47 You Can’t Just Fling a Hook in a River

Thurnscoe and the bank of the River Wharfe at Ulleskelf, North Yorkshire, 1977–80

‘Dave!’ says Denise. ‘Say summat to her!’

‘Never mind chuffing “Dave”! Just get lost, before I go and fetch our Sue.’

Marie Poole fixes David’s hapless ex-girlfriend with a stare and chews her gum with a slow, steady conviction.

‘But Dave . . .’

‘I’ve told you once, shut it. Dave Hollingworth’s wi’ me. I don’t care what he’s told you, he’s been wi’me for six month. He’s a bugger for leading you on, Denise, but I’m not going to let you wreck it for us.’

‘You’re a flaming liar! How come nobody’s ever seen you with him?’

‘We don’t stay round here like you sad sacks, do we, Dave?’

David, who is watching this argument unfold outside the Cora with horror, says, ‘Er, no. No, we don’t.’

‘Oh aye? Where do you go then?’

‘All over,’ says Marie. ‘We go . . . fishing.’

Denise stops, her glossed lips open. ‘Fishing?’

‘Yes, Denise. Fishing.’ Marie makes it sound like a mature, intellectual pursuit beyond Denise’s understanding. It is all a lie; so far she and Dave have been no further than the Cora and the edge of Thurnscoe. ‘In lakes, and rivers, and all over.’

‘You asked me to go fishing with you,’ Denise says to David accusingly.

‘Aye, but you wouldn’t come . . .’

‘Yeah, you wouldn’t go, would you?’ says Marie. ‘You wouldn’t go because, no offence love, you haven’t got what it takes.’

‘What does fishing take?’

‘If you have to ask, you’ll never know.’ It is a line that Marie picked up from the pages of a magazine, and it does the job.

Denise makes a final appeal to David. ‘Are you just going to stand there?’

‘Aye,’ he says. ‘I’m with Marie.’

*

Marie had volunteered to get rid of Denise when, after their third secret date, David had admitted he had a girlfriend and said he felt guilty about chucking her.

‘What will you do?’ he asked.

‘I dunno, pick a fight then think of summat. I’ll tell her we’ve been going out wi’ each other in secret.’

David looked doubtful.

‘Gi o’er, she’ll be grateful in t’ end. Lasses don’t mess about. If it were up to lads nowt’d ever get done.’

Denise is done in a confrontation outside the Cora three weeks after David walked Marie home from the disco. Afterwards, for the first few months of their relationship, David and Marie rely on meeting each other when they go out in the village on Wednesday and Saturday nights. He persuades her to come to the Whinwood, which is the only pub in the village to play heavy music. When she says she likes the music and the way it lifts her out of herself, he feels a surge of love and in return makes an effort with David Cassidy. He can talk to Marie more easily than he could his other girlfriends and when he is with her he feels mature and more fully himself. The only problem is that he has competition for her attention.

One Saturday night when they have been going out for three months, they are sitting in their regular seats in the Cora lounge bar. Having regular seats is important; if you sit in someone else’s customary place you are not only asked to move (‘Them’s my seats!’), you have dagger stares directed at you all night. It is like the village church where the families have their own pews, and people guard their spaces almost as doggedly as they do their families’ reputations. David and Marie sit on a high-backed padded bench facing Marie’s cousin Sue and her boyfriend. Over a table cluttered with pint and shorts glasses and a half-full ashtray, they are talking about a row Marie is having with a manager at work who is trying to ban girls from coming in on Fridays with their rollers in.

‘He reckons it’s a safety hazard,’ says Marie. ‘I said, “How is it a hazard? It means my hair’s up. It’s more of a hazard if your hair’s flapping about, like Dave’s.”’

David swishes his long hair slightly, as a joke.

‘What’s he going to do?’ asks Sue.

‘He said it’s a disciplinary issue and he’s going to give us a warning, but Maureen’s got t’ union onto him.’

She pulls a cigarette from a packet. ‘He’s . . . oh, keep talking and look interested. Jed’s here.’

Jed Stiles, a pit-top man who works on the screens, is in his late thirties, tall and broad with a quiff atop a receding hairline. He is not un­­­attractive but has never married, though often he has girls around him in bars because the girls know that he will spend on them. His personality is dominated by two conspicuous attributes: first, his all-consuming belief in his own charm, particularly as it affects women, and second, a fixation with Elvis Presley. Elvis’s influence on Jed has been such that, since the late 1950s, Jed has tried to deepen his voice and use an accent that blends Memphis and South Yorkshire. ‘Hey,’ he says, slowly and deeply, as he leans against the bar. With his head at an angle, he runs his comb through the sides of his hair and plumps up the quiff like a potter smoothing out clay.

No one laughs, because he is handy with his fists, big enough to flatten most men in the club and quick to anger if he feels he is being mocked.

‘Aww no –’ Marie puts her head down so that her hair covers her face, and grimaces at David. ‘He’s coming over here.’

Jed has tried to woo many of the women in Thurnscoe, and the girls in Marie’s family have been among his prime targets. He had once given her sister Carol a wristwatch and then tried all night to chat her up with Elvis-isms, prompting Carol’s mother to push him out of the fire-exit door with the advice that an uninterested young woman’s mind wasn’t going to be changed by a Timex. The next week he had fixed upon Carol’s younger sister Joan and presented her with a bag of lettuces from his allotment.

He squeezes himself onto the bench beside Marie. ‘How are you, Marie baby?’ He emphasises the ‘How’, and pronounces ‘you’ as ‘ya’, baby as ‘baybeh’.

‘I’m all right thanks.’

