7 The Knuckleduster and the Wedding Ring

Goldthorpe, 1930

Around this time, Annie takes Winnie with her to a séance for the first time. It is held in the front room of the house of an old lady called Mrs Harris on a late summer’s evening. Word has been passed around about it in the shops. A dozen women, from their mid-twenties to their seventies, gather in the sitting room and at about eight o’clock file through to the front room where Mrs Harris yanks the curtains across the grimed windows and the women sit down in a rough semi-circle. Annie, who is to be the medium, ushers Winnie to sit with them, and stands back, watching. When everyone is settled, Mrs Harris turns down the gas lamp and lights a candle with a red shade around it, and the room is hushed. Winnie feels very proud of her mam.

Annie says she is seeing some children, a boy and a girl. ‘Has anybody lost any children?’

A lady has, but she had just lost a little girl, not a boy as well.

‘No, I have a boy and girl,’ says Annie. ‘They’ve been away. They might have known someone here when you were a girl yourself.’

Although Annie finds no one trying to contact her, Winnie is enraptured by the séance. Later on, walking home with her mam, she says she would like to do it again. Two weeks later Annie takes her to a meeting place known as ‘The Rooms’ in a side street leading off the main shopping street, down past the concrete Italianate church and the Sacred Heart Convent, under the black lour of the Hickleton colliery spoil heap.

The Rooms are in a narrow, windowless, brick building with a peeling green-painted door. There are two other mediums that night, and one – a fat, older woman in a shawl – sees the gypsy girl and says Winnie is lucky to have her. To Winnie, the spirit world seems more real and more meaningful than the world in which she lives. In the séances you don’t have to be frightened of anything, and people think about what they can do for you, not what you can do for them.

*

A spring night in 1930. Winnie is preparing herself for a visit to the Empire cinema with Ernest. Millie, patting down the rouge on her pale cheeks in the sitting-room mirror, has argued with her, saying Ernest is a bore and that Winnie should come out with her that night. She is going to a dance at the Welfare with Danny Lunness. They are booked in to be married on 28 December and Millie is full of it; Danny not only has a well-paid job at the pit at Barnburgh, a village just east of Goldthorpe, but is also becoming sufficiently good at boxing for his manager at the gym in Bolton-upon-Dearne to plot a professional career for him. A local champion with cups and shields lining his mam’s sideboard, he has already had his first professional fight, against a boxer called Billy ‘Boy’ Yates, in front of a thousand people at the Plant Hotel, Mexborough. ‘Young Lunness’ lost, but he was paid, and the match had a decent write-up in the boxing press. ‘Making a name for himself,’ says Millie. ‘You don’t know where it could lead.’

Winnie knows where this leads, though. It leads to Millie dismissing Ernest as a wet blanket and championing the Juggler. ‘I don’t know why you don’t get on with him, instead of trailing after Ernie. Juggler’s a good feller, and he always asks after you.’

Winnie flinches. There is a part of her that likes the idea of being the girl that Juggler Hollingworth asks after.

She and Millie go down the street towards the cinema together and wait by the bridge. Outside the Empire, in the gaslight and blue cigarette smoke, Ernest meets Winnie, and Millie meets up with two girls and goes on to the dance. After the picture Ernest buys Winnie a bag of chips which they eat from the newspaper while walking towards the Parkins’ home. They talk about Ernest’s mother and father, and Winnie tells Ernest about the book she is reading, a romance set in the days of Henry VIII. The ladies-in-waiting were right gossips, she says, things don’t change do they?

Suddenly, as they step from under a railway bridge, a man jumps from the bank beside them, stumbles on the path, and lunges at Ernest. Winnie squeals. Ernest pushes the man away and the figure reels back before gathering himself and coming at Ernest again.

‘Harry?’ says Winnie. ‘Harry? What are you doing?’

‘I’ve come to teach him to leave thee alone.’

Winnie notices something in his right hand.

‘Get on with you, Juggler,’ laughs Ernest.

‘What’s that thing in your hand?’ says Winnie.

