Highgate and Sheffield, 1940–45
At first everything changes and nothing happens. Soldiers install anti-aircraft guns on the crossroads in Highgate and RAF men bring white barrage balloons to float high in the blue skies over the village. Harry volunteers to be an ARP warden and goes with men from the council to test air-raid sirens, and one night German bombers fly over, but they drop no bombs.
Many of the young men in the valley rush to join the armed forces. Lads have been signing up to escape unemployment for several years but now recruiting officers turn thousands of them away; foreseeing war and a shortage of men to dig coal for Britain’s home fires and industry, the government has made mining a reserved occupation. Some talk their way in, others don’t. Winnie’s brother Sonny tries to join the Merchant Navy, but when he tells his recruiting officer that he is a miner the officer tells him to get back down the pit and not to come back or there’ll be trouble.
Meanwhile for Harry a new opportunity presents itself. He stays at Manvers but signs up the troupe with the Entertainments National Service Association. ENSA – Every Night Something Awful, the troops call it – pays entertainers handsome rates to perform in shows for armed forces personnel. Reliable turns are in short supply, and as the Mother Riley Roadshow can provide a full evening’s entertainment, the organisers like it. They pay up to £10 a night, and for this money Harry, Millie – who now has a fourth child, Tony, born in the summer of 1939 – and the rest get on buses, borrowed cars and the motorcycle and sidecar to take the Sand Dance, Old Mother Riley and the snap-tins-and-Dudleys drag-drumming act to the troops and workers in the messes and NAAFI huts of Yorkshire’s West Riding.
In these jumpy, undecided days at the start of the war, much of Winnie and Harry’s young-marrieds’ rancour dissipates. They become friendlier and by the autumn of 1940 Winnie is pregnant again, due in May. With Juggler Jane and Tommy, the arrival of another baby will take the number of people in the house to six. This does not seem too many to Jane, but Winnie would like some extra room for the second child, and anyway, with the ENSA money they can manage without Jane’s rent. Winnie frets about telling her, but the old lady just says, ‘Nay lass, when it’s time to go, it’s time,’ and a few days later disappears in a swish of black satin and a rattle of the spirit rosary. The next time they hear from her she has taken Tommy to live with one of her nieces in a small stone cottage in Bolton-upon-Dearne. Harry buys the family a mixed-breed dog called Bonzo, and Winnie redecorates Jane’s old room ready for the new baby.
*
One evening in December 1940, a few weeks after Win’s pregnancy is confirmed, Harry leads the troupe to an ENSA booking near Sheffield. The concert is at No.16 Balloon Centre, an RAF barrage balloon base on the southerly edges of the city, which, because of the expected air raids on the steel mills, is heavily defended. Riding the motorcycle there with Millie, props trunk crammed in the sidecar, he sees ack-ack guns in farmyards and, tethered to moorings at road junctions, barrage balloons which look almost toy-like. As they draw closer to Sheffield they pass more and more army lorries and armoured cars, yet it all seems unreal; Coventry and Birmingham have already been attacked because of their heavy industry, but it seems impossible to think of the bombs being dropped on somewhere they know.
The concert hall sits among vast brick balloon hangars, accommodation huts and a rifle range. An entertainments secretary greets the troupe and guides them to a screened-off dressing room beside a makeshift stage in the Naafi where wooden chairs have been laid out. ‘Look out for the nits,’ he says, ‘we’re infested with ’em.’
Millie shudders and says, ‘Flaming Sheffield lice, they’d better keep out of my hair.’
‘Never mind thy hair,’ says Harry, ‘watch them wigs.’
They are putting on their make-up in the dressing room when they hear the air-raid sirens start up, and the scraping of chairs in the Naafi as men get up and file out. Half dressed, half made-up, the troupe follow some of the soldiers into the bomb shelters. Inside it is hot, overcrowded; the air smells of bodies. Joking gives way to listening as aeroplane engines become audible, and then the first distant crump of an explosion, then another, then another, until the individual explosions merge into one long rumble.
The heavy bombing lasts for hours. There are lulls, but the thumping and cracking goes on till four in the morning. When Harry comes out among the cold, dark buildings, there is a smell of burning on the wind and a red haze of firelight over the city. Sheffield’s centre is in ruins, although the bombers have missed their real targets, the steel mills and forges lying to the north and east being mostly unharmed. Shaken, and with traces of make-up still on his face, Harry climbs on the motorbike with Millie in the sidecar and Barney, the guitarist from the troupe, riding pillion and heads north on the roads circling the city, back towards the Dearne. Many routes are blocked and some houses have been damaged by stray bombs. No lights, no signposts. Harry backs up, swings around, tries other roads, until he finds one that leads up past steel mills, collieries, coking works and factories and back to the moonlit ink of the valley.
