After cobbling together a basic lunch for us both out of a giant jacket potato and some cheese and salad, we went shopping. Ferrington had two small supermarkets according to my online search, one on Old Main Street, and one on the New Side of the river, imaginatively called New Main Street. I could have made a longer trip to a proper supermarket, but I wanted to have a look around the village – and although Daniel had left me full instructions about how the pram converted into a car seat, a walk seemed enough of an expedition for now.
It was a twenty-minute stroll through the orchard, across the field and along a short footpath beside the river until we reached the first row of cottages that led us into the village. The day was mild for January, although the sky was overcast and the shadows gloomy, and pushing Hope ensured my cheeks retained a warm glow. It was easy to spot the shop, and I was grateful I hadn’t risked driving as every space was full along the narrow street leading up to it.
The village was, shall we say, not as picturesque as I’d been expecting. There were some older, cottagey type houses along Old Main Street, but the row of shops was a 1950s eyesore, and looked as though the only fresh paint it had received since then was graffiti. Along with the Ferrington mini-market was a hairdresser featuring faded posters of women showcasing their eighties’ perms, the pizza place that Daniel had been to the other day, a Greggs and an off-licence which also advertised ‘cheapest vapes on the Old Side’. The only vapes on the Old Side, I would imagine. There was the Old Boat House pub that advertised a riverside garden and local sausages, and a miners’ social club that looked like a cheaper version of the pub. Opposite all this was the dinkiest, quaintest old-fashioned church I’d ever seen.
So maybe not quite picture postcard, but at least there was no air pollution, hardly any litter, and I could hear ducks quacking along the riverbank.
I went straight into the shop, loading up as much as I felt able to hang off the back of the pushchair – a fairly even mix of cleaning supplies and food. The selection was basic, to say the least, and they had completely run out of bananas.
Not to worry. We had a good hour or so before it started to get dark, and that gave us an excuse to cross the river to try the shops on the New Side.
Or not, as it turned out. The bridge, which stood in between the pub and the shops, was blocked off with concrete barriers, low enough for me to see that the stone structure had completely collapsed in the centre, leaving a gap of several metres where the Maddon flowed thick and grey beneath it.
I checked the maps on my phone, but couldn’t spot another bridge anywhere in the village. A woman was scurrying up the road towards me, head down, woolly hat pulled low and chin tucked into her scarf.
‘Excuse me?’
She jerked briefly to a stop, shaking her head at the pavement before hurrying past and into the off-licence. The rest of the street was deserted, so, quickly deciding to dismiss her strange response as perhaps mistaking me for a chugger, I followed her in.
Wow. It was like stepping into a nightclub, more like the kind of place I’d expect to find back in London than a rural village in the East Midlands. All the shop fixtures – the display cases, floor and counter, plus the walls and ceiling – were black. Backlighting caused the rows of spirits to glow in varying luminescent shades. In the centre of the room a glitter ball spun, pinpricks of light whirling around it. Techno music pumped from enormous speakers hung in the far corners, and behind the counter a man dressed all in black bounced his baseball-capped head slightly out of time to the beat.
‘All right?’ he asked the woman who’d entered before me, without breaking his stride. He looked about the same age as my dad, with a long, bleached ponytail dangling beneath the cap and a pair of headphones the size of grapefruit around his neck.
She leant her head so close to him that I couldn’t hear her reply, but he bent under the counter and fetched her a packet of cigarettes. Realising that it would look more than a little strange to be standing in this shop without buying anything, particularly with a baby, even if she was transfixed by the light show, I grabbed a bottle of wine. Sidling up as if queuing to pay, I tried to act as though it was a total coincidence me being here, rather than following the woman in immediately after she’d made it clear she didn’t want to talk to me.
‘So,’ I said, going for bright and breezy but ending up more along the lines of potentially-inebriated-while-in-charge-of-a-baby. ‘Lovely day. I mean, for this time of year. Well. Not really a lovely day, but at least it isn’t raining! I mean, that storm the other day – phew!’
