Authors: Richard Benson
The Valley (42 page)
A few weeks later, when Karl is asleep upstairs, they have another argument which Tony ends by punching Lynda to the floor. The next day he is remorseful. He blames the house, and goes out to look for other property to rent or buy. She thinks this is probably a good idea. Leaving plenty of time so that Tony will be well away from the house, she puts Karl in the pushchair and walks without thinking through the village, past the railway line and across the river bridge into the level countryside of the valley bottom. It is early autumn, the sun lowering behind the peaks of coal and spoil heaps at Manvers Main, tractors faintly growling in their fields, thistles going to seed in the lanes’ verges. The world quietly handsome, busy and indifferent.
Soon it will be winter, and then Christmas. She wishes that she could just keep walking.
Thurnscoe and Houghton Main Colliery, 1970–75
While Gary can often be found among the more talkative and extrovert crowds in discos, David Hollingworth is more content to sit back and listen to the music and observe the people. More of a Parkin, says Winnie, thoughtful, and without the notorious Hollingworth gab. Because he used to be shielded by Gary, some people in the family believe him to be shy, which he thinks is wrong; it makes him sound as if he doesn’t have friends, when in fact he has plenty. The girls at school like him because, they say, he has dreamy eyes and looks a bit like David Essex.
He is at his happiest fishing in rivers and lakes in the countryside. A few years ago when he was twelve, a cousin had taken him angling in the lakes of Cusworth Hall near Doncaster, and beside the still, cold, umber-coloured water he had been caught by the calmness and the challenge like a perch caught on a hook. The next day he had borrowed tackle from Colin Greengrass and spent eight hours beside the brickponds in Bolton-upon-Dearne, and since then school, social obligations and his holiday job delivering milk have been inconveniences to be endured between fishing trips. He works his way around the local waterways, and sometimes catches the early train to Ulleskelf in North Yorkshire where people fish for roach, perch and bream on the banks of the Trent and the Wharfe; in all these places it is not the tranquillity in itself that appeals to him, he explains to his uncomprehending brother, but the combination of quiet concentration and a clearly defined task. He likes the feeling he gets when he blocks out all thoughts except those about fish, and the hum of life grows quieter than the lap of the water in the reeds. Sitting with his gaze on the river, he is incapable of feeling bored. At the end of most days, he wishes that he could travel back in time and do it all over again.
When David reaches his teens he grows his hair down past his collar, and starts going into Goldthorpe to listen to music in Duffield’s record shop, and to watch the kids in Ellis’s menswear boutique comparing Ben Sherman shirts, Sta Press trousers and jumbo-collar lengths. Sometimes he and Gary buy an LP with pooled pocket money and, if it’s by an artist their mam says looks like a druggie, smuggle it into the house together. At other times he listens to records or roams the villages with his school friends Mark Perry and Alan Ogden, but he is equally comfortable fishing or walking the lanes around Thurnscoe on his own, as happy with himself as with anybody else, as his mother puts it.
It is his liking for the outdoors and water that brings David into contact with Marie Poole at school. Opened in the autumn of 1969, Thurnscoe comprehensive is a new building, its straight, clean lines and large windows representing a faith in the power of built environments to foster clearer, fairer minds. In a village where many of the old terraces still have outdoor privies and no bathrooms, and the closeness of the pit means people fight a constant war against dirt, this idea is still radical. Such progressiveness carries through to the school’s timetable which has the boys studying cookery and needlework and the girls working with metal and wood. In the fifth year there is an outdoor pursuits option, the first pursuit being the construction of a fibreglass canoe that pupils are taught to use on local lakes. David signs up as soon as the list appears on the noticeboard, and borrows a book about canoeing from the school library.
In the first lesson he is surprised to find that half the group is female. Among them is Marie, one of the good-looking girls frequently discussed by the boys at Ellis’s and Duffield’s. Marie has long, glossy auburn hair and a way of walking that makes the boys look. In the playground she and the other tonged-haired girls who glue Marc Bolan pictures to their exercise books stand with their arms folded, chewing gum to cover the smell of cigarettes, and scanning the playground as if their maturity means they are intuiting events ahead of anyone else. David Hollingworth likes her because she seems funnier than the other girls in the group, but he has never spoken to her. He permits himself a slight hope that they might discuss a common interest in canoes, but the idea is dashed in the first lesson.
