The Valley (40 page)

On 11 February, the day after the Saltley gates are closed, the government imposes more power cuts and a three-day week on British industry. More than a million and a half workers are to be laid off, but public support for the miners holds. In deadlock, the leaders of the Board and the NUM agree to hold an inquiry into working conditions in the modern mines, beginning on 15 February, to be chaired by the law lord, Richard Wilberforce – descendant of William Wilberforce the anti-slavery campaigner. Across Britain people buy candles, add newspapers to their beds, and wait.

*

Six o’clock on the Friday evening after the Saltley Gates news bulletin. A gloomy dusk hangs in the valley: yellow lights in the houses, a mist haze out on the fields, rooks settling in the bare trees. On the bridle path that cuts across the fields, a young man is walking from Thurnscoe towards Highgate. He has cropped hair and wears a long black leather coat, and as he nears Highgate, he breaks into a jog, which makes the coat flap about him so that he resembles a giant, blown-about crow. Past the greyhound track, past a scrapyard with a smouldering brazier, past the school, then down into the backings, across the yard and in through the back door of Number 34 Highgate Lane.

‘Ayup, Gary love,’ says Winnie. ‘Have you come for your tea?’ She stands at the cooker frying fish and wild mushrooms from the Seels’s field. Yes, Gary says, he’d like tea, and his grandmother takes from the fridge another yellow fillet and lays it in the sizzling pan.

In the sitting room, Harry is roasting the backs of his legs against a big furious fire, the smell of heated Crimplene competing with the aromas of food from the kitchen. Lynda is at the table in dressing gown and towel turban, applying mascara.

‘I’ve come to borrow my grandad’s work boots,’ Gary tells Winnie, ‘if he’ll lend them to me.’

The boots are Harry’s highly polished oxblood Dr Marten’s, a form of footwear that, to Harry’s confusion, has become fashionable.

‘Course he will. They’ll look nice wi’ what you’re wearing.’

Winnie always encourages Gary’s experiments with fashion. She had been the only one of his family to approve of the leather coat.

He goes into the sitting room and Harry looks him up and down and says something about the Gestapo, then curses the uselessness of the coal as a hot lump is spat out onto the floor. He scoops it up with the shovel from the companion set and looks up at the television. Arthur Scargill is on the local TV news. ‘Has tha seen this one, Gary?’ Harry says. ‘He could brainwash his sen.’

‘I saw it on t’ telly last night.’ Gary is about to mention Colin saying Arthur did a good job, but stops short because mentioning his other family always feels like some sort of betrayal.

‘Pushing and shoving wi’t’ bobbies, look,’ Harry says with a note of sadness in his voice. He adds, as he often does, that the government should fill in all the pits and close them down, and Gary replies that he thinks the pits are a bit different now to what they used to be.

Winnie brings in the food, and tells her husband to stop running down mining. ‘T’ miners have to stand up for their sens,’ she says. ‘Nobody else will.’

‘Can I borrow your work boots to go out in, Grandad?’

Harry pretends to be amazed, as if such a breach of fashion etiquette is incomprehensible to him. ‘Going out in work boots,’ he says, and wearily shakes his head. ‘I don’t know. I think t’ world’s going mad.’

Winnie looks at Gary and rolls her eyes. ‘Gi’ o’er, Harry. You used to wear a swallowtail coat and hide in graves when you were his age.’

‘
Tombs
.’

‘In tombs then. Anyway, you don’t know what’s in fashion, you’re too old. Our Olive says that in Halifax they all wear rubber gloves to go out in.’

After tea, shod in his grandad’s boots, Gary walks back to Thurnscoe to meet Kenny and Les in the Fairway Hotel, a large pub with a concert room. The Fairway is favoured by people in their teens and twenties who like music, and on Fridays its concert room is usually given over to Sound Syndrome, a mobile disco with banks of multi-coloured lights and lamps that project psychedelic patterns onto the walls. Tonight, because of the power cuts, the disco is cancelled and the concert room closed. A transistor radio is playing at full volume in the candlelit tap-room bar, where the eccentric heavy-rock fans who usually come out for the disco have gathered among the regular drinkers. The heavy rockers express their sense of kinship with theatrical and unconventional rock bands like Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and Genesis. On one table there are four china cups and a teapot full of beer, and a young man a few years older than Gary pouring out cups of bitter for others seated around him, sipping at one himself, periodically asking the barman to pull fresh pints into the teapot. At another is a small group of young men and women dressed like the Marx Brothers. Elsewhere there are girls with glitter on their faces, boys with shoulder-length hair and long beards, and girls putting dabs of glitter on boys’ cheeks for a laugh.

