Thurnscoe; Redcar; Doncaster; Highgate, 1968–69
So that he can stay in contact with his dad without angering his mam, Gary Hollingworth secretly calls him from telephone boxes using loose change and a number that Roy has given him. They arrange meetings outside the scope of the court order, and although these encounters at Winnie and Harry’s, or on days out in the car, thrill Gary, he will sometimes return to the Whites’ with familiar accusations for his mam. It is her fault his dad isn’t there; couldn’t she give him another chance? He might come back and be a good dad if only she left him alone a little. David, quieter and closer in temperament to his mother, and confused by the twin claims on him, watches the arguments in bewilderment.
The secret-meetings arrangement goes awry when Roy moves back to the North East and begins to test the effectiveness of the court order. First David sees him watching the house, then he collects the boys from school and takes them home to Redcar, and the police have to bring them back. One day he collects Gary at the school gates but leaves David to go home. ‘Gary went with Dad,’ David tells his mam when he gets home. ‘He came in t’ car and picked him up at school.’
‘Where did he take him?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What about you?’
‘He said I had to come home to you.’
The police bring Gary home, but the abduction unsettles everyone. Roy keeps on breaking the access agreement, returning the children after the specified times. Gary quarrels with his mam more often; he becomes tense, apprehensive and prone to explosions of anger, and he suffers from constipation and incontinence. To get away from the arguments he hides at Winnie and Harry’s, or in books. He visits the library beside the bowling green in Thurnscoe, walking down by himself on Saturday mornings to borrow science fiction, war stories and history books. One day he finds a hardback copy of The Iliad and reads that, impressed by its similarity to the superhero stories in the comics that his dad buys for him. His favourite character of all is Iron Man, alterego of Tony Stark, the American millionaire industrialist who, after a severe chest injury, builds a hi-tech suit of armour that enables him to do battle with his enemies. In tribute to him, Gary wears an Iron Man T-shirt, bought for him by his dad.
He is wearing the T-shirt on the wintry Saturday morning late in 1968 when he stuffs some clothes, comics and pocket money into a duffel bag and sneaks out of the house to catch the bus from Thurnscoe to Doncaster railway station, as arranged during calls to his dad. Alwyn meets him at the station and takes him on the train to Redcar, where Roy and Alwyn file a new custody claim. They acknowledge that David is happy with Margaret, but say that Gary wants to be with them, and Gary agrees. The claim, resisted by Margaret, goes into a legal process which will lead to a court hearing. In the meantime, Gary adapts to a new family life with Roy, Alwyn and Wendy.
Roy now works at the steelworks in Hartlepool. He has become a shop steward, and after tea, while the rest of the family reads or watches television, he studies books about employment law and trade union history. Most of the time, outside of working hours, he and Alwyn are around the house, but every few weeks Gary and Wendy come home from school to find the house empty, and they have to take care of themselves for a few days until Roy and Alwyn stagger back drunk, and fall asleep on the bed upstairs.
The custody hearing takes place at Doncaster Magistrates’ Court in the spring of 1969. Gary puts on his Redcar school uniform and Roy drives him and Alwyn to Doncaster, urging Gary to speak up for himself and not to let Margaret browbeat him. He stops outside the court and, looking up and down the street, explains that he can’t come inside because if he does he’ll be arrested.
The courtroom is small, tatty and stale-smelling. Gary and Alwyn sit on one side, and his mam and the Whites on the other. Uncle Leonard, freshly shaven and looking big in his suit, glares at Alwyn. The judge questions the solicitors and social workers, and the solicitors question Margaret and then Alwyn. Gary tries to understand it, and waits for someone to ask him where he would like to live. He has come with an idea. Sick of all the fights and wrangling, and unable to keep both his mam and dad happy at once, he will just live with his Grandma and Grandad Hollingworth. It seems the perfect solution to him, but in the end no one even asks his opinion. The judge declares that custody will pass to Margaret, and tells Gary to go across to her.
He refuses to move, and Margaret flinches. Uncle Leonard rubs her arm.
