The Welfare Hall, Goldthorpe, 1929
Three years later, on a warm summer evening, Winnie Parkin and her friend Mabel Stocks are walking down the hill towards the southern edge of the village, where the Miners’ Welfare Hall – built in 1923 with money from the miners and colliery owners – proudly stands in wide green parkland and playing fields, near a working men’s club that Dearne people call ‘the Jungle’.
Both aged nineteen, they are going to their first public dance. Mabel, plainer and shyer than Winnie, wears a simple drop-waist dress she has made herself. Winnie’s beaded frock has been handed down from Miss Marjorie, like her lipstick, rouge and scent. Tonight’s dance, like Winnie’s new wavy hairstyle, is Miss Marjorie’s idea. For a year she has been urging Winnie to get her nose out of her historical romances and to stop bothering so much with ‘spirits’, and to get off dancing. Up until now she has put it off. Winnie prefers going to the pictures, attracted by the cinema’s lush, warm, exotic interior, the way you don’t have to worry too much about how you look, and the cheapness. Most of all she likes Rudolph, who seems to her the acme of modern manhood. All the women like him, Winnie, Miss Marjorie and the girls at work – and they have a song they sing, which feels a bit risqué.
In Blood and Sand
he’s simply grand.
In the Sheik
he’s simply great
He is a hero –
Rudolph Valentino!
Winnie has seen all of Rudolph’s films. She even saw The Son of the Sheik during the lockout, when she was supposed to be giving all her spare money to her mother. His bashfulness and nobility set the tone for Winnie’s thoughts about romance, and when he died unexpectedly in August 1926 she felt bereft, as if a world without Rudolph was one in which she could love no man at all.
The following year, however, her sister Millie announced her engagement to Danny Lunness, a miner and bantam-weight boxer from Goldthorpe. Millie is a year or so younger than Winnie, and Winnie knows that eldest daughters have to be careful because when the younger ones marry quickly, they end up stuck at home looking after their mams and dads. This is why the next time Miss Marjorie brought up the subject of dancing, Winnie said, ‘Would you show me how to do that make-up again?’
*
Millie, who likes dances, suggested the one at the Miners’ Welfare Hall because she was on the bill. She performs with a young amateur singer-comedian from Bolton-upon-Dearne known as the Juggler, and he had asked her to do a couple of songs with him and the band. ‘You’ll have to come and meet him!’ she told Winnie. ‘He’s a good sport, but he’s as daft as a brush.’
Winnie preferred thoughtful and intelligent men to ones who are daft as brushes, but perhaps you have to put up with that at dances, she thought. She had said she would go, and now here she is, walking with Mabel past the long rows of houses with their crimson bricks and grey net curtains and open doors where the women stand talking, to the hall. Even from a hundred yards away they can hear the bassy sounds of the music. Winnie shudders.
‘It’s loud in’t it?’ says Mabel.
‘Isn’t it just?’
‘I’m not keen on that music.’
Winnie isn’t sure herself. ‘Come on,’ she says. ‘We might as well have a look now we’re here.’
They walk up the path to the pillared front of the Welfare Hall and into the foyer where they pay a man at a booth. Winnie can already smell the sweat, candlewaxed floor and cigarette smoke from inside the hall. She suggests that they hang their coats in the cloakroom and go to the Ladies Room to put on more powder before they go in, and Mabel agrees. They both take their time.
When they push through the heavy swing doors into the hall, the music and the faintly sickly smell hit them like a wall. The men are wearing gangster suits and pointed shoes and some of the younger ones have an almost sinister look with centre-parted slicked-down hair and eyes emphasised by the deliberate leaving on of coal dust on the rims. The younger women have bobbed hair and deep red lips, low-waist dresses and bare legs. The band is playing jazz dance music and in the middle of the dancers some people are performing strange moves and waving their arms. Winnie once read a magazine article about Rudolph Valentino and his wife holding a Charleston contest at a party at their house in Hollywood; the article had shown you how to do it, and made it seem glamorous. This dancing does not look much like Rudolph Valentino’s party though. It looks ridiculous.
