Authors: Richard Benson
The Valley (5 page)
Britain and her empire fed on coal: coal for the houses and coal for the factories; coal to make the iron, and coal to make the glass; coal for the trains, and coal for the ships and coal to sell to the rest of the world. ‘Coal has been put in the earth by God,’ wrote an excited author in Charles Dickens’s
Household Words
, so that humanity may live ‘not merely a savage life, but one civilised and refined, with the sense of a soul within’. To feed these fires, engineers at the end of the nineteenth century built more powerful machines that could fetch coal from even deeper-lying seams, and financiers and businessmen bought the machines and leased land to build more mines. By 1910, in the five miles of the Dearne Valley there were fourteen of the vast, new deep mines, and dozens more beyond the valley sides. The landowners became rich on the mineral rights and built themselves grand homes, and became gentlemen.
The colliery owners constructed houses in the old villages in which to put the families who came to work in the mines, families from all over England, from Scotland, and Wales, and from Europe, all seeking work in the mines or customers for their trades: Irish builders, German pork butchers, Russian-Jewish tailors. The Dearne became a jumble of smoking hills and hollows, of haphazard sooted-brick villages and small towns, and of chimneys puthering dense black smoke. Up in the Pennine Hills, above smokey Barnsley, the spring now ran into a millpond dug out for a cotton mill, and the pond’s overflow fed into the runnel. Down in the valley men altered the course of the river and poisoned its water so it became a slow and lifeless black sludge. But the new industry provided jobs, and for many people the work paid far better than the old work on the land.
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It is to the Lower Dearne Valley that Walter Parkin brings Annie and their four children in the early years of the 1920s. They settle first near his mother and stepfather in the village of Adwick-le-Street, beyond the valley’s western edge. Walter goes to work sinking new shafts at a colliery near Doncaster, but when that work is completed, he follows some other men five miles west, to the pit at Goldthorpe.
Goldthorpe, lying halfway between Doncaster and Barnsley, is one of four villages parted only by a few small fields in the heart of the valley: to the north, Thurnscoe, to the west, Highgate, to the south, Bolton-upon-Dearne. Twenty years earlier they were farming hamlets, but with six collieries sunk within walking distance of them all, they are now expanding frontier towns, their frontiers dark and underground. Goldthorpe is the biggest and busiest, with a market and the feel of the Wild West. Wherever you look, men are building new houses, shops and pubs; parts of the village have the look of a Wellsian science-fiction, with a clutter of chimneys, spoil heaps and pit headgears. The new church, built with money donated by Lord Halifax of Hickleton Hall, owner of mineral rights to Hickleton Main colliery at Thurnscoe, is designed in the Italianate style but made out of ferro-concrete slabs.
The Parkins move into a terraced house with steep stairs, thin walls and three bedrooms, built on a crossroads known as Gill’s Corner, near the Wesleyan Methodist chapel. The family worships at the chapel, Walter stern and serious, Annie enjoying the socialising and the hymns. They are not well off, but they are at least in their own home. Walter travels to colliery sites where shaft-sinking is needed, although in the summers and autumn he will sometimes come out of the pit to work on farms, ploughing and handling the horses. Annie attends spiritualist meetings and continues her sittings, sometimes taking the children with her. She is respected for her powers. When a young girl goes missing, a local police inspector asks Annie to help find her, or at least her body; Annie sees in her crystal ball the girl’s corpse lying in a well in a farm and her vision turns out to be true.
When Winnie reaches the age of fourteen, in December 1923, she goes into service as a housemaid. Service pays less well than the mills, but mill girls are brash, says Walter, and he won’t have her working with them. He will have less luck with Olive, later, when work in service is less plentiful, he is ill and Olive is able to face him down. Winnie and most of the girls at school are fearful about life in service, telling each other stories they have heard about rooms with stinking mattresses, ambushes by red-faced sons, and the running of mistresses’ fingers or handkerchiefs along furniture to look for missed dust. Feeling nervous, she finds work at the doctor’s house in Goldthorpe, wages six shillings a week. She will get nothing for a month and then five-sixths of it; all but a shilling will be handed over to her mam. Not only that, on her days off Annie leaves the washing up for Winnie to do, and then asks her to black the grate, or beat a carpet (‘I thought I’d leave them for you, seeing as you were coming’). It is typical of her mother’s selfishness, thinks Winnie, but she cannot say no. Annie doesn’t enjoy the housework, but Winnie, her father’s daughter, cannot relax if there is a surface where dust has gathered.
