum kit dismantled and the crockery of ten thousand suppers wrapped and boxed, Harry, Lynda, Karl and neighbours from the yard carry the household tools and treasures through the backings while a lorry-owning mate brings the furniture. And at the end of the afternoon, Winnie and the little gypsy girl walk back to the old, cracked house, say goodbye to its echo-empty and pensive rooms, and finally close the back door of 34 Highgate Lane for the last time.

*

Through the rest of the summer and into the autumn Lynda’s job applications follow the same pattern. She is interviewed for a receptionist job at the doctor’s surgery, but the doctor asks about Karl and then loses interest in her. The managers at a tennis ball factory in Barnsley seem more positive, but two days later she receives the standard rejection letter. She writes to a Doncaster factory that employs dozens of women in Highgate and Goldthorpe but doesn’t even get a reply.

In October she sees in the
South Yorkshire Times
an advert for a job in general services in the offices of Hickleton colliery, and applies for it. She has a good feeling about this one; the NCB is putting money into some pits, and people in Highgate say that Hickleton is being developed and expanded. ‘Why not me, eh, cocker?’ she says to Karl. ‘Why not me?’

Why not her? Because, a friend tells Lynda, her course taught the wrong kind of shorthand for the NCB. The friend has been for an interview at Manvers Main and says the NCB will consider only people with Pitman. Lynda, assured by the college that it has equal weight with employers, has trained in speed-writing.

She has given up on the application when she receives a letter inviting her to an interview. Expecting it to be a waste of time, she doesn’t plan an outfit, pulling on a plain beige skirt and blouse from the wardrobe that morning, and not even bothering with make-up. She has a flicker of optimism when the personnel officer says that lacking Pitman shorthand does not rule her out, but it is quickly snuffed out.

‘I see you’ve a little boy, Mrs Grainger?’

‘I have, yes.’

‘What if he’s poorly?’

‘I live with my mother, so she looks after him.’

‘And are you staying at your mother’s?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hmm.’ He says they’ll let her know in a week to ten days. Don’t call us.

On the following Saturday, Lynda is asleep when Karl comes into her bedroom with something gripped between his hands. ‘It’s a letter for you, Mam,’ he says in his singsong voice.

Lynda, stirring from a deep sleep, sees a brown A4 envelope with ‘NCB’ on the front. The rejection, she thinks. She digs it open with her thumb and scans the letter, quickly past the Dear Mrs Grainger to the unfamiliar words that she has to read again, and then again, ‘I am pleased to inform you .
.
.’

‘Mam!’ she shouts downstairs. ‘Mam! I’ve got a job!’

47 You Can't Just Fling a Hook in a River

Thurnscoe and the bank of the River Wharfe at Ulleskelf, North Yorkshire, 1977–80

‘Dave!' says Denise. ‘Say summat to her!'

‘Never mind chuffing “Dave”! Just get lost, before I go and fetch our Sue.'

Marie Poole fixes David's hapless ex-girlfriend with a stare and chews her gum with a slow, steady conviction.

‘But Dave .
.
.'

‘I've told you once, shut it. Dave Hollingworth's wi' me. I don't care what he's told you, he's been wi'me for six month. He's a bugger for leading you on, Denise, but I'm not going to let you wreck it for us.'

‘You're a flaming liar! How come nobody's ever seen you with him?'

‘We don't stay round here like you sad sacks, do we, Dave?'

David, who is watching this argument unfold outside the Cora with horror, says, ‘Er, no. No, we don't.'

‘Oh aye? Where do you go then?'

‘All over,' says Marie. ‘We go .
.
. fishing.'

Denise stops, her glossed lips open. ‘Fishing?'

‘Yes, Denise.
Fishing
.' Marie makes it sound like a mature, intellectual pursuit beyond Denise's understanding. It is all a lie; so far she and Dave have been no further than the Cora and the edge of Thurnscoe. ‘In lakes, and rivers, and all over.'

‘You asked me to go fishing with you,' Denise says to David accusingly.

‘Aye, but you wouldn't come .
.
.'