Authors: Richard Benson
She shouts up to Gordon, who comes running downstairs pulling on his clothes, and she phones the doctor, who says he will come. Then Gordon is running to the next-door neighbour to ask if they will look after Richard, and the neighbour is coming round and Richard is on the stairs, and the doctor is at the door, and when he comes in and sees the baby he says, crossly, ‘How long has he been like this?’ and Pauline says, ‘Since I last rang you!’
‘He can’t have been,’ says the doctor.
‘That’s what made me ring,’ says Pauline. ‘If you remember, you wouldn’t come before.’
The doctor calls the hospital, and the hospital says to bring Jonathan in, and they get into the car, Jonathan on Pauline’s lap, and drive fast through the night to Mexborough.
At the hospital the doctors and nurses put Jonathan in a room and make him calm, and tell Pauline and Gordon to go home and to phone at seven in the morning. Pauline and Gordon try to sleep but cannot, and at 6 a.m. the phone rings. Gordon answers.
‘Come straight away,’ says the nurse. ‘He’s not very well. Can you tell us his name? Yes, I need his name, because we’ve got the chaplain here to christen him, just in case.’
When they get to the hospital, Jonathan is dead. Gordon has to identify the body; his son’s little face is blue-purple. A nurse tells them she is very sorry, and as far as the hospital goes that’s it.
*
Later on that day a uniformed policeman calls to tell them the results of the post-mortem. Jonathan had been born with only three heart valves and one of those had been defective, so his heart had been unable to pump sufficient blood around his body. ‘He might have lived to be seven,’ the policeman says, trying to sound comforting, ‘but he would have been a cabbage. Ordinarily he would have been born a blue baby.’
‘But he was pink when he was born,’ says Pauline, ‘that beautiful baby pink.’
The policeman, in his dark blue uniform, may or may not know what shade of pink she means, but he nods, and he listens and in the listening he seems not only dutiful, but also decent.
After the policeman come the man of science and the man of God with their explanations.
The doctor apologises without making eye contact.
The vicar says Pauline must understand that the child is now at rest with God. Having barely spoken to him since her wedding, and sitting alone with him in the sitting room six days after Jonathan’s burial, she is hesitant and nervous in his collared presence, and feels confused by his consolation. At rest with God: it is a puzzle rather than a comfort. She has faith in a God, but this does not make sense to her. Why did God want her baby? Doesn’t He have enough to look after?
She tells the vicar, ‘I don’t understand why, if God cares about us, he would take a child that would have been loved. Can you tell me why? Because I want to know.’
He says something about people not always being able to understand how God works, but this makes her angry, angry at the vicar and angry at herself because she cannot make the vicar understand. She had thought that she
did
understand God, more or less. ‘What I mean is, if a child’s happy in heaven, why not take children that are unhappy on earth? There are all those children in Biafra .
.
.’
There have been reports about the mass starvation in Biafra on the television news, and Pauline has watched in tears. ‘There were some on television last night and their mothers were dead and they were starving to death. Why didn’t God take them, and leave Jonathan where we can look after him?’
The vicar looks at her with an appalled expression. ‘Now that,’ he says, ‘is a selfish thing to say, Mrs Benson! Those little children have as much right to life as yours, wherever they may happen to be from. Do you see?’
More than selfish, Pauline now feels thick. She feels she has made an awful mistake without knowing quite what that mistake is. ‘I didn’t mean to be selfish. I was trying to say I didn’t understand why God took my little boy.’
Not long after the vicar leaves the house, her mam visits. Winnie says everything has been connected: that Jonathan’s heart had been damaged by the shock Pauline had when she thought Gordon had been killed under the tractor. Winnie listens to Pauline, and says she will try to think of someone who can help her. Pauline does not know what her mam means exactly, but a few days later Winnie comes down to the house again to tell her that if Pauline would like it, she can take her to The Rooms in Goldthorpe.
