The Valley (44 page)

‘Tha’d better keep upright, ’Olly,’ Gary hears Kenny say behind him when he stumbles. ‘If tha goes down I’m off over t’ top of thee.’

‘Thanks, comrade.’

‘Tha’s welcome, comrade.’

The men run along the roadway, splash through pooled water, bang through air doors and finally throw themselves onto the conveyor and ride upwards back to where the cage is waiting. At the pit bottom, Gary climbs off the belt. The onsetter is crashing open the cage doors and shouting at them all, come on, hurry up, shift your sorry arses. He is still shouting as Gary piles in and the cage fills up around him.

Usually the men crack jokes as they ride in the cage, but today as it rises through the dark they are silent. At the surface they step out with relief, and jog down the wooden steps into daylight.

‘I reckon tha must have a sixth sense,’ says Kenny.

‘Not really,’ says Gary. ‘It was just fear.’

‘That’s same as us all, kid.’

Same as us all. The only difference was how they dealt with it.

There is no explosion. Most men have showers and go home, a few go to a club and get drunk. By the next morning the escape already feels like something that happened a long time ago. It binds the men together with a sort of rough, unspoken intimacy. No one talks about it much.

*

A few months after the accident at Houghton, Gary’s fiancée Elaine falls pregnant. Neither she nor Gary feel ready to have children, and Elaine’s parents say she doesn’t have to marry if she doesn’t want to, but for her and Gary there is no question of not marrying. They wed on Boxing Day 1975, a Friday, at the register office in Doncaster. Kenny is Gary’s best man, Elaine’s friend Sue the maid of honour. Parents and siblings are invited but Roy, away working on the roads and living in caravans with Alwyn and Wendy, neither responds nor attends. After the ceremony Kenny drives them back to Elaine’s parents’ house in Mexborough for a buffet lunch, and then to a hotel where they have drinks under the Christmas decorations and sing along to ‘
Bohemian Rhapsody’
playing on the sound system.

Gary and Elaine are allocated a pit house on Bolton-upon-Dearne’s large, modern NCB estate, known in the Dearne Valley, where people like to reimagine their localities as Wild West outposts, as the Concrete Canyon. The houses are large and square, mostly semi-detached or in short terraces, rendered and painted in greys and browns, and set out on streets whose names recall places in the Empire – Vancouver Drive, Maori Avenue, Caernarvon Crescent. In the evenings and at weekends the streets are busy with young kids re-fighting the Second World War with plastic soldiers, older kids with scabby knees racing on bikes, and lads repairing jacked-up cars with Radio One playing on their stereos. To the north and east the estate joins the village; to the south and west it looks out over farmland and the smoking Manvers complex, its mighty industrial spectacle surrounded by a pastoral landscape of fields, lanes and small stands of trees.

Gary and Elaine’s semi looks out over fields. It has a large, unkempt garden and a peeling wooden fence. Inside it is unheated, its windows rattle in their frames, and there is damp on the kitchen walls and ceiling; the floors are bare boards and pock marked lino, and the whole house is infested with mice. Their families give them old furniture: Winnie and Harry bring the vinyl suite from the sitting room, and Pauline and Gordon deliver a fridge and some stair carpet in a livestock trailer. With the £40 savings they have between them, the newlyweds buy a bed in a furniture shop in Mexborough and allow themselves the luxury of a small black-and-white TV rented for 34p a week.

In the spring, Margaret White and Colin Greengrass marry at Barnsley register office. Roy is not mentioned and sends no message. When Elaine and Gary’s baby, a ten-pound boy they name Scott, arrives during a summer heatwave that scorches the grass and the fields, there is again no word from Roy.

To work closer to home, Gary transfers temporarily to Manvers Main, where the older men soon realise he is the Juggler’s grandson, and look out for him when they work together. He has a feeling of belonging somewhere and for a while, walking home along Coronation Avenue or Commonwealth Drive, he can imagine himself and Elaine being older here, with more children and a colour television and a car. When he transfers back to Houghton Main, the pit-bus ride along the four or five miles of narrow country roads seems long, particularly at dawn at the end of a night shift.

