The Valley (10 page)

The heart of the home is the sitting room, dominated by the range and an upright piano. Its furnishings are minimal, the only glamour being Harry's picture of Dorothy Lamour and Winnie's of Rudolph Valentino tacked to the wall. The range, with its rag rug in front marked with black spots where spitting slatey coal has sent out sparks, is open to anyone equally, including animals, and is a place of liberation. Women stand in front of the fire with their backs to the flames and hitch up their skirts to warm themselves, an action they would consider outrageous if performed elsewhere. The fire itself is a conversation piece: good fires are admired, though one that is allowed to get too big will be criticised by guests after they have visited (‘What's she want to be chucking coal on t' fire every verse end? I thought she were trying to cook us!'). In the valley there is a detailed knowledge of the various coals from the different pits and people discuss them in the way that winemakers discuss grapes, cursing the rubbishy slack of fragments mixed with dust that won't light, and exclaiming over the pure bituminous cobbles that give you a clean burning light with no ashes.

Beside the fire and within reach of the glossy wood-encased radio is Harry's chair, which will always have an ashtray on its arm. By tacit agreement this chair, the man's chair, is given up to him when he enters the room while Winnie's chair, facing the fire, can be used by visitors and children alike. Against one wall is a square wooden dining table with chairs tucked underneath. Opposite that is the piano, and against another wall is a sideboard. Above the sideboard is a wide, wooden-framed mirror in which Harry arranges his hair and adjusts his clothes before going out. Soon after they have moved in – to please Winnie, he thinks – he cuts out paintings of pink roses from a magazine and glues them round the mirror's edges.

Sideboards are important to Winnie, as to many of her neighbours, because, besides a piano, they are usually the most decorative large item in the sitting room. With their shiny wooden veneers and inlaid sections and mirrored cabinets, the valley's sacred sideboards display special- occasion goods such as fancy sherry glasses, spirits and jars of sweets, store mundane items, such as knives and forks (usually top drawer) and tea towels, and have the important household documents (rent book, insurance papers, driving licence) filed in the drawers. On the top, framed family photographs are displayed among the candlesticks and vases. Harry is assigned one drawer in which he keeps his cufflinks, tie clip, money, comb and brush, but apart from that he is discouraged from using it. To Winnie the sideboard is a sort of family sacristy-cum-altar, and she defends it like a warrior queen defending a castle against the besieging armies of untidiness. If Harry wants to leave anything on the surface he must have permission, and he must leave it in precisely the right place. She takes ignorance of its rules personally; her sense of self takes in items of furniture so intimately that it is as if they were other bodies she inhabited.

*

Most people on Highgate Lane work at one of the valley's pits. Often, during the day, women try to keep their home quiet for their husbands who will be on nights, and in the evening and early mornings the air fills with the sound of men coughing up black dust from their lungs. The Hollingworths share their yard with three other families. Winnie and Harry's house is in one corner, and next door are Nelly and Reg Spencer and their sons, Cyril and Terry. Reg works in the pit offices at Manvers, and is secretary of the working men's club; Nelly, a short and densely built woman who smells of green Palmolive soap, likes a bargain and has social aspirations. Next door to her live Comfort Eades, her husband Agger and son Donald. Agger is a hewer, like Harry, one of the men who digs the coal from the face. Comfort is a pale, quietly spoken woman known for her canniness. She and Nelly are lifelong friends, though often not on speaking terms because Comfort has heard that Nelly has been gossiping about her in the backings. Win discovers after a few weeks that people on Highgate Lane are frequently not speaking to one another. It doesn't mean much; you just ask the children to take messages for you, and wait until you or they come round.

