The Valley (36 page)

‘They're less likely to try something on if there are other people around,' Miss Shepherd offers limply, and there is just sufficient hint of expertise and specialist knowledge in her voice for her to get away with it.

They wait on a small square. At eleven o'clock another social worker comes through the crowds, Alwyn alongside her, ushering Gary and David. Their hair is unkempt and lousy-looking, and their ill-fitting clothes seem to hang off them. Roy is not there. Miss Shepherd had expected him, but as Shirley says, no one is surprised by his absence, and Alwyn offers no explanation. Margaret falls to her knees on the pavement and pulls her sons to her. Passers-by stare. Shirley glowers at Miss Shepherd, and Miss Shepherd tells Alwyn to leave.

Back at home in Thurnscoe, Hilda White gets down the tin bath and warms the water so the boys can wash. When they undress, Margaret sees their bodies are grimy, and her mam starts to cry.

‘Never mind,' says Margaret. ‘It's over now.'

‘We hope,' says Hilda.

*

Margaret and the boys stay at her mam and dad's house again and she re-enrols them at school. On the solicitor's advice she files for divorce, and then she walks around the shops and factories in the villages until she finds jobs to get her off the dole – cleaning at the fish and chip shop, picking potatoes in the fields, and putting up wallpaper for people, with Hilda and Winnie taking it in turns to look after Gary and David. She has to steel the boys against taunts and gossip, but she knows it is hard because she feels the humiliation herself. The failure to be a family: a failure you feel not only on the street, but also in your own home every time you see a perfect, happy family on television or in a magazine.

Her embarrassment smarts most at an appointment at the housing office in Wath-upon-Dearne. The clerks at the housing office, like the clerks at the Labour Exchange and the doctors in the National Health Service, are like gods among the general public, the services set up to help the people seeming in practice like divine powers, their premises as intimidating as courtrooms. Margaret, with Gary and David at her side, is directed to a room occupied by a clerk called Mr Edritch. Mr Edritch has small round spectacles, a black, bristling moustache and heavy eyebrows, and he peers at them from behind piles of papers on his desk. His speech is that of a man wearied by having to explain incomprehensible rules to people whom he considers insufficiently grateful for his time. He over-pronounces every word, drags out the final syllables, and when he speaks he stares at his desktop until he reaches the end of the question, then looks up sharply, with his heavy eyebrows raised. He talks not as a god might, but as a middle-ranking courtier-cum-administrator to the gods, a man who believes that his job sets him apart from the common herd. Gary imagines him as a clerk to the Nazi officers in one of his war comics.

Mr Edritch works his way through a form, making very deliberate ticks. Gary watches the process closely. He feels angry with the man for not being kinder to his mother.

And how long have you resided at that address?

And how many children have you?

Where are you employed?

And your husband?

They always ask that. When Margaret explains her circumstances Mr Edritch tilts his head to look at Margaret, arches a thick wiry brow with its coarse greys in the black, and says contemptuously, ‘Ah, no husband, have you? Hmm, hmmm .
.
.' He writes something down on the form, the noise of the pen pressing through the paper into the worn varnish of the desk seeming loud in the unkempt room.

Gary senses that he, David and his mam are meant to feel ashamed. He lifts his elbows onto the desk in defiance of Mr Edritch, but the clerk seems not to notice and goes out to find some papers. They sit quietly, talking in whispers, as if quietness might be rewarded with a house. He comes back: they will be kept informed if anything comes up. ‘There is nothing suitable
for you
at present.'

Suitable
for you
, Gary remembers. Suitable
for the family without a dad
.

*

Margaret files for divorce on the grounds of persistent cruelty, wilful neglect to maintain a wife and child, desertion and adultery. At the first hearing, at Doncaster Magistrates' Court on 29 November 1967, Roy does not turn up. When they try again in March the following year, his solicitor denies the adultery. In the meantime the court grants Margaret an order preventing Roy from coming near her and the boys except at prearranged times of access. When he comes to collect them, he makes more fuss of Gary than of David, something he knows will anger and hurt Margaret.

