No Way But Gentlenesse

by Richard Hines

  FOUR

  . . . hawking . . . is . . . uncertaine and subject to mischances . . .

  – King James VI of Scotland, later King James I of

  England, Basilikon Doran, 1599

  One evening after school I went to our local cinema, the Kino, with Towser, and as we walked home he suddenly quoted, ‘I love to sit and bay the moon, to keep fat souls from sleep’, before crouching down on his haunches and howling at the full moon. I was still grinning when I entered the house and saw Mother sat in an armchair, her face white with anxiety.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Your dad hasn’t come home from work yet.’

  My stomach churned as I glanced at the clock. It was nearly eleven. The colliery had three shifts: mornings, afternoons and nights. Each week Dad worked on a different shift; today he’d been on the 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. afternoon shift. He would usually be home by ten thirty. Knowing why Mother was so worried I sat down to wait with her. She was still haunted by that awful day when my grandad Westerman, who wore a pink dog rose in the buttonhole of his lapel in spring, hadn’t returned home from the colliery.

  Suddenly Mother jumped up and hurried to the door. I thought she’d heard Dad coming down the path but she was only going outside to stand at the gate to see if she could see him walking down the lane. Had Dad been home tonight when I’d returned from the cinema he’d have greeted me with his usual smile and an affectionate ‘All right, son?’ as he ate his supper. I thought about when I’d last seen him this morning through the open shed door as I set off to school. Kneeling on the floor, he’d cut a dark red patch from an old grammar school blazer of my brother’s, and then had glued it over the rip on a pair of work trousers spread on the shed floor. Grinning at the large deep red patch on the dark-coloured trousers, I’d told him they looked daft. ‘They’ll do for the pit,’ he’d replied, adding, ‘after two minutes it’ll not matter what colour they are – they’ll be black with coal dust.’

  ‘There’s no sign of him,’ Mother said as she came back into the house. Ten minutes later, and then again ten minutes after that, she went out to stand at the gate and gaze up the lane. It was nearly half past eleven when we heard the gate latch click and someone walking down the path. We both looked at the door. Would it open, or would we hear the knock of someone bringing bad news? The wait was unbearable. Then the door opened and Dad walked in grim-faced, his blue-checked ‘pit scarf’ knotted around his neck.

  ‘Thank God,’ Mother said, her relief turning to anger as she asked, ‘Where’ve you been?’

  ‘Digging out Jimmy Pole.’

  Dad told us Jimmy Pole, a Polish man who’d come to work in the pits after the Second World War, had been partially buried by a roof fall.

  ‘Is he all right?’ Mother asked.

  ‘We thought he was,’ Dad said, ‘but when we got him out we saw his foot was hanging off.’

  I’d had my fifteenth birthday in May 1960, a few weeks earlier. Now it was nearing the end of the summer term and I would soon leave school, along with all the other fourth-year lads. To help us with our search for work the school had arranged for a Youth Employment Officer to visit. On the day of the interviews I sat on one of a row of chairs, which had been placed outside the headmaster’s office where the interviews were being held. When I heard my name called and entered the office I was struck by the unusual sight of the Employment Officer sitting behind Ben’s desk, and, as I sat down, behind his head I could see Ben’s canes on the top shelf of the bookcase.

  ‘You must have given it some thought – the kind of job you want to do.’

  I sat looking at him.

  I’d never wanted to be a miner like my dad and both my grandads. Wee Georgie, our metalwork teacher, had once taken us around the steelworks in Sheffield, about ten miles away. I’m not sure why but I hated it: the high cavernous factory, the smoke, the blazing red furnaces, sweating men pouring white-hot molten metal. Worse than that was a workshop where, time after time, women and lads picked up a hacksaw blade, tapped it on a bench, then, after deftly flicking it over and holding the other end, tapped it on the bench again. If satisfied with the sound it made they threw it into a box with hundreds of already tested blades. I’d rather have worked down the pit than do that.

  ‘There must be something you’re interested in,’ the Youth Employment Officer said.

  There was: wildlife, literary fiction, history. Six years older than me, my brother was already training to be a PE teacher, and, fascinated, I’d read every psychology book on his college reading list from cover to cover, but I couldn’t see how any of this stuff would help me find a job. I remained silent.

