The Valley (60 page)

Lynda returns to work in September. The Victorian offices of Hicklelton colliery cannot be made to accommodate a wheelchair, so the Coal Board transfers her to the statistics department of its Doncaster area headquarters, where the manager has installed ramps, a lavatory, and a locker for her catheters and other medical equipment. Lynda’s new workplace is a hushed, windowless computer room where statisticians move between warm, whirring machines, checking printouts and tapping at keyboards. Her job is to record all the accidents from the area’s pits, compiling the reports as they come in and storing the information on floppy disks. At first, not having used a computer before, she is tense, afraid that the wrong key might add ten men to a casualty list somewhere or shut down the entire computer system. Her taut nerves are then wound further by Brenda and Henry, two colleagues who are proud members of APEX. Lynda tells them she hasn’t worked since the strike started. Brenda gives a tight little smile.

‘Oh, well,’ she says, ‘I didn’t have any of that going on. I’m in APEX, same as Henry here.’ Henry screws up his face and shakes his head distastefully. Both he and Brenda are about the same age as Lynda.

‘Me and my husband were on strike for twelve months.’

‘Oh dear,’ laughs Brenda. ‘We had twelve months of getting paid for doing nowt. We used to sit in here knitting, didn’t we, Henry?’

Lynda feels her upper body tingling. ‘I don’t suppose you felt like you should be supporting t’ men who were trying to save your jobs, did you?’

‘APEX weren’t on strike,’ says Henry. ‘It didn’t have anything to do with us.’

‘As it happens I went to a picket line and wished them good luck,’ Brenda offers.

‘It had plenty to do with all of us. And you could have joined a different union.’

‘Now, just a minute.’ Brenda taps her desk with an index finger. ‘I don’t have to apologise for anything.
I
didn’t ask them to go out on strike. I don’t know where it got you all anyway.’

‘No, I don’t either sometimes. But I know I can hold my head up and say I supported t’ men who support us. I think that’s worth summat, even if you don’t.’ Lynda flings the list of accidents and injuries onto Brenda’s desk and wheels herself off, shoving on the hand-rims harder and faster than ever before.

*

In Yorkshire, the NCB sends its severely injured and disabled employees for therapy at Firbeck Hall, a Miners Welfare Commission rehabilitation centre near Maltby. Firbeck is a huge sixteenth-century house set amid neat lawns and lakes, and populated mainly by miners with amputated limbs, broken backs and damaged skulls. Its young doctors and physiotherapists long ago discovered that their patients respond better to bluntness and black humour than soft-voiced sympathy, and its manners are more pit yard than hospital. Lynda loves it.

‘Now then, what’s up wi’ you?’ asks her physio when they first meet. ‘Balance? Get away. Your problem is you’ve forgot how to walk. Let’s get that leg shifting.’ The physio attaches electrodes to her twitchy leg and applies a strong current. The leg flips up violently, and he guffaws. ‘You’re jiggling like Elvis! Let’s do it again!’

Another physio, who specialises in treating amputees, shows her how to use a walking frame to stand up, and among the limbless and laughing men in the high-ceilinged rooms, she learns to inch her body forward. She still has no balance: if she closes her eyes she isn’t even sure which way up she is, and for all she knows could be floating upside down in a pit shaft. But the prickling feelings in her left leg grow sharper, and spread faintly to her right, and about two months after she goes back to work, the feeling is enough for her to stand with a pair of elbow crutches.

One day when she is exercising in the sitting room at home, she feels strong twinges in both legs, and asks John to pass her the two walking sticks that they now keep by the door for Harry. John hands them to her and folds down the wheelchair’s foot flaps. Taking one stick in each hand, she leans forward on them, and pushes herself up, knuckles whitening on the handles as she rises out of the chair. For a moment she is standing; then she lets herself fall back into the chair, whumping into the seat lightly panting. And then she does it again.

A few weeks later Dr Ravichandran is in the reception area of Lodge Moor hospital when he catches sight of Lynda Burton approaching the building. Her husband John is wheeling the chair behind her, and she is gripping wooden walking sticks in each hand. Her walk is a slow, careful hobble of small rolls and lurches, but she is nevertheless walking.