Gary, Kenny and Les, who know most of the people, buy pints of bitter and move from conversation to conversation in the shadows. There are mentions of the strike, of picketing and the lads who have been down to Birmingham. To general agreement a man with long hair and a beard says, ‘It’s our turn now.’ He could be referring to fashion, music, work or politics, but to Gary at that moment they all feel like aspects of the same thing.

*

Lord Wilberforce’s court of inquiry hears evidence on 14 and 15 February, and at the end of the week publishes a report which endorses the miners’ arguments. Before them have been brought for testimony men working in different areas of the industry, including some who have been bypassed by the modernisation of the 1960s. Here, in 1972, is Jack Collins from Kent, who labours in a pit so hot the men work naked, and who in 1963 had earned the equivalent of £5.50 for a shift, but now earns £5. Here is James O’Connor, sixty-two, from Maltby, not far from the Dearne Valley, who is earning £5 a week less than he did in 1966. Here are men still creeping on their bellies, slopping through water, defecating in the best places they can find, trying to bring up families on £18 a week and whatever means-tested social security payments they can get. There is also testimony from Coal Board officials arguing against the wage claim. Derek Ezra, the NCB chairman, says the wages as discussed do not reflect the fact that miners receive benefits in kind, such as the free coal allowance worth £2.30. Lawrence Daly, the NUM president, points out that Ezra has not disclosed the benefits in kind that supplement his salary of approximately £20,000 per year.

Wilberforce’s report says the miners had been asked to make unfair sacrifices when their pay was rationalised in the mid-1960s, and that the closures and job losses have caused great hardship. ‘This rundown, which was brought about with the cooperation of the miners and their union, is without parallel in British industry in terms of social and economic costs it has inevitably entailed for the industry as a whole.’ The national economy needs competitive and efficient coal mines, and they need a satisfied and capable workforce to run them. The miners, it concludes, have ‘a just case for special treatment’. Lord Wilberforce and his colleagues duly propose pay increases averaging eighteen and a half per cent, enough to lift mineworkers twelve per cent above the wages of the average manufacturing worker.

The NUM, however, rejects Wilberforce’s recommendations and holds out for the full pay claim. They don’t get it, but in negotiations with the Heath government the leaders obtain fifteen further improvements in conditions. On Monday 28 February 1972, Colin Greengrass, Kenny and many of the boys from Gary’s year at school return to work as some of the best-paid industrial workers in Britain.

Like the closure of the Saltley coke depot gates, the miners’ victory in the strike has significances that vary according to perspective. For many miners it brings feelings of greater confidence and recognition, and of power. For certain government MPs, it has been a pay claim won by holding the country to ransom. For Gary, it means that his grandparents’ memories are not just stories, and that for once, the television news has some connection to him and the Dearne Valley.

42 Wrong Decisions About Men

Highgate; Goldthorpe; Bolton-upon-Dearne, 1969–74

As these political conflicts play out in the valley, Lynda Hollingworth is experiencing personal struggles of her own. It begins with John sending her away, though for the first year of their separation she cheerfully assumes he will soon change his mind. While waiting for him to do so she works on her career prospects and prepares to apply for office jobs. She attends elocution classes run by an ex-actress in a room above the Co-op, leaves the sewing factory and enrols on a typing and shorthand course at a commercial school in a nearby village. Her friend Carol, who works in London as a nanny for Eamonn Andrews’s family, writes to say she can arrange a nannying job for her if she comes down south when her course has finished.

