Highgate, 1932–33
While Winnie has been nursing her baby, her father’s health has been deteriorating. The tuberculosis that makes the abscesses around his spine has spread to his lungs, causing him to cough blood, and his shrapnel wounds have opened and become re-infected, suppurating yellow pus under the bandages and poultices. On his left hip and right leg there are abscesses the size of his palm. Between them, Annie, Juggler Jane and the doctor have stopped the sores widening, but now the wounds grow deep, and are too painful for him to sleep.
The only Parkin child at home now is Sonny, Olive having married and moved with her blacksmith husband to mill country near Halifax. In the autumn of 1932, it is Sonny who helps his mam to carry Walter’s bed down so that he can lie in the quiet of the sitting room, and not have to climb the stairs. When Winnie calls to see him in his new room in November, his skin is a bloodless grey, his face cold but covered in perspiration; he looks like something that has been dug from the cold winter soil.
She stays with him for the afternoon, baby Roy in the pram, while her mam goes out to give a sitting. Waking from a doze, Walter recounts stories about when he was a boy working on farms, and about his horses, and about his long walk to Shirebrook to find work. He talks about healing and Spirit and meeting Annie, and then he is quiet again, drifting between alertness and a sort of waking-sleep state in which his eyes are open but he seems not to see or hear. When he brightens he talks to his daughter about the strike and the coal owners. ‘He said, “I’d like to see them eating grass.” Eating grass.’ Walter flinches as the pain bites at his insides. ‘T’ pits should be for t’ people, you know. There’s no need for all this . . .’
By ‘all this’ he means unemployment and poverty. In the winter of 1932–33, the South Yorkshire coalfield is at the lowest point of the slump; in some villages in the Dearne half the men are unemployed and many of those that have jobs are on short time, or drawing wages that will not support a family. They pawn their goods and borrow, and some have to go to the Public Assistance Committee, where committee officials ask questions betraying the belief that miners only drink away any money they get. In the areas where coal is easier to extract and there is less competition between districts, a man can live fairly comfortably on pit wages, but in others, fathers cannot afford shoes for their children, and whole families cram themselves into two or three rooms. Walter, like many miners, believes the answer lies in a minimum wage and the nationalisation of the pits; the mines for the miners. Some of the men had been saying this in Shirebrook when he first arrived there in 1903.
The young mother listens to Walter reminiscing until he drifts out again, and then she just sits, with her father and her son sleeping near her in the dwindling light. Dusty net curtains twitch like anxious ghosts in the window draughts. Outside she can see the empty lane and fields tufted with dead brown grass; in the room the firelight catches the brass handle of the ornamental dagger on the wall. She puts coal on the fire and watches the landscape outside grow dark until her mam comes home from her communion with the dead.
In December, as the diseased abscesses deepen and night sweats grow worse, a doctor comes to examine Walter and finds that the tuberculosis has spread beyond his lungs to his other organs. The healer has passed beyond the help of doctors and Spirit now; an old man, Annie she says to Winnie, just forty-three but a bleeding old bag of bones.
By the end of January, he is alternating between half-mad feverish gabbling and tired, sunken-cheeked stupefaction. Annie sits up with him through the nights, sleeping in the day when Sonny or Winnie can relieve her. In the late, lamplit hours of 6 February 1933 she is alone with him when he falls into a deep unconsciousness, and she listens to his breathing grow erratic and watches the skin of his fingers and scalp lose its colour. Finally she feels his spirit move and pull away from his body.
Annie closes her husband’s mouth and draws down his eyelids, sends Sonny to tell Millie and Winnie the news, and then lays out the corpse of the young man who, twenty-five years ago in a stone church, had laid his hands upon her for healing. First she undresses him and washes him head to toe, wiping the old scars and badly mended bones, and then she pulls some cotton wool from its package and shapes it into stoppers that she inserts into each nostril and, shoving her hand beneath his body, his anus. There is more lifting and shoving as she cuts, folds and puts on a cotton-cloth nappy, and then slips over that a pair of clean long johns and a nightshirt. Almost done now, Walter. She binds his chin, enfolds his arms over his chest, and puts his prayer book under his right arm. Finally she takes from her purse two dark pennies which she rubs on her cuffs and places on his eyes. Then she kisses him and goes upstairs to sleep.
In the morning she will withdraw the money they had saved and order for him an oak casket with polished brass handles. Later, friends and sons-in-law will bear him past the houses with curtains drawn, down the hill to the Bolton-upon-Dearne graveyard at the bottom of the valley.
It is almost eighteen years to the month since he sent the letter about the bullet. Keep your spirits up. They have not broken mine, as heavy a fire as I have been under, and I don’t think they will. Kiss the children for me, and remember me to all at home.