The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  “In the Latin. My dad, he’s a ballroom dancer,” Helen said, “in his spare time. He loves it. Him and me mum, they’ve won all sorts of cups. They specialize in the Latin—they won at Blackpool two years ago in the tango, that’s what he likes best. They used to be just tango, but now they’re Argentinian tango.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Oh, it’d take too long to explain to you. He’s always saying that one day they’re going to go to Argentina to learn about it properly—he’s that mad about it, he was on their side in the Falklands war, said they should have the Falklands if they wanted them. Course, my mum wouldn’t go, even without the Falklands. She says mostly it’s the food she couldn’t deal with. Crete were bad enough.”

  “You must be a bit of a disappointment to him,” Daniel said, looking at the vast brick cliffs of the foundry, blackened brick rising above a sad and depleted car park, its signages soiled and half readable, even the main hoarding-sized announcement at the gate. He hardly ever came down here, and he’d never really looked at any of the huge ugly buildings on either side of the route. It was difficult to imagine Helen, so neat and clean in her movements, working in so savage and untended a place.

  “How do you mean, a disappointment?” Helen said.

  “You not taking it up and all,” Daniel said.

  “Oh, he doesn’t mind,” Helen said. “I learnt it for seven years, until I were sixteen. I even got to dyeing my hair black and greasing it down, because you can’t do the Latin with blonde hair that’s fluffy like mine. And I did a few competitions, a nice boy I danced with called David Horniman—he lives with his boyfriend in Middlewood.”

  “You drove him to it, then,” Daniel said. He meant madness, since Middlewood was where the mental hospital was, but too late he saw the insulting ambiguity of his comment.

  She batted it aside. “He works in the steelworks, the boyfriend, on the factory floor. I’d say that was quite unusual, he’s called Michael. Insists on that, he does, not being called Mike or Micky or Mick, pretends not to hear you, then, ‘No, my name’s actually Michael.’ That’s what he says, just like that. He worked in this one coming up, Osborne’s, as a matter of fact. It’s just closed down. They’re all closing down, aren’t they? I don’t know what happened to that Michael. I wouldn’t have thought he’d find it easy to get another job.

  “Well, I went in for a competition or two, but we weren’t even placed, and it weren’t David’s fault, because he’s very good, it were me. I could get round floor, I could do it piece by piece, but it never looked quite right. It’s because of the shape I am, and in the end Dad had to give up hoping and David found himself another partner.”

  “Not Michael who worked at Osborne’s?”

  “Oh, no, they wouldn’t stand for that, they’d be up in arms. I had a job teaching the little ones at the dance school in Rotherham the summer I left school, just a summer job. I were quite good at that. They could always see what I was trying to do because I couldn’t ever quite manage it. But then I went off and worked at British Steel—it’s not much of a job, teaching the little ones the rudiments of the waltz—and then when I got fed up with that, I went to train as a nurse at the Hallamshire and took to going down Casanova’s on a Friday night and here I am. How did I get on to that? Oh, you asked about Dad and the Latin.”

  “My dad’s in a battle society.”

  “What’s that, then?”

  “They re-create famous old battles—they get dressed up, and go out on the moors, once a year, every year.”

  “How do you mean?”

  Daniel explained.

  “I’d like to see the photographs of that,” Helen said. “It sounds daft. Did you ever do it?”

  “I’ve been a roundhead and a cavalier,” Daniel said. “When I was younger, I mean.”

  “I’d pay good money to see that,” Helen said. “Look, there, that’s Linda’s, that house standing on its own.”

  “Oh, I know about Linda’s,” Daniel said. “At school, everyone always said it was a brothel because there’s a red light outside.”

  “It’s not a brothel,” Helen said. “It’s where the gay boys go. Everyone knows that.”

  “Well, at Flint we didn’t know that. We thought it was a brothel. There was one lad who said he’d been there and dozens of beautiful women were lying around with nothing on. I knew he was lying. You’ve not got a relative who works there, have you?”

