Authors: Richard Benson
The courtroom is small, tatty and stale-smelling. Gary and Alwyn sit on one side, and his mam and the Whites on the other. Uncle Leonard, freshly shaven and looking big in his suit, glares at Alwyn. The judge questions the solicitors and social workers, and the solicitors question Margaret and then Alwyn. Gary tries to understand it, and waits for someone to ask him where he would like to live. He has come with an idea. Sick of all the fights and wrangling, and unable to keep both his mam and dad happy at once, he will just live with his Grandma and Grandad Hollingworth. It seems the perfect solution to him, but in the end no one even asks his opinion. The judge declares that custody will pass to Margaret, and tells Gary to go across to her.
He refuses to move, and Margaret flinches. Uncle Leonard rubs her arm.
‘Gary, you must go,’ says the judge. ‘Come along.’
‘I’m not going.’ He cries as the court usher tries to guide him and Leonard steps in to take his arm. Gary drops to the ground, prostrate on the black tiles. ‘Nobody listens to me! Why does nobody listen?’ He feels like property. Men’s hands close around his arms and drag him across the cold floor.
*
Margaret gets a council house at the peaceful, cemetery end of Thurnscoe and a new job as a cleaner at the Albion sewing factory. Her mam and the neighbours help with the boys, and she carefully budgets with her wages and the family allowance so she can afford the bills and occasional treats – nice cushions for her sitting room, a day out with the lads, a couple of Crimplene trouser suits for herself. Gary grudgingly accepts his new home and in return Margaret tolerates him spending many of his afternoons, evenings and weekends at Winnie and Harry’s.
Number 34 has been bought by the council now, Mr Meanly having sold up when the government passed a law compelling landlords to install indoor toilets and washing facilities. He had offered the house to Harry for £200 but, against the urging of Winnie, Pauline and Lynda, Harry had indignantly declined. (‘I’m not buying two walls at £100 apiece for anybody’s money, and I’m not owning half a wall with Nelly and Reg Spencer.’) The council carries out repairs more quickly than Mr Meanly and has installed the anticipated bath and toilet suite, which has not only brought a warmth and luxury to daily life, but also helped Winnie and Harry’s marriage. Until its arrival, Harry had continued to use either the Manvers Main baths or the bath at his friend Wilf Mallion’s, and in her wary moods Winnie had suspected him of using these trips to cover up visits to the pub or to other women. He had always denied this, but now the contention is shelved altogether, this vague resolution of old disputes becoming something of a trend during this period of their marriage.
Winnie, now almost sixty, still has her solid vigour and deftness, though nowadays she is depressed by Roy where once she might have rained fire and judgement on him. Her hair has turned the colour of white garden-fire smoke and her face is lightly lined under the pale freckles of late middle age. The power relationship between her and Harry has shifted in recent years, and she has begun the process, although she does not yet realise it, of acquiring the mastery over her husband that comes to most Highgate Lane wives in the end. As he subsides into bemused and grudging acceptances of words and actions to which he might once have objected, she finds she can risk gentle public mockery of him, and this becomes a new way of discharging old tensions. Harry and his flaming cars. Harry and his flipping clothes. Harry and the carry-on he has with his music. He always laughs now, and the way he laughs makes her like him more.
He even plays the funny man to her straight complaints and laments, and this sets a new tone for them both. Increasingly they resemble a domestic version of Morecambe and Wise: Harry the comic blunderer who ruins what would otherwise be a sophisticated life for Winnie, Winnie the long-suffering, respectable pillar of the community whose censoriousness and lack of humour leaves her talented husband under-appreciated. In the years to come it will be in this comic take on their earlier life that they find a matured version of the feelings they had for one another when they first began courting in the 1920s.
In their own ways, they both work hard at keeping up with contemporary tastes. Winnie takes an open-minded interest in her grandsons’ ideas of fun, which comes naturally to her. Caring for them feels easier and less complicated than it had been with her own children, and she enjoys sharing this rich second flourishing of affection; if her grandchildren find solace and support in her home, they may also return it by becoming the simple objects of love that she had always wanted.
Harry, meanwhile, maintains his collection of 150 jokes, and still sings and drums for the organ players. When his old partners retire he searches out new ones and has started a partnership at the Collingwood with Albert Blessed, a lorry driver and organist in his twenties whose cousin Brian did panto at the Welfare Hall and is now in
Z Cars
. ‘You have to move on with an act,’ Harry tells Gary. ‘It’s no good playing what you want, it’s what your audience wants. That’s entertainment,
mon brave.
