Highgate, 1953
As soon as the date of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation is announced after the death of her father, King George VI, in February 1952, the women of Highgate form a committee to raise money to celebrate with a party. Through the winter and spring Winnie and Granny Illingworth go from house to house and shop to shop, cadging sixpences, shillings and promises of prizes for the raffle, always on Fridays, because Friday is pay day, when everyone pays off their tick, buys treats for the kids, and chucks their change into the collection tins. With the other women who are collecting, they plan and schedule the day. The event is to be held in Benny Slater’s field, and the food served in the club; there will be stalls and games, a tea, children’s fancy dress, and on the Saturday a dance at the Welfare Hall with an exhibition by a ballroom formation team from Doncaster. At night there will be a spectacular finale of fireworks on the field organised, at his own insistence, by Juggler Hollingworth.
Harry’s enjoyment and connoisseurship of fires and explosions expresses itself in a particular passion for fireworks and bonfires. He is one of several fathers in Highgate who every autumn persuades friends at the pit to save big, railway-sleeper-size lumps of coal to put on the Guy Fawkes Night bonfires in the yards, and every October he drives to the Standard factory in Huddersfield to buy a four-by-two-foot crate of mixed fireworks, some of which he sells to other people, and most of which he lets off himself in timed displays.
Harry had begun his planning for the coronation firework display immediately, urging the women to allocate as much of the budget as they could to it, and then topping up the kitty with his own money. ‘It sounds like a lot to me,’ says Winnie, when he tells the family his plans one teatime that spring. ‘Are you sure you can manage that many crackers?’
‘Manage?’ he says. ‘I’m a qualified shot-firer.’
‘You were. But crackers’ll be different to what you had in t’ pit.’
He holds his knife and fork between his plate and mouth, pausing for effect. ‘Is tha trying to tell me about explosives now?’ he says with mock indignation. ‘I’ll get some scaffolding up,’ and – turning to Pauline – ‘we’ll have a right do. It’ll be like Buckingham Palace.’
‘Lovely,’ says Pauline.
‘Scaffolding?’ says Winnie.
Winnie, meanwhile, works on the costumes for the children’s fancy dress competition. She makes a Little Bo Peep dress and bonnet for Lynda, and for Pauline she borrows a gypsy fortune-teller’s outfit. Pauline however is shy, and tries to find reasons for not taking part.
‘I’m pale, Mam. Gypsies have got brown skin.’
‘We’ll put gravy browning on you.’
‘Gravy?’
‘Gravy browning.’
She says this as if putting gravy browning on your skin is something people always do on royal occasions.
‘And Our Muv says she’s got summat for it as well,’ says Winnie. ‘She’ll bring it when she comes.’
Annie’s summat is socks: white ankle socks with red-white-and-blue tops, knitted for the occasion, and produced from her bag when she arrives at Win’s at teatime the day before the celebrations.
‘Do you think gypsies wear ankle socks, Muv?’ asks Pauline, as she plays with Annie’s swollen thumb. The poisoning has never fully gone away, and Pauline likes to knead the fat little cushion of flesh between her fingers.
‘They do now, love,’ says Annie. ‘They’re all t’ fashion. I’ve got a gypsy girl comes to me, you know.’
‘I know,’ says Pauline, who has heard the story before.
‘She watches over me. Have I to read your tea leaves?’
‘Yes please.’ Pauline knows what is coming, because Annie reads her leaves every time they meet. It is always the same: swirl the cup three times, tip it in the saucer, and, Ooh, one day you’re going to meet a tall dark handsome man. Pauline prefers the crystal ball, whose scenarios are more varied.
