The Valley (35 page)

‘What’s going off, Alwyn?’

‘What do you mean?’ Cool as a cucumber. She says yes, Roy might come round sometimes, but they’re just good friends. She says no, she has no idea what he’s told the National Assistance.

Margaret thinks that Alwyn has a very good idea what he’s told them, and the two women argue, the three children casting their eyes downwards and stealing looks at one another. Alwyn refuses to yield, and Margaret realises that Roy might have kept the details of the National Assistance money from her too. It is him that she needs to question. She takes the boys and walks back to the bus stop.

By the time he comes home her anger has subsided into despair. He says she’s got the wrong idea and that there has been a mistake. The council people are idiots: Alwyn is a friend, he calls to see her now and again, but that’s all. She was engaged to a soldier who died, you see, and talking to Roy helps because he understands, having been in the Army himself. Why does Margaret always have to be so jealous and mean-spirited about everything? Surely he can help somebody who’s pining like that? ‘Anyway let’s not fall out,’ he says. ‘Let’s have a fresh start and move out of this van and into somewhere proper.’

He keeps promising a flat, but moves them to a bed and breakfast in Redcar, to another caravan park along the coast, and then back to Coatham Bay. Margaret suspects that he is dodging rent. She cannot find out if there really is a flat for them because most of the time he isn’t around to ask, and when he is, he is in no mood to discuss it. She believes that some of the time when he is away he is with Alwyn, though of course when she says so he shouts and says she’s talking rubbish.

By October the park is emptying of families and fewer and fewer of the caravans are occupied. One night when Roy returns home from a night drinking, and the boys are in bed, Margaret demands to know when they will move into the flat. He tells her to stop nagging. She says she needs to know so she can send the boys to school. ‘It’s not the lads you care about,’ he says, ‘it’s yourself.’ He lurches at her with his hands raised. She staggers backwards and the table flips up and over, and he is shouting, and punching his fists into her. He is wilder than he has been before. She begs him to stop and tries to get away, but he is above her and in control. She expects him to reach down to yank her up, but no, he is kicking her in her back, up and down her spine, his shoe toe in her bones. She screams. Gary and David are peeping round their bedroom door. Roy kicks until he is tired, then stops and walks out into the night.

In the morning she feels sick and wobbles when she stands. There are bruises and welts all over her face and body. When Roy comes back she shows him what he has done, and he seems embarrassed and ashamed and then tells her she needs to go to see a doctor, almost as if it was someone else that had caused the injuries. She is worried. She wonders how thin and damaged you have to be before you die. ‘Can you take me to t’ station to get a train back to Thurnscoe, Roy?’

‘Aye,’ he says. ‘Leave t’ lads here, and you go and get sorted out. I’ll get packed up here and we’ll come down. We’ll have a new start, I promise. Don’t take notice of that Alwyn, it’s nowt. It’s you that I love.’

She travels back to the Dearne alone by train. It has been the worst beating he has ever given her, but at least seeing the damage he has done seems to have changed Roy, she thinks. Once he’s back with her in the place they belong, things will be different.

*

Margaret moves back with her mam and dad, and goes to see a doctor in Thurnscoe. The doctor knows what has caused her injuries, and tries to advise her. ‘There’s no need for you to put up with it, Mrs Hollingworth,’ he counsels, with the tone of a man who has found himself in this situation before. ‘If he doesn’t stop it, you must leave him.’

‘I know,’ she says. ‘But he’s coming back, and we’re going to make a fresh start.’

At the end of two weeks, Roy is not there and has not contacted her. Margaret’s mam and dad tell her to put in for a divorce. She applies for National Assistance and at some point in the course of telling the clerk that she is separated from her husband, and that her husband does not give her any money, she acknowledges the truth: her husband has another woman, and he isn’t coming back. Worse, he has the boys.

