66 Born Wi’t Silver Spoon in Thy Gob

The Selby Complex, Barnsley Main Colliery, Highgate; Doncaster; Hull, 1990–98

In March 1990 news breaks of a scandal involving financial corruption in the NUM. For two weeks it seems that half the pits in South Yorkshire have TV news crews camped at their gates, and journalists pushing microphones at miners for opinions. The accusations, denied by the leaders, are that in the 1984–85 strike the union took large donations of money from Soviet miners and from Colonel Gaddafi and that officials used part of that money to pay off home loans. The NUM members, even the ones disenchanted with Scargill, are sceptical; after the disinformation during the strike, a lot of people suspect that press stories about the NUM are government-generated black propaganda. ‘They reckoned he was lying when he said they’d shut pits,’ says a ventilation man at Grimethorpe to Gary Hollingworth, as they listen to the news on a battered radio in the safety team’s cabin. ‘Bollocks to the lot of them.’ By ‘the lot of them’ he means the union as well. There is a lot of this among the men now, grumbling that the NUM won’t stand up to the managers or British bloody Coal when they cut corners or put their favourites in the best-paying jobs. Trust is harder to earn than it once was.

A Fraud Squad investigation collapses and the Inland Revenue finds no impropriety. However, Gavin Lightman QC conducts an official inquiry for the union and although he clears Scargill and other officials of using Libyan money to pay their mortgages, he does find there have been ‘a number of misapplications of funds and breaches of duty’. To Gary, following the radio news updates, these specific findings are less important than the fact of the story surfacing in the first place. He remembers the skirmish with the Coal Board in 1981, the Welsh miners coming to Yorkshire with their warnings, the coal stockpiles rising before the strike, and wonders if the Scargill story could be a sign. What if someone was raking over the union muck for a reason? The South Yorkshire pits are turning over stories about closures and privatisation like coal on a retreat face, and if the government was going to privatise British Coal, as it was threatening to, it would most likely begin by attacking the NUM.

The uncertainty at work makes Gary feel this may be a good time to move on, and he talks to Elaine about looking for another job. Their standard of living is good: £23,500 a year, a nicely furnished house, a Vauxhall Cavalier SRi outside, Scott training as a civil engineer and Claire at university studying zoology. Even as collieries are closing and an economic recession settles on Britain, some miners are earning good money from new bonus schemes, and from promotions as men leave the industry with their redundancy payments. Like many miners, though, Gary thinks the Conservative government will come for them again; he feels as if he is making the money in the shadows of coming ruination.

What he would secretly like to do is the same as it ever was – teach children, or at least do a job helping other people. Unsure of how to go about it, uncertain about his abilities and nervous of a career change, he distracts himself by enquiring about different engineering jobs. He applies for a couple, and in 1991 is offered a job on the Channel Tunnel project down south, but then as he is considering that he is asked to take the well-paid post of ventilation officer at Whitemoor pit, part of the Selby complex twenty-five miles north of the Dearne.

The Selby complex began producing coal in 1983, its five pitheads living up to their 1970s billing as new-worldly visions. These are posher than Nottinghamshire’s very poshest pits, built of buff brick and coordinated chocolate-brown cladding, and screened by rows of fir and laurel trees to blend in with the pretty, non-industrialised North Yorkshire landscape. The headgears are low and encased in rectangular towers so that seen from certain angles across the fields they resemble plain churches rising above the trees and hedges. Underground, Selby is one of the most technologically advanced coal mines in the world, and it is predicted to have a long future. Gary and Elaine plan to move to the area once Gary is settled there, but it soon becomes apparent that even the superpit of the future is insecure, and the mood there is volatile. Managers have been told to be tougher on the men; personnel are going after the ones with records of absenteeism, and area directors’ reports assessing the prospects of mines are said to be gloomy. To Gary, it seems that safety measures are being reduced. Soon after he starts work there, the same managers that had been paying generous relocation packages begin offering generous redundancy deals. The basic sell is always the same: thousands of pounds available but for a few days only, take it now or risk losing it for ever. In the spring of 1992, Gary takes it.

As a miner leaving the industry he is entitled to an interview with a Personal Evaluation Consultant, an advisor paid for by the government who is supposed to help redundant miners consider their employment options. Gary is eager for the consultation because it will be a chance to find out how he can retrain to become a teacher. At the meeting, the consultant, a man in his thirties who smiles and admits he doesn’t know much about coal mining, refers Gary on to a scheme that helps men to sign up for new jobs and training courses.

