The Valley (58 page)

At Dearneside school one breaktime, Karl Grainger’s best friend accidentally gives away that his dad has gone back to work, and the boys look at each other, frozen. Now Karl understands why his friend has new shoes and smart uniform while the other miners’ kids’ clothes are make-do. He thinks his friend’s dad is wrong, but he sees the sudden fright in his mate’s face. Knowing that the other kids whose dads are working have been cut dead by the rest of the school, he changes the subject and says nothing.

Across the coalfields the picket lines are bitter, the threats, beatings and missiles worsen. Norman Willis, the General Secretary of the TUC, addresses miners in the sports centre at Aberavon, South Wales, and men who have climbed into the roof space dangle a rope noose above his head because he is blaming the pickets for the trouble. Two weeks later, also in South Wales, two striking miners in their early twenties drop a concrete block and a concrete post from a bridge onto a taxi taking a working miner, David Williams, to Merthyr Vale colliery. The concrete goes through the taxi windscreen, killing the driver, a thirty-five-year-old man called David Wilkie who has three children and whose fiancée is seven months pregnant.

The police had taken special measures that week to get working miners into collieries, blocking off roads against pickets. Expecting violence, taxi drivers had been accompanied by police cars and motorcycles, and given police riot helmets to wear. On the radio and television news Arthur Scargill says he is deeply shocked by the tragedy. Mrs Thatcher says she is angry at the wrong against the family of a man who ‘was only doing his duty and taking someone to work who wanted to go to work’. Kim Howells, a South Wales NUM official, blames the death on the Coal Board’s attempts to get miners back to the pits.

In Nottinghamshire, working miners begin assembling their own breakaway organisation, the Union of Democratic Mineworkers. More talks between the NUM and the Coal Board break up with nothing achieved, and the union leaders hold more rallies in the villages. Scargill comes to speak at one at Goldthorpe’s Welfare Hall, but when Gary and Elaine walk away at the end, Elaine says, ‘Will he be going hungry, though?’ and Gary wonders if the women see it all more clearly than the men.

At the end of November, he joins the picket at Kiveton Park, a pit village outside Sheffield near to where Walter Parkin was born. As they stand on the long, straight road leading down to the pit, the police put up lights that shine intense white arcs into the pickets’ eyes and turn on a machine that emits a high-pitched noise. Word goes about that somewhere down the road a picket has been trampled by a horse. Using loudhailers the police shout orders: ‘Make way! Make way! You are obstructing the path of an ambulance.’

But no one can see an ambulance.

‘Where?’ The unamplified pickets’ voices sound puny.

‘We have a casualty. Stop obstructing the ambulance.’

Everyone is looking around. ‘You lying bastards, we’re not stopping you! You’ve not even asked for one.’

‘Disperse now. We have a casualty.’

Then, without warning, the police lines part to allow through a dozen mounted policemen. The horses gallop into the pickets. In the darkness Gary sees the long truncheons, and the sparks off horseshoes on tarmac.

With the rest of the men he runs for the grass verge. The horses pull up, rein in and go back, and there is a stand-off. Someone says there is a big picket gathering at Harworth, ten miles east. The officers are calling reinforcements in from other collieries. He watches now, but he senses the police will come at them again.

Everyone senses it. In the doorways of houses facing the road, men and women appear and shout to the fleeing miners, come on, get in here quick – and then slam the door shut as the men go inside. But the mounted police charge again, and the foot police follow, smashing the doors open with boots and shoulders. As they enter one garden a woman rushes to the door. ‘What are you doing? There’s no one in this house!’

The policeman shouts into her face, ‘Get out the fucking way, you fucking Yorkshire whore!’ She flinches. He kicks the door open and stomps inside, three other policemen following, straight through her house, and out of the back door into the backings.

Soon, it’s all the way up the street: police kicking in doors, marching in, dragging men out of houses. Gary sees one mounted policeman ride right up to a house with a broken door, and the horse put its head through the doorway. Women shouting, men shouting, kids crying, dogs barking; and, all along the road, police shouting in their strange accents.

