The Emerald Valley (8 page)

Harry sighed and nodded.

‘All right. Tell him I'll go for him. Just let me shut up here.'

‘No rush.' The evening breeze stirred a stray lock of Charlotte's hair and she raised a slightly puffy hand to tuck it back into her bun. ‘Our Jim won't be there much before half-past eight, your Dad said.'

‘All right.'

A faint smile lightened Charlotte's worried expression. Stubborn and opinionated as he could be at times, he was still her baby, youngest of the brood and the last she would have now. ‘You're a good boy, Harry,' she said.

When she had gone back up the path Harry checked on his pigeons once more and locked up the house before following her. In the scullery he washed his hands at the stone sink and took off his cap to comb his hair. Then he went through into the kitchen.

‘Mam says you've got some beans for me to take down for our Jim.'

James was sitting in his favourite chair beside the hob and as he turned his head with an effort Harry could see he had deteriorated quite a lot even since teatime, shrinking and slumping as he did when his chest was bad. The heavy rasp of his breathing filled the room.

‘Ah – I wish you would, Harry.' The effort of speaking exhausted him for a moment. ‘There's a few geranium plants too, though tell him not to put them in till May,' he went on when he could manage it. ‘I'd come and get them for you, Harry, but I think I'd better stay where I be …'

‘I'll get them for him, don't you worry,' Charlotte said, adding with a snort, ‘And you thought you were going to go down to the pub yourself! I said you were born silly!'

James opened his mouth to answer, but a fit of coughing took him and though he managed to bring up several sizable globules of phlegm, when the fit had subsided his breathing was worse than ever and he slumped back into his chair. Harry viewed him with alarm. He looked like a wizened old man and there was something very disturbing about the way his eyes, pale and watery, gazed fixedly into space as he fought for breath.

Harry had grown up with his father's ‘turns', but this was as bad as he had ever seen him.

‘I'll go and take the plants off Mam,' he said, grateful for an excuse to escape from the familiar room that seemed suddenly oppressive.

The plants were tied neatly in bundles with newspaper round them. James had clearly put in some time on them before the ‘turn' came on. Charlotte gave Harry the beans in a tobacco tin to put into his pocket and stacked the plants together in a seed-box.

‘Can you manage them like that, or shall I put them in my string bag?' she asked.

‘I can manage them like that!' Harry said hastily. He had no intention of being seen in Hillsbridge carrying a string shopping bag, no matter what it contained!

‘Here you are, then.' Charlotte handed it to him. ‘Don't be late, now. And I wish you'd tell our Jim how bad his Dad is this time,' she added.

Harry nodded. ‘I will. Don't worry.'

But as he walked along the Rank the sense of foreboding he had felt so strongly in the house melted away. Out of earshot of that awful rattling breathing and with the fresh air in his nostrils instead of the faint sickly-sweet smell that seemed to emanate from James when he was unwell, it was easy to tell himself it was just another of his father's ‘turns'.

Harry settled the plants more comfortably in his arms and whistling a fairly tuneless version of ‘The Sheik of Araby'he turned the corner and started down the hill.

The Miners'Arms was and always had been the ‘local'for the men who worked the black seams at Middle Pit, South Hill, Starvault and the other collieries within the Hillsbridge bowl. It stood in the centre of the town, facing a rival hostelry, the George, across the width of the main Bath Road. But the George was the pub used by ‘the nobs' – colliery managers and business men, the secretary of the Cooperative Society, the mill owner and Ralph Porter the timber merchant, known as the richest man in Hillsbridge. None of them would have been seen dead in the Miners'Arms, while the miners similarly avoided the George.

For them, the Miners'Arms had everything they could wish for – a skittle alley for noisy matches with other pubs in the district, a quoits bed where the men of Hillsbridge excelled themselves against all-comers, and a yard where homing pigeon crates could be stacked before being taken over to the railway station for despatch to various distant parts. In addition it had two good-sized rooms: a lounge, or ‘best room'as it was known, and a public bar with sawdust on the floor and spittoons placed in strategic positions. Sometimes, for a change, the patrons visited the Working Men's Club, which boasted the attraction of a piano for live music and sing-songs, and if one miner wanted to see another he could be sure that if he didn't find him in the Miners'Arms he would be in the Club.

