In our village in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the shaking, hallucinations and delusions caused by withdrawal from alcohol were called the ‘blue devils’. When my mother was a girl she once saw a neighbour with the blue devils lying on his back kicking the bottom out of the sideboard. Although he didn’t behave quite as dramatically, my great-grandad Hines often suffered from the blue devils. He drove a shunting engine, moving waggons of coal around the local pit yard. In his spare time Great-grandad would cut old clothes up into ‘clippings’, and then, using a wooden clothes’ peg shaved to a point, he fixed these different coloured clippings into a piece of hessian, to make patterned ‘pegged’ rugs, which he sold. The front room of his small terraced brick cottage was his workshop, where he also carried out woodwork repairs and made furniture to sell. This extra income he used to buy beer and whisky. After his heavy drinking sessions, in the early hours of the morning he’d sit in front of the fire rocking backwards and forwards, moaning. Sometimes his suffering became so bad that his wife, Sophia, would step out into the moonlight, cross the narrow street, open a gate and hurry up a garden path where she would beat on Dr Allott’s door, begging him to come and help her husband.
Perhaps it was this family history of heavy drinking which had put my dad off alcohol, for unlike most miners he didn’t go to the pub. And unlike most miners at that time, he thought that the women who stayed at home, looking after kids day and night, forever washing and ironing clothes, cleaning and cooking, had a more difficult life than miners like him. I can remember when I was younger I was petrified one of my mates would call at the house, see my dad helping with the housework or cooking, and call him a sissy.
It was not long after he’d abandoned reading Sons and Lovers that Dad noticed a lump on his neck while shaving. The diagnosis was Hodgkin’s disease, cancer in the lymph glands, although the doctor didn’t tell my parents the prognosis at the time. Unknown to me, my mother looked it up in our home medicine book with its severe black cover. No known cure, she read. Removing the dustbin lid in the backyard she threw in the book, tipped in a cloud of ashes from the ash pan from under the fire grate to hide it, and ‘didn’t tell a soul’ that dad was dying – including him.
After his hospital visits for radium treatment on his throat, Dad was unable to swallow. He grew thin, so much so that I could have used a finger and thumb to span those biceps that used to shovel sixteen tons of coal a day at the coalface. Over half a century after my great-grandma Sophia had knocked on old Dr Allott’s door and begged him to help my alcoholic great-grandad, on two or three occasions in the summer of 1963 I ran through the empty village streets in the moonlight and knocked on young Dr Allott’s door. Although wearing pyjamas, he always greeted me in the same friendly manner as when he passed me in the street in the daytime, before saying he’d get dressed and would be at my dad’s bedside in a few minutes’ time.
One evening, when I was helping Dad into bed, he pointed at his swollen feet and ankles.
‘It’s just your slippers,’ I told him, ‘they’re too tight.’
‘You’re trying, aren’t you lad?’ he said.
Then as I left the bedroom he asked: ‘You know that book you gave me to read that I didn’t finish?’
‘Sons and Lovers?’
‘Yes. Can you find it for me, please?’
From that point onwards, each time I popped in to see him he was reading Sons and Lovers. One evening as I sat on the edge of the bed he told me that although the arguments between Paul Morel’s haughty mother and drunken miner dad brought his own family experiences as a child to life, there was a crucial difference. Although his dad was a heavy drinker, unlike the drunken miner in Sons and Lovers he was never physically violent, and was always gentle and tolerant with his kids.
Sitting in bed with Sons and Lovers lying open on the bed covers before him, he also told me about something which had happened when he was little. His dad sent him to the shop to buy two ounces of sweets – I think he was going to take them to work. On the way home from the shop my dad helped himself to a couple of his dad’s sweets, but when he arrived home his dad told him he’d bought the wrong ones and sent him back to the shop to change them. The shopkeeper weighed them, and, seeing there was less than two ounces of sweets in the bag, he refused to exchange them.
‘What did your dad say when you got home?’ I asked.
‘He told me I was a snip,’ Dad said, his gaunt face tinged yellow by jaundice, smiling at the memory. ‘Snip’ meant ‘mischievous rogue’.
