Thurnscoe, 1959–61
After the night when he pours milk over Margaret, Roy swings intemperately between tender husbandliness and a cross-grained resentment that grows and grows in him until, with no announcement, he stays away from the house for two or three weeks at a time. When he returns he will start out again as a patient and devoted dad who comes home every night and treats the family kindly. He takes Gary and David to the park, makes balsa-wood model aeroplanes with them, and reads stories to Gary at bedtime. At night he watches television with Margaret and says how much he likes being with her and the lads. He buys a car, an ex-police Ford Zephyr, and takes them all out for day trips. Margaret says he should sit his test and get a licence, but he insists that a qualified tank driver like him doesn’t need to bother with things like that.
If Margaret complains, or questions him about where he has been, though, he becomes irate, and sometimes he hits her. People talk about Jekyll-and-Hyde characters, she thinks, but worse is the man with a side you don’t know at all. It makes her feel she is going insane. Where does he go? Sometimes she has no idea; at other times she knows very well that he is at his mother’s. When he is at Winnie’s, Margaret feels she ought to go there to fetch him back, but it is impossible. If she calls at the house Winnie denies he is there. If she makes a fuss in the street it looks bad. If she waits outside, he goes down the backings.
In the end Winnie always sends him back to her anyway. The routine is unchanging. Roy turns up at Number 34, cursing Margaret, begging his mam for help, never mentioning the violence. Winnie feels sorry for him, blames Margaret for having pursued him so doggedly when they were courting, and tells him to stay. Pauline, watching the scene from the hallway, looks at Lynda and says, ‘We’ll see how long it lasts this time,’ knowing that in about a week their mam will be sick of him coming in late and borrowing money. Then Winnie will tell him to face his responsibilities and go home, and Roy will return to Thurnscoe claiming renewed purpose and optimism.
In 1959 he quits Hatfield pit so that he can look for a job more in keeping with his ambitions, and begins spending time at the Gascoignes’ scrapyard with Humpy, who is helping him to put word out. Margaret runs out of housekeeping money. She had given up her employment to take care of Gary and David, but now she takes a cleaning job at the sewing factory, leaving the boys with her mam or, if she has to, Winnie. Roy gets a job as a crane driver and banksman for a Doncaster plant hire company, whose machines are being used on the new sections of the A1 being built to the west of the town. Having placed its faith in the motor car the government is widening roads, building bypasses and laying down across Britain broad black belts of new motorway, with space-age service stations and complex, looping interchanges. Fashion-conscious young couples go to dinner at service station restaurants, and coachloads of tourists travel to see newly opened sections, photographing the smooth new tarmacadam channels to the future. Building these roads, bridges and elevations, manoeuvring their steel and concrete road sections into place, is skilled and precise work, and Roy is good at it. Harry, greatly impressed by bypasses and their benefits to lorry drivers, is for once openly admiring of his son’s career choice. He is in demand, and the demand takes him further and further out onto the roads, further and further from home: Leeds, County Durham, Tyneside, then God knows where. Margaret doesn’t see him for weeks at a time, and when he does come back, he needs a drink and doesn’t return home until she’s asleep.
*
Early summer, 1960. Roy has been away for four weeks and Margaret, having had to pay the rent at the end of the month, has no money for food. Has Roy been hurt? she wonders. Would anyone know to tell her if he had been killed?
She takes the day off work and goes to a callbox to ring the operator for the number of the firm Roy works for. Once she has the number she calls the office to ask for their address, takes the bus to Doncaster with Gary and David, and walks to the firm’s yard on the outskirts of town.
A secretary in the office goes to find a manager and Margaret, Gary and David wait in the reception. Outside the yard is full of big yellow-painted machines and oil-stained men who stare at the family through the open office door. The manager comes and introduces himself and says Roy has been working in North Yorkshire and staying in a caravan, but there is no reason he should not have come home at weekends. He will make some enquiries; if she doesn’t hear from Roy, she can call the office again.
That night Roy comes home in a rage.