Tonight however, Harry went straight to the public bar at the Miners'Arms, climbing the three stone steps where the bookie's runner sometimes stood to collect his betting slips and pushing open the door to his left. The fuggy air came out to meet him. Anyone would think, mused Harry, that after a day in the stale dusty air underground, the miners would want to breathe something purer in the evenings. But it didn't seem to occur to them. Almost every man in the bar, regardless of the state of his chest, had a cigarette either between his fingers or stuck to his lower lip, and the resulting smoke hung in a thick blanket below the yellowing ceiling and around the lamps.

A few men were ranged along the bar, but by far the biggest group were seated around two tables which they had pushed together.

One of the group, Ewart Brixey, a swarthy man in his early thirties, looked around as Harry came in, balancing his chair on its two back legs.

‘Hey, Jim. Here's your young'un.'

Jim Hall put down his glass, looking up in surprise.

‘Well, so it is! What are you doing here then, Harry?'

Jim was clearly a Hall. Even through the thicker cigarette fug that hung around the tables the family likeness was evident.

‘I've come down for our Dad. He wasn't well and he had some beans and these geranium plants to give you.' Harry put them down on the table between the glasses. ‘He says keep the geraniums out of the frost until May, but the beans ought to go in now if they're to be ready early summer.'

‘Better get'em in then, Jim,' Ewart said and Harry looked at him sharply. Ewart was such a strident character and he was never sure whether he was joking. This time, from the look of his face, Harry didn't think he
was
joking.

‘You'll be wanting them. We shall all want plenty of stuff in our gardens if this strike comes off,' he went on.

The strike had been talked about since the threatened lockout last summer, when the owners had wanted to make a sharp reduction in wages which were already only just above the breadline. It had been averted then because the Government had set up a National Commission, but that had issued its report last month and things were boiling up again now.

‘You reckon it will come off, do you, Ewart?' Reuben Tapper, porter on the S. & D. Railway line, pressed him.

‘I do!' Ewart maintained. ‘Well, look at it like this, Reuben. How would you like to have to do longer hours for less pay? It's scandalous!'

‘But I thought they was offering you better conditions,' Reuben said in his slow way.

Ewart and a couple of others snorted loudly.

‘That's a good'un! Going to join up some of the smaller pits and call that progress! Well, it's no progress as far as I can see.'

‘But baths. I heard they was going to put in baths at the pithead so you can have a wash before you go on home,' Reuben said mildly.

‘So they say. But when? Half of us'll be coming up to retiring before they get round to doing that. And anyway, I'd sooner have my proper pay and wash in front of the fire, same as I've always done,' Ewart added triumphantly.

‘So you reckon it's going to happen?' Reuben persisted.

‘Unless the Government steps in, yes,' said Jim Hall. ‘They did before and I'm in hopes they will again. There's still a couple of days to go to the end of April.'

‘There's one thing about it,' put in Walter Clements, the quietly-spoken next-door neighbour of the Halls. ‘At least this time the mining man won't be on his own. The trade unions are solid behind us.'

Ewart snorted again, hawked and aimed a globule of phlegm at the spittoon. At thirty-two he could already cough with the best of them.

‘I'll believe that when I see it. Look at the strike back in '21. The railwaymen and the steel workers were supposed to back us up – and what happened? When the time came they saved their own skins and we were left to carry the can. This place has never been the same since. There were too bloody many who never got work again. Your father for one!' he said to Harry, who was listening with rapt attention.

‘Our Dad? But I thought it was because of his chest he couldn't work …' Harry said, puzzled. The politics of the coalfield were never discussed at No. 11 Greenslade Terrace.