  “The very idea,” Helen said. “But here, at Cooper’s, my uncle, my mum’s brother, he’s foreman there, or he was. He managed to get early retirement. He says he’s lucky, they’ll not be there in twelve months’ time. All this, along here, it’s the Golden Mile. Every steelworks, every factory, everything, it’s all closing down. There’ll be nothing here in five years’ time, nothing except buildings. They won’t bother knocking them down, but there’ll be no one to work in them, no one’s going to take them over.”

  “Sad when you think about it,” Daniel said.

  “Oh, aye,” Helen said. “When you think about it.”

  He’d hardly ever been out this side of Sheffield. It was as if the landscaped half—the groomed and gardened, the sunlit park side out towards the moors where he’d always lived and gone to school—had been ripped up from its bedding, and its rough dirty roots held up for examination. On this side of the city, there were stretches of waste-ground between the foundries, half-standing walls and raw fields of rubble and soot-painted leggy weeds. Only every so often a single building, left whole, such as Linda’s the brothel, like a single tooth in a foul old mouth. This side of the city had been destroyed by German bombs, decades ago. Where money could be made again, those foundries had been built or rebuilt; the steel foundries, the cutlers’, the great names, they went back a hundred or more years. He knew that: the school “houses” at Flint, the ones you were put into when you arrived at school and had to struggle to remember what you were in when it got to sports day, there had been four, each a different colour, each of them had been named after a different famous steel-maker. He’d been, what? Firth. It had been green.

  “The cutlers, they’ll be all right,” Helen said. “People are always going to want ‘Sheffield Plate’ on their knives and forks. The foundries, though, they can’t go on. It’s not economical, they reckon.”

  “Once, at school, they said to us, there are places in America where they just decided to call the town Sheffield so that they could make knives and put ‘Sheffield Steel’ on them.”

  “I never heard that,” Helen said.

  “I can remember her saying it—what was her name, that teacher? She said it was a dirty cheap trick people would play. I’m glad I don’t have to do that kind of work. Steel, not teaching.”

  “You sound like my dad when he’s talking about mining,” Helen said. “And he actually does it. Says nobody ought to have to do something as bad as that.”

  “Is he on strike at the moment?”

  Helen looked at him, a proper old-fashioned look. “You’re not going to meet him, you know.”

  “Where did that come from?”

  “I’m just saying, you’re not going to meet him. Least, not this afternoon you’re not.”

  “I wouldn’t mind.”

  “I dare say not. But, yes, he’s on strike, and he’s not very happy about it.”

  “I still don’t understand why we can’t go and say hello.”

  “Because then they’d have to invite you to stay for tea, and we’d probably end up staying because they’re not going to take no for an answer.”

  “I’m not going to look down my nose at them, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  Helen shook her head. “I don’t care whether you look down your nose at them or not. I’m not having them laying every blessed thing they have in the kitchen on the table for the sake of company. They’re managing, and I’m helping out, my brother’s helping out a bit more, but I don’t think it’s easy at the moment. All right? It’s n
ot all about you, you know.”

  “I’m sorry,” Daniel said. That morning, he’d gone through his fridge; there was cheese in it, milk, which had gone off because he’d forgotten about it; a pack of mushrooms he’d bought thinking he’d do something with them and never had, gone grey and wrinkled under the cellophane; an old onion at the back and a pound of mince he’d never got round to. He’d thrown it all out, just as when he made too much for himself he threw the rest out, not thinking about it. Last week, he’d opened the boot of the car for the first time in weeks, and found a bag of shopping there; stuff for salad, dripping brown water by now, and a whole ready-made chilli from Marks, and a bottle of wine. When he was a kid, they’d had to go sometimes to his nana Glover’s for Sunday lunch, or she’d come for Christmas lunch, and when he’d try to get out of eating the sprouts or the horrible parsnips leaking water on to the plates, or the potatoes that were never quite mashed properly, his nana Glover, a whiskery old woman with the sweet smell of wee and parsnips, she’d always say the same thing: “Eat it all up, there’s starving children in Biafra,” or “in Bangladesh,” or just “in Africa.” But Bangladesh and Africa and Biafra were a long way away—where the heck was Biafra, anyway?—and Tinstone was only the other side of Rotherham. No one could be starving in Tinstone. It was a load of bollocks.