Ahead of him is Winnie, standing at a window in her nightdress and dressing gown, staring at the red fires on the horizon. The window frames have been vibrating with the heavier bombing, and two doors down the Atkins have had their glass blown out. Roy has watched and listened to it all with her, but is now asleep again. She rests her hands on her tummy, and allows her mind to contemplate the calming bottle of stout in the larder downstairs.
The planes come back again three nights later and in those two evenings almost 700 people are killed, more than 1,500 injured and 40,000 left homeless. On the night of the second raid, Winnie and Harry stand side by side at the window watching the fires in the distance, drawn together in a sort of sadness and fear. Winnie will remember that moment, although it will be many years before she fully realises its significance. In one of those uncanny coincidences common in wartime, the fires they watch that evening set off a chain of events that will lead to an unexpected love affair, and to perhaps the most difficult decision of Winnie Hollingworth’s life.
*
After Sonny Parkin was rejected by the Merchant Navy in 1940, the paperwork recording his failed application was stored, with all the other recruitment papers of men from South Yorkshire, in a local government building in Sheffield’s city centre. In the December raids, that building was hit and the papers destroyed. News of this reached the Dearne Valley at Christmas, and Sonny decided to try again. This time he went with a friend – sixteen-year-old Alf Hollingworth, brother of Tommy and cousin to Harry.
Plotting their applications together, Sonny and Alf become good pals. Both are good-looking, well dressed and eager for adventure away from home. Together they take a train to Bristol and, claiming different occupations, sign on for a voyage on a merchant vessel carrying food and supplies to Freetown, Sierra Leone. After brief training on an old ship moored in the River Severn, they set sail in the early spring. Sonny sends the occasional letter to Annie and Winnie telling them not to worry about the German U-boats, but other than that nobody hears from or sees him, or Alf, for two years.
More planes fly over Sheffield and food grows scarcer, but gradually the war moves back abroad and life on Highgate Lane damps down. Harry attaches wires to his radio and threads them through windows, along the walls and into Nelly and Reg’s sitting room so they can listen to the nine o’clock news through a speaker. The wives exchange and barter food to avoid waste, and Winnie makes and repairs the family’s clothes so she can swap her clothing coupons for Nelly’s food rations – Nelly likes new clothes and can live on her two-bite meals. At night children playing out late hear screams as men cut the throats of pigs illegally fattened on allotments. At Number 34, Harry supplements his shares in the secret pigs with an egg and chicken business. Every few months he takes the motorbike and sidecar to Doncaster market to buy boxes of yellow, peeping, day-old chicks which he brings home and places beside the range in the sitting room for warmth. After a day or so some are strong enough to climb out of the box and pick their way across the lino and carpet squares covering the floor, and soon flocks of tiny birds are occupying the room, living there until Harry decides they are strong enough to be moved to a shed on the allotment. Winnie despairs. ‘I sometimes think your dad thinks t’ war’s an excuse for being daft,’ she says to Roy.
On 4 May 1941, Winnie gives birth to a baby girl whom she and Harry agree to call Pauline. A few days after the baby’s christening in the chapel, Juggler Jane comes to see her and stands gazing down into the pram, muttering a sort of prayer as she passes the spirit rosary between her fingers. ‘The first great-granddaughter,’ she says.
She shows the little girl the rosary, and lets her take it in her hands.
‘You know what it is, don’t you?’ she says. ‘She knows what it is, Winnie.’ Winnie looks at Jane and smiles.
But having commanded all his mam’s attention for nine years, Roy resents the baby and is jealous when Winnie tends to her. He refuses to run errands to the shop, smashes ornaments, and runs off to see the soldiers in the nearby camps. The soldiers talk to him about the war, the Americans, and what Yorkshire girls do and don’t do if you take them out. They have army ration chocolate, real chocolate, not the kind found in sweet shops that tastes like dry, crumbling vegetable fat. Sometimes they give him whole bars which he takes back to show the other kids, and these gifts console and fortify Roy in a home that has been ruined by the baby. The soldiers are living heroes to him, and he seems to feel personally allied with them in their fight against Hitler.
In the backings, where gossip burns like a flame on a fuse, Roy has by the time he is ten acquired an exaggerated reputation for naughtiness. There are accusations of theft and ringleading. One evening some mothers tell a bobby they’ve seen Roy encouraging a gang to knock on back doors and run off, when in fact he has been inside, listening to the radio with his mam. Winnie is furious. She knows all the ringleader stories for lies because Roy is not interested in gangs; he is most content on his own, building cranes and imagined machines from Meccano in the sitting room, or dismantling and reassembling parts of the motorcycle and sidecar with Harry in the yard.