’
*
A Saturday in the autumn of 1969: all afternoon Gary has been out on the allotment with Harry. The allotments are at the rear of the houses across a potholed cinder track, filling the space between two streets and a small farmyard. They are a mess of different neatnesses: individual runs of fencing, narrow pathways, tumbledown greenhouses, tarpaper-roofed sheds, and gardens of green plants and canes. The smells of soil and onions mingle with pipe smoke, cow dung and the sound of men’s murmuring conversations against the rumble of lorries heading west to the M1 motorway.
Harry is shaking soil from a scalp of potatoes so that he can take them in for Sunday’s dinner. He has been telling Gary about looking after the pit ponies, how he would share his snap with his favourite and how the pony would steal sandwiches from your pocket. Gary has drifted off his job of cleaning tools and is imagining a sole brave English Tommy hiding out from the Germans in these allotments. Where would you hide? In one of the sheds? Would a hand grenade lobbed into a shed kill you?
‘Would a hand grenade kill you, Grandad?’
Harry smiles and drops the potatoes into a carrier bag. ‘It wouldn’t do thee much good.’
‘Did you nearly die when you were in t’ explosion?’
‘Nay, I’ve telled thee before. I could have done, but I was lucky.’
‘What did you do?’
Harry gathers up the potatoes, straightens his back and he and Gary walk the thin paths through the allotments towards the backings and the snug houses, where the first lights are going on at the windows in the violet haze of late afternoon.
‘T’ first thing I did, Gary,’ he says, as they step into the kitchen, catching the sound of Kent Walton’s wrestling commentary from inside, ‘I told them to clean my face. I didn’t want my face being a mess. I wasn’t bothered about t’ rest of my body. But I didn’t want coal and scars in my face.’
‘He’s vain, Gary, that’s why,’ says Winnie, coming into the kitchen to brew her two men some tea. She puts the pot on the table and pours it out. Harry takes his mug and adds whisky.
‘It’s not vanity,’ says Harry, scrubbing his fingernails. ‘It’s pride in thy appearance. Nobody wants scars in their face.’
Under the electric light, if he looks closely, Gary can make out fine blue pinpricks in Harry’s face, the smudge in his hairline. This blueness is the keel to his grandad’s vanity, making it noble, giving him the valour of a soldier.
After watching the wrestling, and eating a tea of fish and chips, Harry lets Gary come upstairs to help him get ready to go out. In the bedroom, Gary leans back on the sweet-smelling eiderdown as his grandad, freshly bathed, dresses, and tells him about the tailor who makes his suits. He reaches into the wardrobe for shirts on hangers, taking them out as carefully as he might take delicate old books from a high shelf, and shows them to Gary: whites, creams, pale blues and candy stripes. ‘Look at this one, cocker: that’s a Rocola shirt, just feel t’ cloth on it. Which have I to wear?’ Gary reaches out and rubs the crisp, starchy cotton, and chooses a plain cream.
‘Fetch us my gold cufflinks out of yon drawer.’
Gary brings the cufflinks from a small drawer at the top of the dressing table, and Harry holds out his cuffs. As he threads the little steel spikes through their slits, Gary can sense his grandad preparing to relax once the cufflinks are in. With the last push and the tiny flip of the spike to secure it, he stands back; his grandad slips his hand into a trouser pocket to fish out some coins, and gives them to his grandson for sweets.
Thinking they are ready to go downstairs Gary runs off down the landing, but Harry calls him back. He opens one of the small drawers and pulls something out.
‘Here.’ Harry puts into his hand a silver wristwatch with trillions of tiny abrasions on the glass and a creased, cracked leather strap, and a tie pin polished like the gold bars you see in films on television. ‘These are for thee. My dad gave them to me a long time ago, when I was a lad. They called him Juggler and all, tha knows. Make sure tha takes care of ’em.’
‘I will, thank you, Grandad.’
They both clatter down the stairs and turn right into the sitting room, where Winnie looks up at them from the television. As she smiles, the skin at the outer edges of her eyes folds into little crinkled wings. ‘Here comes our Gary with t’ Duke!’ she says, the Duke her affectionate nickname for her preening husband. Gary feels the warmth of the reflected glory. He sits down beside his grandma on the settee-throne, prepares to inspect their domain of the TV schedules with her, and toasts his aristocratic heritage with a glass of green fruit-flavoured pop.