Rebelling, Gary tells his mother that he's sick of her and wants his dad, and he runs off to Number 34, drawn by the welcome he'll get and by a sense of loyalty to his dad and his dad's family. He likes the plain predictability of the house, the smell of cooking, the grandmotherly cosiness of the settee fabric and the eiderdowns: Winnie in the sitting room, telly on in the corner, his tea ready and waiting, and Lynda being like an older sister. Sometimes his mam lets him stay there the whole weekend and his grandad takes him out in the glassworks lorry and tells him stories about history and geography. He points out the pubs and clubs he has sung at, or the spoil heaps where the sponcom – spontaneous combustion – breaks out in red fires in the night. He recounts ghost stories from the pits, and teaches Gary the names of the different seams running through the earth below them, the Parkgate, the Melton Field and, most famous of all, the Barnsley bed. The Queen has Barnsley bed coal from Brodsworth pit, he explains, because Brodsworth coal burns so hot for so long. If they pass a pit where there was once an explosion that killed men he tells his grandson the story, and then shows him the blue scars in his arm and describes his own accident at Manvers Main, fifteen years ago now. ‘Don't thee go down t' pit, Gary,' he says, ‘no grandson of mine's going down that hole.'

When they come back and Gary tells his grandma what his grandad has said, she ticks Harry off. ‘It's a living, Harry, and miners are as good as anybody else. Take no notice of him, love.'

She berates Harry again on Sundays, which are always the same. Winnie gets up early to cook the dinner, Harry has a lie-in, and Gary and Lynda watch the strange foreign programmes on Sunday morning television. Harry gets up and goes to the club, and later in the afternoon Winnie calls Gary into the front room with a loud whisper – ‘Gary! Come in here.' Through the window they watch Harry coming home, swaying as he walks towards the house.

‘Look at him,' she says. ‘The drunken swine.' Gary looks and smiles.

Harry crosses the road, and comes in crooning. ‘Ayup, love!' he says to Gary, with a gap-toothed smile.

‘Ayup, Grandad.'

‘Your dinner's ready, Harry. You want to have it and get yourself to bed, you drunken so-and-so.'

Winnie is displeased, but less vitriolic than she once was. All three of them know that a small part of her is playing up the conflict to amuse her grandson.

When Harry goes upstairs to lie down, Gary settles on the settee with Winnie to watch an old black-and-white film, and listen to her telling him about the old days when she was a girl. He loves hearing Harry and Winnie talk about the past, and delights in the grand dramas from which their stories hang like loops of film. Most of Winnie's stories are about the family, and all the ancestors who are looking down and whose good characters, she says, remind her very much of Gary. As his grandad sleeps she tells him about her father being hurt in the war, about the union, Churchill and Lady Astor, and about the miners being called the worms of the earth. He has heard much of it before from his Grandad White. ‘Don't listen to thy father telling thee about Churchill,' he always says, ‘I'll tell thee about Churchill', and tells him about 1926, and about Churchill sending troops to the Welsh valleys when the miners there went on strike in 1910.

Gary will remember these tales of cooperation, decency and organisation built from adversity; the struggling, the mothers working all hours, the sleeping four to a bed, the injuries to their fathers. To him it is a secret history, a kind of pedigree, an inheritance of sorts. When he thinks about his mam and dad he feels as if he is in deep water with an uneven bed, so that when he puts down a foot he never knows if there will be anything to meet it. Here, though, safe in the house with Winnie and Harry, he feels as if he has found the rockbed and, when he puts his feet down, there is solid ground beneath them.

39 The Beautiful, Beautiful Glowing Light

Harlington and Goldthorpe, 1968–70

After their marriage, Pauline and Gordon Benson grow into coupled lives that are attuned to the farm, and, at least to begin with, content. They buy a new, semi-detached house close to the farmyard, Gordon works with his father, and Pauline gets a job in the post office in Barnburgh. They buy a Staffordshire bull terrier puppy, and in the house, Pauline paints the kitchen cupboards in various pastel shades in the modern American style. In February 1966 she gives birth to their first child, a son, Richard. Gordon’s parents fuss over him (he is their first grandson and therefore, they think, the future of the farm) and when Winnie and Harry come to see him, Winnie has an unusual, almost philosophical, mood. ‘This,’ she says, holding the baby in her arms, and looking wistful, ‘is where your heartaches begin.’ It seems to Pauline that her mam is saying this as much to herself as to her daughter, and she will later ponder whether the statement was simply about parents and their children, or also about feelings Winnie usually kept hidden.