While I was jabbering on, the woman had paid for her cigarettes and turned to go, head still ducked like an armed robber avoiding the CCTV. I took a slight step to the right to block her path, and before she could object gabbled, ‘Anyway, so the bridge seems to be blocked off. What’s the best way to get across the river?’
The woman froze, eyes swivelling from side to side as if she was preparing to brandish a weapon and demand the contents of the till.
‘I just needed some cigarettes!’ she blurted. ‘The Co-op’s run out of Jase’s brand and I didn’t have time to go anywhere else. I’m not sticking around.’
‘Wait, are you…?’ the man asked, his eyebrows shooting up into his cap. ‘I mean, I’m an open-minded fella. The bank doesn’t discriminate against the source of my poundage, after all. But I thought you must be from Middlebeck or summat. We don’t serve traitors and scabs or their scabby women in ’ere.’ He shook his head in disgust. ‘Better get back where you belong before I offer you a refund on them cigs.’
‘I know, I’m sorry. I’m leaving now!’ And with that, she pushed past me and fled. Utterly baffled, I dumped the wine on the nearest shelf and reversed the pushchair back out the door as fast as I could drag it.
‘You one o’ them too, are you?’ the shop assistant called after me. ‘Didn’t you see the sign in the window? No kids and no New Siders.’
By the time I’d manoeuvred the pushchair through the heavy door, the woman was scuttling back down Old Main Street. I ran after her, Hope’s wheels skidding on the damp pavement.
‘Hello!’ I called. ‘Hey! Can you please stop for a moment!’
To my surprise she did, although that turned out to be because her car was parked there. I upped my speed and reached her just as she wrenched the door open. ‘Please! I’m not out to have a go at you. If it makes you feel better, that guy just refused to serve me,’ I gasped.
She paused, her curvaceous frame half in and half out of the car. ‘You’re from the New Side, too?’ she asked, glancing around furtively. ‘And you came here with a baby?’
‘No,’ I replied, then added quickly as the look of alarm reappeared and she made to slam the door shut. ‘I’m not from any side! I’m from Windermere, and London, and I’m currently staying at Damson Farm.’
‘So, what do you want?’ she asked, clearly eager to get away.
‘I want to get across the river so I can buy Hope some bananas. The mini-market’s run out and besides milk it’s her main food group.’
‘You can’t get across from the village. Have to go back to the main road. It’s miles away, though. It’ll take hours to walk there and back. And there’s no pavement for most of it.’ She looked up and down, sizing us up while still half in and half out of the seat. ‘Stick her in the back, I’ll take you.’
‘I thought you were short on time. In the shop you said that you didn’t have time to go anywhere else…’
She rolled her eyes. ‘Course I had time. I was bored and fancied a mission. Plus, don’t tell anyone in the village I said this – like, literally, don’t or they’ll lob a brick through my window or slash my tyres or something – but who in their right mind can be doing with a stupid old feud anyway? And the pleasure I get from knowing Jase is smoking cigs from the Old Side is worth the risk. He’d choke on them if he knew.’ She cackled, eyes glinting, and I started to wonder if a lift was a bad idea. But then she looked me directly in the eyes and said, ‘Trust me, he deserves it. I’m Alice, by the way.’ Her dark eyes were so lovely that I felt like I could trust her, so together we clicked the car seat part of Hope’s pram into the back of her Fiesta, loaded the frame into the boot and then I took my first voyage into the New Side.
‘So, I don’t know anything about this whole Old and New Side thing,’ I said as we sped out into the open countryside. ‘It seems a big deal, though.’
Alice grimaced. ‘It is a big deal. Or at least it was. See, Ferrington was a mining town. Apart from Old Main Street, New Road and a couple of the smaller side streets, every house in the village was built for the miners back in the fifties. Ferrington was just a bridge and a boathouse surrounded by a few farms before the mine opened. The pit is who we are. But in the strikes, back in eighty-four, the village was split. The Old Side of the river went on strike, and it was brutal. Some families starved. All of them froze. If it wasn’t for the help of the farms, who stayed neutral, whole families would have died. But the New Side, they wouldn’t strike. Said they needed to keep working to support their elderly parents, put shoes on their kids’ feet. And the worst part of it is, the entrance to the mine is on the Old Side, so every morning the New Siders had to cross the village to get to the picket line. It was their right to work, to keep earning a living, but the Old Side didn’t see it that way, so they thought it was their duty to stop them.’