At this next interview, conducted in a new, dark-green Portakabin in the pit yard at Barnsley Main, which had closed in 1991, Gary sits across a plain table from a man and woman who are both about his age. The woman wears her hair pulled back from her face, and has on a black cardigan and black trousers. The man wears glasses, and a crew-neck sweater with shirt and tie.

Gary kneads his hands together, and shifts around in his chair. He feels self-conscious, as if he is watching himself in the room.

‘Are you working at the moment, Gary?’ asks the woman.

‘No. I haven’t worked since I left Whitemoor.’

‘And is there any kind of work you’re interested in?’

‘Yes. Yes, there is actually . . .’ He takes a breath. ‘I’d like to try to retrain as a school teacher. And I wondered if you could help me, maybe?’

‘Oh!’ she says. ‘And why do you want to be a teacher?’

‘Why?’ He hadn’t expected that question. ‘Well, because . . . because I’d like to work with people, and I’ve always wanted to teach children. To help them learn, you know. And I think I could do it if I had a chance, so what I’d like is to go to university, and study education.’ He hears himself gabbling, and sees confusion on the woman’s face. ‘I could pay my way through it. I’m not asking to be given owt.’

The confusion changes to a look of regret, and the woman gives Gary an apologetic smile. ‘I’m sorry, but we can’t help you with that,’ she says. ‘That’s beyond what we would do, you see.’

‘What we have,’ says the man beside her, ‘are things like –’ he takes some pamphlets from the desk and passes them to him. ‘This . . . or this . . . ’

The pamphlets are covered in pictures of men laying bricks and plastering. They are about training courses for builders.

‘I don’t quite . . . why are you showing me these?’

‘Well, because this is what we’re set up to do, really,’ explains the man.

‘But I don’t want to be a bricklayer! I’ve worked in the building trade, and I can go back and do that tomorrow. I thought you were supposed to help us retrain?’

They look at him across the table and the man says, ‘I’m sorry, Mr Hollingworth. We do mainly help with building jobs.’ The woman suggests that maybe he could drive to a teacher training college and ask there.

‘Right. Thank you.’

He takes the pamphlets and walks outside. Alone in the pit yard he imagines arriving at a teacher training college and explaining to the receptionist that a lady on his retraining scheme had advised him to call in. For a moment, he holds to his chest the new ringbinder and A4 notepad he had bought for the meeting, and tries to think of the moment as the start of a journey to a new career. The interview had not been as encouraging as he had hoped, but then perhaps his ambition was greater than he had thought. Perhaps the woman’s suggestion was as much as he could have hoped for, and becoming a teacher was going to be a long process that was now beginning.

But he knows he is kidding himself. He doesn’t belong in a teacher training college or school, does he? If he did, wouldn’t he be there, instead of pretending to himself that the advisors had taken him seriously? All of a sudden the idea of a new career seems a silly fantasy. But then he isn’t going back to any building site either.

Having nothing to do for the rest of the day Gary drives to the Dearne to visit Winnie, going the long way round on the country roads. Verges are high with grass and cow parsley, and in the fields the rape is in flower. He passes railway cuttings and low iron bridges, and then the empty ruins of Manvers; littered with bulldozers and diggers, the site reminds him of images of Berlin at the end of the Second World War.

Across the bridge over the Dearne, and up into Highgate. Winnie is in the sitting room, reading a novel as thick as a breadloaf. As he knocks and comes in at the back door she wrestles herself up out of her chair and beams when she sees him.

‘Ayup, Grandma. I was just passing. I thought I’d call in and see you.’

‘Ayup, love. Have I to make you a sandwich?’

‘Go on then.’

Seated with her at the table, he eats the bread and tinned ham and sucks down the strong chestnut-coloured tea. She tells him about her health, and Lynda’s work. British Coal is closing the area headquarters at Doncaster and giving staff the option to move to offices near Leeds. Leeds being too far to travel home if Winnie needed her at short notice, Lynda had requested a transfer to a South Yorkshire pit, but as none were suitable for wheelchairs, and British Coal would not adapt them, she is having to take her redundancy. ‘She doesn’t think she’ll get another job, what with being in t’ chair,’ says Winnie. ‘I don’t know what she’ll do.’

