A Search for Donald Cottee

by Philip Spires

  “And with treatment I’ll lie in a hospital bed, being sick, feeling rotten, swallowing poison, being fried in your machine. And for what? An extra month? But not an extra month of life, an extra month of suffering. And in a hospital bed, not out doing what I want to do. I want whatever life I have left, Doctor Brown. And I don’t want it being sick in hospital. I want to live it, not suffer it.”

  “My advice is that you should take the treatment, and take it here under the supervision of my department...”

  “No,” said Suzie. “Our flights are booked for Sunday and we will be on them. I am not going through all that again.”

  Doctor Brown gave the slightest of nods. His gaze never once deflected from Suzie’s face. What he saw was a cool, collected and pretty calm resolve. When Suzie’s mind is made up, the matter is closed. It took a minute or more for him to glance aside at the young nurse who still sat silently without once moving. He had to look at her again before she took the hint. Then she stood and placed a hand on Suzie’s shoulder.

  “Would you like a cup of tea, Mrs Cottee?” she asked.

  “No, thank you,” said Suzie, her voice still strong and clear.

  The nurse then looked at me, but I couldn’t speak. My head was full of words, but none would sound. My knees had gone. I couldn’t move, couldn’t stand, though I tried. There was a gaping hole where my stomach used to be. But I felt nothing. The doctor’s words had been anaesthetic.

  “Mrs Cottee, we cannot force you...”

  “That’s right, Doctor,” said Suzie. “You can’t. Come on Donkey, let’s go home.”

  She then rose abruptly from her chair and took three steps to the door. She moved with purpose, with resolve.

  “Come on, Donkey,” she said as she opened the door to admit the corridor noise. I rose slowly and followed her out into the waiting area. I nodded my goodbyes.

  At one o’clock in the morning under a Benidorm moon I turned away from Phil Matthews, pulling our suitcase on a bounce across the gravel. After a pace or two I turned back to face him. He had not moved.

  “The bald fellow with the glasses in The Fleece, the bar-fly who reads the paper all the time, he asked to be remembered, Phil. You were at school together. Wouldn’t give me a name, though. He mentioned that you might owe him something...?”

  “Donkey, will you come and open the sacciferous van?”

  “So the white Transit parked behind the Burger King out of town is yours, Phil? I wonder why you don’t park it closer to where you live.”

  He did not respond.

  “You know, I might just have a load for you to drive for me ... long distance, Interested?”

  He shrugged, just a little.

  “Let’s talk tomorrow. It’s a bulk load,” I said, “bound for Switzerland.”

  Thirty

  The death was given all the respect it deserved... - Don recalls more happy families. He relives a Kiddington tragedy that became a true turning point for all concerned. He identifies why he and Suzie became isolated in the community and offers a new perspective on their continuing feud with their daughter.

  The death was given all the respect it deserved. It was not our doing, after all. He was young, passionate, committed, convinced he was right. Something like that was bound to happen sooner or later, and it proved sooner than most of us imagined. The village mourned, but it was not only the untidy end of a young man’s life we marked that day, but alongside it acknowledged the inevitable end that we would all share.

  I didn’t know him. I should have known him, but I didn’t. He was younger than me. I was pushing forty by then, my thoughts as much on the allotment and pigeon coop of an imagined early retirement as the here and now, the there and then. He was barely twenty-three, not yet married, but a partner of a village lass, his life before him. Was the difference between our assumptions, my complacency, his commitment, my pragmatism, his idealism, the toll of a mere fifteen years of drudgery?

