Grimethorpe colliery, March 1985
In the days leading up to Christmas, the Dearne Valley had been determined to have a good time regardless of money, and it seemed that everyone, miners and non-miners alike, had been generous in trying to help each other. The collection boxes outside G. T. Smith’s filled more rapidly, and in Bolton-upon-Dearne, the union men left their homes on Saturday and Sunday mornings to find their front gardens scattered with a silver snow of coins thrown over by villagers walking home from the pubs and clubs. Afterwards there was an unspoken feeling among the striking families that, having coped with Christmas, they should keep going for a full year. Most do, but in the new year the atmosphere in the villages flattens like January light. Christmas had brought people together, but without that to think about the daily challenge of paying for food and bills preoccupies their minds again. The Coal Board offers new incentives for men to go back, and across the country thousands accept them.
New negotiations between the Coal Board and union fail, and the board reneges on the agreement it made with NACODS about reviewing pit closures. The police still seem like an occupying army, and on picket lines the violence continues. One morning Gary and Kenny are at Denby Grange colliery, in the hilly upper reaches of the Dearne Valley, when pickets build a barricade across the road with planks from a timberyard. The police charge them, and Gary and Kenny are chased through woodland by two policemen with dogs, escaping only by clambering over a high wire fence. Revenge and feuding: when the police clatter you with a Perspex shield or push your face into the road they say, ‘That’s for South Kirkby’, ‘That’s for Goldthorpe’, ‘That’s for Kiveton Park’.
By mid-February, getting on for half of the striking miners across the country have gone back to work. Knowing they have lost, but in many cases thinking they will regroup and strike again later, Yorkshire NUM delegates try to salvage jobs, refusing to return unless the Coal Board declares an amnesty for the striking miners it has sacked for misconduct during the strike. The Coal Board isn’t listening, though, and on Sunday 4 March, a national conference of NUM delegates votes to go back with no agreement.
In Grimethorpe, Gary Hollingworth listens to the news on the radio with Elaine, and David and Marie, who have come over for tea. ‘I want to say this,’ Arthur Scargill tells the miners and journalists gathered in the rain outside the Trades Union Congress headquarters in London. ‘We have been involved in the greatest industrial struggle ever seen. I want to say to each and every one of you, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart.’ The two brothers and their wives look at each other, raise their eyebrows and exhale in the way people do when confronted with an event that is somehow both inevitable and unimaginable.
‘All for nowt, then,’ says Gary, and for several minutes nobody says anything. They feel a loss that is similar to bereavement, but also relief at the prospect of returning to their old lives, although no one will admit that for a while.
*
On the first day back, the families walk to their pits together behind the union banners. In Thurnscoe, under low grey clouds, David Hollingworth pushes Lisa in the buggy, and Marie leads Gemma, their Labrador; in Grimethorpe, Gary and Elaine walk with Claire, Scott being at school; in Goldthorpe, Lynda and John stay at home, worried that they would not cope if fighting broke out between miners and police. At Dearneside school, where the headmaster suspends classes so the pupils can watch the march go past, Karl Grainger pushes his face to the railings and feels a flush of pride. A few older pupils shout at policemen, and some wave to their parents, but mostly the children and their teachers are quiet as the procession passes. Later, the atmosphere in school is uncanny. Teachers and pupils abandon lessons and spend most of the day talking about their families, and the police, and the stories being told in the villages. Karl will remember the day in adulthood, long after the last pits in the Dearne Valley have been closed and their yards demolished and landscaped.
A few days later, on the first pay day after the strike, Elaine Hollingworth accepts Gary’s pay packet as he hands it to her in the kitchen, sorts the money, and then pushes a greasy green pound note back across the table. ‘Here, take that and have a pint,’ she says. ‘Bugger t’ electric this week.’
‘Better not.’
‘Take it.’ He picks up the note, and looks at it, and is surprised at the thought that comes to him, even as he thinks it. ‘A pound to spend. A full pound.’
Ten thousand men across the coalfields have stayed out, and the rest are bearish, their moods gnarled and kinked. Mates sacked because they were convicted of minor, trumped-up offences are banned even from coming into their colliery yards, and those awaiting court hearings cannot go back until they have been tried. Those who worked risk ridicule or worse; managers put them on menial jobs away from the other men or, if they are lucky, transfer them to new pits a distance away.
The moment Gary will remember most often from those first days back comes on a cold drizzly afternoon in the yard. Mick Penny, who works in the headings, comes to work in an anorak decorated with the badges he has collected during the strike. He goes to the ventilation engineers’ hut to collect some equipment, and while he waits outside for someone to bring some parts for it, Gary looks at the anorak. Other men from the team come over to look, which makes Mick laugh. A minute later, noticing the little cluster of men gathering, Mr Lumb, one of the managers, detours from a purposeful walk across the pit yard. Mr Lumb is a self-assured man in his early fifties, who makes a show of being straightforward, open and jocose with the men, but takes no sincere interest in anyone below him in rank. When he comes up, the men’s laughter dies away. He follows the men’s eyes to Mick’s jacket.
‘I see tha’s got thy loser’s medals on, then!’
It is the joke of a man who you know wouldn’t be able to take one back. The joke of a man who hasn’t been without wages for a year. It is all he says. After a moment of silence, he grunts and walks off, making the gravel laugh stiffly under his boots. The men look at each other. Mick raises his eyebrows, another man curses under his breath. Gary feels his heart quicken and his breathing grow fast and shallow. He shakes his head, says, ‘I’m off to find them parts for thee,’ and heads off across the yard.
He walks anywhere, moving to shake down the adrenaline; past piles of wood, rusting coal hoppers, brick office buildings. The strike had been for Lumb’s job, too, hadn’t it? The managers didn’t want pits to close any more than the other men and women who worked there. The galling thing about men like that was, if you complained about them as a group, they called you a militant or said you have a chip on your shoulder.
He pauses for a moment at the point at which he can see the conveyor belts carrying dirt to the spoil heaps in the distance, the mud and coal and silt gushing off at the ends like a waterfall. He feels the wet spring drizzle lightly whipping his face, and he squints against the wind.
The dirt pours down. Behind him in the yard someone calls his name. He turns and walks back to work.