  “Is your dad on strike, though?” Daniel said.

  “He’s supposed to be,” Helen said. “He’s just staying at home, though, and not working. He’s not going down the picket line or anything. He doesn’t approve of it.”

  “Why’s he on strike, then?”

  “You don’t know what it’s like,” Helen said. “You can’t carry on working in those towns if everyone else is on strike. Your life wouldn’t be worth living.”

  “But what would happen if everyone felt like that?”

  “Everyone does,” Helen said. “Sometimes I can’t believe you were born in this town—you don’t seem to understand anything about anything. I suppose you just left school and thought about what you wanted to do, and started doing it, and if you got fed up of persuading people to buy houses, you’d go and do something else. Is that about the size of it?”

  “That sounds normal,” Daniel said.

  “I don’t think it’s much like that for most people in Tinstone,” Helen said. “Here’s Rotherham.”

  The blasted abandoned streets had given way to a few houses, an estate, and then a stately old municipal school, rising behind preserved railings and gateways at the top of a rise of lawn. Suddenly, people, too: groups of boys, sitting on walls, a mother hunched over a pram loaded with baby and shopping bags, and everything so poor. If Daniel didn’t think about it, he could imagine himself in this big car as a rich man, cruising smoothly through charred settlements he would never walk through; if it were not for the insistent whine and grumble of the motor, and Helen sitting by his side, to whom he could never say any of that.

  “I tell you what,” Helen said, “we will go and see my mum and dad. If you want to.”

  “Course I want to,” Daniel said. He’d thought she always wanted to, yet this struck him as a genuine change of mind, one somehow in his favour. “What’s changed your mind?”

  “I’ll ask you a question,” Helen said. “Do you ever use the expression ‘That’s how the other half live?’”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever used it, but I’ve heard it.”

  “And what do you mean by it? Or what do you think people mean by it? If you hear them use it.”

  “What’s all this?”

  “Just answer the question.”

  “Well, it means—what people are like, people who aren’t like you, don’t live like you. I mean, you know, people who don’t—all right, if I used it, I’d mean people who didn’t have any money. ‘Let’s go to Castle Market and see how the other half live.’ I suppose you could say that, though I wouldn’t—it doesn’t seem very kind.”

  “Well, there you are. You see, Daniel, when most people say ‘the other half’—normal people, I mean—they don’t mean poor people. They mean very rich people.”

  “I thought you were explaining why we weren’t going to see your dad and now we are.”

  “It just occurred to me,” Helen said, turning sideways and thoughtfully inspecting Daniel’s face, “that if we go there now, they’ll have finished whatever they’ve had for lunch, and we can get away before the question of tea arises. There’s that, and there’s the thought that if anyone sees me in Tinstone they’ll hear, and wonder why I didn’t drop in on them.”

  “That’s a good point. What are you looking at?”

  “I’m just looking at you. Don’t you ever get spots? You’ve got skin like a girl.”

  “I’ve had a spot.”

  “I bet you cleanse.”

  “Fuck off.”

  They were through Rotherham, with its discount shops, its womenfolk with trolleys, its jammed mess of blue and white buses, and soon turned off the A-road to Tinstone. Only one of the front windows in Daniel’s car opened, the passenger window, and through it came a dense choking smell, as of tons of burning stone and metals. But you could see even here there was countryside, too; the slag heaps intervened in front of some hills, which swelled and were green. It was really a lovely day; those distant hills with their fields glowed, and through what must once have been a valley a line of glittering pylons was frozen in some vast rural dance. The little town was a mass of identical houses, all built at the same time, and at the far side, a winding mechanism rose up, the head of the mine where they worked.

  “Are they all on a picket line, then?” Daniel said, as they turned off again.

  “Probably,” Helen said. “My dad won’t be, though. He says he’s done enough, withdrawing his labour. He’s been down there thirty years. Left again here.”

  “I don’t know why you like me,” Daniel said, quite suddenly.

  “And it’s probably quite good for you not to know very well why someone likes you. That’s what I think.”

