Authors: Richard Benson
Returned to France once more, Walter joins a new unit, the 10th (Service) Battalion of the Lincolnshire Regiment, the Grimsby Chums, who are on a period of rest and refit in Gomiecourt. In March 1918, he moves up with his unit to Arras. They are in forward positions when, one foggy night, the Germans launch the biggest barrage of the entire war. Mortars, smoke canisters, tear gas, mustard gas, chlorine gas; a million shells in five hours in an area of over a hundred and fifty square miles, and more than seven thousand Allied casualties before the German infantry go in. This time the bullets, or at least the shells, are meant for Walter Parkin. In the explosions Walter’s body is torn up by shrapnel, his spine damaged, his skin scorched by mustard gas. He lies in the mud with the other injured, dead and dying men, vomiting blood as the mucous membrane of his lungs and bronchial tubes burns away. His skin goes a greenish-yellow, although he cannot see this because he has been blinded, his eyes glued shut by the gas. Between the retching, he feels his throat closing as if to choke and kill him.
Walter is turned onto a stretcher and sent back to Blighty blind and unable to walk. He is treated at Park Hall, a military hospital in the grounds of a timbered Jacobean mansion near Oswestry. It is here that eight-year-old Winnie Parkin sees her father for the first time since his injuries, when she, Annie, Millie and Olive come to visit. Winnie has pined for him while he has been away and now she gazes at him in his bed, his eyes bandaged, his voice abraded, speech hardly coherent. The nurses are kind but most of the soldiers seem to be dazed or dying. Annie, eyes brimming with tears, says encouraging things to her husband. Winnie rests her hands on the bed covers and gazes at him.
‘Is our Winnie there?’ he asks. ‘And Millie and Olive?’
‘Yes,’ says Winnie. She does not cry, and does not look like crying. ‘I’m here. I’ll look after you.’
Walter is honourably discharged on 2 May 1918. He receives another medal, the Silver War Badge, and a pension, but crippled and partially blind he remains at Park Hall until long after the war has ended and the men have come home. He is moved to a convalescence home a few miles away, taught to walk again with the aid of wooden frames, and brought back to Shirebrook in the autumn of 1919.
Winnie, almost ten, is excited by the thought of her father coming home, but her excitement collapses into pity and horror when she sees him: bent, hoarse, and still half-blind, he is at thirty a frail old man. Stooping and shuffling, he barely speaks as he is helped into the house and up the stairs, and although he seems to be trying to force a pride and imperviousness, once he is laid down, he remains in bed for several weeks.
It is only on Armistice Day morning that, in the room downstairs, Winnie, Annie, Millie and Olive hear above their heads the sound of Walter forcing himself out of bed and dressing so as to be standing at eleven; he then marches up and down the room. It is an act he will repeat every Armistice Day for the last few years of his life. Often unable to move and racked with pain, he will make himself rise and dress, and put on his medals, and sometimes he will make it to the war memorial. ‘I was lucky, Winnie,’ he says. ‘I saw you children, and your mam again. I’m a lucky one.’
Winnie, as the eldest girl, is kept off school by Annie so she can help nurse her father. Slowly she takes his arm and leads him around the village and some days he tells her about when he was a boy working the land, about spirits, and about saving Lieutenant Smith. On other days he is stern, rigid and critical. As he regains some strength he imposes an ever-stricter discipline: no talking at the table, barely any talking at all sometimes, this enforced with a banging of hands on the table and a threat of beating. Winnie simply obeys him and resents her mother and sisters when they disrespect his wishes. She knows it is the shrapnel and the gas, and she knows that her sadness will make him feel worse. So she learns to take it.
*
Walter and Annie have the bullet and button made into a brass handle for an ornamental dagger which they display on their sitting-room wall. The shell metal still embedded in his spine and legs burns him with pain, and he rubs coal dust into his wounds believing it might keep them from further infection. Whether or not the coal is to thank, he does, gradually, begin to recover. In the months following his return to Shirebrook he seems to will his limbs to action, walking a little more, helping men on their allotments for an hour or two, going under the hands of healers at the Spiritualist Church.