After tea Annie and Winnie hang up bunting in the sitting room. Lynda plays among the trailing strings, and Pauline irons their fancy dress costumes. Soon the back door latch rattles and the door swings open, and there is a babble of voices as Sonny and May and their young daughters Carole, Amanda and Heather bundle through into the sitting room. ‘Now then, are you all ready for tomorrow?’ everyone says. ‘What are you going in t’ fancy dress as?’; ‘Where did you get those socks, Pauline?’ Sonny says he is singing in a concert with the Thurnscoe male voice choir tomorrow, and gives the room a few lines from the song programme. Winnie looks at the clock and wonders where Harry is. He is supposed to be setting up the scaffolding in Benny Slater’s field, but he’s been out there since dinnertime. There is another rattle of the latch, then a man crooning ‘We’re poor little lambs . . .’ and a woman saying, ‘I’ll give you poor little lambs!’ and Danny, Millie and their children come through the door, laughing. They want to know what Juggler’s playing at, because he was supposed to be ready and waiting to go up to the club.
‘God knows,’ says Winnie.
Everyone talks about the decorations in the village, and the fete, and the Queen, about how young she is, and how hard it has been for her losing her father like that. Annie says that Walter would have liked all the celebrations, because he always loved the King and the royal family. Danny tells Sonny to ask for a particular barrel of beer at the club, because that is the one the steward has added a bottle of whisky to for the royal occasion.
An hour later Harry comes in in his work clothes, grease smears on his hands and face. ‘I’ve been working for Her Majesty,’ he announces, and orders Millie out of the kitchen so he can have a stripwash at the sink.
‘It’s nowt I’ve not seen before, Juggler.’
‘Humour him,’ says Winnie. ‘He takes more time getting ready than a woman.’
After he has washed and taken his time standing before the sitting-room mirror to comb his hair, knot his tie and apply a gold-plated tie-clip, the adults leave Muv with the children and clatter out of the door, down the steps and up the street towards the Halfway Hotel and the club. The sky is overcast, and to the west, towards the Pennines, banks of dense clouds are gathering. Across the road the cows lie in a fenced-off part of Benny Slater’s field as if guarding the farmhouse. In the other part there rises from the ground a gigantic scaffolding structure, with a six-foot-high wooden platform and, at the back of that platform, a latticework of pipes, iron bars and wooden poles. The group stops to admire the size of Harry’s construction. ‘I just wanted everybody to be able to see,’ he says.
*
The next morning the valley is hung with a veil of grey drizzling rain. With the radio news on, Winnie cooks and cleans while Harry shuttles between the yard door, where he looks up at the clouds, and the sitting-room table, where he draws little sketches on envelopes. At noon Win dresses Lynda as Little Bo Peep and then makes Pauline strip to her vest and knickers and stand on a newspaper while she rubs gravy browning into her daughter’s arms, legs and face. Looking up, Harry says he thought they had an Arab in the house and performs a burst of the Sand Dance.
Once browned, Pauline dresses in her outfit: black blouse, long black skirt, bolero jacket, three-cornered scarf with brass coins hanging from its edges, and red-white-and-blue ankle socks. ‘Lovely,’ says Winnie, and if there is any danger in dressing someone as a copy of your own long-standing spirit guide, neither she nor Annie appears to be aware of it.
As the Hollingworths cross the road to the field in the faint drizzle, they can see everywhere Union Jacks and portraits of the Queen. Assembled for the fancy dress are Boudiccas, Queens of Hearts, princesses, cowboys, robots and clowns, and hundreds of children dressed up in red, white and blue, some in outfits fashioned from large flags with head and armholes cut in them. The scene ought to look joyful but, standing in a spitting Yorkshire rain, most of the children look uncomfortable and cold. As Pauline joins her age group she tastes something salty running onto her top lip and into her mouth; pink spots bloom on her arms, and by the time her line moves, a brown tide of gravy browning is soaking into the tops of her woollen ankle socks. She hopes that since the other costumes are so striking, and most of the girls are so pretty, the judge won’t notice her. She is disappointed.
‘And now, The Gypsy!’ booms the judge – a man from the club committee – from under an umbrella. ‘She’s very good! But I don’t think a gypsy would wear ankle socks!’
People in the crowd chuckle, and under the streaked browning, Pauline reddens.
