The Valley (59 page)

By mid-February, getting on for half of the striking miners across the country have gone back to work. Knowing they have lost, but in many cases thinking they will regroup and strike again later, Yorkshire NUM delegates try to salvage jobs, refusing to return unless the Coal Board declares an amnesty for the striking miners it has sacked for misconduct during the strike. The Coal Board isn't listening, though, and on Sunday 4 March, a national conference of NUM delegates votes to go back with no agreement.

In Grimethorpe, Gary Hollingworth listens to the news on the radio with Elaine, and David and Marie, who have come over for tea. ‘I want to say this,' Arthur Scargill tells the miners and journalists gathered in the rain outside the Trades Union Congress headquarters in London. ‘We have been involved in the greatest industrial struggle ever seen. I want to say to each and every one of you, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart.' The two brothers and their wives look at each other, raise their eyebrows and exhale in the way people do when confronted with an event that is somehow both inevitable and unimaginable.

‘All for nowt, then,' says Gary, and for several minutes nobody says anything. They feel a loss that is similar to bereavement, but also relief at the prospect of returning to their old lives, although no one will admit that for a while.

*

On the first day back, the families walk to their pits together behind the union banners. In Thurnscoe, under low grey clouds, David Hollingworth pushes Lisa in the buggy, and Marie leads Gemma, their Labrador; in Grimethorpe, Gary and Elaine walk with Claire, Scott being at school; in Goldthorpe, Lynda and John stay at home, worried that they would not cope if fighting broke out between miners and police. At Dearneside school, where the headmaster suspends classes so the pupils can watch the march go past, Karl Grainger pushes his face to the railings and feels a flush of pride. A few older pupils shout at policemen, and some wave to their parents, but mostly the children and their teachers are quiet as the procession passes. Later, the atmosphere in school is uncanny. Teachers and pupils abandon lessons and spend most of the day talking about their families, and the police, and the stories being told in the villages. Karl will remember the day in adulthood, long after the last pits in the Dearne Valley have been closed and their yards demolished and landscaped.

A few days later, on the first pay day after the strike, Elaine Hollingworth accepts Gary's pay packet as he hands it to her in the kitchen, sorts the money, and then pushes a greasy green pound note back across the table. ‘Here, take that and have a pint,' she says. ‘Bugger t' electric this week.'

‘Better not.'

‘Take it.' He picks up the note, and looks at it, and is surprised at the thought that comes to him, even as he thinks it. ‘A pound to spend. A full pound.'

Ten thousand men across the coalfields have stayed out, and the rest are bearish, their moods gnarled and kinked. Mates sacked because they were convicted of minor, trumped-up offences are banned even from coming into their colliery yards, and those awaiting court hearings cannot go back until they have been tried. Those who worked risk ridicule or worse; managers put them on menial jobs away from the other men or, if they are lucky, transfer them to new pits a distance away.

The moment Gary will remember most often from those first days back comes on a cold drizzly afternoon in the yard. Mick Penny, who works in the headings, comes to work in an anorak decorated with the badges he has collected during the strike. He goes to the ventilation engineers' hut to collect some equipment, and while he waits outside for someone to bring some parts for it, Gary looks at the anorak. Other men from the team come over to look, which makes Mick laugh. A minute later, noticing the little cluster of men gathering, Mr Lumb, one of the managers, detours from a purposeful walk across the pit yard. Mr Lumb is a self-assured man in his early fifties, who makes a show of being straightforward, open and jocose with the men, but takes no sincere interest in anyone below him in rank. When he comes up, the men's laughter dies away. He follows the men's eyes to Mick's jacket.

‘I see tha's got thy loser's medals on, then!'

It is the joke of a man who you know wouldn't be able to take one back. The joke of a man who hasn't been without wages for a year. It is all he says. After a moment of silence, he grunts and walks off, making the gravel laugh stiffly under his boots. The men look at each other. Mick raises his eyebrows, another man curses under his breath. Gary feels his heart quicken and his breathing grow fast and shallow. He shakes his head, says, ‘I'm off to find them parts for thee,' and heads off across the yard.

