Bolton-upon-Dearne; Flamborough, East Riding of Yorkshire; Highgate, 1963–65
By the middle of the 1960s the new motorways and widened roads being built across South Yorkshire have brought the Dearne Valley within a half-hour car ride of Leeds, Wakefield and Sheffield, and a twenty-minute drive of Doncaster, Barnsley and Rotherham. These roads and increasing car ownership encourage an influx of commuters’ families and property speculators, and in fields across the valley builders come to construct tracts of trim, modern bungalows and semi-detached houses in clean, warm orangeish brick. The new homes are coveted not only by city families seeking an affordable rural escape, but also by ambitious young local couples who imagine themselves relaxing in the wide back gardens, or showing off the fitted wooden units and serving hatch in the kitchen. These couples and families save for deposits and take out mortgages, and when their mams and dads come down to tea they tell their children how marvellous the house is, how superior to the poky holes that their generation had when they were first married. And after the mam and dad have been dropped back home in the husband’s car, the couple feel contented and proud because, even if the stairs are still uncarpeted and the front lawn devoid of grass, they are bettering themselves and getting on.
To the astonishment of his family it is with one such home that, in 1963, Roy Hollingworth comes good on a promise of a fresh start. He tells Margaret he has secured a mortgage on a pristine new bungalow in Bolton-upon-Dearne. ‘And you can stop working if you like, and stay at home and look after t’ lads. I can afford it,’ he says. ‘My problems are over.’
Since the end of his sentence two years ago, Roy’s problems have driven the family all the way across Yorkshire and back, and then left them briefly homeless.
He arrived home from prison one Friday evening, driven by a man in a Jaguar car. Gary had opened the door and hugged his dad as the driver took a holdall and two large paintings from the boot. ‘This is your Uncle Mick, Gary,’ said Roy, ushering him and the man with the paintings inside. Margaret brought a bottle of whisky and three glasses into the sitting room and Roy poured the drinks.
‘Look at these, lads.’ He took the paintings from Mick, and held them up for Gary and David to see. They were portraits of Indian chiefs with headdresses. ‘Your Uncle Mick’s painted these for you. There’s one apiece. I’m going to put them up over your beds, and they’ll watch over you and keep you safe.’ The boys loved the idea of their dad arranging for them to be watched over and sat looking at the Indians while the adults talked. The next day Roy put up the paintings in the boys’ new rooms, but they never saw Uncle Mick again.
Roy was relaxed and cheerful for two weeks, but then one evening he shouted at Margaret about the letters she sent when he was in prison, and said he had found out that she was working with the police. She admitted it, and tried to explain that she had not dared refuse them, but then he accused her of sleeping with a Goldthorpe policeman. Soon after that he came home with a knife wound across his face. He said he had been attacked at random in the street, but privately Margaret did not believe him.
They moved into a council house on the same street as Mr and Mrs White, and Roy found another job with a construction company. He was back to working away from home: when Gary was diagnosed with tuberculosis, it was a full week before his dad knew about it.
In the spring of 1963, the police turned up at the new house looking for Roy, but he was out. The next day Margaret came home from work to find Roy waiting for her. ‘Get your bags packed and the lads ready,’ he said with a forced cheerfulness. ‘You’re coming with me, up to Flamborough.’
‘What for?’ says Margaret.
‘For a little break. I’ve got us a lovely little cottage.’
‘For how long?’
‘We’ll see. However long we like.’
They put the boys in the car and drove through the night to a cottage in a remote, fishing village on high chalk cliffs to the north of Bridlington and stayed there for two months, spring into summer. Almost every day Roy took the boys walking along the sands between the white cliffs and the brown sea, and sometimes he sat with them in the cottage and watched films on a TV with a fuzzy reception. He took them to his pal’s garage in Bridlington and his pal showed them a German soldier’s helmet with a bullet hole in it. He and Margaret did not fight or argue even when Roy had been to the pub, and for a while it was like being in one of the normal, contented families on the television. Gary and David thought they would live there for ever.