  He had been vocal from the start, always more than willing to be up there on the podium, to shout the rallying cry through the loud hailer at the crowd, to shake his fist with the defiance he sought to encourage in others. He was no saint; neither was he a martyr. He was perhaps not a good man, but he was no cad. He was Mr Average, Mr Kiddington Average, and he died, crushed, more than averagely crushed. Mr Average had made several flying jaunts. He was what they started to call militant, willing to put himself and his beliefs on the line. He spent most days on those lines that picketed the depots, the roads that carried the power station deliveries. He was one of the small army that rocked the buses ferrying inside those who still worked. The army shouted at the seated occupants as they passed, called them scabs, but I can’t say the word. Police came to protect the right to work. Ironic, isn’t it, given the legacy of closure and unemployment... That day all the Kiddington strikers were picketing their own pit. They were waiting for the bus carrying those still working. Their ranks were ten deep across the entrance, the corridor they left behind the rows of police along the pit lane barely wide enough for the bus. But then they spotted a loaded truck approaching the exit from the loading areas fifty metres down the road. En masse they gravitated at charge towards the barriers to block its way.

  The truck driver had a full load. He had to be stopped. Their attention went there. The bus parked a hundred yards shy and waited, waited to see what would happen. They surrounded the truck, barred its way. Police pulled them aside. The truck edged out. Then, when a gap momentarily, mysteriously materialised, the driver lurched the vehicle forward with a heavy right foot followed by a giant hiss of air-brakes. Another gap, another lurch, and then he was away, only crawling at first, but then accelerating with mobs of stone-throwing men in pursuit. It was then that...

  There was no intention, we were told. It was a misadventure made by chance, anger, hysteria and bloody-mindedness mixed. An irate driver made his point, a crowd surged and a young man slipped under a rear wheel. It was the first death, and was mourned by everyone involved as a judgment of the tragedy we were all playing.

  We had already seen police charges, horseback beatings for men who refused to move on. There had been the smearing of non-striker’s homes, the painting or breaking of windows, the word scab sprayed across council house pebble dash.

  I, of course, was on maintenance. As an electrician, I and my team had to keep the machines serviceable. Without them, there would be no industry left even if the strike were to end that afternoon. So I worked. My team worked. And, in theory at least, we were in sympathy with the miners. I was in a different union, did official support, was responsible. I made donations from my pay into strike funds, but I had a mortgage. I couldn’t afford to work for nothing. I wasn’t in dispute with my employer, who was a manufacturer of mining machinery based in Bromaton. By then we were already working down Kiddington pit on contract, already a privatised offshoot of the Coal Board’s business. And there were conditions to that contract. If I broke them, it left me jobless and probably black-listed by the rest of the private sector. By 1984, there were only a couple of those companies left, and they supplied the entire industry. I worked, or I would be out for good.

  By that stage I and my gang had grown used to running the gauntlet. It had only taken a few weeks for what we did each morning and evening to become a way of life. On a normal day there were thirty or forty blokes barring the way, ready to persuade us, democratically, of course, that we should act in solidarity, refuse to work until the management and the government, but not in that order, saw the light. And every day it was the same story. The pattern was established on day one and never changed. There was no negotiation. Tactics were in play. The strategy was perhaps pre-determined.

  On a bad day, and we had already had a few, there would be a hundred on the lines. Our bus might take an hour to get through. There would be more things thrown at the windows than on a nor
mal day, considerably more. And the variety of projectile would be more varied, with evidence of pre-planning sometimes browning the weld-mesh-shielded windows. And, as time went by, the process became ritualised. Soon every day was a bad day. People did not give up. They felt they had no choice and, of course, after the first few weeks, they had a clear motive for repeatedly turning up outside Kiddington colliery’s gates.

  Each day for over a year we arrived at the gates and crossed the picket lines in our bus. Each day the irrecusable lustrations rocked us from side to side, threatening to turn the buccinal thing over. But they never did. We always got through. At first, we shouted back through the windows, but as the months went by, any comment from us took on an air of triumphalism, because the grit had filtered out of the fight and all that was left was a concoction of stale pride and vindictive retribution. Punch-drunk, the strikers stumbled through several more rounds, the inevitable end delayed by the in-control champion unwilling to deliver his knock-out punch until he was sure his challenger would never rise again.