One day in the summer holidays, an argument in the backings turns into a fight, and he runs home with a bleeding nose. Winnie soothes his face with handkerchiefs soaked in cold water, and sends him back out. Winnie is tidying the sitting room and Pauline playing on the rug when the door bursts open a second time and Roy runs back inside, weeping, with more blood on his nose, mouth and chin. Once again she patches him up, but this time she tells him to stay in.
As the afternoon reaches its hot midpoint Millie’s son Brian appears, peering around the privy at the back before he warily enters the yard. Brian has been taught to fight by his dad, who spars with him in the front room, and he is tough. (‘You have to fight because it’s the only way you’ll get influence,’ Danny tells him; Winnie wishes her husband would give Roy such advice, but Harry won’t even discipline the kids.)
The children in the backings stop playing and stare at Brian.
‘Where is he then?’
‘He’s in t’ house!’ shouts another kid in the yard.
Brian steps nearer so he can see the back door, ‘Roy . . .’
Roy is in the sitting room, watching Brian from behind the net curtains.
‘What does he want?’ says Winnie.
‘Nowt.’
‘Nothing.’ Even at tense moments such as this Winnie attempts to improve her children’s diction and manners.
‘Nothing. He wants to get me.’
‘Right!’ She snatches Roy’s upper right arm in her strong, stubby grip, yanks him out from the room and pulls open the door. Brian freezes long enough for Win to thrust Roy into the space between the door and the yard wall; she grabs Brian’s arm and shoves him next to Roy, and stands back, barring the escape. Behind her the children stand, watch and shout.
‘Now, hit him!’ she says to Roy.
Roy doesn’t move. Brian looks angry.
‘I said hit him!’
Roy swipes the side of Brian’s face. Brian, ignoring Winnie, lunges back at him. ‘Hit him harder!’ she says. ‘Harder!’
Roy hits Brian’s nose, making it bleed, but Brian lays into him again. Roy, backed against the wall, fights back, but Brian, though smaller, has a boxer’s technique and threatens to overwhelm his cousin. Winnie steps between them and drags Brian off. He stands looking at her and Roy, then turns and runs out of the yard, down the backings to his mam and dad’s house.
‘Well done,’ Winnie says to Roy.
He looks up at his mam, triumphant.
She is pleased. Millie might come up soon, but she doesn’t care; this is all for Roy, as she will tell Harry later on.
*
Sonny Parkin comes back home from the Merchant Navy in November 1942, intending to stay for a couple of months. After visiting his mam, he and Alf walk up to Winnie’s house one Saturday afternoon, bringing stories of sea battles, U-boats, and the people and towns they have seen in Africa. Sonny, who models himself on Bing Crosby, has an easy elegance about him, fine facial features and a relaxed version of his father’s principled courtesy. Alf is quieter, thoughtful and more tousled-looking, with chestnut-coloured eyes and thick dark hair that flops in a boyish kink near the parting. They are bronzed and confident, both seeming far older than their years. Roy gazes up at them in awe, and when Alf extracts a map from his jacket pocket and shows him where they’ve been, he takes the map in his hands as if it has been blessed, and carries it across the room to show his mam. Winnie looks to where he is pointing, and then she looks up, across the oceans and battlefields, at Alf. They catch eyes. Winnie has always felt sorry for Alf because of his having grown up without a mam or dad, and now her gratitude for this kindness to Roy, and for his politeness, sweetens her sympathy. Typical of her brother to pal up with a decent lad, she thinks.
Sonny says they are planning to sign on for another voyage but don’t have anywhere to stay in the meantime. Winnie says they can stay in the front room for a few weeks if they like, and so they unpack their kitbags and bed down there. Within days, though, Sonny meets up with a girl he used to know, May Ward. May lives in Lancashire, but comes to the valley every now and then to visit her father in Thurnscoe. She and Sonny got along well when they last met in the summer of 1939, and now, taken by the strange, impulsive mood of wartime, they fall in love. Sonny decides not to rejoin the Merchant Navy and proposes to May, and within twelve weeks they are married, and living with May’s father, leaving Alf the bed in the front room to himself.
Alf does not want to go back to the Merchant Navy without Sonny, and so he too stays and takes a job at Highgate pit. He works different shifts to Harry, which means that Winnie often has another man in the house when she is tidying up, or doing the washing. At first she thinks this could be a burden, but Alf is polite and amenable. He helps her to fold the sheets and clean out the grates, and he chats to her about the books she is reading. She talks to him about his travels in the war, and about his sad childhood with his dad taking off and Juggler Jane bringing him up. They laugh together about backings gossip, and tell each other funny stories about Harry and his acts, and Alf mends the broken things in the house. And this, in the hungry and unreal days of the Second World War, is how Winnie and Alf Hollingworth start to become something more than friends.