‘That’s a knuckleduster!’ says Ernest.

‘You can’t use a knuckleduster, can you?’

‘Yes, I can,’ says Harry, but Ernest looks unconvinced. Harry’s hand drops to his side. ‘Shut thy cakehole.’

Ernest shakes his head.

‘Aw, what do you want to go with him for?’ says Harry. ‘He’s nowt. I love you.’

‘It looks like it, hiding under bridges with that thing on your hand,’ says Winnie.

But she is not put off. All her life Winnie will crave romantic love and toughness; she will try to fill herself with the sentiment of romances and greetings cards, but what she loves is open declarations. Possibly now, even accompanied by a knuckleduster under a railway bridge, she falls for it.

‘You lying swine, Hollingworth,’ says Ernest, and pushes Juggler in the chest. Harry inexpertly swings the arm with the knuckleduster up into Ernest’s jaw. It cuts the skin and blood runs down into his white muffler.

‘Oh hell, sorry cock,’ says Harry.

Winnie tells them to stop. Ernest comes back and swings at him. Juggler sidesteps and swings again, connecting clumsily with the side of Ernest’s neck, and the fight peters out.

‘Just leave me alone, you maniac,’ says Ernest, holding his bleeding face and retreating.

‘He’s not a man,’ Harry informs Winnie. ‘You do as you like, but I love you,’ and turns and walks down the street.

‘Get away with you,’ Win shouts after him. ‘You’re a bad ’un.’

*

The fight means Winnie is late coming in, and Walter bawls at her, but his back is bad, and in the end it all comes to no more than complaints.

She stays away from Harry for a while but he pursues her, asking her out, sending messages via Millie, and she comes round. Within months Winnie is visiting the cinema with him and going off to the dances with Harry, Millie and Danny.

One night Harry comes back to the Parkin home with Winnie and Millie, who is pregnant with Danny’s baby, and tells his jokes and charms them. ‘Sonny,’ he says, ‘I’m learning to play t’ drums so I can be in dance bands, does tha want a job helping me carry t’ kit on buses? . . . Olive, what sort of spirits does tha like, Winnie’s kind or my kind?’

Olive thinks he is a hoot, and Annie thinks him marvellous, especially when he calls her ‘Nance’ instead of Annie. They sing songs and after a few with Millie, Harry sings a close harmony with Nance, sealing the relationship.

Perhaps Winnie is caught up in this convenient foursome. Perhaps she is scared of being left behind by her younger sister. Perhaps she is jealous, or disappointed in Ernest, or desperate to marry to get away from her father. Maybe she is impressed by Harry’s rough declaration of love under the railway bridge. Whatever the reason, they are soon courting properly, and one evening Harry suggests they go for a walk (walk being code for sex). When Winnie tells this story to her daughters, and then her granddaughter, many years after, she does not go into detail, saying only that, ‘he did something he shouldn’t’.

Later, Harry says that as she could now be pregnant they should get married. She seems to have been so unsure of the likelihood or otherwise of actually becoming pregnant, and so deprived of the vocabulary and language to talk about the situation, that she is agrees. She tells Annie, and then her father, that she is pregnant, and Harry comes to the house to discuss his and Winnie’s marriage. Walter rages, but his initial anger subsides into a desire to protect his daughter. However much she forgives her father, Winnie needs to be free of the house. On the other hand, she is fearful that Harry’s pleasure-seeking and carousing will overwhelm her. She likes to be the matronly carer and nurturer; it is the role life has allotted her and she is used to it, but she isn’t that with Harry.

But still, a woman gets only a certain number of chances to escape. When she insists that she will undertake the marriage, Walter shakes his head. He knows men like Harry, he says; they represent the mud from which decent people like the Parkins have dragged themselves. He pleads with her. ‘Nay, Winnie. Not him, lass,’ he says. ‘I’ve seen it before. You think you know, but –’

Winnie defies him. Quietly, but insistently she says, ‘I love him.’

‘I’m telling you,’ says Walter, ‘you do as you like, but you’ll never be happy if you marry that man.’