  ‘What about hobbies? Do you like constructing Meccano sets, for example?’

  I racked my brain trying to give him something to work with. Barry was good at sport and had won lots of prizes in local athletics meetings. It was this that had encouraged him to train to be a PE teacher. I remembered how the last time he’d been home from college he’d filled a fancy dish he’d won with soil and planted some cacti.

  ‘Cactuses,’ I said.

  ‘Cacti,’ the Youth Employment Officer corrected.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Planting them?’ he asked. ‘Making little cacti gardens?’

  I nodded, and he wrote ‘gardening’ under my name in his notebook.

  I’d no interest in cacti or gardening but I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I don’t recall if the Youth Employment Officer arranged it, or if I’d seen the job advertised in the local newspaper but I had an interview with the owner of a local landscape gardening business.

  The offices were in a large shed. A secretary showed me into the boss’s office. He was a big bloke in his early forties working at a desk. He didn’t look up and left me standing there awkwardly. When eventually he looked up I thought he might ask me to sit down. He didn’t. I stood there as he asked me questions.

  ‘Start next Monday – 7.30 a.m.,’ he said finally, before turning back to the paperwork on his desk.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said.

  He looked up, glaring at me.

  ‘Yes?’

  I told him I had another interview to attend for a similar gardening labourer’s job with the parks department of the local council. I said if I was offered that job and decided to take it I’d come and tell him immediately, rather than just not turn up to work for him next Monday. Anger drained his face white and in a quiet, threatening voice he asked: ‘Who do you think you are?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Coming here wasting my time?’

  ‘I thought . . .’

  ‘GET OUT,’ he roared.

  Frightened, I tiptoed out of the office, quietly closing the door behind me.

  My parents had warned me of the indignities suffered by working-class people. From the age of fourteen until she was twenty-one, when she married Dad, my mother had worked as a servant. Although a feisty lass who often ranted in the privacy of her attic bedroom at the way she’d been spoken to, she needed the job badly, and whatever degradations she suffered at the hands of her employers she said she always ‘bit her tongue’ and told me that’s what I’d have to learn to do.

  When I was younger a coal lorry had pulled up in the lane outside our house. When the driver knocked on our door, Dad had left his dinner half eaten and climbed into the lorry with the driver before he drove off. My mother anxiously told me that earlier at work Dad had argued with a deputy manager, and had been summoned to see the colliery manager. When he returned home I asked him what the pit manager had said. He said he’d told him ‘not to get aggressive with the officials’. I laughed but Dad didn’t, for they’d threatened him with the sack. Dad said he hoped I wouldn’t end up like him, an unskilled labourer, but told me if I did, even if they are wrong, you don’t argue with the bosses, because they can take away your livelihood and make it difficult for you to get a job anywhere else. He gave me the same advice as my mother: ‘Bite your tongue.’

 
What my parents had told me about the realities of working-class people’s lives probably never crossed my mind. If it did, I ignored it that day in the interview at the landscaper’s office. I was suddenly overcome by a rage and turned around abruptly, marched back to the office door I’d so meekly closed seconds before, and flung it open with such force that it banged on the inside of the office wall. Startled, the man looked up from his work as I strode back to his desk. I told him – probably while jabbing my finger at him – that I’d tried to be fair to him and would have kept my word, and that owning a company didn’t give him the right to treat people the way he’d treated me.

  He picked up the telephone receiver, held his finger above the nine on the dial, and spoke in that official way that people seem to adopt in such circumstances as he threatened to call the police and have me escorted off the premises.

  FIVE

  CAST, a ‘cast’ of hawks, i.e. two . . .

  – J. E. Harting, Bibliotheca Accipitraria, 1891

  At the very end of term at secondary modern school, when I was fifteen, the headmaster, Ben, had marched into the classroom and asked if any boy wanted to take an entrance exam for a new two-year course at Barnsley Technology College, which would give them the opportunity to study for GCE O levels. I took the entrance exam but I was so convinced that I’d failed, I’d already started the job as a labourer in the council parks department after leaving school. It came as a pleasant surprise when I received a letter telling me I’d been accepted on the full-time course. This meant I could leave my job and begin attending Barnsley Tech in September 1960, along with Towser, who had also passed the entrance exam. We both passed a few GCE O levels and in 1962, aged seventeen, we transferred to Ecclesfield Grammar School to study GCE A levels and travelled the three miles to get there on the bus.

