Highgate, 1982
If John Burton’s relationship with his father-in-law has been thawed by his rescue in the backings and John’s song at the Union Club, it is thoroughly warmed in the early 1980s by the council’s installation of a new fireplace in John and Lynda’s house. The Rayburn is one of the coke-burning fires that have become popular because, unlike coal, they do not produce polluting smoke. The lit coke can be sealed behind a metal plate for a slow burn, or left open to blaze like a conventional fire. Harry finds it hotter than his and Winnie’s Parkray with its closed, glass-windowed door, and that heat now brings him round on autumn and winter evenings to, as he says, ‘get a warm’.
‘Getting a warm’ means first toeing aside Lynda and John’s sheepdog Sam, then sliding up the metal plate to increase the airflow to the fire. Once he has admired the look and feel of the glowing coke, he turns to stand in front of the hearth with the heat cooking the backs of his thighs. Soon, other people in the room can smell his trousers heating to the point at which it seems they must be beginning to burn.
‘You’ll scorch, Dad!’ says Lynda.
‘I know!’ he replies. ‘And tha’ll not shift me.’
John, Lynda and Karl wait for him to give in. Rocking on his heels on the hearth he ignores their looks, and only at the point when he seems about to burst into flames does he step away. ‘It’s a right fire, that,’ he says.
‘Tha’s not meant to keep it turned right up tha knows, Harry,’ says John.
‘Turned up!’ says Harry. He is appalled by the idea of controls on a fireplace, but still falls into conversation with his daughter and son-in-law about fires and the best kinds of coal. They move on to gossip from Highgate and Goldthorpe, and in this way their friendship slowly proves like a breadloaf in the warmth.
Harry has slowed slightly, as he acknowledged to the journalist from the South Yorkshire Times. He has packed away the drums (Winnie complained they took up too much space, but playing on his own hadn’t been the same in any case) and now he spends more time watching television and complaining about the new programmes. ‘Them’s not comics,’ he will say to Karl as they watch a satirist from the sixties, or one of the new ‘alternative’ comedians. ‘They’re too daft to laugh at. See what’s on t’ other side.’
When Harry says he is too tired to manage all of his allotment, John begins helping him. They plan and plant cabbages, carrots, potatoes, cucumbers, chrysanthemums, and as they work through the year’s damps and breezes and sun-warmed days, boots sinking in the dark earth, backs dipping and rising together, they become friends in the way that men often do when they grow and make things together. But with the flowering and the harvest comes a family dispute.
One day in May, John notices Harry digging up the last of their spring cabbages. It occurs to John that he has not seen Lynda or Winnie cook any of them. Looking around he notices that far more vegetables of all kinds have been dug up than have been eaten by the family. And then he remembers seeing Tony Grainger leaving Winnie’s with heavy, lumpy-looking carrier bags.
It takes only two weeks of watching to spot that Winnie is asking Harry to take the vegetables John has planted so that she can give them to Tony as gifts.
The day John realises he asks Lynda to tell her mam to stop it. He has limits and he isn’t going to grow food for Tony.
First she tries her dad. ‘Don’t tell me,’ says Harry. ‘Tell your mam.’
When Lynda tells her mam, dropping the request into a casual conversation in Winnie’s kitchen one Saturday morning, Winnie snaps, ‘That’s our Karl’s dad.’
‘Maybe it is. But I’m with John now, and John doesn’t want to grow stuff on that garden for Tony. So forget it.’
‘Right then,’ says Winnie. Her face is like cold flint. ‘If that’s it you can get through that door and not come back. Stay away, and don’t darken my doorstep again.’
Don’t darken my doorstep? The doorstep is only five doors away from mine, thinks Lynda. But she still dare not answer back. ‘Fair enough, Mother,’ she says, and gets through the door as instructed.
Lynda cannot fully understand Winnie’s reasons for wanting to give food to Tony. What she does understand is her mam’s desire to maintain control. Winnie believes she has a crude, practical hold over Lynda, because Lynda has no one else with whom she can leave Karl when she works. However, unbeknown to Winnie, this has changed, because John has a new shift pattern that enables him to collect Karl from school.
Lynda does not feel the need to apologise, and so they stop speaking: days, a week, months, though Karl still visits. One day Lynda is walking down Barnsley Road with some shopping when she sees Winnie, red vinyl shopping bag in hand, trudging towards her. Lynda fixes her gaze on her, thinking to speak as they pass, but Winnie keeps her head up and looks straight ahead, ignoring her on the street. The same thing happens when they pass in the backings, and Harry falls in behind her.
Christmas comes and things stay the same. It seems quite possible that they may never speak again.
‘She’ll come round before I will,’ says Winnie on New Year’s Eve.
‘She’ll come round before I will,’ says Lynda at roughly the same time.