Occasionally people asked my mother if she smoked. ‘Only on Tuesdays,’ she replied – Tuesday evening was when she went to a dance in a nearby village with her female friends. At one point Dad had been in hospital but had been discharged and seemed a little better. He was even sitting up in a chair, downstairs, and so my mother had decided to go to the dance with her friends and leave me looking after him. That evening he was telling me that if he did manage to get better he didn’t think he would be strong enough to do his old job on the coalface, and so would ask for a ‘button job’ operating the conveyor belt that the coal was carried out on. There was a knock on the door. I opened it and Towser was standing there, smoking a pipe.
‘Coming for a pint?’
I glanced at Dad sitting beside the coal fire, his feet on a stool.
‘I’ll be all right,’ he said.
In the Prince of Wales pub a voice said, ‘Get them down your necks’, as two plates with hot dogs and onions were plonked on the table beside Towser and me. Looking up, we saw a youth with shoulder-length bleached blond hair and tattooed forearms. It was Budgie, who I’d robbed the toy stall with, and who had become my nature-loving best friend in junior school. He’d also been a friend of Towser’s at that time, but we’d hardly seen him since he’d been put into a different class at secondary modern school, and he had found new friends.
‘What’re you lads doing now?’ Budgie asked.
Towser told him we were studying A levels at grammar school.
‘Bloody hell . . . well done both on ye,’ said Budgie, his surprise turning to an unselfish delight for us.
‘Where tha working? The pit?’ I asked Budgie, after thanking him for the hot dogs.
‘Foundry – got sacked from the pit.’
‘What for?’
‘Threatening to chuck a boss down the pit shaft.’
Towser picked up our empty beer glasses and stood up laughing.
‘Sit down. I’ll get thi a pint.’
‘No, tha right – I’m with them,’ Budgie said, pointing at a group of youths sitting at a table across the room.
Budgie and Towser walked away, Budgie to join his mates and Towser to the bar. When Towser returned, carrying two pints of beer, he sat down and said: ‘I’ve got to get out of the village. Move away. I’m going to apply to drama college.’
I don’t know if it was Towser’s change of mood, but I seemed to suddenly come to my senses and realise how stupid and selfish I’d been leaving Dad by himself.
‘I’ve got to go.’
‘I’ve just got thi a fresh pint,’ Towser said.
‘Thee sup it,’ I said, ‘or give it to Budgie or one of his mates.’
By now I was captain of the grammar school rugby union team and extremely fit, and when I opened the door and entered the house I wasn’t even slightly out of breath. Only the beads of sweat on my forehead gave away that I’d run the half a mile or so from the pub almost at a sprint. Dad, his thin, anxious face still slightly yellow from jaundice, was sitting strangely upright in a chair with a woman neighbour sitting nearby.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.
‘I’m frightened,’ he said.
‘He managed to crawl to the fireplace on his hands and knees and bang on the fireback with the poker till I came,’ said the neighbour.
‘Have you sent for the doctor? Called an ambulance?’
‘He won’t let me – till your mother gets home,’ she r
eplied.
So I immediately ran to the Working Men’s Club where I found Ken, a family friend who owned a car, who fetched my mother home from her Tuesday evening dance.
Maybe it was my mother’s own guilt but as we waited for the ambulance she berated me for my thoughtlessness. She went on and on. Finally I lost my temper.
‘I know,’ I shouted, ‘I should be shot.’
Still sitting curiously upright in his chair, Dad quietly said: ‘Shut up, Richard. You weren’t to know lad.’
Riding in Ken’s car under a late August full moon, my mother and I followed the ambulance to the Royal Infirmary in Sheffield. There the ward sister wouldn’t let us stay with Dad and we returned home.