‘Gary, you must go,’ says the judge. ‘Come along.’
‘I’m not going.’ He cries as the court usher tries to guide him and Leonard steps in to take his arm. Gary drops to the ground, prostrate on the black tiles. ‘Nobody listens to me! Why does nobody listen?’ He feels like property. Men’s hands close around his arms and drag him across the cold floor.
*
Margaret gets a council house at the peaceful, cemetery end of Thurnscoe and a new job as a cleaner at the Albion sewing factory. Her mam and the neighbours help with the boys, and she carefully budgets with her wages and the family allowance so she can afford the bills and occasional treats – nice cushions for her sitting room, a day out with the lads, a couple of Crimplene trouser suits for herself. Gary grudgingly accepts his new home and in return Margaret tolerates him spending many of his afternoons, evenings and weekends at Winnie and Harry’s.
Number 34 has been bought by the council now, Mr Meanly having sold up when the government passed a law compelling landlords to install indoor toilets and washing facilities. He had offered the house to Harry for £200 but, against the urging of Winnie, Pauline and Lynda, Harry had indignantly declined. (‘I’m not buying two walls at £100 apiece for anybody’s money, and I’m not owning half a wall with Nelly and Reg Spencer.’) The council carries out repairs more quickly than Mr Meanly and has installed the anticipated bath and toilet suite, which has not only brought a warmth and luxury to daily life, but also helped Winnie and Harry’s marriage. Until its arrival, Harry had continued to use either the Manvers Main baths or the bath at his friend Wilf Mallion’s, and in her wary moods Winnie had suspected him of using these trips to cover up visits to the pub or to other women. He had always denied this, but now the contention is shelved altogether, this vague resolution of old disputes becoming something of a trend during this period of their marriage.
Winnie, now almost sixty, still has her solid vigour and deftness, though nowadays she is depressed by Roy where once she might have rained fire and judgement on him. Her hair has turned the colour of white garden-fire smoke and her face is lightly lined under the pale freckles of late middle age. The power relationship between her and Harry has shifted in recent years, and she has begun the process, although she does not yet realise it, of acquiring the mastery over her husband that comes to most Highgate Lane wives in the end. As he subsides into bemused and grudging acceptances of words and actions to which he might once have objected, she finds she can risk gentle public mockery of him, and this becomes a new way of discharging old tensions. Harry and his flaming cars. Harry and his flipping clothes. Harry and the carry-on he has with his music. He always laughs now, and the way he laughs makes her like him more.
He even plays the funny man to her straight complaints and laments, and this sets a new tone for them both. Increasingly they resemble a domestic version of Morecambe and Wise: Harry the comic blunderer who ruins what would otherwise be a sophisticated life for Winnie, Winnie the long-suffering, respectable pillar of the community whose censoriousness and lack of humour leaves her talented husband under-appreciated. In the years to come it will be in this comic take on their earlier life that they find a matured version of the feelings they had for one another when they first began courting in the 1920s.
In their own ways, they both work hard at keeping up with contemporary tastes. Winnie takes an open-minded interest in her grandsons’ ideas of fun, which comes naturally to her. Caring for them feels easier and less complicated than it had been with her own children, and she enjoys sharing this rich second flourishing of affection; if her grandchildren find solace and support in her home, they may also return it by becoming the simple objects of love that she had always wanted.
Harry, meanwhile, maintains his collection of 150 jokes, and still sings and drums for the organ players. When his old partners retire he searches out new ones and has started a partnership at the Collingwood with Albert Blessed, a lorry driver and organist in his twenties whose cousin Brian did panto at the Welfare Hall and is now in Z Cars. ‘You have to move on with an act,’ Harry tells Gary. ‘It’s no good playing what you want, it’s what your audience wants. That’s entertainment, mon brave.’
*
A Saturday in the autumn of 1969: all afternoon Gary has been out on the allotment with Harry. The allotments are at the rear of the houses across a potholed cinder track, filling the space between two streets and a small farmyard. They are a mess of different neatnesses: individual runs of fencing, narrow pathways, tumbledown greenhouses, tarpaper-roofed sheds, and gardens of green plants and canes. The smells of soil and onions mingle with pipe smoke, cow dung and the sound of men’s murmuring conversations against the rumble of lorries heading west to the M1 motorway.