He walks anywhere, moving to shake down the adrenaline; past piles of wood, rusting coal hoppers, brick office buildings. The strike had been for Lumb's job, too, hadn't it? The managers didn't want pits to close any more than the other men and women who worked there. The galling thing about men like that was, if you complained about them as a group, they called you a militant or said you have a chip on your shoulder.

He pauses for a moment at the point at which he can see the conveyor belts carrying dirt to the spoil heaps in the distance, the mud and coal and silt gushing off at the ends like a waterfall. He feels the wet spring drizzle lightly whipping his face, and he squints against the wind.

The dirt pours down. Behind him in the yard someone calls his name. He turns and walks back to work.

Part Eight

60 Moonlight Promenade

Barnsley Road between Highgate and Darfield, 1985

At the age of seventy-five, Harry Hollingworth still goes to Highgate Club most weekday evenings, sipping at pints of bitter, taking in the news, joining the banter and disputes. Sometimes John is in the club too, and they walk back together. If he isn’t there Harry sets his empty glass on the bar at half past ten, and strolls home alone, back to the house where Winnie will have left a slice of bread iced with pale grey dripping and brown-jelly crust for his supper. By the time he arrives she will be in bed, reading a Catherine Cookson novel and listening for the garden gate latch to briefly sound his safe return.

One night in the spring of 1985, when the showery rain has made the streets smell of wet soil, Harry walks home along the Barnsley Road as usual, murmuring an old song over the pavement-click of the segs in his brogues. The Halfway Hotel is still warm and noisy, the farm and the school on the crossroads silent and still. As he passes down the road, cars whizz past carrying shiftworkers and people heading home after nights out, and he glimpses through curtain cracks people eating their suppers and watching TV. This is the road along which he and Millie had cycled on their way to perform in Skegness, and the road edge where he used to stand with his father to watch the motor cars when they were new and rare. It may be because he is lost in such imaginings tonight that he does not notice the pavement beneath his feet turn to grass, and the segs in his shoes falling silent as they move from asphalt to soft, noiseless earth on the edge of the village.

He passes the lowing, muck-musked farmyard that marks the western extent of Highgate and wonders why he hasn’t yet come to his own house, but he keeps on walking into the darkness. Open countryside, faster cars; the open fields stretch away into the Pennine landscape and vehicle headlamps make fans of cream light in the blackness. Suddenly he seems to be in a different part of the valley, going downhill, down towards the river. Keep walking. When he was driving lorries, if he got lost in the dark or in fog he used to think, keep on, keep going, keep on the road and you’ll always find a place you can navigate from.

‘Keep travelling,’ he used to say, ‘it’ll allus bring thee home in t’ end.’

Reg Robson, the man who finds Harry and brings him home in his car, is a casual family acquaintance about ten years older than Lynda. As Reg explains to Winnie, Lynda and John in the sitting room of 239 Barnsley Road, he had been out late walking with his dogs when he saw this old lad looking a bit lost. ‘He looked like he were heading towards Darfield. And then I looked, and thought, Ayup, in’t that t’ Juggler? I always remember him because he were a right comic, weren’t he?’

After Reg leaves, Harry, who has now understood his lapse of memory, warms his legs in front of the Parkray and explains that he had somehow missed the house. When he noticed, he had become confused and couldn’t think where he needed to go. Harry is embarrassed, Winnie half worried and half bemused: she is so used to his kidding and jokes that she finds it difficult to take the incident as seriously as she suspects she ought to. Lynda and John exchange glances, and Lynda tells her dad that he needs to be careful. From now on he must ring John when he wants to come home, so that John can walk over to fetch him.

‘Listen to what they’re telling you, Harry,’ says Winnie.

‘Don’t start,’ says Harry. Winnie glowers, Harry ignores her, and with normal service resumed, Lynda and John go home to bed.

No one will talk about the incident again, but when Win thinks about it the next day, she recalls other times in recent months when his memory has slackened or unknotted itself, moments when he has responded to simple questions with momentary blinking blankness, and it reminds her of her father. She thinks it might not be the drink alone, but another problem. Within a year she will know she was right.

