The Valley (57 page)

On Monday 15 October, three days after the IRA bombs the Grand Hotel in Brighton, where the Conservative Party is holding its annual conference, the talks collapse, and the NACODS leaders say they will strike from 25 October. They publicly protest that the government appears to want to see the miners beaten rather than agree a settlement; in turn, the government backs down, denying that there is a list of pits to be closed, and accepting the NACODS suggestion for a fresh closure procedure involving a new independent review body. For a few days it seems as though the NCB will make concessions, the threatened pits will stay open and a compromise will be reached. Then, suddenly, it is all off – the NUM accusing NACODS of reneging on part of their agreement, NACODS seeming to accept assurances rather than choosing to strike and win. The striking miners in the Dearne are disappointed, but unsurprised.

Days later, the BBC correspondent Michael Buerk reports from refugee camps in Ethiopia about the country’s ‘biblical-scale’ famine. The story attracts a wave of public sympathy; pop stars collaborate on a single to raise money for the refugees; the single released the next month stays at number one for five weeks. Meanwhile on 28 October, the
Sunday Times
carries a front-page story about NUM chief executive Roger Windsor meeting Colonel Gaddafi to ask for money on behalf of the union. Many striking miners suspect the story is propaganda, but it will have political repercussions for twenty years. The ACAS talks collapse on 31 October, the news pushed back in the bulletins by coverage of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination by her bodyguards, and more about the famine in Ethiopia. By November it is clear that the other unions are not, in fact, going to do much striking in support of the NUM. The miners’ strike is beginning to feel like old news.

*

The failure of the NACODS deal is disappointing, but to David and Gary Hollingworth’s families the summer and autumn’s events increase their determination to stay out until they win some concessions from the Coal Board.

David Hollingworth goes on picket duty, first at Hickleton Main and Grimethorpe, and then out to Rossington near Doncaster and down to Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, believing that if the working men can be persuaded to come out, the strike can still be won and the threatened pits kept open. He gets some work potato-picking with a gang of miners from Bolton-upon-Dearne, and to save money he and Marie pick out winter clothes for Lisa from second-hand stalls on the market, and fill up on pies at the soup kitchen. They add to their food supplies with aid parcels donated by the public and channelled through the Church or the union. Their first one is made up of tinned food from Russia; one tin has a picture of a strange black bird on the front and contains grey meat, which Marie makes into a pie to make it seem less off-putting. The second contains a pair of second-hand Wellington boots from Iceland.

For fuel, David riddles ashes on the rubbish tip across the road from Hickleton pit. Until the mid-sixties the tip had been used for household refuse, but since then it has been fenced off and forgotten about. Patches of weeds and long grass now grow out of it among bits of old furniture and rusting metal, and parents try to warn their children off playing there with stories of rats. Decay and treading down by kids has lowered the tip, but it is still bulked up high, stretching back into the fields and looking almost like something alive in which you can make out the broken forms of things people have used – sofas, motorcycle forks, busted stereo speakers. Below these things, buried deep down, is decades of ash from people’s home fires. If you take from these ashes the burned clinkers, and put those clinkers onto a coke-burning inset fire like a Parkray or Rayburn, they will burn again, and this free fuel brings Thurnscoe’s striking miners to the tip with sacks, shovels, barrows and homemade wood-and-wire riddles.

Early on autumn mornings in 1984, packs of men in battered coats and jackets clamber over the tip’s surface, stopping to dig out old ashes, and sift them through their riddles to leave the clinkers, which they empty into barrows and sacks. Across the road, behind the colliery, others climb the pit spoil heap and riddle for pieces of coal discarded with the waste. Everywhere the men keep a wary lookout for private security guards employed by the Coal Board to patrol the heaps and keep them free of scavengers.