Then one morning Roy told them to pack up their things because they were going back to the Dearne. By now someone else had moved into the council house, so Margaret and the boys moved in with her mam and dad, and Roy went to Winnie and Harry’s. Margaret did not know what would happen to the family and she didn’t dare to ask, but a month after they moved back Roy called round and told them about the bungalow. He and Gary began decorating it in the evenings and weekends, and a fortnight later they moved in.
Once they are established in the bungalow, Roy takes a job at Manvers for a short while so that the family qualifies for the miners’ free coal allowance, and then he resumes working on the motorways. The work is local, he comes home, and they have money. He rents a television, and buys a new, walnut-veneered sideboard and an up-to-the-minute radiogram that he demonstrates to the family and friends by playing his new collection of stereo LPs. Margaret sees pals from the factory who live in Bolton-upon-Dearne and makes friends with women in the other new houses. They take their children out for walks together and sit in each other’s kitchens drinking coffee.
Happiest to have Roy around again is Gary. Aged seven, he is sensible to what is and is not normal in families. At school there is another boy who doesn’t have a dad, but his father was killed at the pit so the other children don’t ask questions about him. They ask a lot of questions about Gary’s dad though: Is it true that you a’nt got a dad? Why doesn’t your dad live with your mam? Why does your grandma always pick you up from school? Gary learns to lie and to remember what he has said. ‘Yes, but he works away from home’; ‘He’s rich, and we have to travel around’; ‘He’s in the Army.’ Some boys who live on Highgate Lane, or near the Whites, stare at him doubtfully when he recites his stories, but he stares back at them until they look away. Now his dad is at home, Gary hopes he’ll take him to real places that he can describe to the doubters at school.
‘Do you want to come and give me a hand on site today?’ Roy says one Saturday morning, standing in the kitchen in his overalls.
‘Course!’ says Gary, and they drive out of the valley, past canals, fields, woodland and long spoil heaps that Gary imagines to be volcanoes, to a mud wilderness of gouged earth, yellow bulldozers and cranes. Men are steering vast machines back and forth over the dark brown soil. Gary and his dad get out of the car and pick their way through the mud to a bulldozer.
‘Are you drivin’ or shall I?’
Gary grins, ‘I’ll drive!’
They share the seat. His dad starts the roaring, juddering diesel engine, then lets Gary rest his hands on the levers as he lowers them to set the blade. When the bulldozer advances the soil bulks up violently and wonderfully and then falls away to the side.
After a while they stop and go to have a sandwich at a caravan where other workers are eating, drinking tea and smoking. The men talk about the motorways and how they’ll be a waste of money because no one will use them. ‘You’re wrong, everybody’ll use them,’ says Roy. ‘In ten years’ time everything’ll travel on them, you watch.’ He tells the men that he is proud of Gary’s bulldozer-driving, and Gary moves closer to him, and blushes. His dad is always in a good mood in places like this, talking to other men. Gary thinks if his mam would stop picking at him, he would not go away so often. He thinks that if he could make his dad proud enough, he would stay with them all the time.
But after they have lived in the new bungalow for a few months, Roy and Margaret start arguing again, this time about money. One day at home he hands her a five-pound note for groceries and tells her to bring back some change.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean get up there and do your shopping, and bring me some bloody change back from yon fiver.’
‘I only asked what you meant, Roy . . .’
‘You’re not only asking, you’re trying it on. Get to those bloody shops, and bring some bloody change back, that’s all.’
Angry, she spends the lot. When she gets back with her shopping bags, Roy is listening to an LP on the radiogram. ‘Where’s my change then?’
‘There wasn’t any.’
‘What?’
‘I needed it all. You want feeding, don’t you?’
He leaps up from his chair, and snaps off the record.
‘What are you going to do, Roy? Hit me again?’
He walks out of the room, and snatches a jacket from the hall. David cries and runs to his mam. Gary runs to the window to see his dad storming away down the path.
This becomes the routine every time Margaret asks for money.
Roy stays away more often, and when he does come home he drinks heavily and is belligerent. After a while he sells the radiogram and the LPs to Pauline, and when she and Gordon come to pick it up with their car and trailer he asks them to take the new walnut-veneered sideboard up to his mam and dad’s. He’s gone off it, he says; it doesn’t suit the bungalow. As Gordon and Harry heave the sideboard down the passage at Number 34, Winnie exclaims over it as if it were a bowl of diamonds. ‘Isn’t it a lovely surprise, Pauline?’ she says. ‘He’s a smashing lad sometimes, our Roy. He’s good to me.’