Fucking Yorkshire slags.

Fucking Northern bitches.

Fucking Northern bastards in their fucking Northern slums.

The street lights and the pit lights are still on, but daylight is breaking. Over the rooftops the sunrise looks beautiful.

58 Coming Round the Mountain

Highgate, December 1984

On 21 December, Lynda comes home to Highgate, having told the doctors she wants to be out by Christmas so that she can cook the dinner (‘I’m doing it!’ she tells John. ‘Your mam pokes t’ roast taties too much.’) John hoiks her up into his arms from the front seat of their Austin Allegro, missing the catheter bag so it swings wildly free, making Lynda shriek with laughter, and carries her into the house at chest-height, like a bride. Finally he lays her on the bed, runs a bath, undresses her, lowers her into the bath so she can wash herself. When she has finished he carries her back to the bed.

‘This is the life!’ she says.

‘Don’t get used to it,’ says John. ‘I’m starting your exercise regime as soon as you’ve settled in.’

And he does. A friend has lent them an old exercise bike, and John lifts her from her chair into its saddle. She wobbles because of her lost balance, and tumbles sideways.

‘I don’t know if I can do it, John.’

‘You’ve got to do it. Get on.’

He holds her up with one arm, and with the other hand reaches down to her feet, and puts them on the pedals. The foot that she can wiggle flips, flaps and falls off. He puts it back on. It flaps off again, like a heavy, finless fish. She tries to fix it with her will, but while she can make it move, she cannot control the movements that it makes.

On again. Off again. On. Off.

‘Just a minute,’ says John. ‘Wait there.’

‘In case you haven’t noticed, I don’t have much choice.’

He brings a ball of white string from the kitchen and moves the bike so Lynda can lean against a wall. Then he bends down and ties her feet to the pedals.‘Now pedal.’

‘What if I fall off?’

‘Don’t fall off. And a little less conversation, please. Just
pedal
.’

*

Christmas Day. At half-past two Lynda is in her steam-soaked kitchen with the vegetables boiling on the hob and the turkey in the oven. She wanted to cook on her own, so John is out, and Karl at Winnie and Harry’s. So far she has coped in the wheelchair, though it is strange to have her pans and worktops at chest height, unbalancing her if she stretches too far towards them. It is the balance that does for her when she opens the oven door to slide out the turkey for basting. The weight pulls her forward, she jerks back and the roasting tray tips, spilling scalding hot fat over the oven and floor. She twists away. ‘Damn you! Bloody damn you!’ She shoves the tray back in, slams the door and in anger grabs the nearest object, a full bottle of washing-up liquid, and hurls it across the kitchen towards the door. The bottle thuds against something, and the thing says, ‘What the bloody hell’s that for? Happy Christmas to thee an’ all.’

‘Dad?’

He looks at her, and at the fat on the floor.

‘What’s up wi’ you?’

‘This bloody thing.’ She gestures at her wheelchair, and bursts into tears.

‘Ayup,’ he says. ‘Shut up and come on. Tha’ll be all right.’

She would like him to put his arms around her. He has done it before: she thinks of her twenty-first birthday party when he asked the DJ to play ‘
The Wonder of You’
and held her close as they danced around the dancefloor. She knows that would be hard for him in private, though; it is the shyness of the comedian.

It had been clear when they visited her that both Harry and Winnie had been harrowed by Lynda’s disability. Beside their daughter’s hospital bed, Winnie had cried a little, but had in the main appeared stalwart and encouraging. But with Jane Seels, Winnie had sobbed and confessed to feeling guilty because of her estrangement from Lynda at the time she was admitted to hospital. She had also thanked John for helping Lynda, and then even hugged him, her embrace a sort of apology-gift to them both.

‘I know,’ Lynda says to her dad, as he puts the washing-up bottle back on the side, ‘I will be all right. I’m just feeling sorry for myself.’

‘You will be,’ he says. ‘I know thee.’