Having grown up with her mam’s spirit guide living in the house, and with Annie reading her tea leaves for her amusement, Pauline is open-minded about spiritualism. Gordon says she should go, and she accepts Winnie’s offer. Gordon will never tell anyone but Pauline, but he has been visited himself. Close to midnight one night in the week of Mr Benson’s funeral, Pauline had heard Gordon return home from harvesting barley alone in one of the fields; she had heard him come in but he had not come up to bed. Putting on her dressing gown and slippers, she had padded downstairs to see him seated at the table, head bowed, with tears making thin uneven trickles of clean skin through the dust on his face. He had felt his father come to him as he worked, he told her, he had felt his father’s hand laid on his hand, and heard a voice saying, ‘Tha’s done enough for tonight, lad, go back home.’ Panicking, he had stopped the combine harvester in the middle of a row and driven home at speed on the tractor.
‘If tha wants to go to T’ Rooms, love, then go,’ he says to Pauline. Whatever happens, he adds, it will probably do her more good than the vicar or the doctor had done.
*
Pauline drives her and her mam up to The Rooms one clear night a few weeks after Jonathan’s death. The building, near the Italianate church, is darker and more careworn than she remembers it. As she steps through the door she sees the venue is already packed full of solemn-looking women and a few scattered men. Emotion surges through her and she feels full of something. She begins weeping, not from grief, but from relief and gratitude, and the tears will not stop until she leaves.
There are wooden chairs set out in rows. Winnie speaks to a few acquaintances, and she and Pauline take their places in the middle. At a quarter to eight the medium, who had been sitting to the side of the room, stands up and comes forward to face the audience. She introduces herself, sits down at a small table and talks about the people who are coming through. ‘I have someone who .
.
. had been alone a long time.’ ‘I have someone with a sign .
.
. like .
.
. a rose.’
As she talks, some members of the audience say, ‘Well, my brother lived on his own,’ or ‘My mother loved roses’, and the medium tells them what she can make out from the person coming to her. Pauline, with tears all over her face, feels a warmth and kindness in the gathering, but also some sceptical bemusement because of course anyone could say these things and someone would pick up on them eventually.
‘You’ve just lost your father – ’
The medium is speaking directly to her.
‘No,’ she says, ‘I haven’t –’ but Winnie nudges her elbow and whispers, ‘You have, in a way.’
‘I’m sensing that you have, love,’ says the medium.
‘It –’ Winnie looks at the woman. ‘It was her father-in-law.’
‘Oh. Oh, alright. It could be –’
Here we go, thinks Pauline. Trust my mam to fall for this.
‘He’s saying you’ve not to worry,’ she says, and listens again. ‘He says he’s got your little boy with him.’
Pauline feels a moment of fear and clarity, an abrupt gathering of herself. Jonathan had been buried in the same grave as Mr and Mrs Benson.
‘He says he’s got your little boy there, and he’s looking after him. He’s all right. They’re both all right. And he says not to worry. That’s what he wants you to know, that you mustn’t worry yourself.’
The medium comes closer, and speaks as if there were just the two of them in the room. ‘Don’t worry, my dear, and don’t be afraid. Your little boy is with your husband’s father. They are going to be all right, and you’re going to be all right. You have a beautiful light around you, you know. You have a light that’s been there all the time you’ve been in this room. A beautiful, beautiful glowing light.’
The people in The Rooms smile at her and it is as if she has a beautiful light that is bathing her as she sobs.
Afterwards, Winnie will swear that she had told no one about Pauline’s bereavements. Pauline will never know for certain that the medium was not tipped off, but when she thinks about the evening later in her life this will hardly seem to matter. It will not be the belief or non-belief she remembers, but rather the calming feeling, the thought that someone she knew was taking care of her baby, and the being told, there in the darkness, that she had a beautiful light.