‘I didn’t have you down as a canoeist, Marie,’ says Mr Birchall, their teacher.
‘It gets us out of PE, sir,’ Marie replies. ‘But you never know, do you?’
David sometimes catches her eye over a work bench, but apart from when he passes her a chisel or a carton of glue he does not manage to speak to Marie during the design and building phase. The closest they come to conversation is in the last lesson, when Mr Birchall takes the class to try out the canoes on a lake in a park near Barnsley.
It is a warm Friday afternoon in July. The boys and girls strip down to swimming costumes beneath their uniforms and, at Mr Birchall’s orders, carry the canoes from the minibus to the lake and line up along the edge, threatening to push each other in.
Marie, in a purple bikini, says, ‘I‘m not going in no canoe for anybody, sir! I’m discoing tonight and I’m not getting my hair wet and going out looking like a drowned rat. Are you off out, sir?’
David laughs. He has already practised in the canoes in the school baths, so feels confident, and finds Marie’s nervousness endearing. When he looks down the line at her, her straight auburn hair looks beautiful against the purple bikini top.
Mr Birchall pushes a canoe into the water and wades in. He is young, bearded and casual and, away from school, speaks to the children as an older brother might. ‘Let’s have someone in to demonstrate, then,’ he says, and before anyone can volunteer he picks out Marie.
‘Come on,’ he says, looking up at her. ‘You start us off.’
‘Get lost.’
‘Not scared, are you?’
‘No, I’m not scared. I don’t want to wet my hair.’
‘You won’t have to.’ He makes her get in the boat. Everyone is laughing, and no one is taking canoeing seriously at all. What the boys are taking seriously is Marie Poole.
Mr Birchall holds her upright in the boat and, exaggerating her nervousness, Marie paddles out into the lake. When he tells her to roll the canoe over, she just looks at him, and paddles back. When she gets out she has command of the group, with her friend Tina Cooke playing a supporting role. As the teacher persuades another girl to climb into the canoe, Marie, now feeding off the adulation, stands on the edge of the lake and plays to her audience.
‘At least my hair’ll look alright tonight,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t have gone out stinking of
pond water
.’
Laughter.
‘I couldn’t have gone out smelling like a pond, could I, Dave?’
She is talking to him. Why? he wonders. His eyes flick from side to side; everyone is looking.
‘What do you reckon, Dave? Smelling of ponds and lakes is no good, is it?’
‘I don’t mind t’ smell of ponds and lakes,’ says David, and his friends snigger and groan.
Marie is looking straight at him. ‘Don’t you?’
‘No. Some lakes have got a nice smell.’
‘Right,’ she says. ‘Well now we know.’ She looks round at Tina and the other girls. ‘Are we going out tonight then, Dave?’
‘Don’t know,’ he says, and feels his eyebrows twitch. Now the girls snigger.
‘Don’t take any notice of them, Dave. You come out wi’ me.’
‘We’ll see,’ he says.
Mr Birchall hears the teasing and laughter, but just grins weakly, as if he is in on Marie’s joke, and helps another girl into the canoe.
‘Dave’s coming out wi’ us, in’t he, Teen?’
More cackling laughter around the pool. It is not hostile, but it makes David the centre of attention, and he feels his face burning.
When Mr Birchall asks for a new canoeist, David pushes forward and gets in. As he paddles away he hears the laughter fading and, in spite of himself, imagines Marie Poole in her purple bikini behind him on the shore. When they get back to school, however, Marie does not mention going out with him again.