Dr Ravichandran pushes through the heavy glass doors to meet her. ‘Lynda!’ he says. ‘How .
.
. where is your car?’

‘Back there.’

‘So you have walked .
.
.’ He beams and holds up his arms like a sports coach cheering an athlete. ‘I can’t believe you are walking! Though you know you shouldn’t really be .
.
.’ He moves to her side. ‘Here, let me help you.’

‘No,’ she says, ‘don’t touch me. I don’t want anybody helping me until I’m through those doors.’

‘Tha’d better listen to what she tells thee, cock,’ says John, holding the wheelchair fast behind her to catch her in case she falls.

The doctor stands back. ‘You are sure you’re alright?’

‘Aye. Stop worrying, and go and open that door for me.’ She walks across the threshold into the hospital, and then half-sits, half-falls back into the wheelchair, sighs a deep sigh, and looks at John.

‘We did it!’ she says.

Dr Ravichandran has heard stories like this before, but he does not know why Lynda can walk without having any balance. During the physiotherapy session he and his student examine her in a side room. He tells the student her case history and when he has finished the examination, says, ‘Can we just demonstrate, Lynda?’

‘If you like.’

He stands at the back of her and tells her to shut her eyes. He tells her not to worry as he will catch her if she falls. She falls. He catches her. Setting her upright again, he smiles. Dr Ravichandran turns to the student and says, ‘OK, Simon. The thing here is, Lynda can only feel one leg. She has no balance. So how does she walk?’

Simon tries to remember some other element involved in walking but cannot. ‘I don’t know,’ he says.

‘No,’ says Dr Ravichandran. ‘That is the thing. At this moment, neither do I.’

*

Lynda does not fully recover the use of her legs. The blood clot that poisoned her spinal fluid has damaged the nerves, and all her doctors say a repairing operation could make them worse. But she does learn to use sticks to walk short distances and to get around the car so she can heave her wheelchair into the boot then climb in the driver’s seat.

She and John make it a rule to try live the way they lived before Lynda’s illness. When they have paid off most of their debts from the strike, John and Lynda take Karl for a week’s holiday to Santa Ponsa in Majorca. ‘Come on, let’s go,’ says John after checking that the airline takes wheelchairs. ‘What’s t’ worst that can happen?’

At the resort he and Karl push her along the seafront in the hot sunshine, and in and out of the shops and sometimes up the steep hills towards the edges of the town, where the streets are lined by pine trees and they can walk in the cooler air for miles. They stop to look down at the sea beneath them and watch old black-laced Majorcan ladies sitting in the pine-shade, and John complains about how much all his pushing is going to cost him in sandal leather.

One afternoon they set off up one of the long, straight sloping streets when the weather is overcast, seeking clearer air than in the resort which is sultry and quiet under low grey clouds. When they are about halfway up, the sky darkens and Lynda, John and Karl feel spots of rain on their bare sunburned forearms. Ahead of them lies a crossroads and shops, and John, thinking he can shelter Lynda under an awning, pushes harder to reach the crossroads before the rain is heavy. But the rain is heavy at once, and John lowers his body to get more power. Karl helps him to push, but on the wet marble pavement their feet slip and Lynda in the wheelchair rolls backwards, forcing them down the slope. If they scrabble for grip, they tumble to their knees. If they hold still, they slide. Karl grabs the front of the chair, but his feet slither about beneath him.

John glances back; a quarter-mile of empty, steep pavement broken only by a side road. The three of them are sliding. ‘Are we all right?’ asks Lynda.

‘No.’

‘I didn’t think so.’

He makes a last push, but they slide back and this time he is losing control. ‘I’m sorry about this, love,’ he says, ‘but hold on.’

He squeezes the handles, steps to one side of the chair and, as it slides down past him, pulls up hard on one handle so that one side flies up. The chair overbalances sending Lynda sprawling over the pavement, and then skitters away down the hill.

Lynda is rubbing her arm, but she is unhurt.

‘Talk about agile,’ says John. ‘Tha went down like Gordon Banks there.’

John peers down the slope and looks rueful, almost guilty. ‘I was maybe a bit gung-ho coming up there, I never thought about it raining. I’m sorry.’