Sometimes on those pale, tired mornings he looks out of the window at the fields and worries that, at just twenty, he is too young to be a father. Afraid of his own inexperience, he would like to be able to ask his own father for advice, but there is scant chance of that. It is strength that he needs, not the Iron Man kind, but the kind that some of the older men at work have. Where did you learn that, though? In a war?

He leans his head against the glass and watches the brightening world pass by, and then he thinks of his son at home, and feels proud and almost tearful. Even if you were twenty and not strong, you could still try to be a decent, loving dad.

45 A Walk Around the Houses

Thurnscoe, 1976

At ten o’clock on a warm Wednesday night in the summer of 1976, eighteen-year-old David Hollingworth and his friend Ian Alder are sitting on the metal-framed chairs around the edge of the Coronation Club function room, drinking lager and watching the dancers. The Coronation Club – or Cora, as everyone calls it – is a modern building the size of a small village primary school. It has an immense main bar, a snooker and billiards room with full-size tables, and dartboards, and a barn-size function room with a stage at one end and a bar at the other. Wednesday night is disco night, a concept introduced by the club’s committee for the young people of Thurnscoe who find the more traditional working men’s clubs dull and stiff. It has been a much-envied success, and is one of the most popular nights out in the area.

Tonight the dance floor is full as the evening peaks in anticipation of the slow dances that will soon bring the disco to a close. There are a few men dancing, but the floor, lit by flashing red, blue and yellow lights, clearly belongs to the women, in their long skirts, flicked hair and strappy platform sandals. The clothes exaggerate the sways and dips of the women’s dancing, and in their presence, the Valley men can only shuffle and look. David is watching so that he can, if necessary, hide from his girlfriend Denise. They have been going out for six weeks, but while their relationship began well, when he asked her if she might like to go fishing with him, she had laughed out loud at him. It was typical: girls always liked him, but he got bored staying in Thurnscoe, and the girls never wanted to go anywhere else. Tonight he had told Denise he was staying in, then come to the Cora disco to listen out for the heavy rock, which is another thing she dislikes.

‘Doesn’t look like he’s going to play any Deep Purple,’ says Ian, leaning in and shouting over the music. Earlier, Ian had requested ‘
Smoke on the Water’
.

‘No,’ says David. ‘It’s not been worth coming. Shall we have another drink or go somewhere else?’

‘Finish these and try somewhere else I reckon.’

The two boys are about to leave when Ian notices a girl walking over to them. ‘Ayup,’ he says. ‘Who’s this?’

The girl had been dancing with a group of friends, and after conferring with one of them while looking over at David and Ian, she is now approaching purposefully, cheesecloth blouse knotted at the waist, maxi-skirt kicking and flouncing around her ankles.

‘Ayup, David.’ He recognises her as Sue Waine, a girl who was in the year below him at school. She leans near enough for him to smell her perfume, cigarettes and sugary mint chewing gum. ‘Will you go wi’ our Marie?’

Marie? It takes a couple of seconds to work it out: Sue Waine is a cousin of Marie Poole, the girl from school with the beautiful hair. David can see her in the group that Sue was dancing with. He suspects that Sue is setting up a joke at his expense.

‘Umm,’ he says, ‘maybe not tonight.’

‘Why?’

David blushes.

‘I’m serious you know! She wants to know if you’ll walk her home.’

Marie is sitting down, watching them and smoking a cigarette. When her eyes catch David’s, she looks away. He is not, he thinks, going to volunteer himself to be the subject of her banter again.

But Sue is persistent. ‘Look,’ she says. ‘I’ll tell her to meet you near t’ doors, okay?’

‘Okay.’

‘Ace! She likes you, you know. Are you coming for a dance?’

‘No,’ says David, and Sue spins away in a whirl of cotton skirt and cheesecloth to dance to the last of the disco music before the slow songs start.

‘You’re in there, mate!’ says Ian.

‘Aye,’ says David, ‘but for what?’

