The Valley by Richard Benson Read Free Book Online

less-well-off neighbours.
    Near the Parkins’ house there is a working men’s club known as the Union Jack Memorial Club, or less formally ‘the Comrades’. It was founded in 1919 by ex-servicemen, and Walter will go there occasionally for the conversation. The steward has banned for life some members who have accepted the coal owners’ new conditions, and the men have been ostracised and jeered at in the street. Walter doesn’t know what to make of it: ‘They should have talked to people, Winnie. People would have tried to help ’em, tha knows. If tha wants to get anywhere tha’s to stick together.’
    Winnie does know. You have to stick together because if you don’t, they’ll make you eat grass and be a worm of the earth. She loves these conversations with her father. Some men think their daughters un­­­worthy of politics and history, but in this respect, and so long as she agrees with him, Walter sees her as nothing less than his equal.
    ‘It’ll never be right ’til they nationalise t’ pits,’ he says. ‘T’ mines for t’ miners! Does tha remember when they used to say it in Shirebrook?’
    She does.
    ‘We shall live to see it, tha knows.’
    ‘I know,’ she says.
    They will not see it this year, though, or the next. By the autumn, the miners’ confidence is ebbing, and you can see people getting thinner from the scarcity of food. Clothes are looser, and gaps appear between waists and waistbands. More men go back to work and take the bans and the jeers. In Nottingham, where mine conditions are better and the coal is easier to extract, some miners form a breakaway group, the Spencer Union, and return to work. The coal owners and mineral rights owners stand fast, their leaders insisting that because Russian trades unions have contributed over a million pounds to the miners’ welfare organisations, the fight is against communist sedition.
    In November, the Miners’ Federation agrees to go back to work on the owners’ terms. Walter had guessed this would happen in the late summer, but he is furious almost to the point of weeping. ‘All for nowt, Winnie. Again!’ Those who have organised the strike or spoken out against the owners are put on blacklists and not employed. Many pits go on to short time, closing down for two or three days a week. Some who cannot find work travel south to London or to the new car factories in the Midlands, leaving the women alone with the children. Some end up begging on the streets of Leeds, Sheffield and Manchester. Those who stay and find work have their wages reduced, so that wives and daughters who still have jobs come under more pressure to provide for their families. Millie and Winnie’s wages are now permanently eaten into by the household expenses, and so, in addition to the near breaking of her father’s spirit, Winnie now adds to the list of Churchill and Lady Astor’s crimes a lack of new clothes, a reduction in cinema visits, and the end of her hope of one day buying a gift for Miss Marjorie in return for all the inches and half-inches of exotic perfumes.

5 Dancing
    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