  I can remember how, after failing my eleven plus exam, I’d longed to wear that deep red grammar school blazer. Yet by the time I’d passed my O levels, and transferred to Ecclesfield Grammar School, I’d cultivated my own style of dressing: open-necked shirts, usually dark blue or dark red. If it was cold I wore arty-looking sweaters, polo- and round-necked, sometimes ribbed, usually black or dark blue. Wearing the grammar school uniform now made me feel daft, like some big awkward kid. Nevertheless I tolerated it, although I drew the line at the school tie. The teachers who taught me A level History and Geography didn’t seem to notice, or care. Similarly the deputy head who taught me A level English Literature didn’t seem offended by my open-necked collar. Unfortunately my other literature teacher, Brooky, wasn’t having it. Wherever he spotted me, walking up the school drive, along a corridor, entering a classroom, he’d call: ‘Necktie, Hines.’

  One summer afternoon it was so hot that some girls in the classroom were fanning their faces with the essays that Brooky had just handed back to us. Brooky, wearing a black gown and mortarboard, stood in front of us, and when he started talking about the poems of John Donne I thought he was going to let it go for once but he noticed me.

  ‘Necktie, Hines,’ he roared.

  ‘It’s too hot to wear a tie, sir.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘I’m wearing a shirt, tie, jacket and gown. It’s about discipline, boy. Something you obviously know nothing about.’

  Irritated, I asked: ‘Doesn’t it make you sweaty, sir – wearing all that stuff?’

  As the other boys and girls struggled to suppress laughter, Brooky quickly returned to talking about John Donne.

  A couple of days later Towser approached me in the corridor looking extremely amused.

  ‘What tha grinning at?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve just been talking to Brooky about my essay.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘He said “Your friend Hines is a philistine”.’

  I was upset. Not because Brooky had insulted me, but because I feared what he’d said was true.

  Although I had managed to get myself into the sixth form of grammar school to study A levels, that awful sense of failure and low self-worth brought about by my time at secondary modern school still haunted me. That wasn’t the only legacy of my experience. Had I entered grammar school at eleven and met classmates from different areas and social classes, either consciously or unconsciously I would have modified my local dialect so they could understand me more easily. But in our pit village and at secondary modern school, where all the lads spoke in the regional dialect, had I attempted to speak in Standard English I would have been thought of as trying to get above myself, and been scornfully asked: ‘Who’s tha think thy are?’

  And, of course, speaking dialect all the time meant when we had to revert from dialect to a more standard way of speaking we had a strong regional accent. At Barnsley Tech we were almost all local working-class secondary modern school kids, and I hadn’t thought about how I spoke. I like the Barnsley dialect; it’s often warm and humorous. Even so, when I’d moved to grammar school to spend my days among A level students and gowned ex-Oxbridge teachers, I became aware I was the only pupil with a strong accent, and when Brooky told Towser I was a philistine, uncultured, it played on the insecurity I’d felt since arriving at grammar school; that I was crude and unrefined. I’d become self-conscious, socially awkward.

  By contrast Towser felt at ease at grammar school, switching in an instant from the Yorkshire dialect we used when speaking together to the beautiful accentless voice that he used in class discussions or with teachers. For Towser, grammar school had opened up the kind of life he wanted to live.

  One morning in assembly in the school hall a girl wearing a white blouse and green skirt stood beside a grand piano waiting to sing. The sweet sad music played by the teacher sitting at the piano moved me, but when the girl took a deep breath and opened her mouth and sang, her voice sounded so beautiful I thought my heart would break.

  ‘I was nearly roaring when that lass was singing,’ I told Towser as we walked out of assembly. Roaring meant crying.

  ‘Was tha?’ asked Towser. ‘I’ve heard her before, it’s Elizabeth Gale. I know her from when we did elocution lessons together as kids.’