She hears about better-paid work at the Broad Highway, a large modern travellers’ inn on a junction of the Great North Road near Doncaster. Abutting a newly opened golf course and country club, it is the kind of place that has flourished with the popularity of the motor car. Staff can live in, so when Winnie obtains a position as a general chambermaid and cleaner there, she escapes her home and Walter’s temper. Scrubbing floors and guest rooms, washing crockery and dusting bars, she feels freer: the Broad Highway is airy and light, and full of commercial travellers and coachloads on their way to the races at Doncaster. The work makes Winnie, boosted up on bread and dripping breakfasts, physically strong as she enters her late teens. Her sisters and friends note the stocky power building in her body.
Her boss, Mrs Bligh, the wife of the good-looking, get-ahead owner Thomas Bligh, is kind to her, and their daughter Marjorie (‘Miss Marjorie’ to Winnie) is friendly and protective. Miss Marjorie is three years older than Winnie, beautiful, radiant with glamour, and full of stories from the new, stylish arcades and dance halls of Doncaster. She has fashionable dresses made up in velvets, organdies and printed cottons from the town’s market, and comes back from shopping trips in her father’s car with silk stockings, cloche hats, make-up and perfumes with French names. ‘Try some of this, Winnie,’ she says, and applies deep red lipstick to the younger girl’s tremulous, awestruck mouth. ‘I’ve a new one of these’ – holding up an almost empty bottle of Soir de Paris – ‘would you like to take what’s left?’
Miss Marjorie is the only woman Winnie knows whose parents do not labour for a living, and she tries to ape her manners and attitudes, as her mam had copied her mistress’s before her. Winnie might not have her bone structure, and she could neither afford make-up nor risk it in her father’s sight, but it costs nothing to mimic Miss Marjorie’s elegant mannerisms which, she imagines, set her apart from the rougher girls in Goldthorpe. Miss Marjorie encourages her to share her feelings about Rudolph Valentino after she has been to see his films and in turn tells her about the new music, jazz and quicksteps, the comical dance moves to the Black Bottom and the Charleston that some of the girls do in the dance halls. ‘If you go dancing you have to watch, because their legs go everywhere,’ she says. ‘They clip your ankles.’
Winnie says she hasn’t been dancing yet.
‘You want to be going soon,’ says Miss Marjorie. ‘Have some fun!’
At home, though, fun remains a vexed and dangerous area. Walter alternates between gentleness and rage, and despite Winnie being of working age, he still addresses and treats her as a child when she is there at weekends and on her half-day Wednesdays. His moods are erratic, possibly made worse by anxiety over money as the coal owners threaten to reduce the wages again. If Winnie complains she sometimes gets a sympathetic hearing, and sometimes a slap or the belt. The only difference her age makes is to increase Walter’s aggressive protection of her against men, most of whom he regards as idlers, gamblers and ne’er-do-wells. Winnie does not go with boys, but this only makes Walter more suspicious. There is widespread moral outrage about the new style and mood among young women: the dance moves, the make-up, the music, the cheap fashions, the exposed arms and legs. Walter fears that such behaviour will lead Winnie into the arms of one of the new breed of young men whose politics are revolutionary and whose dress and demeanour imitate the heroes in films.
One night in 1925, when Winnie is fifteen, her father sees her talking to a young man at Goldthorpe’s fish and chip shop. When she gets back to the house later, Walter instructs her to go to her bedroom and undress to her underwear.
If Walter’s eldest had been a boy, the boy might have turned on him and stopped it, but Winnie is a girl, and this is how it works for girls. You get punished if the men decide you have erred, and if you complain you get punished again, only harder. Not bearing the discipline is a greater crime than the crime itself.