The remark turns out to be in some ways strangely prescient, although what now begins for Pauline and Gordon are heartaches connected not to the birth, but to a series of deaths that will change the way Pauline thinks about the world, and lead ultimately to her and Gordon’s departure from the Dearne Valley.

To start with, Gordon’s mother, at the age of fifty-six, is diagnosed with throat cancer. When she becomes so ill that she needs nursing and there is no one to feed and clean up after her husband and the farm workers, Pauline steps in, helping to run the household while looking after a year-old son and a dying mother-in-law. She learns how to get the blood from the handkerchiefs and sheets; she learns what to cook, and how to clean quickly. This is not the home economics she had learned at school, the economics element in particular unlike anything she has previously known. Gordon’s father is parsimonious and determined to put his money back into the farm, and when Pauline needs money for his housekeeping she has to request it. When he gives it to her he wants receipts in return, as if women cannot be trusted with finances. He is not unusual among farmers, says Gordon, but it is unusual for Pauline. On Highgate Lane it is generally the women, not the men, who control the money.

Mrs Benson dies at home in April 1968. The following summer, when Pauline is three months pregnant with their second child, Mr Benson is killed when his new tractor topples over the edge of a heap of silage, crushing his body. Gordon is working in the yard when it happens, and he finds the wreck with his father in it. Pauline is washing the crockery in the sink and is alerted by a neighbour at the kitchen window (‘One of ’em’s under t’ tractor, Pauline!’). She thinks it is Gordon, and for a few panicked seconds stands frozen, believing herself a widow until another neighbour brings more news.

In the aftermath of the accident, Gordon assumes the landlord, the National Coal Board, will allow the tenancy to pass from his father to him, but three days later the NCB’s land agent turns him off the farm. The Board representatives say it is because they have a consolidation plan, driving for efficiency. The farm fields are included in a larger, single parcel and rented out at a higher rate, the yard is sold for housing, and the NCB gives Gordon and Pauline twelve months’ notice to quit Beech Farm.

*

In late January, Pauline gives birth at home to a second son, whom they name Jonathan. He is drowsy and always sleeping and his movements are slow; he takes an hour to drink a four-ounce bottle of milk. The doctor, from a nearby village, says he’ll be fine. But they fret. Gordon, who had not nursed Richard because he was afraid of squashing him, looks mournful, and takes the baby in his thick hairy arms as if he was made of gossamer and nurses him and talks to him, and they convince themselves he will be alright. But then one evening four weeks after his birth, just after tea when Gordon is at work, Jonathan begins a shrill crying that Pauline cannot calm. His face turns a deep red. Pauline calls the doctor on the telephone, anxious. The doctor says don’t worry, it’s not important, it’ll just be a bit of colic, that’s all.

‘But he’s in pain, I know he is. Babies don’t cry like that if there’s nothing wrong.’

The tone of the doctor’s voice betrays his impatience. ‘It’ll be
fine
, Mrs Benson. You young mothers think every little thing’s a life or death matter. Just give him some of the medicine I left last time and trust me. He’ll be all right.’

Pauline replaces the handset in the cradle and sits beside her baby son hoping Richard won’t wake up. But he doesn’t get better and she calls the doctor again. He is crosser this time.

Gordon comes in at nine and sits with them for a while as she strokes Jonathan’s head. Pauline, trying to convince herself it is colic, tells her husband to sleep, and that she’ll call him if she needs him. At midnight, after Gordon has turned off the light and she has walked up and down the room with Jonathan, he stops crying, and the house falls silent. His pumping chest calms, his eyes begin to close, and then she notices his mouth. There is a bluish tinge to the lips and the tongue, and as she looks it seems to spread and deepen; and then she is sure.