Goldthorpe, West Riding of Yorkshire, 1925
In the Pennine Hills above Barnsley in the West Riding of Yorkshire, a thin clear spring breaks from a grass bank, trickles down a hillside and, at the bottom, becomes a runnel draining water from the hill. Over several miles the runnel widens into a stream, and then into a river that has carved a deep valley through the hills on which Barnsley is built. Leaving the town, the river turns south and slows, and opens up a broad, shallow valley of rich pastureland and water meadows. The river is called the Dearne, from the Old English word ‘dearne’ or ‘dierne’, meaning hidden, or secret, or dark. Its valley, five miles long, is properly called the Lower Dearne Valley, but the people who live there usually just call it the Dearne Valley, or more simply, the Dearne.
Until the early eighteenth century, the Dearne’s meadow and pasture were sparsely populated, with stone farms and villages and cottage rows scattered like limestone stars in a green grass sky. Its people lived by farming, weaving and village crafts, and by digging coal in small bell pits or on outcrops on the valley shoulders. Then businessmen came with new machines and steam engines and used them to take coal from outcrops and shallow seams to the west and the south of the valley, and other businessmen built canals and navigations, and altered the course of the river to carry the coal to the cities. In the 1840s railway men were sent to lay iron tracks that crossed the valley first one way, then another, and then another, in deep cuttings and iron bridges that ran above the lanes and through the villages. The coal and canals and railways and mass of labour brought entrepreneurs, glassmakers, brickmakers, iron founders and textile weavers, and these men built new factories, foundries and mills. Day and night their steam trains sent out sparks that set fire to haystacks and crops in the fields, and hung the valley with trails of grey steam as they hauled coal trucks from the pits to the iron foundries and the glassworks and the mills and to the docks of Hull and Goole.
Britain and her empire fed on coal: coal for the houses and coal for the factories; coal to make the iron, and coal to make the glass; coal for the trains, and coal for the ships and coal to sell to the rest of the world. ‘Coal has been put in the earth by God,’ wrote an excited author in Charles Dickens’s Household Words, so that humanity may live ‘not merely a savage life, but one civilised and refined, with the sense of a soul within’. To feed these fires, engineers at the end of the nineteenth century built more powerful machines that could fetch coal from even deeper-lying seams, and financiers and businessmen bought the machines and leased land to build more mines. By 1910, in the five miles of the Dearne Valley there were fourteen of the vast, new deep mines, and dozens more beyond the valley sides. The landowners became rich on the mineral rights and built themselves grand homes, and became gentlemen.
The colliery owners constructed houses in the old villages in which to put the families who came to work in the mines, families from all over England, from Scotland, and Wales, and from Europe, all seeking work in the mines or customers for their trades: Irish builders, German pork butchers, Russian-Jewish tailors. The Dearne became a jumble of smoking hills and hollows, of haphazard sooted-brick villages and small towns, and of chimneys puthering dense black smoke. Up in the Pennine Hills, above smokey Barnsley, the spring now ran into a millpond dug out for a cotton mill, and the pond’s overflow fed into the runnel. Down in the valley men altered the course of the river and poisoned its water so it became a slow and lifeless black sludge. But the new industry provided jobs, and for many people the work paid far better than the old work on the land.
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It is to the Lower Dearne Valley that Walter Parkin brings Annie and their four children in the early years of the 1920s. They settle first near his mother and stepfather in the village of Adwick-le-Street, beyond the valley’s western edge. Walter goes to work sinking new shafts at a colliery near Doncaster, but when that work is completed, he follows some other men five miles west, to the pit at Goldthorpe.
Goldthorpe, lying halfway between Doncaster and Barnsley, is one of four villages parted only by a few small fields in the heart of the valley: to the north, Thurnscoe, to the west, Highgate, to the south, Bolton-upon-Dearne. Twenty years earlier they were farming hamlets, but with six collieries sunk within walking distance of them all, they are now expanding frontier towns, their frontiers dark and underground. Goldthorpe is the biggest and busiest, with a market and the feel of the Wild West. Wherever you look, men are building new houses, shops and pubs; parts of the village have the look of a Wellsian science-fiction, with a clutter of chimneys, spoil heaps and pit headgears. The new church, built with money donated by Lord Halifax of Hickleton Hall, owner of mineral rights to Hickleton Main colliery at Thurnscoe, is designed in the Italianate style but made out of ferro-concrete slabs.
The Parkins move into a terraced house with steep stairs, thin walls and three bedrooms, built on a crossroads known as Gill’s Corner, near the Wesleyan Methodist chapel. The family worships at the chapel, Walter stern and serious, Annie enjoying the socialising and the hymns. They are not well off, but they are at least in their own home. Walter travels to colliery sites where shaft-sinking is needed, although in the summers and autumn he will sometimes come out of the pit to work on farms, ploughing and handling the horses. Annie attends spiritualist meetings and continues her sittings, sometimes taking the children with her. She is respected for her powers. When a young girl goes missing, a local police inspector asks Annie to help find her, or at least her body; Annie sees in her crystal ball the girl’s corpse lying in a well in a farm and her vision turns out to be true.