*
Easter 1964: the school holidays, Roy away working. Gary and David are reading comics in the sitting room when they hear their mam arguing with someone at the front door. Gary goes to the hall to see four men in dark suits, one with a briefcase, standing outside. Behind them is a large van. The man with the briefcase is closest and he is talking to Margaret as a schoolteacher talks to a naughty pupil. Margaret is crying. ‘It’s mine,’ she is saying. ‘A lot of it’s mine. I bought it from t’ club at work.’
The man confers with the others, then turns back. ‘You tell us what’s in your name, and we’ll leave that and take t’ other.’
‘Now?’
‘I’m afraid so.’ Gary scuttles back to the sitting room, followed by his mam and the suited men. The briefcase man asks Margaret what in the room is hers, and she points to the dining chairs, hearth rug and table. ‘Right,’ he says to the others. ‘Take t’ telly and t’ suite.’
The items are carried out and put into the van, and the neighbours come out of their homes to watch. They take the boys’ beds and the kitchen chairs, the clocks and the paintings of the Indian chiefs. When they have taken all they want, they close up the house, and Margaret, Gary and David walk away from the new bungalows and up the hill towards Thurnscoe, the repossessed bungalow shut up behind them. When she finds Roy at Winnie’s, he says he’s sorry, the bailiffs shouldn’t have come because he had the money for the mortgage arrears payment.
‘Roy says I’ve not to worry, because it’s only bricks and mortar,’ she tells her mam later. ‘He says, “You can’t get tied down by material things.” And I said, “It’d be nice to have a choice.”’
Margaret, Gary and David stay with Mr and Mrs White, and Roy avoids his wife and her parents for almost twelve months. It is during this time that Gary begins to form a strong attachment to Harry and Winnie and their home on Highgate Lane. He blames his mam for driving Roy away, but his Grandma and Grandad White and his mam’s brothers and sister tell him off for accusing her, and he comes to feel that he is not wanted in the house. When he and David stay at their Grandma Hollingworth’s, it feels like a comforting respite. He can talk about his dad without having to hear him called a bad ’un, and Winnie listens to him telling her about the cartoon characters on television, and then tells him stories about when she was a little girl. One night they have a little party in the sitting room with their friends and neighbours who can play some of the instruments. Gary and David get to stay up two hours past their bedtime, and their Grandad Hollingworth stands up in front of everyone and tells jokes. As he makes everyone laugh he winks at the boys, which makes Gary feel proud.
There are days when Roy comes to stay. He argues with Winnie and Harry and makes the boys promise not to tell Margaret that he is here. Sometimes he takes Gary to the motorway building sites, or to see Humpy Gascoigne at the scrapyard. The yard is strange and dark with dismembered cars all over, and in the main house there are always Christmas decorations on the walls and ceilings, whatever the time of year, so it is not long before Gary is asking to go back to Highgate Lane, where his grandma will give him bread and butter and Ovaltine to drink.
Gary tries to shelter David during these strange days spent with either their mam or dad at their grandparents’ houses. They make an unspoken pact to accept what is happening, and to not concede that there is something wrong with their family. Sometimes he has to cut in over David if he starts to tell the Whites something the Hollingworths have said about them, or vice versa. If, back at the Whites’ house, Gary lets slip that he has seen his dad, Margaret will bang her teacup down in its saucer, or poke at the hot coals as if she were stabbing the devil, and fire off questions about Roy: How long did he stay? Where does he live? Did he have anybody with him? The questions make Gary miserable, all the more so when his Grandma and Grandad White join in because once they have started on Roy, they start on the rest of the Hollingworths.
‘Shut up!’ says Gary. ‘They aren’t bad.’
‘Nay cocker, I didn’t mean . . .’
But he knows what they mean. He cries in a torment that they call ‘one of his rages’, and runs out of the house into the street, and David watches it all from the edge of the room, feeling afraid and wishing it would end.