In the last house on the yard live a retired couple called Arthur and Elsie (‘Granny') Illingworth, who are loved by everyone by virtue of being old and not cantankerous. It is thanks to Granny Illingworth that Winnie finds favour in the yard two weeks after she and Harry move in. The old lady needs her washing-line stringing, as she is not strong enough to pull and tie it as she'd like. Seeing Winnie tying hers, she asks for help, and Winnie, with her strong arms, yanks it with a vicious snarl and makes it taut as cheesewire. Taut lines are coveted, a source of pleasure and status among the women, so when Nelly notices Granny Illingworth's line she asks about it, and comes straight to Winnie's door. Comfort, not to be outdone, follows minutes later. Soon half of Highgate is calling for her, wanting slack lines tightening, and in this way Winnie Hollingworth, her who's married to t' Juggler, becomes known and respected on the street for her sheer physical strength.

The women tell her about Mr Meanly, and she learns that she and Harry guessed right about his name. He owns dozens of houses on Highgate Lane and all his tenants say the same; his rent collectors want their money the minute it's due, but whatever he does with it, he doesn't spend much of it on the houses. Their windows are badly made and let in the wind, laden with soot and coal dust; when his tenants show him the sills he says that it can't
all
have come through windows, implying that it is you that is dirty. When the walls are damp, he says stop drying so many clothes on your fires. When something breaks he promises repairs but his men never come. When you ask for maintenance his rent man puts you off: ‘Mr Meanly's not got time to be mending gutters' – as if his boss were the Mayor of Barnsley – or ‘Mr Meanly's got more to bother about than thy fence.' Some people repair and improve their houses themselves, hanging new front doors, or repainting their windowsills. Others seem to absorb Mr Meanly's attitudes and not only ignore their own houses but mock anyone who does his work for him. It is Nelly who ringleads the opposition to the landlord, dispensing tips and ruses for getting repairs done, driven by an invent­ive frugality that is as impressive as Winnie's strength. She is famous in the yard for cutting all her buns in half before serving them because, she says, all the pleasure in food lies in the first two mouthfuls.

*

Winnie and Harry have been at Number 34 for two months before Harry reveals to her the lodger who will help them pay Mr Meanly's rent. It is his paternal grandmother Juggler Jane, so-called because she shares some of the eccentricities of the Hollingworth men.

Said to be descended from gypsies, Juggler Jane is old and wears long black dresses in the Victorian style. She carries at her waistband a fifteen-decade rosary, carved from Whitby jet and threaded on silk, which she uses in old healing rituals. Jane treats the rosary with a religious reverence, though she is not a practising Catholic. She says prayers with the beads, but also uses them to talk to her ancestors.

Like Annie Parkin, Jane helps with births and the laying out of the dead. She also brews potions from wild plants and herbs that she picks from the roadside and fields, her skirts often wet and muddied at the hem. She makes wine from nettles and dandelions, and cooks hedgehogs in clay. The Hollingworth family story that Winnie recalls best is the one about Jane pushing a pram through the village and the local bobby stopping her to pass the time of day and remark that he didn't know she'd had another baby. She hadn't; she had slit a sheep's throat in the fields, wrapped it in a baby's blanket, and was using the pram to get it home.

Juggler Jane now cares for four young grandchildren abandoned by one of her sons, who, after his wife died, left Bolton-upon-Dearne to seek his fortune. She moves between whatever accommodation she can find. The children – John, Joan, Tommy and Alf – are sometimes together, sometimes dispersed among relatives.

The day she arrives at Number 34, Jane brings with her the youngest of the grandsons, five-year-old Tommy. Her belongings are in a trunk, brought by one of Harry's friends in his car. ‘Ayup young Juggler lad. Ayup Winnie,' she says as she walks straight past them into the passage, rosary and crucifix swinging with her skirts. She instructs young Tommy to take the trunk, and when he complains about its weight tells him to hold his tongue, and ‘Pull, sirree, or else I'll be after you wi' my rhubarb again.' Jane uses rhubarb to whack naughty children's legs, and when men displease her she threatens to whack them with it too.

She moves into an upstairs room with Tommy, unpacks her cooking equipment (pestle and mortar, a small cauldron, and some metal implements Winnie does not recognise) into the kitchen cupboards and sits down with a bottle of pale ale and a clay pipe. The next day she shows Winnie how to cook hedgehogs, first rolling them in clay then baking them in the oven bottom. They taste less bad than Winnie is expecting, but their cooking smell is terrible.