Next day we travelled on two buses to visit Dad in hospital. It was 1963 and walking into the cancer ward felt like walking into a hospital from the Victorian age. There were at least forty men in that ward, old men with white hair, men around my dad’s age – he was fifty-three then – and younger men. There was even a fourteen-year-old boy dying of leukaemia. All the patients lay in beds facing each other across a large ward with a high ceiling. As each became more ill they were moved closer to the door to save the doctors and nurses having to walk far. In his previous stays in this hospital Dad had watched the drama of other men’s failing health played out in bed moves as they’d been edged closer to the door. Finally they would end up in the bed right beside the door, where before long the curtains would be swished around the bed, and in the quiet half-light of night Dad would see the man’s body carried out of the ward, freeing up the bed for the next doomed occupant. Terrified, he’d asked my mother to ask the nurses not to move him into the bed next to the door. She did ask but when we next visited, two days after he’d been admitted, that’s where Dad was lying, hallucinating, saying things we couldn’t make sense of.
A few weeks before he was admitted, Ken had driven Dad, accompanied by my mother, into the Derbyshire Peak District to look at a particular view he’d asked to see, where, as a young man standing astride his bike as skylarks sang high in the sky, he’d gazed across the moors to distant peaks. Maybe a road had been slightly altered, or walls had fallen down or been rebuilt, or maybe after nearly forty years he’d misremembered, but after hours of driving the moorland lanes they had to return Dad home exhausted. Through the window of the cancer ward I could see industrial wasteland, and beyond that an ugly red-brick council estate that stretched for miles. I desperately hoped this wouldn’t be the last view my dad would ever see.
We were never allowed to stay on outside the strict visiting hours, but that evening my mother decided that she needed to see my dad regardless of hospital rules. I remember just one detail from that journey. The green tunnel created by overhanging branches from a wood was lit by the headlights, before we once again drove out into moonlight. Eventually we reached Sheffield. After disappearing into the hospital for a few minutes my mother returned to the car, and, under a full moon, she told Ken and me through wound-down car windows that Dad had died half an hour earlier.
Early the next morning I walked through the village to the undertaker’s, which was only a few minutes away. He lived in a detached house and as I knocked on the back door, across the yard I could see the carpenters’ shop where the coffins were made. An upstairs window opened, and when the undertaker stuck out his head, his hair was ruffled and he was wearing a white vest under an open striped pyjama jacket. Despite my grief, I couldn’t stop grinning, and he must have thought I was heartless as I called up and told him my dad had died. I was grinning even more when, seemingly only seconds later, he stood at the open door before me with a grave look on his face, his hair immaculately combed, and dressed in a white shirt, black tie, black jacket with tails, black trousers with razor-sharp creases and shiny black shoes. All that was missing was his black top hat.
‘It’s not fair . . . It’s not fair,’ my mother called out in heartbroken despair when, a few days later, she saw Dad lying in an open coffin standing on trestles in our front room. With his arm around her waist and gently taking her wrist in his hand, the undertaker led my sobbing mother to the coffin and placed her hand on Dad’s forehead. The curtains were closed, as was the custom, and the shades of blue, green and red on the loosely woven curtains made the September light filtering through seem as if it had passed through stained glass. The coloured light, and the cool marble feel of Dad’s forehead when I placed my hand on it, reminded me of touching those white statues which lie on tombs in medieval churches.
One moment Dad’s kind, gentle face was there. Then it was gone, never to be seen again as the undertaker screwed down the coffin lid.
A brass plaque on the coffin lid read: RICHARD LAWENCE HINES.
Whoever had inscribed that plaque had missed out the R in Lawrence. I know Dad wouldn’t have minded. He’d have seen it as a mistake that anyone could have made.
Although I’d been robbed of a future with my dad, nothing had been left unsaid, nothing had been left unresolved. And my grief in the years following his loss took the form of a longing, a continuation of the sad sweet yearning evoked in me by the autumn song of the robin that had sung in the graveyard on that sunny September day when, the grass glistening with dew, my dad’s coffin had been slowly lowered into the earth.
SEVEN
Falconry is not a hobby or an amusement; it is a rage . . .
