This is a book about real people, places and events. Its stories are taken from my own memory, from my family’s memories, from interviews with relatives and other people who were involved with the family, and from historical research. The national and international events that bear on the experiences of people in these stories are written about from the points of view of those people. I have tried to show how politics and economics touched individuals’ lives, but I do not present the book as a comprehensive or objective history.
When I started my research I wanted to write about a place changing through time. However, as I gathered memories and information, I realised that I was, inevitably, collecting individual stories rather than assembling a single narrative that encapsulated the history of the place – the Dearne Valley in South Yorkshire – in which most of the action takes place. This made me wonder if I should turn the stories into a novel. A novel would certainly have been neater, because a novelist orders significant events whereas in actual life they occur in inconvenient clumps. In a novel characters behave more or less as you expect them to, while actual people can be surprising and inconsistent and so more difficult for both writer and reader to assimilate. And the novelist need not spend time trying, as I tried, to stand up family anecdotes about spirits and ghosts that are, at least by the conventional standards of corroboration, unverifiable.
The problem was that too many of the things people did, and too many of the things that happened to them, would not be credible in fiction. In fiction, a character who is told their legs are permanently paralyzed but who learns to walk again through what seems to be sheer mental effort would seem unconvincing in the extreme. The same is true of a soldier whose life is saved from a bullet by a brass button on his uniform; a young mother who is visited by reassuring spirits when science and the church have failed her; or a middle-aged woman of puritan morals who has an extra-marital love affair with a man fourteen years her junior. Such people and experiences did occur in my family stories though, so non-fiction it had to be.
Details. On the few occasions I appear, I write about myself in the third person as ‘Richard’. This was the least unsatisfactory of various unsatisfactory alternatives. To protect some people’s privacy certain names have been changed, and the details of certain places left unspecified. The thoughts and feelings of characters who were dead at the time of writing are based on their accounts as told to surviving family members. Where possible, events have been checked against historical records, and I have used those records in the descriptions of some locations. In some cases prior to 1930, I have taken conversations recalled in passed-down family stories, and recreated them in made-up dialogue based on my knowledge of the speech and mannerisms of the people speaking. I list these passages, with the sources for the stories, online at richardbenson.com/thevalley.
It is true that some of the accounts of historical events that follow may test one’s credulity. However, to doubt them would be to ignore a rule well known to people familiar with the history of South Yorkshire, mining villages and the Hollingworth family: namely, that the more improbable and absurd an event seems to be, the more likely it is to have actually happened.