49 Husbands and Lovers, Fathers and Mothers

Highgate and Thurnscoe, 1978–79

Despite being told to stay away from John, Lynda visits him at his mother’s house and they reconvene at the Cora. When John walks her home, Harry enacts a repeat performance on the doorstep; get home you little reptile, get yourself back to your wife and kids. John hesitates to defy him, but Harry knows how to hurt an audience just as he knows how to please it, and he won’t stop. ‘Harry!’ John squeezes his temper in his clenched fists and forces his voice down, because he isn’t going to shout in the street. ‘Harry. I’m telling thee it’s a good job tha’s an older man, because if tha weren’t, I’d knock thee up and down this street. Now stop calling me names.’

All three of them stand dumbstruck.

‘No offence meant,’ says John. ‘Anyway, I’ll be off. I’ll see thee later, Lynda.’

Harry shouts after him, but he is diminished and he knows it.

When John next meets Lynda, he apologises for the argument. They are both in their late twenties, but of a generation brought up to defer to their elders, and he regrets his language. It is the first time he has called Lynda’s father anything other than Mr Hollingworth.

He sends an apology to Harry via Lynda but it makes no difference, and when she sets off to meet him again Winnie upbraids her and demands that she break off the relationship. To make matters worse, Winnie encourages Tony Grainger to visit the house, welcoming him even when he disregards the timetables agreed in the divorce settlement, or nips at Lynda, picking arguments or blaming her for the breakdown of their marriage. He has been exceeding his allotted times since Lynda walked out. After talking to Karl, he lingers in the kitchen with Winnie while Lynda sits tight-lipped in the sitting room with the television turned up, waiting for him to leave.

‘He’s got a right to come, Lynda,’ Winnie lectures her daughter. ‘Tony’s our Karl’s dad. And children need their dads.’

This is Walter Parkin’s daughter talking, Lynda thinks; the girl who loved her dad even as he beat her. She took her punishment in silence, and so must all other women.

‘He doesn’t have a right to call me names, though, does he?’

‘You should ignore him. You should think of our Karl.’

As if she doesn’t. As if Karl has not been the only good part of her life for five years, and her only reason for not running away. ‘Tell him to keep away, Mother,’ she says.

When Tony hears Lynda is seeing John Burton he visits more often, plying Winnie with concocted gossip among the hubbling, bubbling pans and steam-beaded windows of her kitchen. John is trying to lure Lynda away from Winnie; John wants Lynda to stop speaking to her mam altogether; John’s been seen looking at houses for him and Lynda to move into. The idea of her daughter being lured into a trap agitates Winnie, and she confronts Lynda with Tony’s evidence. (‘He’s been seen, Lynda. Going into that empty house next door to his mam’s with a ladder.’) Lynda corrects her, but Winnie spreads Tony’s tales anyway.

‘Sorry for my mam, John,’ she has to say when she hears her mother has been bad-mouthing him in the Goldthorpe shops again.

‘Doesn’t matter, love. If she’s having a go at me, she’s leaving somebody else alone.’

By the autumn they are together more often than they are apart. They go to see rock ’n’ roll revival bands, and have parties with their old friends from school and the café. She helps him get a new job in Hickleton pit’s lamp room. Some nights they stay in at John’s mam’s house and play records by the recently deceased Elvis, including the ‘Down by the Riverside/When the Saints Go Marching In’ EP.

Winnie and Harry remain set against John Burton until two events in the early months of 1979 check the swell of their resentment.

One night not long after New Year, with Harry out and Winnie in bed with a cold, John calls on Lynda at Barnsley Road. Walking home through the backings close to midnight, he notices a man lying face down, smooth leather soles of his brogues facing out, dull against the frosty tarmac.

‘Is tha all right, cock?’ He sees his face, and realises who it is.

‘Where am I?’ groans Harry.

‘Come on, lad. Let’s get thee up . . .’ John takes off his coat, and tucks it around Harry’s shoulders. He helps him to his feet, and laughs. ‘Harry, if tha knew . . .’

‘Knew what?’

‘Never mind.’

The next morning Harry sees the grazes on his face, and remembers what happened. ‘If you see John,’ he says to Lynda, ‘thank him for me. For helping me last night.’

She is tempted to ask if he would like to add an apology, but she hears the humility in the thanks and lets it pass. ‘Alright,’ she says. ‘I’ll tell him.’

After that night, Winnie and Harry do not yet welcome John, but they do afford him a stilted tolerance in their home. One evening he comes back with Lynda after a friend’s wedding and he and Winnie find themselves alone in the sitting room. She avoids eye contact and stares at the television.

‘Winnie,’ he says. ‘If you don’t want me here, will you just say? Because I’ll go if you like, no trouble or hard feelings. Just tell me.’

Her mouth tightens. She still does not meet his gaze. ‘We just don’t want her to get hurt again, John.’

‘She won’t. I want to look after her.’

Winnie thinks for a moment, then looks him in the eye. ‘Promise me, then.’

‘I promise you. I know you’re her mam, but you don’t understand. Lynda’s t’ love of my life, I know she is.’

Winnie makes small, slow, chastened nods. These are the sort of words she likes to hear men saying; it is unsettling and inconvenient to hear them from a man she considers unfit for her daughter, but she allows herself to be transported. ‘Alright,’ she says. ‘Well, make sure you do.’

*

In October, John, Lynda and Karl move into a council house ten doors down from Winnie and Harry on the Barnsley Road. Soon afterwards he asks her to marry him. Lynda says she isn’t sure, she can’t see the need; she’s been through it twice now, and in both cases getting married led to nothing but trouble.

‘But we should be married!’ says John. ‘Say no if tha likes, but I’m just going to keep asking.’

And he does. ‘Let’s get married!’ he says, placing drinks on a table in the Cora. ‘Come on, marry me, Lynda!’ he urges, getting up to change the television channel at home. ‘Has tha decided to marry me yet?’ he asks, putting down a plate of toast for her breakfast on a Saturday morning. Eventually, fifteen years after she first watched him singing on the steps of the beer-off, she accepts.

Their wedding takes place on a sunny day in May 1980 at St Mark’s Methodist chapel in Goldthorpe. Lynda and her mam get up early to prepare the buffet and Lynda ferries carloads of sandwiches and salads for the wedding reception at the Goldthorpe Hotel, a large miners’ pub on the Doncaster Road. She washes the crockery and lays out the tables, then goes home and changes into her wedding outfit. One of John’s cousins drives Lynda and Harry to the church in his new blue Ford Cortina. Even sitting in the back of the car and walking up the aisle, Lynda can sense her dad’s suspicious reluctance; it ought to trouble her, but it doesn’t. After a decade and a half – half her lifetime, she thinks – she is, for once, certain.

Winnie and Harry take Karl home in the evening and the party goes on into the small hours. When John and Lynda climb into their bed, they discover that friends and neighbours have tied a bell underneath. John undoes it and jangles it loudly against the wall, and the friends listening behind the wall laugh, and keep laughing until John and Lynda fall asleep and pale daylight edges the curtains of the bedroom.