At first, the realisation that Roy does not intend to bring Gary and David home makes her feel as if she is in a dream. Each morning she wakes and instinctively listens out for them, to see if they are up or not, and then she remembers they are with Roy, and lapses into numb listlessness. If she thinks of trying to retrieve them, she is seized by terror and nausea. As she recovers her strength she investigates ways in which she might get them back, but no one seems willing to help her: Social Services say they can’t get involved, and the police in Goldthorpe say the same. Harry and Winnie deny knowledge of Roy’s whereabouts, though Margaret thinks that they are covering for him because they prefer their grandsons to be with Roy.

*

Meanwhile, Gary and David adjust to life on the salt-wind whipped caravan park. David, now eight, feels anxious and frightened, and Gary tries to looks after him, even though he is scared himself.

Roy goes out in the mornings and sometimes he doesn’t get home until eleven or twelve at night. Most days he leaves the boys locked in the caravan with a tin of beans for their lunch. On Saturdays, Alwyn and Wendy come, and Wendy plays with the boys while Alwyn bakes, and makes them platefuls of sausages and chips, and scolds Roy for neglecting his children. Alwyn washes their hair in paraffin to kill the nits, and then they go out together to the amusements, or to the beach. But then Alwyn has a row with Roy, and she and Wendy stop coming, without explanation. The boys are lonely and, as summer draws to an end, they spend much of their time just looking out of the window at the other caravans. One day Gary starts to get dinner for himself and David, and finds just a half tin of baked beans and a bag of flour, a vestige of Alwyn’s baking visits. They eat the beans but two hours later David says, ‘I’m starving, Gary.’

‘Aye, I am an’ all.’ Gary sees his little brother’s face and tries to think what he can do. ‘Let’s see if we can find something.’

But they can’t. David looks mournful. Gary remembers Alwyn making pancakes on the stovetop; he can’t remember all the ingredients, but he knows one of them was flour. He takes the flour bag from the cupboard, shakes the contents into a jug and mixes the flour with water. Then he pops on the gas. ‘Just a minute, our kid,’ he says. ‘We’ll have some pancakes.’

With shaky hands he pours some of the white liquid into the pan and attempts to scrape it into a pancake shape and flip it over, but it looks a mess. He scrapes the mess onto two plates and they try to eat it, forcing down mouthfuls until they catch each other’s eye.

‘It’s not right, is it?’ says David.

‘No,’ says Gary, and takes both their plates to scrape them into the waste bin.

Another day they are looking out of the window when they see workmen gathered around one of the empty caravans on the far side of the field. The men back up a truck to it, attach the towbar, and drive it away. In the afternoon they come back for another. The next day, and every day after, more workmen come, moving the caravans one by one. The holiday season is over. Eventually there is only the boys’ caravan and one other. To Gary and David it is as if everyone is being taken away and dropped into the sea.

On a Saturday morning, when there are just the two caravans left, Roy tells Gary and David to come with him to the gates of the caravan park because he has a surprise for them. They stand in the cold wind, shivering, until a bus comes to the gates, and Alwyn and Wendy get off. Alwyn runs to David and Gary, and puts her arms around them and cries into their thin little bodies. ‘These two want something to eat, Roy.’ She makes Roy take them all to a café where she tells the boys they are all going to live together.

The next day they pack up the caravan and move into a flat in Redcar. Soon after that, they move into another caravan park in Bridlington, and Alwyn sends Gary, David and Wendy to a school in the town. For a while the two brothers feel safe and part of a family again. There are teas eaten in cafés, balls booted about on beaches and comics featuring soldiers and superheroes, bought from newsagents. On evenings when he isn’t at work, or in the pub with Alwyn, there is their dad, sitting on the caravan settee under the big window, telling them about what he did in the Army, and about Montgomery, and the Duke of Marlborough, and other great men who, like soldiers such as himself, had fought to make the country what it was, to create Great Britain and the Empire, to defend the race of heroes.

Outside the sea wind blows and the white lights on Bridlington promenade sway. ‘Tell us another one, Dad,’ says Gary. ‘Go on, tell us another story about t’ war.’