Harry is better at doing than talking. In the New Year, he helps Lynda and John to put into action a plan that Lynda made in hospital when she watched a woman walking her dogs on the moor. Together they teach Sam the sheepdog to fetch and retrieve household items in the way that he might have brought sheep for a shepherd. Lynda drills him in bringing her clothes and shoes. John hangs a low clothes line, and she trains Sam to carry the peg basket, and to pick up the pegs that she drops. Harry shows him how to bring sticks from the yard when she is making a fire. It becomes an act at parties: Sam the dog who collects pegs, followed by Karl wheelie-ing the wheelchair around the back garden without touching the front wheels down once.

Lynda attends physio sessions and check-ups at the hospital, and, with John’s help, repeats the cycling exercise with the foot she can move. One gloomy morning in February, when the news has been about more miners going back to work, and police vans with keening sirens have been racing up and down Barnsley Road, John helps Lynda into the bath, carrying her from the bedroom over his shoulder like a fireman. He helps her wash herself, and then when she is clean wraps a towel about her and carries her back to the bedroom, dripping over him and the carpet like a bath-warm, Imperial Leather-scented mermaid. He flops her onto a towel laid over the bed. ‘Now, you get dried, while I get in t’ bath.’ Always businesslike and crisp, as if not being able to use your legs is like having a sprained wrist. Lynda, laughing, hauls herself up and sits on the bed edge, and begins drying herself. From the bathroom comes the sound of her husband splashing and singing ‘
I’ll Remember You’
. Through the outside window, beaded with condensation, she sees the squat, strong white-headed shape of Winnie walking slowly down the backings.

Now for her legs. She imagines her mind being in the whole of her body, instead of her brain. She tries to feel her feet without being aware that she is feeling them. Room and house recede. She imagines dancing. She remembers the little girl dancing the part of a bewitched fairy for Mrs Buxton.

‘I can’t hear you moving! Come on and get those legs going,’ calls John. ‘We’re off jiving tonight!’

When she thinks about something happening, the thinking is what seems to prevent it. It feels more a matter of letting it happen. ‘Don’t think “connect”,’ she says, ‘just do it.’

Just do it. Suddenly her leg shoots up violently, a damp white, warm limb rearing up before her. It falls back. She thinks it must have been a spasm. She tries to stop thinking and allow the connection, and her leg shoots up again. Then it falls, and rises again.

‘John!’

He jumps out of the bath and comes running to the bedroom.

‘Look what I can do!’

Her leg is sticking up at ninety degrees to the mattress, and she is keeping it there.

59 Loser's Medals

Grimethorpe colliery, March 1985

In the days leading up to Christmas, the Dearne Valley had been determined to have a good time regardless of money, and it seemed that everyone, miners and non-miners alike, had been generous in trying to help each other. The collection boxes outside G. T. Smith's filled more rapidly, and in Bolton-upon-Dearne, the union men left their homes on Saturday and Sunday mornings to find their front gardens scattered with a silver snow of coins thrown over by villagers walking home from the pubs and clubs. Afterwards there was an unspoken feeling among the striking families that, having coped with Christmas, they should keep going for a full year. Most do, but in the new year the atmosphere in the villages flattens like January light. Christmas had brought people together, but without that to think about the daily challenge of paying for food and bills preoccupies their minds again. The Coal Board offers new incentives for men to go back, and across the country thousands accept them.

New negotiations between the Coal Board and union fail, and the board reneges on the agreement it made with NACODS about reviewing pit closures. The police still seem like an occupying army, and on picket lines the violence continues. One morning Gary and Kenny are at Denby Grange colliery, in the hilly upper reaches of the Dearne Valley, when pickets build a barricade across the road with planks from a timberyard. The police charge them, and Gary and Kenny are chased through woodland by two policemen with dogs, escaping only by clambering over a high wire fence. Revenge and feuding: when the police clatter you with a Perspex shield or push your face into the road they say, ‘That's for South Kirkby', ‘That's for Goldthorpe', ‘That's for Kiveton Park'.