‘No, I’ve never seen a gypsy wearing jazzy ankle socks like that!’
‘Sorry,’ Pauline squeaks, but no one hears her because the crowd is still laughing.
The judge moves on to someone dressed as Britannia, and Pauline decides that in future she will refuse to wear any socks knitted by Muv, whatever the colour or occasion.
In the end, neither Pauline nor Lynda, who has been tottering along with the under-fives, receive a prize. Once the judge has handed out the firsts, seconds and thirds, and the rumours about it all being a fix have circulated, the mothers, fathers and children drift away to the stalls and games. The clouds and rain clear and the grass and roadways dry off. Winnie takes the girls home to change into sky-blue taffeta dresses that she has bought to wear in the evening, and Pauline begins pulling off her outfit as soon as she gets in the door. The gypsy girl’s public incarnation has gone badly, but this will not be the day’s only unfortunate ending.
*
At four o’clock they all go over to the club, where the ceilings are hung with bunting and Union flags, and a feast of quartered sandwiches, iced buns, and red jelly and custard awaits them on trestle tables for the coronation tea. Afterwards they walk back to Number 34 to watch the repeat of the coronation ceremony on television. Most families do the same, and for a few hours be-flagged Highgate falls quiet in the late-afternoon sunshine. In the field, in the dull, warmish early evening breezes tug at the tarpaulins hanging over deserted stalls and sideshows. In a corner away from the cows and pit ponies, a group of beery lads kick a football around. Benny Slater checks his fence and, up on the scaffolding, Juggler Hollingworth makes his last adjustments to the pipes, bars and poles, then climbs down and walks home to where the Hollingworths are drinking tea and watching the crowning of their young Queen.
When dusk falls the family put on their coats and shoes and step out into the night air. There is the sound of people laughing and shouting, and the smell of drying earth and bonfire smoke. In the field Harry goes to join a group of men clustered about the scaffolding, while Winnie, Annie and the girls take up a good position at the front. Harry selects a handful of fireworks from a metal box and then climbs up a ladder to the platform. He nails pinwheels to the wooden poles, inserts rockets into bottles, and sets individual fireworks on small plinths of bricks built to varying heights. Walking above the crowd in the twilight, checking a nail or straightening a brick, he looks like a compère of a ghostly mechanical theatre, though when friends in the crowd call out to him, he is too absorbed to answer. Finally, in the darkness, he leans down to confer with the organiser. Someone shouts out, ‘Go on, Juggler, we’re ready!’ and he nimbly trots along the platform lighting the pinwheels until the field in front of the stage is illuminated by a bright, magnesium-coloured glow. The crowd oohs and coos. Hundreds of hands spatter applause. He lights a fuse linking several Roman candles which erupt in succession, casting colours and dancing shadows across the bodies in the crowd and over the concrete walls of the mission church behind. Danny, who is helping, passes up more tubes, wheels and rockets, as Harry dodges the still-lit crackers and lights new ones to keep the display going.
‘I hope he’ll be careful,’ Winnie frets to Muv.
‘Stop wittering, Winnie,’ says her mother. ‘He knows what he’s doing.’
And then, as a shower of silver stars bursts in the sky high above the village, just as other stars are bursting above other villages in the valley, Harry lights three large crackers linked with a fuse, but they fizzle. Seeing something is not right he edges forward to look, but suddenly they all go off at once, with a mighty bang and a bright flash. As he steps back to avoid the sparks he feels part of the scaffolding give way, and he leaps clear. To Winnie, Annie, Pauline, Lynda and the others watching it is as if one of the crackers has blasted him off the stage and up into the air.
This, then, is how England’s new Elizabethan age begins for the Hollingworths: with a little gypsy girl in gravy browning showing herself in patriotic socks, and the Juggler flying across the night sky over the valley, lit by the fiery-bright smoking lights of his own display, flailing about and falling. His body thuds hard into the earth and Winnie runs to where he is lying, face down and still in the damp grass.