About eight months after his discharge from hospital he is back working at the pit, at first on the top, and then underground. This is dangerous work for the war wounded; not only is there the risk of falling rocks, but veterans’ old injuries and mended bones often burst open or break again under the pressure of bending and lifting, and head wounds lead to dizziness and faints in the heat. When injuries have been caused by work the pit managers will usually pay compensation, but when the war wounded get hurt in the pits the managers say the responsibility lies with the Army. The War Office often counters that the injuries are the fault of the mine owner, meaning that the men who fought the war ‘for Britain, the Empire and civilisation’ are left unentitled to support and unable to work.
Compensation for injuries, though, is only one part of a fight between the men and the colliery owners that Walter walks into in the summer of 1920. Coal mining employs one in ten of all the working men in Britain and the war has left the industry in chaos. In 1917 the government had taken over the running of the mines, setting a higher, national level for wages, and guaranteeing profits for the colliery owners. Some safety laws were relaxed, with a consequent rise in deaths and injuries, and the government tried, on behalf of the mine owners, to lower the minimum age of boys employed in the pits and to suspend the eight-hour day. Men returned from the war to find that while food was scarce and rising prices were devaluing their wages, a high demand for coal was bringing money to the government and to mine companies.
In response, in February 1919, British miners voted to strike for a thirty per cent wage increase, a six-hour day, full pay for all miners demobbed but unemployed, and the nationalisation of the mines. The government, under Prime Minister David Lloyd George, headed off the vote by announcing a royal commission to investigate conditions in the industry. Reporting back in March, the commission called for the wage increase, the reduction in hours, a levy of a penny per ton of coal to improve housing and amenities in coal-mining areas and nationalisation. However, despite declaring his commitment to following the recommendations, Lloyd George dodged. Nationalisation was rejected, and all that came of the commission’s enquiries was a reduction in working hours and the penny levy.
Walter and Annie, like most of the other families in Shirebrook, felt betrayed by the government’s duplicity and confirmed in the belief that if you were not fighting to improve your pay and conditions then the coal owners would be degrading them. Years ago, in the village they lived in before Shirebrook, Annie’s father, brother, grandfather and uncles had been among the miners striking against the colliery owner to force him to employ only members of the Derbyshire Miners’ Association. Annie remembered the DMA medals worn on their caps as declarations of solidarity. Since then she, like Walter, has seen the cycle of booms, when the men strike for higher wages, and slumps, when employers lock out the men, and allow them back only when they accept reduced wages. They have heard the men talk about the union trying to stop the owners and managers taking risks underground to get more coal, and while they can be sceptical about the union leaders, both Walter and Annie believe that combining with their neighbours is the great hope for betterment. Nationalisation seems the logical next step of that combination, and if the government kept control of the mines – well, if it isn’t a hope exactly, it is better than nothing.
A few months after Walter goes back to work – around the time that Annie tells him that she is pregnant for the fourth time – Lloyd George says he will pass control of the industry back to the owners next year, in 1921. Knowing the owners will cancel the agreements that gave them shorter hours and better pay, and fearful of having wages cut, the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain draws up a list of demands. The miners, supported by the railwaymen and steelworkers, come out on strike in October 1920. For several weeks, Annie, Walter, Winnie, Millie and four-year-old Olive eat in the Shirebrook soup kitchens.
The miners go back to work in November and in March 1921, a few weeks before Annie gives birth to a baby boy – Ralph, but known from his birth as Sonny – the colliery owners take control of the pits and abolish the national wage agreement, effectively cutting wages. The miners threaten to strike and the owners impose a lockout. After three months the government offers a £10 million subsidy to fill the gap between the old wage levels and the owners’ new deals, on condition that the miners accept the owners’ terms and return to work. They accept. The colliery owners promise better wages but the agreements are broken, and within a few months unemployment and poverty are settling back across the mining towns and villages of Britain and the managers are sacking men deemed to have been militant in the strike. That year Walter receives two more military medals, sent as a pair to all eligible veterans: the British War Medal, issued to those who served in the British and Imperial Forces between 1914 and 1918, and in celebration, the Victory Medal.