Unfortunately when Lynda mentions this to her mam and dad, her dad tells her to get the idea out of her head, because he won’t have her going to London. ‘You’re going nowhere,’ he says, and this last sentence is truer than he intends it to be. Winnie had not questioned the commercial school’s claim to improve employment prospects, and Lynda had not questioned her mam, but when she applies for secretarial jobs she realises the school is not accredited with examination boards. Its thin certificates are no more use than the picture cards in packets of tea. Feeling foolish and guilty, Lynda quits early to save her mam a few weeks of fees, and takes a job stitching flannelette pyjamas and nighties at the Silhouette sewing factory in Thurnscoe. It will do until something else turns up, she thinks. She is fast enough on the overlockers to earn bonuses, and she likes the shop floor’s open amicability. Most of the women there are young and sociable like her, their chatter as quick and sharp as the sewing machine needles. On Friday afternoons the anticipation of the weekend makes the building feel like a big bottle of Babycham being shaken, the bell at 2.30 releasing energies that last the girls right through to Sunday evening.

One Saturday night out at a working men’s club near Rotherham, Lynda meets a man called Geoff Allan. He is the same age as her, with fair, curly hair, boyish face, and the affable humour of a man who has grown up as part of a large family in a small house. They arrange to meet again and soon they are seeing each other almost every weekend, out in a club on Saturday nights, relaxing in Highgate on Sundays. They go to the Halfway Hotel and the club with Harry, and when they see Lynda’s friends there, Geoff gets along with them, and everything is easy and jolly and comfortable. It is not a serious courtship, but it is pleasurable and convenient; Lynda thinks Geoff will be good, un­­­demanding company until her reconciliation with John Burton.

Lynda is in the Halfway’s tap room with Harry and Geoff one Sunday lunchtime in the autumn of 1968, when she sees her friend Maureen. After exchanging pleasantries, Maureen says, ‘Have you heard from John, then?’

‘No, not a skerrick. Have you?’

Maureen used to live near John’s family in Goldthorpe. She frowns.

‘No, but .
.
.’

‘But what?’

‘Nowt .
.
. It’s just that I saw him a bit since, and he reckoned he was going to see you and sort it all out. I thought you must have told him you weren’t interested.’

Lynda feels a smile rise up through her whole body and force her lips into a grin. ‘It’s news to me,’ she says. ‘He knows where I live, anyroad.’

‘He’s on with getting married now though, in’t he?’

The smile sinks back down through her and she feels sick. ‘Is he?’

‘Aye, to Susan Swift. He’s not been courting her five minutes.’

Lynda does not know who Susan Swift is. She asks Maureen as many questions as she can without seeming too concerned, and then goes back to sit with Geoff and Harry. When she picks up her glass, she sees the surface of the Martini and lemonade rippling from the shake in her hand.

‘Come on. My mam’ll have t’ dinner ready – ’ She puts her arms around him and squeezes him tightly, and Geoff says, ‘Crikey. What’s brought this on?’

Six months later, in April 1969, they are married at Goldthorpe church. Lynda wears Pauline’s old wedding dress with a lace jacket made by a friend, Geoff a new slim-cut suit with a fat patterned tie. The mood is playful and giddy.

At the reception in the Dearne Miners’ Welfare Club near the Welfare Hall, Harry sings a song for them. His response to the marriage has been inscrutable (‘Do what tha likes,’ he said when Geoff asked his permission to propose) but during the preparations he had insisted that he would sing: the song he chooses is ‘
Marta’
, an old favourite, but swapping the name ‘Marta’ for ‘Lynda’.

Lynda, rambling rose of the wildwood

Lynda, with your fragrance divine,

Rosebud, of the days of my childhood,

Watched you bloom in the wild wood,

And I hoped you’d be mine.

The newlyweds honeymoon in Redcar, then move in with Harry and Winnie while they save for a home. All that summer the news is unsettling: trouble in Northern Ireland and Rhodesia, macabre mass murders in Los Angeles, the war in Vietnam, astronauts landing on the moon. People find it difficult to accept the reality of all the events and say the world’s off barmy. In this fictional-feeling world Lynda feels she is acting out a game with Geoff, and she makes herself believe they are soulmates. What she actually feels is that if she cannot be married to John Burton then Geoff seems as good a bet as anyone else.