‘We’ll know t’ next time, won’t we?’ she says. ‘That’s t’ position we’re in from now on. We have to try things to see if we can do them or not. Sometimes they’re impossible and sometimes they’re not, but I reckon you’ve got to be a bit gung-ho in this life sometimes, or it’s not worth living.’

62 I Think He's Trying to Tell Me That He Loves Me

Highgate and Driffield, East Yorkshire, 1985–86

In June 1985, Harry and Winnie go with Winnie's sister Olive and her husband Frank, to stay in Pauline and Gordon's house on the Yorkshire Wolds to watch over the farm while the family go on holiday. In the evenings Harry drinks in the village pub, where the regulars know him from past visits. ‘Got a joke for us, Juggler?' ask the farm workers, mechanics and lorry drivers, their weatherworn faces expectant, and lips already curling into half-smiles. ‘Well,' he says, ‘I'm not saying my wife's mean, but .
.
.' The landlord, Norman, a round and jolly man who appreciates Harry's liveliness, occasionally stands him a pint, but at ten o'clock one night he calls the farmhouse and asks for Juggler's missus.

‘I think someone'd better come and walk him home,' he says. ‘He's alright, aye, nowt wrong really. It's just that he keeps buying people drinks, and it's getting a bit awkward because folks don't want to keep taking off him. To be honest with you, it's like he doesn't know what he's doing.'

Olive walks over to the pub. Harry has a group of men around him, some smiling, others looking concerned. Harry acclaims the arrival of Olive – ‘Ayup t' main turn's arrived, what you having to drink, love?' – and weakly protests when she insists he come home with her.

The next morning, Winnie looks in his wallet. She knows how much money he should have, and sees that last night he spent £15 when he would usually have spent about £4. Let's see what happens tonight, she thinks. She makes his bread and dripping as usual and waits up, but there is no call from Norman, and Harry comes back as usual, and she puts the previous evening from her mind.

Back in the Dearne, however, more instances of treating and excessive tap-room generosity demonstrate that Harry Hollingworth's mind is sticking and jamming like an old rusted gearbox. Initially people put this down to his daftness, but such explanations become less and less convincing. The men at Highgate Club realise it is not just his eccentricity the night he pauses, in the middle of ordering a round of drinks, to ask if they can tell him where he is.

Winnie persuades him to see a doctor, the doctor refers him to Barnsley Hospital, and there, in the autumn, he is diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and dementia. He doesn't talk about it, but Winnie becomes the nurse, taking on Harry's portion of the worry as well as her own. ‘We'll manage,' she says. ‘We always have before.'

At first he mostly stays the same. Whisky in his tea, carping at the telly, performing practical jokes for his grandchildren: when Pauline and Gordon's children come to stay in October, he entertains them with a series of holed and bending joke teaspoons that leak sugar and cause Winnie to slap his arm in reprimand. But as the winter comes on and the nights pull in he forgets where he is again, and leaves strips of whiskers on his chin when he shaves. One teatime, when he can't see his teacup, Winnie tries to show it to him and he flings an angry arm out at her. Two weeks later, when he threatens to punch her, Lynda and Pauline ask the doctors if he can go to a nursing home for a while, to give their mam a rest, but the doctors say the danger is not yet serious enough.

As Christmas comes and goes, he becomes less coherent. He searches for clothes he hasn't had for forty years, waits for Millie to join in when he sings and imagines feeding the pit ponies underground at Manvers Main as he did when he was a boy. ‘Where the bloody hell's Winnie?' he asks, searching for her even as she stands in front of him.

John comes round in the evenings to chat with him in the sitting room, or to take him to the club for a slow pint that Harry sometimes loses on the bar-top. At weekends, they walk around the village, or down to the allotments. Harry, who cannot bear to have women physically helping him in his frailty, asks for John when he needs assistance, and in the mornings and evenings John helps him dress, guides him as he climbs into the bath, and shaves him with a slow, gentle delicacy, scraping the slackening skin of its white whiskers. John and Lynda worry about Winnie, though, and in the new year Harry justifies their concern. After a spell of lucidity and friendliness, he threatens her with the breadknife and then tries to push her downstairs, his lack of coordination all there is between her and injury.