David leaves school with his final report on a summer Friday in 1974. There is no trip to the pit for David’s year, but the careers officer encourages him to think about the mines because they’re a big employer and the wages have gone up again. Mark Perry and Alan Ogden go to work at the collieries where their fathers are employed, and David goes with half a dozen lads to Greg Brown’s paint spraying works, opposite the Albion sewing factory on Lidget Lane, where most of the work is fixing up cars for quick re-sale, or painting old coaches. As he counts the board and lodging from his pay packet into his mam’s hand, he knows his childhood is ending there and then. Told what the home’s food, rent and heating cost, he suddenly assumes a responsibility to the family; it makes him feel grown up, proud and vulnerable at the same time.
*
The reason David’s career officer could urge him to consider the high wages being offered by the pits was that in early 1974 the British miners had gone on strike again, and won another large pay rise. This time, aided by developments in international politics, they had helped to bring down the Conservative government, and fostered a new buoyant and optimistic mood in the coalfields.
The initial problem was that large pay awards in other industries had within months eroded the gains from the 1972 strike. In the summer of 1973 the miners voted for a pay claim of £8–£13 a week in defiance of the Heath government’s wage restraint policies, and then in October 1973 a war in the Middle East led to a seventy per cent increase in oil prices. With oil now expensive there was increased demand for coal, which improved the union’s bargaining position. Rejecting the Coal Board’s offer of less than half the claim, the NUM began an overtime ban in November 1973. Edward Heath declared a state of emergency, with power cuts and a three-day week. In January 1974, the oil price doubled again: wage negotiations failed and the miners voted to strike.
The strike begins at midnight on 9 February. Two days later the Heath government calls a general election for 28 February, asking the public whether the government or the unions is running the country. The public is undecided; a minority Labour government succeeds Heath, and Harold Wilson is returned as Prime Minister. The Pay Board, an agency set up by Heath’s government to advise on pay and prices policies, endorses the union’s full claim, and the Coal Board awards the largest increase in the history of British mining, raising wages for faceworkers by more than thirty per cent. In October 1974, the Labour Party wins another general election and, with the Coal Board and the NUM, agrees a long-term plan for coal based on national output almost doubling by the end of the century as oil use declines. Some old mines will be closed and some new ones sunk. An important part of the plan is the development of a new ‘superpit’ in the Vale of York near Selby, thirty miles north of the Dearne Valley. The Selby complex will be the largest pit in Europe and one of the most technologically advanced in the world: ‘A New World of Mining’, as the Coal Board’s promotional leaflets promise.
One big winner in the changes, and now seen as a champion by many Yorkshire miners and an important figure in both the new world of mining and British politics, is Arthur Scargill. Elected president of the Yorkshire Area of the NUM in 1973, he had a high media profile before the 1974 strike, and after it he becomes a national celebrity. Though public opinion about him is divided, even some of his opponents respect the way he has stood up for his members. (‘Gordon doesn’t like him,’ Pauline tells Winnie, ‘but he says he wishes Arthur Scargill’d come and run t’ National Farmers Union for a bit.’) The NUM’s Victorian neo-Gothic offices in Barnsley become known as King Arthur’s Castle, and
Harpers & Queen
magazine runs a profile of him. One Saturday night he appears on Michael Parkinson’s TV chat show. When the host (also the son of a Barnsley coal miner) asks Arthur what, in the event of a communist revolution such as he sought, would happen to the Queen, he replies, ‘We’d find her a job in Woolworth’s.’
The high wages, and emphasis on skilled work in futuristic mines, kindle the imagination of Gary Hollingworth, now a builder’s apprentice with long hair in the style of David Bowie. By 1974, with the novelty of receiving his own wages having worn off, and his dad telling him to get a better job because he could do more than fetch and carry on building sites, he feels restless and ambitious. Regretting the dead squib of his own education, he daydreams about becoming a teacher, the sort of person who would understand boys like him and talk to them decently. He has no idea how a man like him would go about that, though, so for want of any other ideas he tries self-improvement, reading more books and ordering the
Guardian
and
The Times
at the newsagent. One night in the Fairway he meets an intelligent, free-spirited girl called Elaine, and when they start going out Gary finds they understand each other; after a few weeks he decides that he is in love, and suggests they get engaged. Elaine, still in her last year at school, says yes. It is a youthful promise, for Gary the outward sign of an adult relationship, and a clear mark of his ambition.