Some people stand watching the dancers, while others do a sort of jog-cum-foxtrot around the edge of the dance floor. Winnie looks at the band, her eyes searching for Millie. When she sees her sister is not yet on stage, she and Mabel sit down at the side. The singer introduces a new song and the windmilling Charleston lot drift off the floor as new dancers partner up. When the foxtrot begins, a man comes over and asks Mabel to dance. Winnie sits alone, looking at the band and the other women in their frocks.
The man brings Mabel back, and a second man, his friend, takes Winnie off to dance. He feels hot and smells of shaving soap, and he holds her too tight and pushes himself against her. The girls at work talk about this sort of thing; it is exactly what she had worried about. She smiles thinly and moves her body away, holding her partner at length by extending her arms until he takes her back to her seat. As she sits down Millie comes through the crowd with a friend in tow, a friend who is wearing full flapper get-up. Winnie can imagine what her father would have to say about that.
‘This is my big sister,’ Millie says to the flapper. ‘She doesn’t like dances much, do you, Win? But she’s come to hear me and Juggler singing.’
‘I don’t dislike them,’ says Winnie. She is anxious not to seem a stick-in-the-mud, but no one is listening. The band’s handsome singer has announced the interval, and the flapper is squealing at Millie.
‘You next. It’s your big moment!’
‘Aye, better go and get myself sorted out,’ says Millie. ‘Juggler says I have to swallow some VapoRub.’
‘Vicks VapoRub?’ asks Winnie, bewildered.
‘Yes, he says it improves your voice. He’s got some funny ideas, but most of them work. See you later anyway, I’m off backstage.’
A few songs into the second part of the evening, the singer steps up to the microphone and says, in a broad Barnsley accent that contrasts with the American one he sings with, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I’d now like to introduce a new double act who’ll be singing a few numbers for you t’neet. Some of you may have heard them before – they’re a young local pair, and I hope you’ll gie ’em a right warm welcome. Ladies and gentlemen, Millie Parkin and Harry Hollingworth – also known as the Juggler!’
‘Isn’t that t’ Juggler then?’ says Mabel.
‘It doesn’t look like it,’ says Winnie.
Both had assumed Millie would be joining the singer from the first half, but hearing their confusion, a man beside Winnie laughs and says, ‘Nay, love, this is t’ Juggler,’ and points to the stage where Millie is standing in the spotlight with another, younger man who is not like the first singer at all. This man has slicked-back, centre-parted hair and is dressed in a wide-legged gangster suit. He is tall and broad-shouldered but his facial features look as if they could belong to various comic cartoon characters. His pale brown eyes are heavily lidded and topped by heavy, dark eyebrows that make him appear sleepy. Sticking out like giant handles, his ears seem too large for his head. His forehead is high, accentuating his height. When he opens his mouth to smile, he reveals a wide gap where his upper front teeth are missing (‘Kicked out by a pit pony,’ Millie tells Winnie later on).
Stepping downstage, he winks at someone in the audience and spins off three quick gags. Millie makes a joke about his looks and he frowns theatrically; more laughs. Then she says, ‘For God’s sake, Juggler, sing!’ and the band starts ‘Home in Pasadena’, and Juggler steps forward. He presses his arms flat against his sides to make himself taller and straighter, half closes his eyes, and then opens his near-toothless mouth.
The voice that comes out of the strange face is a tenor as sweet, rich and strong as the sponge at the bottom of a sherry trifle. Winnie is amazed at its tunefulness, and senses the amazement of the others in the hall. When Millie’s voice comes in, mixing with his, she thinks they sound wonderful, like singers you might hear on the radio. And as she watches she finds that although she feels thrilled and impressed by her younger sister, she cannot keep her eyes from drifting back to the gaping grin and heavy-lidded eyes of the Juggler.