  When Tommy Jones died, we all knew he could easily have been pushed beneath the wheels. It was that morning, early in the strike, when that loaded lorry had attracted an already distanced hue and cry in its wake. It attracted attention. We wondered later if it might even have been a planned distraction, since workers going in were politically more powerful than coal coming out. The gate was momentarily free. We had parked a good hundred yards away, our driver resolved to see how things might develop before advancing. In the days before mobile phones, he had been equipped with a walkie-talkie, and he could talk to the policeman directing operations around the entrance. But the conversation never lifted above an inaudible mumble as far as we were concerned. Even at tick-over, the noise of that old petrol engine in the bus was all we could hear from the front.

  A few seconds is all it took, a few seconds of decision, repeated decision and assertion that in retrospect still seems reasonable. At the time, there was a loaded truck speeding down the road, and a string of men shouting after it, attracted by the communal anger they could share and direct towards something that could not answer back.

  There was hiatus. Policemen at the pit’s entrance, their actions driven by strategies drawn up in meetings between their superiors and politicians, political appointees and their appointers, saw a pragmatic chance, an opportunity presented that they could not miss. An officer frantically waved the bus on.

  It was one of those older, short wheelbase, petrol-engined single-deckers that used to do school runs. There were just ten of us on board, including the driver, occupying as many of the forty seats as we could, the nine passengers horizontal across the benches, head down, unwilling to be recognised though we were aware that everyone in the village knew who we were. It was eye contact we avoided. The bus had an excess of power that any nervous driver would be tempted to use. It could accelerate quickly, and it did as our driver made his dash. The pursuing pickets saw us move, heard the engine growl. They turned. It became a race. We had a hundred yards. They had forty.

  We arrived first, of course, first, that is, except for a small group of laggards who had not chased after the loaded truck, probably because they knew the main ploy was to get the working miners inside so they could be counted by the media. By the time we arrived at the pit gate, they were forming a straggled gauntlet line. The barrier was already raised for us. There was no need to slow down. We approached at high speed, a non-negotiable commitment to enter. A second group arrived at the picket, another twenty or so men came running across the road, joining ranks with a momentum of angry enthusiasm.

  There was no film crew in attendance that morning. But there was one there every day for the following week. It was an era before the digital camera, before the mobile phone with built-in video. All that existed at the inquest was one man’s word against another, an official line against a community. Had there been evidence, however, the process would have probably been precisely the same.

  No-one saw a push. No-one suggested one. Suicide, martyrdom for the cause was claimed, but not by anyone who knew poor young Tommy Jones. He was committed, claimed those for whom his death provided opportunity. It was something that happened in the heat of the moment, said those who knew him, an expression of his anger at those who worked. He was fired up. He ran too hard and fast, and that was all. There was at least one Stokes in that crowd, and for me that would always suggest a push, but then that would be bias, a product of prejudice that was born of my true knowledge of that community, gained a generation before.

  Tommy Jones lunged forward as our bus approached at precisely twenty-eight miles an hour, as was calculated later and reported at the inquest. We weren’t even breaking the speed limit. The mandatory ten miles per hour restriction inside the pit gates did not apply until thirty metres after the barrier. We were on a public highway in a designated built-up area, built-up despite the fact that the only building within three hundred yards on either side was a working men’s club, deserted at eight in the morning and, in any case, there were no working men inside who might amble across the road beyond the barrier.

  But poor Tommy Jones finished under the wheels of the bus, crushed not dragged, left in a neat misshapen sack rather than a string of dissected meat. On board, we heard the bang, but from our prostrate poses, we could never have told what it was. I doubt whether the driver saw anything. He was past the line and on his way in his flat-fronted, noisy, growling, petrol-engined bus with its hastily tacked on weld-mesh armour over windows designed to keep the locals out and the scabs in.