‘What the bloody hell did you go to t’ office for?’ His expression suggests he is expecting an apology.
‘I didn’t know where you were, Roy! We’ve heard nowt for a month, and I had no money to buy food for t’ kids with!’
‘Don’t bring them into it. It’s you that can’t look after them, not me.’
‘But I’ve no money!’
‘Don’t blame me! You’re working, aren’t you? You’re just a bloody useless mother.’
‘I’m not a bad mother! What sort of father are you then? You’re not even a man!’
He pushes her against the wall and punches her. She covers her head and squeals, and he punches her again. Gary pushes in between them and tries to stop him, but he keeps thrashing at her over Gary’s head before he tires and storms out of the flat.
He comes back later, drunk, and sleeps on the settee. In the morning he is sorry and regretful. He gives Gary some superhero comics and sends the two boys to play in the bedroom while he talks to Margaret. He apologises and says it will be the last time. She asks him why he does it: he doesn’t answer, but promises that he will change. She says all she wants is a nice family life like the girls at the factory have, and she doesn’t understand why she and Roy can’t have a better time of it. ‘I’ll change,’ he says again, almost crying. ‘I really promise. I swear.’
Unconvinced, Margaret goes to Goldthorpe police station to ask if they can help to stop Roy from hitting her. She talks to Sergeant Bell, who is from Thurnscoe. Nothing they can do, says the sergeant, it’s a private matter: ‘The police can’t get involved, you see, and half these women, if you do go in they tell you to stay away.’
‘I wouldn’t tell you to stay away,’ says Margaret.
‘I know, love,’ he says. ‘But . . . Let me know if it doesn’t stop.’
Alan Bell had been in Margaret White’s year at school. When he goes off duty that evening he finds Roy in the Halfway Hotel and warns him to leave Margaret alone. Roy tells her off for that, but he doesn’t hit her, and for a time he behaves. Then she goes for a day out to Blackpool with the girls from the factory and he accuses her of going with other men while she was there. ‘There were no men with us!’ she says, but for that he shoves her against the wall and hits her in the face.
Her family and friends see the bruises, but her parents are afraid of Roy and she won’t listen to the girls at work. They tell her to fight back, but how can she? Roy is a big man, and all the mouth in the world is useless when a man like that gets started.
He goes back to the motorways and stays away longer than he did before, and Margaret has to borrow money from her mam. Then one night in the spring of 1961, when Roy is at home, he answers a knock at the door and Margaret, listening at the top of the stairs, hears alarming words: station . . . report . . . questions . . . all spoken in an unfamiliar voice. Peering down to the foot of the stairs she sees a police officer. When Roy comes back up he says he has to go to Goldthorpe police station, but it’s nothing serious and she needn’t worry. He is away all night, and when he comes back the next morning he says he’s had a right run-in with the head bloke there, Sergeant Grimes, but he’s put him straight. It’s nowt, he says, just a little knock that he’s had in the car.
The next day more police turn up and take him back to the station, and this time when he comes home he confesses to having been in a car accident, and says he will have to appear in court. Margaret thinks there could be more to the story than he is telling her. She knows he has no licence or insurance, and it would hardly be a surprise if he had been drinking, but she daren’t ask.
Roy goes to court in Doncaster on his own and does not come home. That evening another police officer calls to tell Margaret that Roy has been sent to prison for six months – the maximum sentence for driving drunk without a licence and causing an accident. The officer gives Margaret Roy’s prison details and asks her to insert into her letters to him certain questions about his friends, and about his intentions on being released. She should take care of the letters he sends back, he says, and someone from the station will discreetly call to read them. This request, together with the long prison sentence and other subsequent events, will suggest to Margaret that the police suspected Roy of some more serious crimes, but lacked the evidence to convict him. She will never know if she is right or not.
The police officer hands her a handwritten list of questions, and then leaves. Margaret locks the front door and goes to comfort Gary and David, who are sitting on the settee in a state of confusion, wondering where their dad is, and when he will be coming home again.