‘I don’t know what any of us’ll do, Grandma.’ He tells her about the interview. ‘A bit disappointing really. I’d like to do summat . . . useful, if you know what I mean. With people.’

‘Aye, love. Like your grandad. He liked people.’ She pats his upper arm. ‘Sometimes these things find you, you know.’

Winnie has never given Gary actual advice, just made him feel wanted and a part of something. It always works. She clears the crockery, and they sit for a while remembering things that Harry did when Gary was little, and talking about Roy, and recalling the days when Gary used to come and stay. Her memories seem clearer than her understanding of the present, but then, Gary thinks later, you could say the same about most people, in a way.

When he leaves he hugs her, and she is small but solid in his arms. Through her nylon pinnie he can feel the knitted cabling on her sweater, and beneath that the bony knots of her shoulders. He has a strange sense of there being something he would like to say to her, or perhaps ask her, but he doesn’t know what it is.

On the way home he stops at Bolton-upon-Dearne cemetery, with its weather-scrubbed, smoke-blackened headstones standing at angles back through centuries: great-uncles, great-grandads, cousins, Hollingworths who may or may not be related, almost all of them coal miners from the early 1800s. Until now.

In Thurnscoe he stops and goes to the Cora for a drink, but the bar is half-empty, and when he tries to read a newspaper, he can’t concentrate. He finishes his pint, and buys a bottle of red wine and a four-pack of John Smith’s bitter from a shop and takes them home.

Elaine is out, and the house sounds and feels empty and alien. He drinks the beer watching a black-and-white Western on Channel 4, and after draining two cans, he goes up to his and Elaine’s bedroom and brings down a small cardboard box containing the keepsakes that his grandad had given him when he was a boy. The brown leather wallet he used when he went out to the club, his old silver wristwatch, the gold-plated tie clip that he wore for best. Gary takes them out and looks at them as he opens the wine. When Elaine comes home he is asleep on the settee, the Western finished, the watch and tie clip in his hand.

*

The story of how Gary Hollingworth eventually finds his new career begins a few weeks after he is asked to paint Highgate Club in the autumn of 1992.

So as not to be unemployed he does some work for a painting and decorating firm in Darfield. The wages are low and the job boring, and he misses the old intimate camaraderie you get working in a group with a single, urgent purpose. Sometimes he even misses the awkward, aggressive blokes who made out they couldn’t stand him. He begins drinking more at home in the evenings, bottle of wine, Elaine in bed, him flicking between TV channels on the settee downstairs searching out sitcoms and dramas that he liked when he was young, or those set in the sixties and seventies, like Heartbeat. He’s in decline, he thinks: he is thirty-four after all. He doesn’t understand why he keeps thinking about the past and his childhood, why he feels so out of step with the present.

The boss sends him and two of the other men to paint Highgate Club. The steward, Barry, son of Winnie’s neighbour Margaret Westerman, tells them where he wants the creams, whites and dark blue, and gives them a warning: don’t get so much as a splash on the mural or he and the committee will bloody well string them up. The mural is above the bar, a large, black and white picture painted by a local man in 1984. Titled Our Struggle 1984–85, it is a collage of scenes and public figures from the strike. Gary volunteers to paint the walls around it and he works on the edges with small, slow brushstrokes and daydreams himself into the scenes. Then he imagines he hears an organ and drums, and sees Juggler on the stage. The music stops and Harry looks up at him and says, ‘What’s tha doing, Gary love? Is tha back painting and decorating?’ Before he can answer, the boss comes into view, taking Harry’s place.

Gary thinks he is going to moan about him taking too long to paint the edges, but he just stands at the bar contemplating the mural. ‘Take your time, mate,’ he says. ‘Somebody took some time and care over that, once. It doesn’t want spoiling.’

Gary begins to look for work at places where he thinks his technical knowledge might be useful, but the interviewers always say he has more experience than they need. At an air-conditioner factory he tries to explain the connection between the products and pit ventilation, but ends up trying to describe colliery airlocks and gas containment systems. He and the two interviewers end up laughing about it, and he apologises.

He takes a temporary job with a team of miners working short-term contracts at Selby. Short-term contractor teams are British Coal’s big idea. Managers use them to avoid dealing with the NUM, but lots of the contractors are pro-union, and gung-ho about disputes because they have had their redundancy money and have nothing to fear. British Coal now employs management consultants to sit in pit canteens talking to the men about how everyone could work better together, but Gary doesn’t notice relations changing for better or for worse. What he does notice is the worsening quality of work: low air pressures, bad air doors, holes for pipes hacked in the doors. Nobody bothering, nobody checking, because everybody knows they’ll be away sooner or later. Some of the pits are friendly, others hard to work in because the full-time men won’t cooperate with contractors, and accuse them of having sold their jobs and betrayed the next generation.