In the between-light of half past seven one morning in November, David is here with a homemade riddle and an old, heavy wooden barrow borrowed from his next-door neighbour. He shovels the ashes from the old fires into the riddle, and then shakes the riddle so that the solid, burnable coals are left. After picking out any stray tin cans, he tips the coals into a wheelbarrow or sack held by a mate. Everyone is trying to fill as many sacks as their trolleys can carry. Because the coke burns faster than new, several sacks are needed if you want to be sure of having enough hot water for two baths.

Earlier, as usual, he and the other Thurnscoe miners had been down to the pit gates to picket the six o’clock shift. Since the summer, four men have gone back to work at Hickleton. One of them lives over the fields in the next village, South Elmsall; the other three had always kept themselves to themselves at work. Last week the union reps had been to see the South Elmsall man and he had told them he would not go in again, but this morning he had been on the bus.

‘He’ll be sat drinking bloody tea in t’ lamp room now,’ says Ian Alder, riddling next to David, as sifted grey dust falls onto his boots.

‘They’ll not be riddling coke,’ says David. It is cold, and his fingers on the shovel are white. Scraps of wind blow Ian’s ashes about.

‘No, same as them buggers,’ says another man, looking across to a cluster of policemen standing near a van outside the pit. ‘Supping coffee from their flasks on three hundred quid a week overtime.’

Ian notices someone coming up the slope towards them. ‘No .
.
. Ayup, he’s here again. What’s he want this time?’

Struggling towards them, hands bunched in his anorak pockets and collar turned up against the cold, is a man with his hair loosely combed up into a quiff which the wind tugs down around his ears.

‘Hey guys,’ he says as he comes within earshot. ‘How are you doin’ this mornin’, huh?’

‘Ayup, Jed,’ says David.

‘Hey, David.’ The American accent sounds stronger in this setting. ‘You think I’m lookin’ like Elvis?’

‘Bloody hell, Jed. We’re standing on Thurnscoe tip.’ Ian edges away, smiling.

‘Sure, but in myself?’

David puts down his shovel and leans on it. There is something about the situation that makes him feel the need to be truthful. ‘To be honest, Jed,’ he says, ‘I’ve always thought you look more like a young Tom Jones.’

*

One morning around the same time, Gary is at Thurcroft, a village just outside Sheffield, waiting with some mates for the other pickets. It is cold and half dark, with sparse birdsong in the damp dawn air. They have parked up at the side of the road, and they stand about, blowing on hands, hunching shoulders and swapping lapel badges.

A police van drives towards them. It stops ten yards back, and a policeman climbs out of the cab. He is Thames Valley Police. His manner is typical of the police now, more authoritarian.

‘Move on, please.’

‘What for? We’re not hurting anybody,’ says Gary. It is strange; before the strike, he would never have disagreed with a police officer let alone denied his orders. But no one is awed by the police any more.

The police officer’s radio fuzzes loudly. Voices and clicks. It sounds absurd out here in the still village morning, as if an extra-terrestrial had fluffed his arrival by landing in Thurcroft instead of London.

‘We’ve got to keep this road open.’

The men groan. Is this the best he can do?

Gary says, ‘What for?’

‘For people going to work.’

‘For people going to work? This is Thurcroft!’ says Gary.

‘As I said.’

‘It’s a pit village! Everybody works at t’ pit! Where do you think we are, Surbiton?’

The policeman stares at Gary, and at the rest of the men. It is intended as a show of strength, but it seems ridiculous. Everything about the scene seems ridiculous. The policeman turns and walks back to the van. More police arrive. Then more pickets, then more police. They are all a long walk from the colliery.

‘Jesus,’ someone among the pickets calls out. ‘How many o’ thee does it take?’ An officer silently points over their heads, and the lads look around. Behind them, past houses and mist-hung stubble fields, they can see the M18 motorway, which runs along the village’s western edge; on a tangle of flyovers and sliproads for the M1 junction more police vans are heading towards the village. The horizon across the fields glows giddy with blue lights. Gary wonders where the vans are going, and then realises the pickets are being set up.