  Towser rekindled his friendship with Elizabeth – she later became an international opera singer – and became mates with a kid called Fred who composed classical music. He also took up drama and landed himself the lead male role in several school productions.

  One evening when I called around to see Towser his mother told me he was upstairs. I could hear Howlin’ Wolf’s deep voice and the sound of his whining electric guitar becoming louder as I climbed the second set of stairs to Towser’s attic bedroom. White smoke drifting up from his cigarette emphasised the blackness of his curly hair as he sat in a chair reading. Becoming aware of my presence in the doorway, Towser put down his book, stood up and turned down the record player.

  ‘I’m going to make a coffee. Does tha want one?’

  ‘Please.’

  I spotted a book I’d lent him a few nights earlier which I’d really enjoyed, This Sporting Life, David Storey’s novel about a working-class professional rugby league player.

  ‘Has tha read it yet?’ I asked, pointing to the book.

  Towser nodded.

  ‘What did tha think?’

  ‘It was all right,’ he said unenthusiastically, pulling a pained face before asking: ‘Does tha want a piece of cake?’

  ‘What kind?’

  ‘Ginger,’ he said, knowing I hated it.

  ‘Piss off,’ I said, as Towser walked laughing down the attic stairs.

  I picked up the book he had been reading. It was The Caucasian Chalk Circle, a play by Bertolt Brecht. In our first year in the sixth form at grammar school, Towser and I had started going to the theatre in Sheffield and Rotherham. We’d seen the Brecht play, which, set in Soviet Russia, is about a dispute between two communes over who should manage the land abandoned by the Nazis at the end of the Second World War. Towser liked it because it used a folk tale and music to tell the story in a non-naturalistic style. I enjoyed it, too, b
ut I found myself drawn to what I thought were more authentic plays, like Arnold Wesker’s Roots, which was about a farm labourer’s daughter gaining self-confidence. Towser had become fed up with the stuff I loved most, the new wave of novels and films such as This Sporting Life, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, which realistically portrayed northern working-class life. Our tastes had diverged.

  I put the copy of The Caucasian Chalk Circle back on Towser’s desk and walked across his bedroom to the bookshelf where I’d spotted a grammar school magazine in which we’d each had a poem published. Mine was about the hovering male kestrel I’d seen as an eleven-year-old near Tankersley Old Hall, the underside of its outstretched wings and fanned tail shining white in the evening sun. I was reading Towser’s poem when he entered the bedroom carrying two mugs of coffee.

  ‘What’re tha grinning at?’ asked Towser.

  After getting off the school bus I occasionally walked home with a lad who was about to go to Oxford University in the autumn, and I’d just remembered something that he had said. Showing Towser the cover of the school magazine, I said: ‘What that kid – him that got in at Oxford – said about our poems. Mine was bad but thine was worse.’

  ‘Piss off,’ said Towser, handing me my coffee.

  SIX

  O, for a falconer’s voice,

  To lure this tassle-gentle [male peregrine] back again!

  – William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, 1597

  My favourite book while studying A level English Literature at grammar school was D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. It was the first book I’d read about a mining family, and I shared with Lawrence the experience of being a miner’s son living in a pit village surrounded by fields, farms and woods. This shared history brought his novel vividly to life, although Dad’s experiences of family life in a mining village were much closer to Lawrence’s than mine. So I persuaded him to read the novel. He said the scene in the first chapter, where Walter Morel returns home late and drunk to the fury of his wife, reminded him of an afternoon when his own dad, my grandad, returned home hours late from the pub and discovered my grandma had thrown his dinner on the coal fire. My dad said he, his brother and six sisters were expecting my grandad to start shouting. Instead he had picked up an apple from the fruit dish, and before taking a bite had said, ‘I could eat a horse, and I’ve got to be content with an apple’. Yet although Dad said the novel perfectly captured what life had been like in his childhood, after he’d read the first chapter he abandoned Sons and Lovers and returned to reading westerns written by Zane Grey, his favourite author. He didn’t want to read about the goings-on in a mining village, he told me; he preferred to get away from his own life experiences.