He stays on the team for eight months and then, thinking to improve on the skills he already has, he enrols on a part-time course in engineering at a college in Doncaster. Someone he meets on the course mentions that the local further education colleges need more people to teach health and safety regulations to apprentices, and that they like ex-miners because of their attention to detail. He calls some colleges, and two weeks later begins working part-time in the Dearne Valley. He takes a class of sixteen-year-old boys, mostly apprentices employed by local builders working for their City and Guilds. Gary has no idea how to teach a class of boys, so he talks to them as he had talked to the younger lads at Grimethorpe, as an equal. The boys want to learn and they listen and ask questions. By the end of the first lesson they are sharing anecdotes, even cracking jokes. When he walks out of the classroom he briefly closes his eyes and breaks into a smile as wide as the valley itself.

As the weeks pass he notices a boy who is always on his own and not involved in the other boys’ banter. Thin, nervy and reluctant to make eye contact, he usually stands or sits towards the back or side of the classroom. His work is fine, a little above the average in fact, but he neither asks questions nor offers answers, and when Gary invites him to talk, he crosses his arms and shrugs.

At home Gary thinks about the kid, and one afternoon at the end of the class he stops him with the excuse of a question about a worksheet.

‘And how’s t’ class going for you, mate?’

‘S’alright.’

‘Are you getting what you want out of it?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What are you hoping to do once you’ve finished?’

A pause: the long, drifting pause of someone who dislikes thinking about themselves or the future. ‘Depends if I get a job,’ he says, and with his hands tucked inside his sweatshirt cuffs, he crosses his arms across his body and looks away.

It might have been that any teacher in the college would have noticed the boy’s behaviour, and intuited that his problems ran deeper than simple shyness. But Gary knows how loneliness and worry sit in a teenage boy; their troubles might have differed, but feelings of anxiety and unbelonging at home can give someone a certain look. It might also have been that somewhere in Gary’s mind, something about the kid connected with the memory of two little boys locked in a caravan in the North East of England, looking out of the window at the other caravans being taken away, and wishing that someone would come.

That night he lies awake thinking about the boy. Should he mind his own business? Is he getting carried away with the teaching?

The next time he is in the college, he plucks up the courage to ask one of the secretaries. ‘Excuse me,’ he says. ‘Could I have a word with you please? It’s about one of the students.’ The secretary arranges for him to meet the college counsellor, a soft-voiced and purposeful woman who thanks him and promises to talk to the boy.

‘We can try, can’t we?’ she says. He admires how she says ‘we’.

Although Gary never knows, nor asks, what the problems are, the counsellor later tells him she has met the boy and his family, and thinks she may have helped them. When Gary asks if the boy is all right, she says she can’t discuss it. ‘But let’s just say it’s a good job that you mentioned it,’ she adds. ‘Thank you.’

The following term a college teacher tells him that as he has worked with children, he can apply to be included on the local Social Services relief register of people who provide emergency help in children’s homes when staff levels are low. He applies and, having passed his interviews, starts working night shifts at a home near Doncaster. Most of the children are alienated and angry, but if he tries to guess at their feelings, understand their motivations and talk to them in plain language, he finds he can talk to them. With some it is just a matter of trying to make them feel that they might be wanted somewhere. Some of the staff at the children’s home urge him to work there full time but, as they explain, to work for Social Services he would need a diploma, and that would require study at a university. ‘Not sure I’d be up to that yet!’ he laughs. ‘I don’t think they’d let me in.’ Still, he secretly sends off for a prospectus.

*

‘. . . Gary? Gary?’ Ten o’clock at night, his dad calling. Drunk. In the last five years Roy has been drinking more heavily, and it is becoming clear that he is suffering from alcoholism. Sometimes when he drinks, he calls late at night, as if he has something important to say. It always turns out to be unimportant, or made up.

‘Gary! Do you want to talk to an old soldier?’

‘Dad . . .’

‘Father to son?’

‘Dad. Are you all right?’

‘Course I’m bloody all right!’ His speech is slurred and irregular. ‘Come on, talk to your father.’