Horse vans park up down the road, and half a dozen mounted offi­cers clop towards the rear of the hundred men on the police line. All for sixty-odd pickets.

They’re doing what they like now, he thinks. They’ve won the PR, they know the television news will cover them. In recent weeks he has felt the atmosphere becoming more brutal. In October some men had gone back to work in Grimethorpe where the strike has to date been solid. Windows were smashed, the word ‘SCAB’ spray-painted on house doors and people had attacked the police station and thrown stones at the mounted police. It was hard to imagine that happening in any of the villages when he was growing up in the sixties. The whole mood had changed, somehow.

‘Come on,’ someone in the crowd says. ‘We’ll not finish this. It’s Maggie’s militia.’ The men walk back to their cars, and drive off in different directions. On the motorway, the vans are still coming. Gary’s driver takes them to look for food: roadkill, potatoes taken from field edges, winter vegetables from farms in Lincolnshire.

*

On the damp blue autumn morning of 14 November, the violence comes to Goldthorpe. There has been little trouble here all the way through the strike, even when a man was bussed to work in a blare of police vans that hurtled into the village and past the pickets lined at either side of the road, and through the pit gates. But then, on the fourteenth, a larger detachment of policemen is brought in in a fleet of white vans that parks along Doncaster Road.

At the start of the first shift, the policemen push back the pickets from the pit gates, and a bus carries in a handful of men who are said to be working. There is pushing and jeering, and then the gates close and the pickets ease back, lingering beside the road. As the morning wears on women pass on their way to the shops, ignoring the police still outside the pit, and men and women come to their doors, stand on doorsteps, talk to the pickets. Suddenly, police vans and police in riot clothing are coming down the road towards them all. There is a stand-off, a charge, and then coming up the road in the other direction, more police. The streets are in tumult: men run over the allotments, down the railway bankings, up side streets and down the backs. Police officers follow. Passers-by try to get out of the way. Coming out of the supermarket Jack Gundry, Pam’s husband, almost fifty now, sees police officers chasing after men, snatching the older, slower ones from the back and hauling them to the ground as the younger ones escape into the backings and snickets. Winnie is at home. When friends call later on to tell her about it, she and Harry say they cannot believe it; their mums and dads would never have believed it: police chasing people on the streets like they had in flaming 1926.

A few days later two brothers from Goldthorpe, Darren and Paul Holmes, aged fourteen and fifteen, are killed while digging for coal in the railway embankment opposite Bob’s Diner, as Rocky Wall’s old café is now called. Ten feet below the surface there is a coal seam which had been dug out in the 1920s and 1970s and was now being dug out again. Most of the diggers are children and teenagers looking for coal to give to their parents or to sell. The further anyone digs, the more the holes become tunnels. On Sunday 19 November, Darren and Paul and two other boys are digging into the embankment when the roof caves in. People including the boys’ father try to dig them out, but they both die as a result of their injuries. Of the other two boys, one has broken legs and the other, John Farmer, gets out unhurt. It is John that does the interviews on the national news night-time bulletins. Karl Grainger, who has known the two dead boys since they were at junior school together, watches stunned as the reporters try to frame the event with strike angles. Did this say something about the times? Did people blame the strike, or even the government? No, say the people, who are more familiar than the reporters with the random dangers of digging the earth for coal, no, not really. That’s not how it works. It was an accident, and it ought to be left at that.

*

Christmas is coming. Understanding that mothers and fathers are trying to work out how they will buy turkeys and a bit o’ summat for the kids to open on Christmas morning, the NCB sends letters to miners offering a Christmas bonus and holiday money if miners report back to work by 19 November. ‘You can’t go back,’ says Elaine to Gary, ‘but what will we do for t’ kids? We need more than you and Kenny can make riddling coal on Grimey stack.’ The bonus money is a lot more than you can make riddling coal on the stacks, a lot more; on the TV news on the Monday after the letter is sent, Ian MacGregor says hundreds of miners have gone back that morning, though he doesn’t mention the bonus.