He takes a sip from his pint. ‘I’m well too, honey. Marie, tell me now – do you think I look like Elvis?’

No one around the table dares look at each other, in case they laugh.

‘Yeah, Jed. Dead ringer.’

‘Thank you, thank you. And are you coming to my wedding?’

This is Jed’s chat-up line. The idea is that you say, ‘Why, are you getting married?’ And he says, ‘Of course. To you.’ Marie has heard this before so she knows the way to slip out of the conversation is to say, ‘Aye, I’ll be a bridesmaid.’

‘Heh heh,’ he replies, slightly on the back foot. ‘But I want you to be my bride!’

‘I’m taken, Jed. I don’t think Dave’d be very pleased with that, do you?’

‘Well, if I come up on t’ horses –’ Jed’s use of ‘t’ horses’ rather than ‘the horses’ indicates his cool is slipping – ‘I’m a-paying him off and you can move in with me, how about that?’

‘Do you want another pint, Jed?’ asks Sue’s boyfriend, who is quiet but has a good sense of awkward situations.

‘Take no notice,’ whispers Marie to David. ‘I’m with you.’

*

After Christmas, Marie says, ‘Well, it’s getting on for a year, are you going to make me beg you to take me fishing or what?’ And he takes her on the early morning train from Thurnscoe to Ulleskelf, and leads her for miles along the dew-wet tracks to his favourite place on the river bank. It is a steely February morning, and the stillness of the silent, immaculate landscape is broken only by a few restless rooks and scattered pairs of fishermen. On the steep bank, David spreads out a sheet, and pours coffee from his flask.

‘I hope it isn’t going to be boring for you, Marie.’

She looks around at the river and the fields. ‘How can this be boring? It’s beautiful.’

‘Not everybody sees it like that.’

‘Well I do. Now show me how to catch a fish.’

He shows her how to bait the hook and cast the line. The sky clears, and more fishermen walk down the bank. Across the river, cows mosey to the land edge and stare across at them.

‘Dave, I’ve caught one!’

Seeing the silver flash in the water, Marie instinctively pulls up the rod, and steps backwards up the slope. David looks across to see the rod jerk in her hands and her body begin to topple as the line pulls hard.

‘Watch, it’ll be a pike . . .’

‘A what?’ She tries to adjust her balance, but overdoes it. Still grasping the rod, she staggers forward down the slope, trips and falls headfirst into the river.

The pike takes both bait and hook. Marie dries herself using the dirty, ragged towel David uses to wipe his hands after a catch. ‘I thought at least I’d have caught t’ fish, you know,’ she says, as they squelch back through the fields towards a pub.

‘It’s difficult with pike. They’re challenging.’

‘I never thought it was that hard. You can’t just fling a hook in a river, can you?’

‘No,’ he says. ‘No, you can’t just do that.’

*

David and one of his friends from work, Houdie, put in application forms for Hickleton Main and Houghton Main collieries, and are offered jobs underground at Hickleton. David had hoped for pit-top employment, but still, even if the work underground is hard, the wages, benefits and training are better than most other jobs and, after the shocks of the first few weeks, he begins to feel a sense of camaraderie with the men and pride in his work.

David and Marie are becoming more serious about their relationship, and when David is not on late shifts they spend the evenings at each other’s parents’ homes: Mondays and Wednesdays at Colin and Margaret’s, Tuesdays and Thursdays at Mrs Poole’s, Fridays a quick sandwich anywhere then out to the pub. David’s mam likes Marie from the outset, partly because she has a family connection: Margaret’s sister Alice now owns a knitting shop in Thurnscoe and had taught Marie to knit. When Marie starts knitting David a cream cable-knit sweater, Mrs Poole recognises the serious intent and allows the pair to use her front room as their own. To David this new domestic element of their courtship is a pleasure in itself.

On summer evenings, freshly showered from the pit baths and wearing wide-flared jeans and a clean band T-shirt, David walks out of the colliery gates and down the road to the Pooles’ house where, if he’s lucky, Marie will have bribed her dad to go out to the Cora while her mum is at bingo. They eat their tea together in the front room and, with the cutlery chinking on the plates, tell each other about their days at work: rumours of affairs in the offices, new disputes about hair rollers, the tropical butterflies David finds in the pit hatched from chrysalises in the imported pit props. Later, Marie brings her portable record player into the room, and when the last of the LPs has been played, a drowsy calmness fills the room, and David feels as if he has escaped into another life.

‘We’re like a little old married couple,’ says Marie. ‘I could live like this, Dave, couldn’t you?’

‘Aye,’ he says.

*

David Hollingworth and Marie Poole marry at St Hilda’s Church in Thurnscoe on a summer’s day in 1980. Gary is best man, and Roy, with whom David no longer has any contact, is not invited. As David unlocks the front door of their newly rented NCB house, he takes hold of his unsuspecting bride.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Marie hisses. ‘We’re on t’ doorstep, everybody can see.’

‘Shush a minute –’ He slides one arm around her thighs and the other around her shoulders, and hoists her up.

‘You’d better not drop me and cause a disaster.’

‘I won’t.’ He carries her through the door and sets her down in the hallway. ‘Thank you, Mrs Hollingworth.’

‘Thank you, Mr Hollingworth. I never knew you were so old-fashioned.’

A few minutes later they fall into a bickering dispute about honeymoon arrangements that lasts into the next day, and drops only when David fetches a portable black and white television set for them to watch from a neighbour. It’s a strange way to find yourselves settling your first argument as a married couple, they agree, but then love and arguments don’t always go the ways you expect them to.