When Winnie reaches the age of fourteen, in December 1923, she goes into service as a housemaid. Service pays less well than the mills, but mill girls are brash, says Walter, and he won’t have her working with them. He will have less luck with Olive, later, when work in service is less plentiful, he is ill and Olive is able to face him down. Winnie and most of the girls at school are fearful about life in service, telling each other stories they have heard about rooms with stinking mattresses, ambushes by red-faced sons, and the running of mistresses’ fingers or handkerchiefs along furniture to look for missed dust. Feeling nervous, she finds work at the doctor’s house in Goldthorpe, wages six shillings a week. She will get nothing for a month and then five-sixths of it; all but a shilling will be handed over to her mam. Not only that, on her days off Annie leaves the washing up for Winnie to do, and then asks her to black the grate, or beat a carpet (‘I thought I’d leave them for you, seeing as you were coming’). It is typical of her mother’s selfishness, thinks Winnie, but she cannot say no. Annie doesn’t enjoy the housework, but Winnie, her father’s daughter, cannot relax if there is a surface where dust has gathered.
She hears about better-paid work at the Broad Highway, a large modern travellers’ inn on a junction of the Great North Road near Doncaster. Abutting a newly opened golf course and country club, it is the kind of place that has flourished with the popularity of the motor car. Staff can live in, so when Winnie obtains a position as a general chambermaid and cleaner there, she escapes her home and Walter’s temper. Scrubbing floors and guest rooms, washing crockery and dusting bars, she feels freer: the Broad Highway is airy and light, and full of commercial travellers and coachloads on their way to the races at Doncaster. The work makes Winnie, boosted up on bread and dripping breakfasts, physically strong as she enters her late teens. Her sisters and friends note the stocky power building in her body.
Her boss, Mrs Bligh, the wife of the good-looking, get-ahead owner Thomas Bligh, is kind to her, and their daughter Marjorie (‘Miss Marjorie’ to Winnie) is friendly and protective. Miss Marjorie is three years older than Winnie, beautiful, radiant with glamour, and full of stories from the new, stylish arcades and dance halls of Doncaster. She has fashionable dresses made up in velvets, organdies and printed cottons from the town’s market, and comes back from shopping trips in her father’s car with silk stockings, cloche hats, make-up and perfumes with French names. ‘Try some of this, Winnie,’ she says, and applies deep red lipstick to the younger girl’s tremulous, awestruck mouth. ‘I’ve a new one of these’ – holding up an almost empty bottle of Soir de Paris – ‘would you like to take what’s left?’
Miss Marjorie is the only woman Winnie knows whose parents do not labour for a living, and she tries to ape her manners and attitudes, as her mam had copied her mistress’s before her. Winnie might not have her bone structure, and she could neither afford make-up nor risk it in her father’s sight, but it costs nothing to mimic Miss Marjorie’s elegant mannerisms which, she imagines, set her apart from the rougher girls in Goldthorpe. Miss Marjorie encourages her to share her feelings about Rudolph Valentino after she has been to see his films and in turn tells her about the new music, jazz and quicksteps, the comical dance moves to the Black Bottom and the Charleston that some of the girls do in the dance halls. ‘If you go dancing you have to watch, because their legs go everywhere,’ she says. ‘They clip your ankles.’
Winnie says she hasn’t been dancing yet.
‘You want to be going soon,’ says Miss Marjorie. ‘Have some fun!’
At home, though, fun remains a vexed and dangerous area. Walter alternates between gentleness and rage, and despite Winnie being of working age, he still addresses and treats her as a child when she is there at weekends and on her half-day Wednesdays. His moods are erratic, possibly made worse by anxiety over money as the coal owners threaten to reduce the wages again. If Winnie complains she sometimes gets a sympathetic hearing, and sometimes a slap or the belt. The only difference her age makes is to increase Walter’s aggressive protection of her against men, most of whom he regards as idlers, gamblers and ne’er-do-wells. Winnie does not go with boys, but this only makes Walter more suspicious. There is widespread moral outrage about the new style and mood among young women: the dance moves, the make-up, the music, the cheap fashions, the exposed arms and legs. Walter fears that such behaviour will lead Winnie into the arms of one of the new breed of young men whose politics are revolutionary and whose dress and demeanour imitate the heroes in films.
One night in 1925, when Winnie is fifteen, her father sees her talking to a young man at Goldthorpe’s fish and chip shop. When she gets back to the house later, Walter instructs her to go to her bedroom and undress to her underwear.
If Walter’s eldest had been a boy, the boy might have turned on him and stopped it, but Winnie is a girl, and this is how it works for girls. You get punished if the men decide you have erred, and if you complain you get punished again, only harder. Not bearing the discipline is a greater crime than the crime itself.
Dress, underskirt, corset fastened at front with bobble and hook. As she stands there and hears his steps on the narrow wooden stairs, she works out how this was her fault. He is a good man, fighting to cope with what has happened to him in the war. If he is a good man, and he has been so disgusted with her, then what is she? She stops thinking and just decides she will not cry. She won’t let him see that the beating works and won’t upset him by weeping tears that will induce the self-pity of a thwarted man. It is defiance, not only of his power, but also of what he is when he is like this.
‘Tha can take that off.’ Walter, face full of contempt, looks at her corset. She turns from him and unhooks it, exposing her bare back, mottled pale as pearls. She hears the pop and loose jingle of the belt buckle as he loosens it. The slither of the belt through the loops.
‘Bend over.’ The tone is the one he uses when dismissing a lie, or sending out a disgraced dog. ‘Tha’s acting like a whore, Winnie. Tha’ll stay away from them lads.’
The gypsy girl is with her, beside her, and telling her she will be all right.
He uses the buckle end on her, which tells her he is at his angriest. The beating lasts until he is exhausted. She feels rising weals. She tells herself not to cry. She loves him, and because she loves him does not want him to see her weeping. She has learnt to hold it in.
‘He could never make me cry,’ she will tell her daughters, and then her granddaughter, many years from now. ‘However hard he hit me, I wouldn’t.’