‘And the only way to the mine was across the bridge.’
Alice nodded, slowing down to pull a sharp turn onto a dual carriageway. ‘They blockaded it, day after day. The New Siders had to push through, getting spat on and kicked and shoved. Plenty of times men ended up floating in the river, from both sides. New Side started using boats, but then one of them was tampered with, and an old guy died. As the Old Siders got hungrier and colder and angrier and more disheartened, the worse it got because they blamed the New Side scabs. It soon reached the point where you didn’t dare cross the bridge for any reason. Young women were getting hassled, people knocked off their bikes. Fights breaking out in the miners’ club, windows smashed and worse. And then, a year or so after the strikes were all over, we demolished the bridge. And that was the last time the whole village did anything together. Now, we’re two villages who happen to share a name. There’s a campaign to officially change to New Ferrington and Old Ferrington, but these things take time, and the powers-that-be don’t understand it so they aren’t exactly hurrying things along.’
‘Wow.’ I let all this sink in as we began to re-enter the village, on the other side of the river this time. Someone had scrawled ‘NEW’ in black spray paint on the Ferrington sign.
‘So, are both sides back working in the mine now?’ I asked.
‘You’re joking?’ Alice glanced at me. ‘You really aren’t from round here, are you? The mine closed in ninety-four. Over thirty-five years since the strikes, twenty-five since the mine shut for good, and we are still just an ex-mining town, because we don’t know how to be anything else, and we don’t have anything else to be.’
Well, I could relate to that…
‘When the mine shut, it broke us. I mean, don’t get me wrong, there are towns and villages all over who faced the same. No jobs, no purpose, defined by a miserable past, with no hope of a future. I’d not let anyone else hear me say it, but it’s not as though mining is all that. Dangerous, dirty, knackering work with crap pay. But it’s like even people my age, who weren’t born when the strike happened, we’ve grown up feeling wronged, like we’re the bottom of the slag heap, abandoned and left to rot. Maybe the anger will fizzle out, die with the mining generation. But I think it’s more likely we’ll still be angry – no jobs, no money, no help – just no one will remember how we ended up here.’
And I’d thought my life was depressing…
We pulled up then at the Co-op. The road mirrored Old Main Street almost perfectly. There was a Gregg’s and a hairdresser, only the off-licence was a betting shop and instead of Pepper’s Pizza, it was the Ferrington Fish and Chippy. Opposite the Old Boat House stood the Water Boatman pub, and instead of a replica old church, a white Methodist chapel squatted.
Alice waited in the car while I nipped in for the bananas, and this time I noticed the glances from other customers as I whizzed round, choosing the self-checkout to avoid an interrogation by the glowering older woman behind the till.
‘So, were your family miners?’ I asked as she drove us back to the farm, fascinated by this woeful tale of a village split in two.
‘My dad was nineteen. He kept working because he wanted to marry my mum. His dad mined too, of course. My uncle had three kids, one with cystic fibrosis, so he kept working. Mum’s dad had retired with bad lungs, so that was another reason for Dad to keep earning, to help her family out. It wasn’t that they didn’t sympathise, or get why people did strike, but they never believed it would work. And turned out they were right.’
‘So in the end the strikers did it all for nothing?’
‘Yep.’
‘And Jase, is he your husband?’
Alice shrugged. ‘We moved in together a few months ago. To be honest, it was a rush decision and if he doesn’t pull his finger out soon I’ll be reconsidering. Only problem is, working in the Water Boatman doesn’t make nearly enough to get my own place, and however much I love her, and everyone who knows me knows I do, I can’t face going back to sharing a bedroom with my Nana.’
‘You what?’
And right there I had made myself a new friend.