Watching and taking this in is Winnie Parkin, who will remember the bitter stories her mother and father tell her for the rest of her life. She has acquired a companion. One day in 1920 she is standing out in the street on her own when she notices beside her a gypsy girl of her own age. None of the women walking past on their way to the shops can see her, but Winnie hears her saying she has come to watch over her and take care of her, whatever happens, for the rest of her life. Knowing what it means, Winnie walks into the house and tells her mam that she has met her guardian angel.
Annie, who of course has had one since she was a young girl, is pleased. ‘She’ll watch over you,’ she says. ‘All people have them you know, but they cannot always have the sight for them.’
Winnie likes this idea very much, and goes back out to the gypsy girl, who – along with Walter – immediately becomes her joint favourite person.
*
Even with Walter’s military pension the Parkins are poor, and at times it seems to Winnie that the injustice and injuries might destroy her father. She has come to see him as a gentleman, a man of high taste and intelligence, like the heroes in the lending-library historical romances she reads, though sometimes he confuses her. In his gentle moods, he is benign and kind, but when he rages and shouts, she finds it hard to respond. To make this worse, there is the galling truth that he appears more indulgent to Sonny, Olive and Millie than he has ever been to her. There is a divide between the young women, formed by the harsh discipline of the pre-war days, and those whose memories all came after 1914; and in keeping with this, Olive and Millie have developed a cheekiness that Winnie envies. Unable to copy it, she instead tries to earn Walter’s respect with her reserve and fortitude, sitting with her head bowed, looking down, and circling her thumbs around each other. It is the right thing to do, says the little gypsy girl: your father is poorly, and you must try to understand.
At other times, though, Walter takes her out to the fields, or to see the allotments, and then Winnie is at her happiest. He talks about the pit, the war, and about the strikes, and she is outraged with him.
One day in 1922 he tells her he has had enough of Shirebrook and that they will try their luck elsewhere. He has had a letter from his mother saying, why not come up to Doncaster? There are new powerful engines and winding equipment, new kinds of cement to seal the leaking shaft sides, new chemicals from Europe that freeze the earth so you can dig the shafts more easily, and the coal owners are using them to reach rich seams that were buried too deep before, thick bands of untold black treasure spoken of like a myth. With Walter’s abilities, he will easily get work in the new shafts, and there’ll be more hours and better wages than in Derbyshire.
He will give it a try. What’s happened doesn’t seem right to him, he says. What about the men that died? What about the men in the trenches and the men in the mines? They had laid down their lives and this is how their families are repaid: fear, poverty and homelessness. When it comes to it human beings can endure most things, he tells Winnie. Injustice, though, will destroy them.
Goldthorpe, West Riding of Yorkshire, 1925
In the Pennine Hills above Barnsley in the West Riding of Yorkshire, a thin clear spring breaks from a grass bank, trickles down a hillside and, at the bottom, becomes a runnel draining water from the hill. Over several miles the runnel widens into a stream, and then into a river that has carved a deep valley through the hills on which Barnsley is built. Leaving the town, the river turns south and slows, and opens up a broad, shallow valley of rich pastureland and water meadows. The river is called the Dearne, from the Old English word ‘dearne’ or ‘dierne’, meaning hidden, or secret, or dark. Its valley, five miles long, is properly called the Lower Dearne Valley, but the people who live there usually just call it the Dearne Valley, or more simply, the Dearne.
Until the early eighteenth century, the Dearne’s meadow and pasture were sparsely populated, with stone farms and villages and cottage rows scattered like limestone stars in a green grass sky. Its people lived by farming, weaving and village crafts, and by digging coal in small bell pits or on outcrops on the valley shoulders. Then businessmen came with new machines and steam engines and used them to take coal from outcrops and shallow seams to the west and the south of the valley, and other businessmen built canals and navigations, and altered the course of the river to carry the coal to the cities. In the 1840s railway men were sent to lay iron tracks that crossed the valley first one way, then another, and then another, in deep cuttings and iron bridges that ran above the lanes and through the villages. The coal and canals and railways and mass of labour brought entrepreneurs, glassmakers, brickmakers, iron founders and textile weavers, and these men built new factories, foundries and mills. Day and night their steam trains sent out sparks that set fire to haystacks and crops in the fields, and hung the valley with trails of grey steam as they hauled coal trucks from the pits to the iron foundries and the glassworks and the mills and to the docks of Hull and Goole.