  The street where Helen’s parents lived was very much like the other streets they’d passed through. The houses were in pairs, identical except for the various colours of the front doors. The gardens were neat, and well-kept, but not much more for the most part. Only once or twice did something more ambitious appear: a complicated garden of roses, doing as well as could be expected, witness to a serious hobby, and once, an absurd plaster porch in the style of a Greek temple, shining brilliantly against the yellow-grey brick of the semi-detached house. The cars in the drives were small and clean; there was nothing like Daniel’s terrible Cortina. It wasn’t like the towns of the poor he had always imagined, nothing like a place where people worried about food.

  Helen’s parents lived at number forty-two, and their front door was a cheerful blue, the front garden neatly kept with a sort of standard border of marigolds and lobelias. It wasn’t the house of a tango champion, and when the woman opened the door, too quickly after Helen’s brisk ring, she didn’t look much like a tango champion either. There was only a suggestion of neatness about her figure and an upright stance to imply any of that.

  “You could have phoned,” she said to Helen, with a degree of reproachful but delighted welcome, inspecting not Helen but Daniel. “And who’s this, then?”

  It had been one of Philip Cavan’s worse days. They’d grown more frequent since the men from the NUM had decided to leave him alone. When they’d first gone out on strike, announced it without a ballot, Philip had been one of those who’d grumbled. “It won’t get anyone anywhere,” he said. “We’ll be out on strike for four months and then they’ll close down the pits just as they would have done.” There was a lot of talk of “solidarity,” though, and talk like Philip’s wasn’t popular, however many might have agreed with it. “Solidarity with who? That’s what I’d like to know,” he said.

  “Solidarity with the lads, Phil,” Thiselton, the new NUM man had said—he was twenty years younger than Cavan, and a fi
rebrand.

  Philip had liked John Collins well enough, Thiselton’s predecessor as the union man, but this one talked too much about the working man’s struggle and the fascist Tory government for his liking. Philip would never have admitted it to anyone, not even to Shirley, but the year before, the only reason he’d not voted for Mrs. T was the nonsense in the Falklands. Apart from that, she was doing the country a lot of good, he reckoned. Thiselton was Scargill’s man, and Philip couldn’t stand Arthur. “It’s all very well him calling us all out on strike without the courtesy of a ballot,” he’d observed to Thiselton, “but it’s not him going to lose his job at the end of it, is it, now?”

  All these observations were made during a series of visits by the union men to Philip’s house in the early days of the strike. At first they’d tried to get him to come and do his stint at the picket line. “I reckon giving up my wages at Arthur’s command is solidarity enough,” Philip said, and they’d stopped trying to persuade him. They settled, in the end, for a promise that he wouldn’t go back to work against the clear majority wishes of the mine-workers. “What majority wishes?” Philip asked. “Show me the ballot results.” The man from the NUM explained that there was no ballot, because the requirement to hold a ballot was one imposed on working people by the fascist Tory government in a clear attempt to frustrate the democratically expressed wishes of the working classes. “Oh, aye,” Philip said laconically, then kindly observed that he supposed the lads had mostly come out, and that was a majority, any road.

  Having extracted this minimal promise, the NUM left him and Shirley alone to fill their days as best they could. They could practise the tango in the community hall, cluttered up now with banners and collection tins and boxes of donated cans of food, waiting for the boot-faced NUM wives to hand out to supposedly deserving cases. The food got collected in Sheffield town centre, half by the boot-faced contingent and half by a lot of silly students being supported through university by Mummy and Daddy and all the tax Philip Cavan had paid over the years. Shirley’d made it clear, when the NUM wives had come round at the start to gather names, that she wouldn’t demean herself by accepting hand-outs, hadn’t in her life eaten dinner out of tin cans and didn’t propose to start eating tinned food now, donated or not. She’d kept them on the doorstep with their little clipboards, rudely hadn’t asked them in, had made it plain that solidarity wouldn’t now require her to ask women into her house she’d never have asked in before. Philip was proud of her, even if the bit about not eating tinned food wasn’t strictly true, and as they practised the tango, she took care, at least once each session, to kick over a pile of tinned beans with one of her famous, neatly timed turns.