Dress, underskirt, corset fastened at front with bobble and hook. As she stands there and hears his steps on the narrow wooden stairs, she works out how this was her fault. He is a good man, fighting to cope with what has happened to him in the war. If he is a good man, and he has been so disgusted with her, then what is she? She stops thinking and just decides she will not cry. She won’t let him see that the beating works and won’t upset him by weeping tears that will induce the self-pity of a thwarted man. It is defiance, not only of his power, but also of what he is when he is like this.
‘Tha can take that off.’ Walter, face full of contempt, looks at her corset. She turns from him and unhooks it, exposing her bare back, mottled pale as pearls. She hears the pop and loose jingle of the belt buckle as he loosens it. The slither of the belt through the loops.
‘Bend over.’ The tone is the one he uses when dismissing a lie, or sending out a disgraced dog. ‘Tha’s acting like a whore, Winnie. Tha’ll stay away from them lads.’
The gypsy girl is with her, beside her, and telling her she will be all right.
He uses the buckle end on her, which tells her he is at his angriest. The beating lasts until he is exhausted. She feels rising weals. She tells herself not to cry. She loves him, and because she loves him does not want him to see her weeping. She has learnt to hold it in.
‘He could never make me cry,’ she will tell her daughters, and then her granddaughter, many years from now. ‘However hard he hit me, I wouldn’t.’
Goldthorpe, 1926
A year later, in June 1926, Winnie Parkin is working with her father among the dry soil and thirsty vegetables of his allotment on the edge of the village. It is her half-day and she has come to help him and keep him company. He is always calmer out here – when he is well enough to come – moving in his own time, his sick back slowly rising and falling and rising again among the canes and the plant tops. Alone with him here, Winnie feels safe. She fetches water for him and pulls up knotgrass and nettles. She learns to plant out beetroot, beans and leeks, and she keeps tidy the tiny, dilapidated cabin he has assembled from old doors and salvaged planks. And when they stand to rest and sip water from Walter’s pit bottle, she talks to him about his childhood on the farms, and about Shirebrook, and the miners whose struggle has come to seem to her as permanent a part of life as the weather.
This June, though, Walter is locked out with the rest of the British miners following the coal owners’ reduction of their wages. The dispute had been building for years. The coal markets were down and the mine owners wished to retain their profits; the miners, however, were already on such reduced wages that they felt they might as well try to force the owners to back down. The government tried to head off the conflict in 1925 by commissioning another report and paying a nine-month subsidy to make up the wages. Throughout the months leading up to the report’s publication and the end of the subsidy, Arthur ‘A. J.’ Cook, the miners’ leader, had toured the coalfields with his rallying cry: ‘Not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day.’ The local newspapers carried weekly reports about the situation, and the miners’ newspapers were full of stories about the dispute. In the chapels, the preachers delivered solemn sermons likening the miners to the Children of Israel in bondage and the coal owners to the Babylonians and Egyptians.
The subsidy ran out at the end of April and the miners, refusing to accept pay cuts and longer hours, found themselves locked out by the owners. On May Day, the chief executives of all the TUC unions voted to strike in support of the miners, and to defend their own wages, starting at midnight on the third. The general strike lasted nine days but by June the miners had been left out on their own.
From the allotment, Winnie and Walter watch men searching Hickleton colliery’s spoil heap for discarded coal while Walter tells Winnie stories about the lockout. The hero is always Arthur Cook, the villains Winston Churchill and Churchill’s supposed friend, Nancy Astor. Churchill is Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Conservative government and keen to confront the miners. They have disliked him since 1910 when, as Home Secretary, he sent in troops to reinforce the police when miners went on strike in the Rhondda. There had been trouble and miners hurt, and the two sides had blamed each other ever since. ‘You know what he said to Arthur Cook, Winnie?’ says Walter. ‘When Arthur said, “We’ll let grass grow on those pulley wheels before we submit to tyranny”? He said: “And I’ll make you eat it.” Eat grass!’
Winnie looks at the grass and weeds around her and wonders what it would be like to eat, and how you would cook it. If the strike goes on, is this what they’ll have for dinner?
