Hickleton Main Colliery and the Coronation Club, Thurnscoe, 1977–78
Lynda’s job at Hickleton colliery is that of clerical officer in the General Services Department, which means that she works for every department in the pit. Her desk is among banks of typewriters and banding machines in a Victorian office building with high windows and parquet floors. On her first morning she is given the post to sort into dozens of dark wooden pigeonholes, envelopes and mail for everyone from baths attendants, bricklayers and chemical engineers to facemen, nursing staff and dust control officers. In the afternoon she is asked to minute a meeting. Her speed-writing is accepted (Manvers and Hickleton, it turns out, are in different administrative areas and accept different kinds of shorthand) but when the men begin to talk, she trembles and feels sick because the language is completely incomprehensible to her. In-bye, out-bye, headgear, ripping lips. Longwall shearers. Double-ended ranging drum shearers. She likes the sound of the words but just guesses at the spellings, and when she takes the minutes to Mr Perkins, her manager, he laughs and says, ‘Don’t worry, we give you a bit of time to get used to it. Let’s see how you’re going on this time next year.’
In the autumn she organises the laundry of the dirty towels from the pit baths, and answers the calls from underground for ambulances when men are sick or injured. She types letters and rolls copies from the Gestetner machine and indulges her love of filing. She learns that when a deputy sends you to the bakery for some snap you bring back bottles of pop and not cans because cans might make sparks, and that women are not allowed to wear trousers to work, even when it snows. She learns about all the departments and about a lot of the employees, because when the personnel manager, Mr Ashworth, notices the quality of her typing and her bantering conversations with the men, he asks her to help him with the personnel absence reports.
She loves the work, even when Mr Ashworth asks her to type up his private letters to his divorce lawyer. The atmosphere of people working together with a sense of urgency and common underlying purpose suits her. The practical jokes make her weep with laughter and, as she learns the lingo, she comes to love the way it makes a world. She memorises the names of all the collieries in the NCB Doncaster area: Askern, Barnburgh, Bentley, Brodsworth, Cadeby and Denaby, Frickley, Goldthorpe, Highgate, Hatfield, Markham, Rossington, Thorne. At home she recites them to Karl and he memorises them too. She begins to understand what the men are talking about, and work becomes a sort of sanctuary to her.
Using her wages, Lynda takes driving lessons and passes her test. She buys a Vauxhall Viva from the garage across the road, and the next weekend drives herself and Karl into Barnsley to go Christmas shopping. On the way home she glances at him in the rear-view mirror. He is asleep, softly snoring with his head slumped against the seat back, winter pinks streaking the Pennine skies behind him. Just the two of them: her and Karl, partners. She decides that she would rather have money and a car than a man, any day of the week.
‘We’ll manage, won’t we, cocker?’ she says to her sleeping son. ‘We’re going to do alright on our own. Watch this space.’
Her friend Beryl sees the change in her and suggests she start going out again. At first Lynda refuses, but in February, the week before Valentine’s Day, Beryl persuades her to go to the disco at the Cora. ‘Come on,’ she says. ‘There’ll be plenty of fellas you can talk to now you know about your Longball Shearers. They’re all going to love you.’
‘Longwall,’ she corrects. ‘But I’m not talking to any men, thank you. I’d rather type up atmospheric pressure figures all night.’
The disco is busy and loud, and its coloured lights give strange casts to people’s faces. Lynda clocks men and women she knows from work, and chats briefly with David and Marie, but as she and Beryl stand sipping their sweet Martinis, she feels out of place. How is a person supposed to be when they are in a club or a disco? She feels she has almost forgotten. And her clothes are not quite right: she has chosen a smart pencil skirt, blouse and stilettos, but other people look scruffy. The fashions have moved on: the men peer out from under long shapeless hair, and the women wobble about on platform shoes like something from one of her dad’s turns. She looks at a gang of long-haired men near the bar; the kids at Rocky Wall’s café in the sixties would have said they looked like tramps.
Beryl goes to the bar leaving Lynda standing against the wall. Out of the crowd appears a wiry, grinning man with a shirt undone to the third button, and a silver necklace around his neck.
‘Ayup, Lynda,’ he says.
She tenses – and then remembers she is trying to have fun. ‘Ayup, Ian.’ The man is Ian Davidson, an old acquaintance from Goldthorpe.
‘Are y’alright?’
‘Yes thank you. Are you?’
‘Only down one side, eh?’ He flashes her a smile and drinks off some of his pint. Following her vacant gaze he studies the dance floor and comments on some of the dancers. Then, too soon, ‘Can I take you home tonight, then?’
Here we go, she thinks. The last of the great romantics.
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s a long story, Ian. Let’s just say I don’t want you talking about me with all your mates in t’ pit bottom tomorrow morning, and leave it at that.’
‘I wouldn’t.’
‘Yes you would. I work there, remember.’
‘Well, if you change your mind – ’
‘I won’t.’
He winks. Lynda looks beyond Ian to the bar, seeking out Beryl. She is talking to one of the men in the long-haired gang. Both have their backs to Lynda, and she wonders if the man is asking if he can walk Beryl home.
Ian persists until Beryl at last comes back with the drinks.
‘Getting on wi’ Ian, are you?’ she asks Lynda, once he has left them.
‘No I am flaming not. He was getting on my flaming nerves.’
‘I don’t think he’s so bad.’
Lynda shrugs. She doesn’t want to talk about him. ‘Who were you talking to anyroad?’
‘A pal at t’ bar, I’ve not seen him for a bit. He said he were a friend of yours and he were asking all about you. Have I to bring him over?’
‘I don’t know, who is he?’
‘His name’s John Burton,’ says Beryl.