‘That's partly it, of course,' Ewart conceded. ‘But 1921 was a sell-out. We went back – those of us who were lucky enough to get back – for less than we were getting before. And now they want us to take another cut. It's bloody scandalous, that's what it is!'

The men murmured agreement and Reuben Tapper muttered, ‘A land fit for heroes, that's what it was s'posed to be. A land fit for heroes!'

‘And heroes is what we be!' Ewart declared, warming to his subject. ‘Look at the conditions we put up with! Working down in that filthy hole, breathing muck into our lungs for years and then, when we'm fit for nothing because of it, thrown on the scrap-heap to cough and wheeze till we can't cough and wheeze no more. Look at your Dad, Harry, and the state he's in. It's all through the years he's spent underground. But does anybody give a bugger? Not likely!'

‘Here, Harry, here's a drink for you.' Jim Hall, who had visited the bar during the conversation, put a half pint of cider down at Harry's elbow, but Harry hardly noticed. He had never really heard anyone talking like this before – or perhaps it was just that he had not listened. Underground, when he and the rest of his team stopped work to sit down and eat their cognocker, he chatted mostly to the other carting boys, swapping jokes and betting on who could be the first to entice a mouse out of the dark ground with a few crumbs of cheese. If the older men's talk was too serious, the lads merely ignored it. Even the threat of strike had gone largely over his head. Men often muttered about strikes – they had done so almost all the time since he started work in the pit. But nothing had come of it and Harry, who could remember very little about the 1921 confrontation, viewed it very much as people had viewed the boy who cried ‘Wolf!'

No, he went to work, he did enough to bring home his money at the end of the week and if he behaved himself, his mother would give him back enough to have a night out. Every week she made some comment about wishing she did not have to take it from him, but he had always accepted it as a fact of life. Now, he thought of his father wheezing in his chair and the pieces clicked into place. His own meagre wage was going to help support the household because James could no longer work. Yet it wasn't James's fault; he was being penalised because of what the pits had done to him.

‘Oh, yes, this strike's going to come all right, and the sooner we all stick together and show the bosses they can't treat us like slaves, the better it'll be for all of us!' Ewart finished. Then, grinning, he turned and held out his glass to Jim. ‘Get us another pint, Jim, will 'ee – and another half for young Harry here while you're about it.'

‘No, I don't want any more – I'd better be going on home,' Harry said, wishing all the same that he need not do so. He didn't want to leave the cheerful company in the bar – go home to hear his father's wheezing and see the anxious sidelong glances his mother kept giving her ailing husband. Here in the smoky, hop-heavy atmosphere, he felt oddly free. But he knew his mother would not expect him to be away too long. It would worry her – and she had enough to worry about without him adding to it.

He pulled his cap onto his bright fair hair.

‘Be seeing you, Jim,' he said. And set out to walk back up the hill that led to home.

At first Harry did not know what had woken him. He lay with the sheets pulled up to his chin listening to the tiny sounds of the night – the beams settling, the boards giving an occasional soft creak, an owl hooting as it winged its way across the valley. Then, louder than all these and much closer, he heard that awful breathless gasping which he had grown to know over the years … and to dread.

James was having another ‘turn'.

Resisting the temptation to bury himself under the clothes and go back to sleep, Harry sat up to listen. James had been so much worse this time, worse even than during the really cold spell in the winter, and there was something so desperate in that noisy struggle for oxygen that it struck terror even to Harry's sixteen-year-old heart. But there was something not quite right, somehow, for the sounds seemed to come not from the bedroom next door but from downstairs. And as Harry strained his ears to listen, he heard the thud of something being knocked over.

For a second he froze, sitting bolt upright, eyes wide, fingers clawed around the hem of the blanket. He half-expected to hear the soft buzz of his mother's voice, low and anxious, but there was nothing except the terrible gasping, faster and harsher even than before and accompanied by a high-pitched moan.

Harry felt his blood begin to tingle oddly in his veins and fear seemed almost to stop his own breath. He ought to do something, he thought, and he ought to do it right away. Go and see if Mam was awake, perhaps? Or find out first just what was going on downstairs?