61 Catch Me If I Fall

NCB Yorkshire Area Headquarters, Doncaster; Lodge Moor Hospital; Santa Ponsa, Majorca, 1985

All year Lynda’s left leg has continued its unpredictable flipping and twitching. She finds that if she thinks in her new way, with her whole body rather than her brain, she can raise the limb four inches from the ground. It is four inches of hope, and at her weekly Lodge Moor visits she asks the nurses and physiotherapists how she might turn it into a step or two. Their instructions, however, are only to teach her how to cope with her disability, not to indulge her faith that she will walk again. ‘That’s great,’ they say, ‘now let’s see if we can show you how to be more mobile in your chair.’

John’s support and determination bolster her. Lynda is strong, but sometimes someone else’s belief in your strength makes you more able to use it. She thinks she is lucky, too; she knows John loves her, but plenty of men love women without loving their steel will.

At the end of the strike Dr McCraig says she is still unfit for work. She doesn’t go in, and Frank Tulley, the Hickleton pit manager, calls her at home to ask if she wants to take redundancy. The NCB are offering very good terms to anyone wanting to leave.

‘I’ll bet they are,’ she says. ‘But no, I don’t want redundancy. It’s my legs that don’t work, not my brain.’

‘Aye. Sorry, Lynda.’ Mr Tulley is a compassionate man trying to do right, but he sounds embarrassed. ‘I just thought with you being disabled you might not be coming back to work, you know.’

It is the thought of coming back to work that has kept Lynda going. ‘I don’t think of myself as disabled,’ she tells him. ‘I can do everything in an office that I used to do, I’ll just do it all from a chair that’s all – as soon as Lodge Moor’ll let me.’ She is not as sure of this as she sounds, but she will make herself do anything if it means keeping her job.

‘Okay, okay. I’m just asking.’

‘And I’m just saying .
.
.’

‘Right,’ he says. ‘I can tell it’s not affected thy tongue.’

That’s better, she thinks, back to the sarcasm and cheek. It was when they started cheeking you that you knew you had their respect.

Mr Tulley puts her on sick leave, and she spends the next six months learning to cope at home. John leaves the Hickleton Main lamp room and takes a job at the Sta-Lite battery factory in Highgate, so that he can be closer. While Lynda pumps dumbbells, learns to drive an adapted car, and teaches Sam to fetch the cordless phone handset when it rings, John and Karl install a stairlift, widen the house’s doors and build concrete ramps over the outside steps. She bans herself, her family and any visitors to the house from pondering why this should all have happened to her, and, by extension, to them. ‘You might as well ask, “Why not me?” All I can do is get on wi’ it,’ she says. ‘Anyway, it’s amazing what I find out I can do if I set my mind right.’

Away from public scrutiny, there are moments of solitary, godforsaken despair. She cannot reach to clean the skirting boards. She tries to fill the coal bucket and spills it all down her, until she learns to hold the handle with her teeth as she wheels herself into the house. She worries about who will look after her dad if he gets poorly and her mam can’t manage. When John takes her out to clubs she enjoys herself, but finds it hard to watch people dancing because she always wants to get up and dance with them, and she gets in the way as they join or leave the dance floor. ‘Just shove me in a corner or a passage somewhere out of t’ way, will you?’ she says to John one night when they are out watching a Frankie Valli tribute act.

‘No,’ he says. ‘I will not. I’ll move thee out of t’ way, and I’ll stop folks bumping into thee. But so long tha’s wi me, tha’s going in no passage and no corner. So forget it.’

*

The summer passes. The news is full of talk about Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union and Live Aid at Wembley Stadium. In South Yorkshire, the NUM campaigns for the reinstatement of miners sacked in the strike, and it seems half the pits in the county are rumoured to be closing in the autumn. At Lodge Moor, Dr McCraig retires and is replaced by Dr Ravichandran, a genial man who is more encouraging to Lynda, without agreeing that she might use her legs again. At their first appointment Lynda tells him that she and her husband have decided that she’s going to walk into the hospital one day, and they both laugh.