– T. H. White, The Godstone and the Blackymor, 1956
One evening I found myself filling in an application for an administrative job in the housing department at the Town Hall. I landed the job, and soon after Dad’s death in 1963, aged eighteen, I was working for the local council in Hoyland, a small town – more a large village, really – on the eastern border of our village. The office, which was about fifty yards behind the Town Hall, and across a car park, was housed in a century-old converted stone cottage with wide windowsills and low ceilings.
One day the bell rang to alert me that someone was waiting for attention. When I left my desk and walked to the counter there stood Mrs Mardy. One of the two or three women teachers who’d taught at my all-boys’ secondary modern school, she was unsmiling, had dark hair and was in her forties. I’d never been taught by her or been rude to her, but she’d seemed to have it in for me. Once when she’d tried to slap me across the face (I don’t recall why) I’d grabbed her hand, put my other arm around her waist and infuriated her by waltzing her along the school corridor. She’d punished me for that by giving me an essay to write. When she handed it back she said, ‘That’s very good’. For once I thought she was going to be nice to me, until she asked, ‘Who wrote it for you?’
‘I didn’t expect to see you here,’ Mrs Mardy said, remembering me from school as I faced her across the counter.
‘Why not?’
‘I thought you’d need qualifications for this job,’ she replied, a scornful grin on her face.
Irritated, I was about to tell her that I’d studied for GCE O levels, but, guessing she’d ask who took the exams for me, I decided to remain silent as I sullenly went about sorting out the business that had brought her into the office – maybe she’d come in to put her parents’ names on the waiting list for a council bungalow.
Outside, there was a small garden which had belonged to the old cottage before it had been converted into an office. The garden had been left to run wild, but flowers planted by the generations of people who’d previously lived in the cottage still bloomed and marked the seasons. One morning when I walked out of the office, dark pink Michaelmas daisies were in flower in the once-tended garden borders. Picking up a folder of ‘work cards’, on which were written requests for building repairs, I’d told a colleague I was going to visit council house tenants to check out these repair requests, but instead I walked across to the Town Hall and up the steps beneath its clock tower. To my relief the grand entrance hall was empty, eerily quiet, with no voices or the tapping of typewriters coming from any of the offices. Easing the door shut behind me, I entered
the sombre, high-ceilinged council chamber where the councillors met. There, sitting on one of the tiered leather benches, I opened my folder of work cards and took out a book: The Goshawk by T. H. White. I removed the bookmark and began to read.
It was the story of how in 1937, the author T. H. White had abandoned his teaching job in a public school to live in a gamekeeper’s cottage in woods in Buckinghamshire. There, using knowledge he’d gleaned from reading medieval falconry books, he’d trained a young goshawk that had been taken from a nest deep in the forests of Germany, and flown over in an aeroplane. The book had gripped me the moment I’d opened it the previous evening. In the first paragraph of the first page, White’s goshawk had just arrived in a basket covered with sacking and ‘was bumping against it from underneath: bump, bump, bump, incessantly, with more than a hint of lunacy’. Captivated by the goshawk’s wildness I read on. In its early stages of training, time after time, with ‘talons like scimitars’ it would clutch White’s leather glove as it perched there, then, with ‘mad’ yellow eyes staring, the young goshawk would leap off in a headlong ‘dive of rage’ in ‘a wild bid for freedom’, only to hang upside down by the leather thongs around its legs. Until, with ‘gentleness and patience’, T. H. White would once again lift it back on to the glove. Even when the goshawk had been trained well enough to fly a hundred yards to his raised glove, White still couldn’t help feeling a little afraid of Gos’s wildness, as ‘the horrible aerial toad, the silent feathered owl, the humped back aviating Richard the third, made toward [him] close to the ground’. Enthralled, last night I’d read into the early hours, then brought the book into work in the morning to continue reading, desperate to discover if Gos, who had escaped and disappeared into the woods, would be found alive. I don’t know how long I read, but by the time I sneaked back out of the council chamber I discovered White never did find his beloved goshawk, which, he speculated, would have most likely ended up ‘a bundle of green bones and ruined feathers . . . swinging in the winter wind’, after the leather thongs around its legs had become entangled in a tree.
No Way But Gentlenesse Page 5