41 A Pork Pie and a Pint of Milk
Thurnscoe; Goldthorpe; Highgate, 1971–72
‘Today you will be shown some of the opportunities that are now open to school-leavers like yourselves. Remember, this is a big employer. Those of you who’ll be looking for work after Easter or in the summer, make sure to listen, and don’t be afraid to ask questions. Does anybody have any questions for me before we get on the bus?’
Thurnscoe comprehensive school’s fourth-year boys, gathered in the school hall for this briefing from their careers teacher, look down at the parquet floor, or out to the playground where two private-hire coaches are waiting for them in the bright, March morning sunshine. Several of them edge towards the exit in readiness for a race for the buses’ back seats.
‘Stay where you are, Crossley, McGregor, and the rest!’ Mr Clark, the teacher, bangs his clipboard on the table for emphasis. ‘I hope you’ll bear in mind this is an educational visit, and
not an excuse for a day’s larking about. A lot of trouble’s gone into organising this trip for you. Now, if there’s nothing else before we go –’
A plump boy raises his hand. ‘What about us dinner, sir?’
‘Dinner? Is that all you’ve got to ask about?’
The boy blushes as the others jeer at him.
‘It’s all laid on for you, you’ll no doubt be glad to know, Spence. They’re being very generous. Make sure you repay their generosity with good manners. Right, off you go.’
The boys stampede out of the school, and scrabble aboard the two coaches. Among them is Gary Hollingworth, crop-haired, face framed by wispy, teenage-whisker sideburns the size of lamb chops. He sits with his friend Kenny near the back of one of the buses, and pitches in with the insults and banter about who will and won’t get taken on.
‘They’ll not take Spence on ’cos he’ll eat all t’ food in t’ canteen!’
‘They’ll not even gi’e thee a button job, Crossley, ’cos tha’s scared o’ t’ dark!’
‘They’ll not take thee on, ’Olly, ’cos thy hair makes thee look like a psycho.’
‘And they’ll not take thee on, McGregor, because tha’d want to take thy mam to work wi’ thee!’
Gary rubs his head, irritated by McGregor’s suggestion. He and Kenny had recently persuaded Kenny’s dad to shave their heads in the skinhead fashion because they thought it would look rebellious and nonconformist. On seeing them in school, Mr Taylor, the deputy head, made the two boys stand on chairs in assembly while he denounced them as the sort of thugs who mug elderly women. It was ridiculous; Gary is not at all violent, he just enjoys acting like an outsider. Almost fifteen, he believes that his dad’s absence has taught him to be strong and independent of other people; when he looks in the mirror he sees a kind of wispy-sideburned skinhead Iron Man. Like most of the other boys he is impatient for adult life. His mam says she needs another wage coming in anyway, and his dad tells him to get to night school and make something of himself.
He turns away from the pillocking. ‘Only a couple of months and we’ll be free, Kenny.’
‘Aye. Two months too long.’
Kenny’s dad works at Houghton Main colliery, a mile to the west of Thurnscoe. He has told his son what to expect on the trip. ‘We might get set on wi’ a job today tha knows. We’ll soon be earning, ’Olly lad.’
The coaches drive through the village and, ten minutes after leaving the school, turn into the car park of Hickleton Main colliery. Hickleton’s training officers have arranged today’s visit so the boys can be shown around and invited to apply for jobs, all as part of an NCB recruitment drive currently being promoted on television and in newspapers and boys’ magazines. That month an advert in an issue of
Goal
, with a grinning Gordon Banks on the cover, urges readers to ‘Get the Best Industrial Training in Britain and Nearly £10 a Week at 15’. Underneath this headline a comic strip shows a pretty blonde girl rejecting a grocery delivery boy named Paul. ‘Get lost,’ she tells him. ‘I only go out with real men!’ Paul’s friend sees that he’s upset and asks, ‘Why don’t you get a real man’s job and join me and my mates in mining? You get a darn good training in basic engineering.’ Paul heeds the advice and joins an NCB training scheme. In the final frame he is reunited with the now-adoring blonde. ‘Honestly, mate,’ his friend needlessly reminds him. ‘You can’t go wrong in mining .
.
.’