Lynda has wondered what she would feel if she saw him out in a pub or met him somewhere unexpectedly. She has imagined herself asking what was wrong with him the day she called to see him with the Elvis record, and he ignored her. It would be like a scene from a film; she would ask him casually and he would explain, and it would all be revealed as a silly misunderstanding between two old mates. As for what happened after that – well, there were several possibilities. But in the event, here in the Coronation Club disco on a February night in 1978, she doesn’t feel anything much at all, apart from mild shock, and then amusement at his long hair, moustache and three-quarter-length embroidered Afghan coat.
He keeps shooting looks across to where she and Beryl are standing. She meets his look, but he doesn’t respond.
‘No, don’t worry,’ she says. ‘I used to go out with him at one time, you know. But I can’t be bothered.’
Eventually it is Lynda’s turn to go to the bar. Unless she takes a detour around the edge of the room, she will have to walk past John’s group. She knows that he has seen her, and that if she does not speak to him it will appear a deliberate snub, so as she passes she touches his arm, and says, ‘How’s your mother?’ She had been on good terms with Mrs Burton, and asking about his family is the action of a casual old friend rather than a former lover.
‘Ayup,’ he says, deadpan.
As if you had never ignored me when I tried to give you that record, she thinks. As if you had not gone past my flat on the bus, looking in through the upstairs window.
‘She’s alright. She were poorly at Christmas but she’s all right now. Is tha keeping all right?’
‘Yes thanks.’
‘I’ve been going to ring thee.’
I’ve been going to ring thee? What, since 1967?
‘Ring me?’ she says. ‘What would you be ringing me for?’ Previously she was struggling to even hear herself over the music. Now she is barely aware of it, and could hear him if he whispered.
‘Work’s given me two tickets to Wakefield Theatre Club to go and see Tom O’Connor, free meal and free bar. A load of us have been volunteering for fire duty while t’ firemen have been on strike, and they reckon they want to do summat to thank us.’
‘Lovely,’ she says, unclear as to where this might be going. ‘He’s good, Tom O’Connor.’
‘So will tha come with me?’
Men, she thinks. Bloody, bloody, bloody men. ‘Why, who’s let you down?’
‘Nobody!’ He sounds surprised.
‘Pull t’ other one, kiddo, it’s got wedding bells on.’
‘I’ve not asked anybody else if that’s what tha means.’
‘No, of course not.’
‘I’ve not! I thought of it because of our Glenys. You know, my cousin Glenys? She were at my mam’s t’ other day and she says, “You’ll never guess who’s got divorced? Lynda Hollingworth.”’
‘Great,’ says Lynda. ‘Thanks.’
‘And then I saw it in t’ paper!’ He wears the expression of a man describing a winning bet on a horse. ‘That’s why I was going to ring thee, tha sees!’
Lynda has the sensation of looking down on herself while simultaneously taking part in the conversation. She is torn between wanting to talk to John, and not wanting to talk about a date. She very much wants to ask about his moustache.
‘So will tha come then?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because . . . I’m not going with you, that’s all.’
His tone becomes more earnest. ‘Look, don’t come to Wakefield if you don’t want. But will you come and see me? Come up to my mam’s and see us all.’
She feels herself off balance for a moment. She wants to run away. ‘I maybe will,’ she says. ‘See you about, anyroad.’
And as she turns he says, ‘Here – ’ and in a swift liquid movement he holds her hand, and takes from somewhere a gold ring and puts it on her finger. ‘Bring me that back tomorrow, and tell me that you’ll come with me.’
She looks at him and thinks she ought to be angry.
‘Come up tomorrow afternoon.’
‘Alright.’
And then, right there at the bar of the Cora disco, John puts an arm around her shoulders and kisses her. Her reason twists against it, but she feels as if he pulls her blood towards him. It is not a question of deciding.
At the end of the night they walk back to Highgate together, talking. He tells her about Susan. They had moved to Coventry with their baby and had three more children but then Susan had wanted to come home. She moved to Doncaster, and he stayed working in the Midlands, returning home at weekends. When that became strained he moved back to her and the kids in Doncaster, but it didn’t work and he left. The time since has been the lowest point in his life. He and Susan are divorcing and he is living at his mam’s house in Goldthorpe. He has wanted to visit Lynda, or at least just talk to her on the phone, but hadn’t had the courage.
They pass the Halfway Hotel, and walk up to 239 Barnsley Road. Ahead she can see Harry standing on the front doorstep waiting for her. He has done this ever since she started going out on her own in the evening, always watching until she is within about a hundred yards of the house, then slipping back inside to be in bed by the time she arrives, believing that she has not seen him. Tonight, though, he stays on the doorstep, and when Lynda and John reach the gate, he shouts at her, ‘Get in that house now, you!’
‘Dad? What are you – ’ says Lynda.
‘And you,’ he says to John, ‘you can get off home!’
‘Mr Hollingworth –’
‘I said, get home! She’s had enough trouble. You can leave her alone, you bloody reptile.’
Reptile. It is an insult of the old school, and all the worse for it.
John stands for a moment, considering the situation. ‘All right.’ He pauses, holding up his hands to acknowledge Harry, and says goodnight to them both. Harry tells Lynda to get inside and she reminds him how old she is, and they go inside to argue.
Left alone, John heads back up the road towards Goldthorpe, but had Lynda or Harry stopped arguing and stood on the step to listen for a moment, they might have heard him muttering to himself under his moustache as he walked, ‘I’ll marry you, Lynda Hollingworth. I’ll marry you if it’s the only thing I ever do. I don’t care what your dad says or your mam says or what anybody says; you are the one love of my life. And this time you’re not getting away.’