‘I’m here, what’s up?’

‘What’s up? What’s up with you? Have you got a bloody job yet?’

This is how it goes. Twenty years of work, halfway to a new life now, and still this. The conversation will be pointless. ‘I’ve told thee. I’m working at a children’s home. They’ve put me on a temporary contract.’

A confused pause. Roy has forgotten, of course. ‘Children’s home? What are you working there for?’

‘Because I like it, and I’m good at it. I want to make a career of something like that.’

‘Bullshit,’ says his dad into the phone. ‘You want to get yourself a right job.’

Gary has thought a great deal about his dad since he began work at the home. His thinking leads to questions he cannot quite put into words.

‘It’s not bullshit. It’s helping people.’

Another pause. Then: ‘You’re an untrustworthy bastard, you. I wouldn’t have wanted you behind me in Suez, I’ll tell you that.’

‘What?’

‘In Suez. You’d have stabbed me in the back as soon as look at me.’

‘. . . Dad? What are you talking about. It’s me, Gary!’

‘I know who it is.’

‘But what have I . . .?’ It is ridiculous. He is a grown man, his father is drunk, and yet Gary’s reaction to the insult is to search his memory for an act that might have offended him.

‘I was shot at, you know. You couldn’t trust any of ’em. You needed a good mate. Not somebody like you.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘You don’t know what I’m talking about,’ he mimics. ‘You’d be a right help in the Army.’

‘Dad, leave it . . .’

‘You’d run away. I wouldn’t trust you as far as I could throw you.’

Snap. With those words, Gary feels something inside him break. ‘You wouldn’t trust me? Who are you to tell me about trust? Where were you when I needed you?’

‘I was there . . .’

‘No. No, you were bloody well not there. You weren’t there for me or our David, and we’ve done all right without you. Leave me alone.’

‘Don’t talk to me like that! Who d’you think you are?’

‘Dad . . . Dad, who do you think you are?’

‘I know who I am. I did my duty . . .’

‘Dad . . . I’ve had enough of this. More than enough. Shut up and goodbye!’ says Gary. And seventy miles away, somewhere in the Midlands night, Roy hears the phone crash into its cradle, and he and his eldest son’s relationship ends in the sound of a single, high-pitched electronic beep in the darkness.

*

It takes Gary three more years to find the confidence to apply to study for a social work diploma at university, and the process is interwoven with the break-up of his marriage to Elaine.

At home, he begins to feel different. Coming back after the shift at the children’s home he wants to talk about the new world he is working in, but it doesn’t feel right. A friendship with a woman at work called Heather develops into an affair, and he becomes aggressive with Elaine as a way of concealing and decoying the relationship. One Christmas, Elaine guesses about the affair and in the New Year Gary moves out. Dizzy with a mixture of self-hatred and relief, he crams his clothes into three bin bags and drives away from Grimethorpe with women staring out of their windows along the street. He stays with Margaret and Colin for a few nights, but when he tells his mam the truth she boils up in fury and tells him to leave. For several weeks he rents a mobile home on a caravan park, populated mainly by divorced and unemployed men. Living there, he puts his life in order then, jointly with Heather, buys a semi-detached house on a new development at the edge of Thurnscoe, behind one of the old pit estates.

In 1997 he begins a part-time diploma course at Hull University and gets a daytime field placement as a social worker in another former pit village in the Doncaster hinterlands. In his first week he is awed and nervous, though as there are two ex-miners there already he can hardly use his background to explain that. It is the process that amazes him, all the emails, memos, agendas and bottlecap-twisting meetings that press you under the circuits of talk and the weight of warm printer ink. He wonders what some of the men from Houghton Main and Grimethorpe would have made of it.

Gary keeps quiet, does as he is asked, and tries to mimic the ways staff interact with each other. He shadows case workers and then is assigned his own cases. These are straightforward at first: looking in on lonely old ladies, ensuring that women who have moved away from abusive husbands are being left alone, trying to arrange accommodation for the homeless. It is when he moves to the more difficult cases that he suddenly finds himself accused of being a snooping snob.

One afternoon he visits a man whose arguments with his wife are hardening into thumps on the walls and furniture. The woman is meek and anxious, so Social Services have sent her on an assertiveness course; now she can defy her husband, but he thinks the social workers are using her to hurt him. They live in a semi on an old pit estate. When Gary arrives, a group of shirtless boys is perching on a broken settee on the communal green, smoking and drinking cider, and somewhere a bass-heavy car stereo is shaking the air.