In the late summer, Millie and Danny move into a house halfway down Highgate Lane with Brian and a newborn baby daughter, Barbara. Soon afterwards Annie, Walter, Olive and Sonny take one of Mr Meanly's houses at the bottom of the hill, which means Annie can help Winnie through her pregnancy and Winnie can look in on Walter. At the same time Harry's sister Clara moves into Number 34 for a few weeks when she comes home from Manchester.

‘God almighty, what's she cooking?' says Clara, when on her first day of living there she finds Juggler Jane hunched at the range amid a vapour of unusual, offalish smells. Clara, having lived in a well-off part of Manchester, is up to date and fashion conscious, with bobbed hair and dinky hats. ‘I'm not eating hedgehog, Jane. It's 1932!'

Winnie goes through her pregnancy relying on her mam's advice and half a pint of Mackeson's stout every night. When she goes into labour early in the evening of Sunday 24 September, Annie comes to the house and sits with her and tells Jane to go off to bed, and Harry to get himself out to the club. Winnie remains in labour all night. Harry comes home, sleeps in his chair, and goes to work. Annie wipes her daughter's face with a cloth dipped in cool water, and soothes her. The gypsy girl stands in the corner of the bedroom, telling them both that it's going to be all right, but by mid-morning Annie realises there is a problem that is beyond her abilities as a midwife, and sends Comfort to fetch a doctor.

By the time the doctor arrives, Winnie is bucking and grimacing in agony. Under her father's blows she has learned to cope with pain by stopping herself from feeling, but this does not work now. The doctor looks disdainfully around the small room and shouts at her to stay still. He examines her belly and she starts to cry. She feels as if her insides are a sink, the plates being not only washed up but also dropped in and broken.

There is a problem with the labour, the doctor says, and he will need to use the instruments. Everyone calls whatever the doctor uses ‘the instruments', as if you could not hope to understand the differences in what they might do to you or your baby. He extricates from his leather bag a pair of steel obstetrical forceps, and Winnie reaches for her mam's hand. That metal on a baby's head! She winces and tries to breathe steadily.

The doctor barks, ‘Will you please try to be
still
,' as if he hates her.

Slowly the forceps tug, and draw out, and tug again. Winnie gasps, and squeezes her eyes shut. She feels more tugging, and the baby comes out. There is no crying. She looks up to see the doctor holding up a baby with a buckled head and a face mauve-blue beneath its caul.

‘A boy,' says the doctor, ‘but it's dead.'

The room is silent. The doctor tosses the body to the foot of the bed. He examines her, and her mam wipes her face. Annie looks hurt and angry, but Winnie knows that she fears the doctor, and will say nothing.

And then, as the doctor methodically tidies away his instruments, there is a small, half-choked, wrenched cry at bed end, then a movement. Annie is the first to respond, whipping up the baby and massaging his back. Another cry, a millisecond longer; the doctor snatches him back and Winnie sees a limp, slow movement in the legs. There is urgent movement, and more massaging and then more crying, and finally, after what feels to Winnie like several hours, the baby is in her weary arms, he looking up at her and her looking back at him, the little boy brought back from the dead.

*

The boy looks like his father, Winnie later notes with some disappointment. Later she will say she thought he was ugly, although by then he will have turned out to be handsome and tall. Immediately she and Harry begin negotiations over the name. Before the birth Harry said that he would like a boy to be called Harry, because the name had been given to eldest sons in the Hollingworth family for generations. Winnie replied that she didn't like Harry, but had no other ideas. Her father's name was the obvious alternative, but she didn't like Walter either. Daft to argue, they agreed, because it might be a girl.

Now a boy has made an argument inevitable.

‘I don't know what we shall call him,' says Winnie, drinking a cup of tea as the baby sleeps in a basket near the fire.

‘I've said,' says her husband, ‘we'll call him Harry.'

‘I'm not keen,' says Winnie. ‘It's not very modern.'

Harry freezes theatrically, mid-puff, and looks as he might if she had complained that the name Harry was not French. ‘Of course it isn't modern. It's a proper English name.'