38 You're Never Telling Me You're Going to Do it on the Street?

Bridlington; Thurnscoe; Highgate, 1967

One night soon after Margaret has moved back in with her parents, she is watching
Crossroads
with her mam when two uniformed policemen and a man in a suit come to the door. They are looking for Roy. Has she seen him? ‘Chance would be a fine thing,' she says. She assumes he's at the caravan at Coatham, though he's not replying to her letters. They leave, but the following morning the man in the suit comes back. He is Roy's probation officer, Mr Bullard, heavily set, dark-haired, worldly and sympathetic. He says the police want Roy in connection with a traffic offence. They are having trouble finding him because all the caravans in the park where he was staying have been cleared for the winter. He wonders if Margaret knows anywhere he might have gone.

Her immediate thought is the boys. If Roy is missing, where are they? She buckles and leans against the wall. Mr Bullard asks if she wants to sit down. Her mam comes to the door. ‘Them Hollingworths,' she spits. ‘I'll swing for that Roy .
.
.'

‘How will I get them back?' Margaret asks her mam and the probation officer. ‘I don't even know where they are!'

It is Mr Bullard, acting out of personal compassion, who helps her as various institutions bat her away. He tells her where and how to engage a solicitor, what the solicitor needs to find out and who they need to tell.

With money given to her by her dad from his savings she employs a solicitor. The solicitor contacts the police, who locate Roy, Alwyn, Gary and David in the caravan park in Bridlington. Margaret's elder brother Leonard sends a friend with a motorcycle out to the coast to check, then the solicitor drives to the caravan himself, returning to tell Margaret that taking the children back will be harder than they had expected because Alwyn and Roy are claiming that Gary and David are Alwyn's children. The next time, Margaret goes to see them herself, with the solicitor accompanying her. She finds Roy and Alwyn waiting for her in the caravan with a vicar. The vicar tells the solicitor that, as far as he knows, Alwyn is the mother of all three children.

‘How can
you
know?' Margaret loses her temper, and screams. ‘How can you possibly know? You're a liar! Get back to your church!'

‘This is what it's like,' Roy says to the vicar. ‘Do you see? Do you see what I've been trying to tell you?'

The children watch, David and Wendy cowering behind Gary. Margaret has no choice but to leave the boys behind. She hugs them tightly, trying not to cry, and the solicitor leads her back to his car, and takes her home.

*

Through November and December and into the New Year, Margaret visits her solicitor two or three times a week to sign papers or just to hear what has been done and what Roy has said. The social workers agree that Margaret should have custody, and decide that Gary and David should pass into her care in Bridlington on a set day that coming spring.

She travels up the night before with Leonard and his wife Shirley, and stays in a guest house. In bed Margaret lies awake listening to the distant sea, playing back memories: that first night at the market café, the boys as babies, Winnie trying to warn her about getting married. She falls asleep and dreams that she is separated from Gary and David by a door that she cannot open; she can hear the boys, but however hard she pulls or pushes, the door stays closed. She wakes, with the door still unopened, at 5 a.m.

The exchange is set for eleven that morning, a Saturday. The social workers, a well-spoken woman called Miss Shepherd and another young woman whose name Margaret never catches, meet them at the guest house after breakfast.

‘Are you all right?' Miss Shepherd asks.

‘Yes, we're all right,' says Shirley. ‘You just concentrate on keeping this Alwyn out of our way. Because if you don't, I'm going to maim her.'

‘I understand,' says Miss Shepherd, being careful about what she says. ‘We'll keep her out of the way. Shall we go?'

It is a blue day, cold and dampish. They make their way through side roads to one of the main streets where a few early morning shoppers are out with their bags and trolleys.

‘Here we are,' says Miss Shepherd. ‘We'll just meet them here.'

‘Here?' says Shirley. ‘You're never telling me you're going to do it on the street, are you?'

Miss Shepherd looks hesitant, then guilty. Shirley is incensed. For her, though clearly not for Miss Shepherd, it is a breach of a basic code of decency: you don't conduct your private business in public.