*
In the end, Pauline and Gordon look for a new farm to rent outside the Dearne Valley. It takes a year to find one, in which time Pauline gives birth to a baby daughter, Helen. The farm, which they buy at an auction, is a small one in a village on the Yorkshire Wolds, fifty miles from the Dearne. Rose Farm lies next to the village church and was built in the 1830s by John Rose, who was reputedly a faith healer. They move the agricultural equipment up there week by week during the spring of 1970, and one day that summer, Gordon and Pauline pile Richard, Helen, two dogs and the farm cat into their car, and drive out of the Dearne Valley for good. A year later, Beech Farm and its outbuildings are demolished, and the land covered with smart modern houses and bungalows.
Thurnscoe; Redcar; Doncaster; Highgate, 1968–69
So that he can stay in contact with his dad without angering his mam, Gary Hollingworth secretly calls him from telephone boxes using loose change and a number that Roy has given him. They arrange meetings outside the scope of the court order, and although these encounters at Winnie and Harry’s, or on days out in the car, thrill Gary, he will sometimes return to the Whites’ with familiar accusations for his mam. It is her fault his dad isn’t there; couldn’t she give him another chance? He might come back and be a good dad if only she left him alone a little. David, quieter and closer in temperament to his mother, and confused by the twin claims on him, watches the arguments in bewilderment.
The secret-meetings arrangement goes awry when Roy moves back to the North East and begins to test the effectiveness of the court order. First David sees him watching the house, then he collects the boys from school and takes them home to Redcar, and the police have to bring them back. One day he collects Gary at the school gates but leaves David to go home. ‘Gary went with Dad,’ David tells his mam when he gets home. ‘He came in t’ car and picked him up at school.’
‘Where did he take him?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What about you?’
‘He said I had to come home to you.’
The police bring Gary home, but the abduction unsettles everyone. Roy keeps on breaking the access agreement, returning the children after the specified times. Gary quarrels with his mam more often; he becomes tense, apprehensive and prone to explosions of anger, and he suffers from constipation and incontinence. To get away from the arguments he hides at Winnie and Harry’s, or in books. He visits the library beside the bowling green in Thurnscoe, walking down by himself on Saturday mornings to borrow science fiction, war stories and history books. One day he finds a hardback copy of
The Iliad
and reads that, impressed by its similarity to the superhero stories in the comics that his dad buys for him. His favourite character of all is Iron Man, alterego of Tony Stark, the American millionaire industrialist who, after a severe chest injury, builds a hi-tech suit of armour that enables him to do battle with his enemies. In tribute to him, Gary wears an Iron Man T-shirt, bought for him by his dad.
He is wearing the T-shirt on the wintry Saturday morning late in 1968 when he stuffs some clothes, comics and pocket money into a duffel bag and sneaks out of the house to catch the bus from Thurnscoe to Doncaster railway station, as arranged during calls to his dad. Alwyn meets him at the station and takes him on the train to Redcar, where Roy and Alwyn file a new custody claim. They acknowledge that David is happy with Margaret, but say that Gary wants to be with them, and Gary agrees. The claim, resisted by Margaret, goes into a legal process which will lead to a court hearing. In the meantime, Gary adapts to a new family life with Roy, Alwyn and Wendy.
Roy now works at the steelworks in Hartlepool. He has become a shop steward, and after tea, while the rest of the family reads or watches television, he studies books about employment law and trade union history. Most of the time, outside of working hours, he and Alwyn are around the house, but every few weeks Gary and Wendy come home from school to find the house empty, and they have to take care of themselves for a few days until Roy and Alwyn stagger back drunk, and fall asleep on the bed upstairs.
The custody hearing takes place at Doncaster Magistrates’ Court in the spring of 1969. Gary puts on his Redcar school uniform and Roy drives him and Alwyn to Doncaster, urging Gary to speak up for himself and not to let Margaret browbeat him. He stops outside the court and, looking up and down the street, explains that he can’t come inside because if he does he’ll be arrested.