Harry is shaking soil from a scalp of potatoes so that he can take them in for Sunday’s dinner. He has been telling Gary about looking after the pit ponies, how he would share his snap with his favourite and how the pony would steal sandwiches from your pocket. Gary has drifted off his job of cleaning tools and is imagining a sole brave English Tommy hiding out from the Germans in these allotments. Where would you hide? In one of the sheds? Would a hand grenade lobbed into a shed kill you?
‘Would a hand grenade kill you, Grandad?’
Harry smiles and drops the potatoes into a carrier bag. ‘It wouldn’t do thee much good.’
‘Did you nearly die when you were in t’ explosion?’
‘Nay, I’ve telled thee before. I could have done, but I was lucky.’
‘What did you do?’
Harry gathers up the potatoes, straightens his back and he and Gary walk the thin paths through the allotments towards the backings and the snug houses, where the first lights are going on at the windows in the violet haze of late afternoon.
‘T’ first thing I did, Gary,’ he says, as they step into the kitchen, catching the sound of Kent Walton’s wrestling commentary from inside, ‘I told them to clean my face. I didn’t want my face being a mess. I wasn’t bothered about t’ rest of my body. But I didn’t want coal and scars in my face.’
‘He’s vain, Gary, that’s why,’ says Winnie, coming into the kitchen to brew her two men some tea. She puts the pot on the table and pours it out. Harry takes his mug and adds whisky.
‘It’s not vanity,’ says Harry, scrubbing his fingernails. ‘It’s pride in thy appearance. Nobody wants scars in their face.’
Under the electric light, if he looks closely, Gary can make out fine blue pinpricks in Harry’s face, the smudge in his hairline. This blueness is the keel to his grandad’s vanity, making it noble, giving him the valour of a soldier.
After watching the wrestling, and eating a tea of fish and chips, Harry lets Gary come upstairs to help him get ready to go out. In the bedroom, Gary leans back on the sweet-smelling eiderdown as his grandad, freshly bathed, dresses, and tells him about the tailor who makes his suits. He reaches into the wardrobe for shirts on hangers, taking them out as carefully as he might take delicate old books from a high shelf, and shows them to Gary: whites, creams, pale blues and candy stripes. ‘Look at this one, cocker: that’s a Rocola shirt, just feel t’ cloth on it. Which have I to wear?’ Gary reaches out and rubs the crisp, starchy cotton, and chooses a plain cream.
‘Fetch us my gold cufflinks out of yon drawer.’
Gary brings the cufflinks from a small drawer at the top of the dressing table, and Harry holds out his cuffs. As he threads the little steel spikes through their slits, Gary can sense his grandad preparing to relax once the cufflinks are in. With the last push and the tiny flip of the spike to secure it, he stands back; his grandad slips his hand into a trouser pocket to fish out some coins, and gives them to his grandson for sweets.
Thinking they are ready to go downstairs Gary runs off down the landing, but Harry calls him back. He opens one of the small drawers and pulls something out.
‘Here.’ Harry puts into his hand a silver wristwatch with trillions of tiny abrasions on the glass and a creased, cracked leather strap, and a tie pin polished like the gold bars you see in films on television. ‘These are for thee. My dad gave them to me a long time ago, when I was a lad. They called him Juggler and all, tha knows. Make sure tha takes care of ’em.’
‘I will, thank you, Grandad.’
They both clatter down the stairs and turn right into the sitting room, where Winnie looks up at them from the television. As she smiles, the skin at the outer edges of her eyes folds into little crinkled wings. ‘Here comes our Gary with t’ Duke!’ she says, the Duke her affectionate nickname for her preening husband. Gary feels the warmth of the reflected glory. He sits down beside his grandma on the settee-throne, prepares to inspect their domain of the TV schedules with her, and toasts his aristocratic heritage with a glass of green fruit-flavoured pop.