The man opens the front door with no greeting. He is five foot eight, heavy, an ex-miner judging by the black specks and blue scars on his neck. Gary can guess the story: redundancy money spent, no job and no idea what to do, sense of inadequacy taken out on the wife. The man looks hostile, but he defers to Gary. In the chaotic sitting room where two of his children are watching television, he admits to being difficult to live with. ‘I suppose now tha’s going to tell me how to live my life?’

‘No,’ says Gary, ‘I just wondered if we could have a talk.’

The man answers the first questions comfortably enough, but he knows he is being accused of something. When Gary suggests there may be some problems with the children’s school attendance, the man’s face reddens and his movements become abrupt. His chest is visibly rising and falling.

‘There might be things we could do that would help you get on top of your situation. I can see it’s difficult.’

The man gives a dismissive growl. ‘You can’t see owt. ’As tha got kids?’

‘Yeah, I’ve got two.’ You have to be careful with personal details, but Gary wants the man to trust him. From inside the house there is the sound of children running up the stairs. Something heavy falls over. The man shouts at them. Turning back to Gary, he redoubles his attack.

‘Aye, and tha were born wi’t silver spoon in thy gob. See, when tha goes home, tha’ll go in a nice car, to a nice house and a nice view. But when I’m in t’ house, I have to sit and look out at that.’ He gestures at the net-curtained living-room window and, beyond, to the green and the tired-looking houses.

At the mention of the silver spoon, Gary feels a tingle of indignation. He has a passing urge to dump his bag on the doorstep and go. ‘You’ve got your cushty job,’ the man is saying. ‘You know nowt about what it’s like living here.’

‘Oi, mate, I haven’t always done this job, have I? I used to do summat totally different, and probably not what tha’d think either. I’m trying to help thee, if tha’ll just listen for a minute.’

‘Oh aye, I’ll bet tha’s trying to help me! What did tha do, push a fucking pen?’

‘No,’ says Gary, and tells him.

They end up sharing old pit stories and later sit down together in the man’s front room, and Gary works out a care plan. He encourages the man to make the decisions himself, and to talk about himself and his family. As he talks, the man clasps and squeezes his tea mug, and the mug looks small and delicate in his meaty, tattooed hands. He thinks people look down on him for being unemployed, and he sees schemes for kids and women and everyone else, but nothing for men like him. He had been to the retraining people as well, and had no more luck than Gary. Everybody was moving on, but he was stuck here, trying to get whatever jobs were going in warehouses or supermarkets.

Gary knows that in some ways, seen from the outside, there was no great tragedy to the man’s life. The man had lost a job, but he still had a house, a family that loved him and a wife who supported them with her wages. He had friends and he had maintained his interests. What he had lost was evident from the things he didn’t mention, at least not in the present tense – work, workmates, social life, politics. With the redundancy he had signed away his idea of his value and his bond to the rest of the world, and for some people those things could be as hard to replace as a home. This didn’t excuse anything but, Gary realises, if he is to stop frightening his wife, it would help him if he could start to replace those ideas.

*

As the years pass, Gary settles into the work, both in the field office and at the children’s home. The manager at the field office is impressed with his abilities as he deals with problems from domestic abuse and truancy to mental health and homelessness, and he is promoted, and then seconded to cover for the assistant manager of a Wakefield office. At home, he and Heather decorate the house and buy the trappings of modern, comfortable lives. Claire has taken her degree at Nottingham University. Scott marries his girlfriend and in 1998 has a baby son, Reece, making Gary a grandfather.

When he looks back at the changes in his life since leaving Whitemoor, Gary Hollingworth will recall no great epiphanies, nor any determining mentors. He will, however, think back to the pit yards of Houghton Main and Grimethorpe, where stubborn older miners had taught him the need for ingenuity and tact, and, more often, to the parts of his childhood spent at Number 34 Highgate Lane. There, he comes to believe, his grandma and grandad had seeded his desire to help other people by demonstrating how help could be given. Their stories about history had been a part of that, because the stories had connected him to people and ideas that gave him an identity, and that identity had helped him explain himself. Winnie and Harry Hollingworth had shown him how a lonely person could be made to feel wanted, and how that person could change their idea of themselves by being listened to and taken seriously. Those methods could not solve everyone’s problems, but they could usually be a start, just as they had once been a start for him.