  I and my gang did attend the funeral, but we stood apart. A hundred metres of Kiddington main road separated us from the mourners as they walked from the church to follow the hearse through the village before it set off for the crematorium in Ribthwaite. We too followed, but it was mere seconds before a group turned back from the main body to face us, making utterly clear that our continued presence would not be appreciated. Reluctantly, we left. The rest is history.

  The last time I actually set foot in Kiddington Working Men’s Club was in early 1986. The place went silent when Suzie and I walked in. It stayed quiet for the ten minutes it took for a member of the Stokes family to approach us and say, “Hop it, Cottee.” Everyone concurred. It was perhaps symbolic that it was a Stokes that applied the familial eloquence to the prevalent mood. Reluctantly, we left. Since then, we have been Kiddingtonians in Bromaton, in Punslet, in Ribthwaite, even in Benidorm, but in Kiddington itself we have remained exiles.

  During that year of Suzie’s absence after our failed Benidorm foray with the Crawshaws, I had done everything in my power to make life what Dulcie seemed to demand. Everything she wanted she got. She did demand, but I provided. I gave in to every request. She grew up fast. She was seventeen before I knew it and then more. She was a woman needing clothes. She looked in every shop window and saw herself, but herself dressed as someone else. She wanted make-up, behind which she hid, and she wanted what her friends had so she could compete. She brought boys home. She was attractive, extremely attractive, not unlike her mother. But I never feared for her. I knew she was always in control, because she controlled me as well.

  And then, with a sudden spurt, she was mature and she was gone. She was suddenly no longer my girl, but someone else’s girlfriend. She met him towards the end of Suzie’s Benidorm year. They were serious within a month. And then Suzie came home.

  Dulcie had completely grown up during that year. It was as if Suzie didn’t even know her at first. When, two months after Suzie’s return, she announced that she had made up her mind and that she was moving out, the two of us found it hard to react. Then she also announced that they weren’t going to get married, because marriage was something that no longer applied. She pointed at the two of us to indicate the basis of her evidence. Suzie shouted at her, called her names and pushed her out of the door.

  Now I have always been a dab hand a
t Happy Families. Mr Bun the Baker was meant for Mrs Bun. They had met before I knew them. Sad though the occasion was, I was perfectly willing to live with Dulcie’s decision. My problem was that I had no language with which to speak my mind. Suzie, however, could not be calmed. She cursed her own daughter as she pushed her out, and Dulcie has never forgiven her. Neither has she forgiven me. It has to be said that she did have a few good months with her bloke before the strike. He was a few years older than Dulcie. Yes, he was a miner. Yes he was on strike while I worked. Yes, he was Tommy Jones, and was crushed under the wheels of my bus.

  Thirty One

  I never did a lot of pure science... - Don analyses the relationship between instinct, learning and intelligence. This is apposite, since he again visits the cave in Montesinos in search of his life’s new goal. Fearing Maureen, he actually encounters new characters, who seem to be expecting him. He unsuccessfully tries to convince them he is a quality control manager and as time passes begins to find the experience distinctly less pleasurable.

  I never did a lot of pure science. I tried a couple of theory courses, but most of the options needed facilities for practical work. For the courses I did, they used to send experiments in cardboard boxes and the fees were exorbitant, so I opted out of all but the most basic science units. I did a little biology, however, because to do that you could study wild flowers, plants, trees and locally available fauna. It certainly took me back, because I had to go off across Kiddington Common to collect my samples. I even bought a new fishing net to catch things in the dam. In days of old, my nets were prized possessions, made from garden canes, bent wire and cut up onion sacks, usually bright red or green, but sometimes the same iridescent brown as a Spanish onion skin. My new one, of course, could not be so constructed, since we now inhabit an age when one daren’t be seen with anything obviously home made in case people think you can’t afford to buy the real thing. So I paid a tenner for a piece of plastic whose net split on its first contact with a submerged twig and whose shaft broke when I dropped it. It was made in Britian - at least that’s what it said on the label.