*

Marie is waiting for him in the foyer near the wooden cabin where the doorman sits checking memberships. To David, who has drunk two pints in quick succession, she seems more self-conscious than he remembers her being at school. They do not speak as they push outside together, but their knuckles brush, and then, somehow, they are holding hands.

The Cora sits at the head of the pit estate, at the pit end of the village. If you live up this end the problem with being walked home from the disco is that the walk is very short, but suggesting that you go the long way round can seem a bit forward. The Pooles live at the other end of the estate, less than five minutes away. David, wishing she lived further away, sets off, but Marie, having got this far, is not going to let social nicety ruin her evening.

‘Dave,’ she says.

‘Aye?’ he replies, nervously.

‘Let’s walk round t’ other way, shall we?’

‘T’ other way?’

‘Yes, Dave. The other way.’

‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Right.’

‘Just to talk, I don’t mean owt like .
.
. you know.’

The night air is still warm and there is an almost full, white moon above the roofs of the houses. Apart from a few people making their way home, the roads are quiet. The only noise the sound of David and Marie’s shoes on the pavement.

‘You’re quiet, aren’t you?’ says Marie.

‘I suppose so.’

‘Would you say you were deep, Dave?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘I’m not either. But I like you being quiet. I think that’s what attracts me to you.’

‘Right.’

‘But I also think you’re lovely looking. I think you look like David Essex wi’ your hair like that. I said to Sue when we were sitting outside work watching you all, “David Hollingworth looks like David Essex.” She said, “He never does,” but I said, “He does, and I think I fancy him!” and so here we are!’

‘Here we are,’ he says.

She looks at him. ‘And then Sue told me to come to t’ Cora, she said you’d be in. What do you reckon to that?’

Oh no, thinks David, a question. ‘Well, I usually am in,’ he says, avoiding it. ‘You don’t come in much, do you?’

‘I never did, because my mam and dad go there and I was underage. How did you come on at school, anyroad?’ she asks. ‘I got kicked out of Maths and English, I couldn’t be doing with them. Do you remember t’ canoes?’

They have come to a stop on one of the streets and are just talking. Canoes, the sewing factory where she works, and even David’s fishing. ‘I’d like to try that,’ she says.

She asks if he has a girlfriend.

‘No,’ he lies. ‘Have you got a boyfriend?’

‘No. Not apart from you anyroad. Come on, you’re supposed to be walking me home not waylaying me.’ She pauses, and looks at him. ‘Haven’t you got lovely ears?’

‘Have I?’

‘Oh aye,’ she says. ‘Lovely and little. I hate my ears.’

‘I can’t see them for your hair.’

‘I keep them covered up. Don’t ever ask me to show you them.’

They carry on like this for the rest of the walk. David drops her off at the gate and says he’ll see her in the Fairway or the Cora at the weekend. He walks back through the estate, then past the old church with the gravestones leaning at drunk, sunk angles. When he gets in, Colin and Margaret have gone to bed but have left him a ham sandwich for his supper. He thinks it is the best-tasting ham sandwich he has ever eaten.

46 Too Late Now, Cocker!

Bolton-upon-Dearne; Highgate; Thurnscoe, 1977

Six months after Lynda and Tony Grainger put their names down on the list for a council house, the council announces plans to demolish their row, and so they are rehoused in a crescent of new semi-detached houses beside the Bolton brickponds. Lynda hopes it will be a fresh start, but the house seems to harden them against each other. She brings home paint and wallpaper, having imagined Tony will want to help, but he sits looking over his newspaper at her toiling, and seems to enjoy it. The sophistication and erudite conversation is gone completely, replaced by talk of work politics and racehorses for his Saturday bets, and she never sees any of the money if he wins.

Lynda finds a crammer course in shorthand and office practice at Barnsley Technical College. She begins in January 1977, dropping Karl off at her mam’s at night, taking buses to the college, and then back to her mam’s to collect Karl and home. Tony hates the course, or rather the fact of her being enrolled on it. Each time she arrives back home he seems angry to have been left alone. ‘It sounds useless to me,’ he says, even as she tells him her marks were in the top three again, or shows him certificates for passing her speed-writing module. ‘You’re wasting your time. You’ll do nowt wi’ it.’