Afterwards Millie brings him over to meet Winnie and Mabel, and a crowd gathers around them cracking jokes and catching at the Juggler’s elbow. Winnie tells Millie she was marvellous and Millie squeezes her hand and thanks her, and Winnie feels more confident and comfortable in the crowd. Soon though, Millie is tugged away by some girls, and when Winnie looks for Mabel she isn’t there. For a moment she is alone among all the loud, chattering people, but then, suddenly, somehow, the Juggler is there looking directly at her, and she feels paralysed and unable to speak.
‘Now then, love,’ he says.
Many years from now, when Winnie and Juggler are married and have had their many wars and sieges in their home, when there is no more dancing in the Welfare Hall and Millie has died a premature death of a broken heart, Winnie’s daughters will say to each other and to their children at parties and on Sunday afternoon visits: ‘I don’t know why she ever married him. They were as unlike as you could possibly get.’ And yet, years after that, Winnie’s daughters will pass into her old lady’s liver-spotted hands a cracked, faded and freckled photograph of her late husband performing on stage, and she will write on the back, ‘Harry – how I miss him!’ And through rheumy yellow eyes she will look into space, far away, and remember, perhaps, this moment in Goldthorpe Welfare Hall in 1929, when the band was playing and Juggler first appeared out of the hot, smoking crowd and spoke to her.
‘Are they not talking to you?’ he asks. Cocky so-and-so, she thinks.
She laughs self-consciously. ‘I thought you’d be talking to our Millie about your singing.’
‘I’ve talked to Millie,’ he says. ‘Or she’s talked to me anyroad.’ He affects weariness, and indulges what will be one of his great passions in life, the aphorism. ‘Your Millie’s a lass of few words, but she doesn’t stint in using ’em.’
Winnie laughs.
‘Tha’s a right dancer, though,’ he says. ‘I’ve been watching thee.’
‘You never have.’
She notices how pink and clean he looks.
He winks. ‘Tha’s got to have four pair of eyes up there. Tha don’t know what tha’ll find in here.’
‘I enjoyed it,’ she half lies. ‘I thought our Millie was super didn’t you?’
Winnie thinks ‘super’ is a classy and up-to-date word.
‘That’s cos she’s had a right trainer.’
‘Has she? Who?’
‘Me.’
Winnie makes a show of stifling a laugh.
‘I’m opera-trained, you know.’
‘Are you?’
Harry tells her about his career as a tenor in the operas of Milan and Paris, and Winnie doesn’t know what to say, dare not say, ‘Get on with you.’ And then Millie comes back and he says, ‘Why didn’t you tell them about my operas?’ and Millie digs him in the ribs and says you daft ’apeth and Winnie realises it was all a joke, and the Juggler winks. He asks if he can walk her home. Winnie accepts on the proviso that Mabel comes too. The three of them go half way together, and then Mabel breaks off for her street. The Juggler looks less handsome outside and he has whisky on his breath, but he is funny. He cracks jokes all the way home. He mentions working as a miner, and says that he knows Walter Parkin. He tells her he is learning how to play the drums by practising on his mother’s sideboard, kicking the cupboard for the bass drum. When Winnie laughs he says it isn’t a joke. He is playing in Mexborough the next night, he says, but why doesn’t she come out with him the night after, to the pictures? She says yes. At the end of the street they pause. Her dad will be up waiting inside and she daren’t let him see her with a lad.
‘Right,’ says Juggler. ‘I’ll sithee.’
He leans in to kiss her, but she pulls back. ‘Awww, come on,’ he says. ‘Gie’ us a right kiss.’
‘I’ve to go home,’ she says, and walks away, her heart beating hard and fast down in her whalebone and elastic.
‘I’ll see thee outside t’ Picture Palace, half past seven!’ he calls. And then the ring of his segs on the pavement and the sound of him singing to himself fade away into the darkness behind her.
Outside her mam and dad’s house, in the gas-lit street, she is left with her spirit guide. The little gypsy girl will watch over Winnie when she is with lads – which, thinks Win, is fortunate. She has a feeling that if she is going to go out with Juggler Hollingworth, she will probably need some watching over.