Even though I’d brought it on myself, the awful sense of shame I felt was even harder to bear than the lack of money. My feelings came as a shock. I hadn’t anticipated the humiliation and embarrassment I felt at being without a job, and the way it led me to behave. For instance, I kept quiet about being unemployed and tried to avoid people I knew, fearing they would ask me about work. Once, when I was travelling home on the train after an unsuccessful interview for a director’s job on a factual film, I ducked into the toilet when I saw an acquaintance walking down the aisle towards me. On another occasion when I went to sign on, I carried on walking past the Dole Office when I saw someone I knew; terrified they’d see me go in and then spread the word I was unemployed, I only returned once they were out of sight. I began to think I’d become paranoid. Yet I noticed other men in the queues that snaked around the Dole Office, their eyes staring straight ahead of them, as if they feared catching someone’s eye, and I began to wonder if they felt like I did: emasculated without a job to define me and give me purpose. Ironically, it was the awful experience of being unemployed, and the unexpected effects this had on my state of mind, that gave me the idea that would turn my life around.
Back then, in the early 1980s, Yorkshire Arts, which was funded by the Arts Council of Great Britain, gave grants to artists and film-makers. I submitted a script for a thirty-minute drama film based on my experiences of being unemployed, called After the Ball, and was awarded a budget big enough to buy and process the 16mm film stock, hire a film camera, a tape recorder, lights and so on, and pay all the actors and film crew – except for myself. The story was about a redundant worker, who not only feels ashamed and emasculated after losing his job, but also fears local children will taunt and bully his son if they discover his dad is out of work. I wasn’t happy with all aspects of the film, particularly the beginning, which felt too slow. Yet when I showed it to a commissioning editor for independent film at Channel 4 television he thought it worked well, and to my delight he bought After the Ball for broadcast.
Around this time, Channel 4 was looking for documentary programme ideas. Interested in how working-class history was passed down the generations through stories, I wrote a proposal for a series of programmes called A Tale to Tell. Fortunately my idea was commissioned by Channel 4, and with the help of a friend who was more technically minded than I am, I set up a film company called Banner Film and Television to make the four programmes and found myself once more in paid work.
I travelled around the pit villages of South Yorkshire, and sometimes into areas of Sheffield where the steelworks were by now empty, derelict buildings, in my search for men and women to participate in A Tale to Tell. It was my fascination with the stories of the mining community that had given me the idea for the series, so I also persuaded a miner called Harry, who was a brilliant tale-teller and a friend of my parents, to take part and tell stories from our pit village’s past. For example, in one of Harry’s stories, on smelling cooking drifting up from the kitchen a man who was dying in bed called to his wife: ‘That ham smells nice.’ To which she replied: ‘It’s not for thee. It’s for the coffin bearers.’ Another story that Harry told in A Tale to Tell was of a miner who was confused by the formal, unfamiliar vocabulary that was sometimes used in union meetings at our local colliery. After it had been reported that some miners hadn’t paid their union subscriptions, a union official had said to the chairman: ‘Mr Chairman, I propose you divulge their names.’ This prompted one miner to angrily call out: ‘Don’t divulge their names, Mr Chairman! Read the buggers out!’
And yet, in my experience, working-class people, if they are made to feel at ease, and trust you, are articulate, vivid speakers, even when being filmed. Particularly when they are fired up and feel strongly about a cause, as I discovered when I made two documentary films for Channel 4 during the 1984–5 miners’ strike. In these films, miners and their wives eloquently and movingly put the social and economic case for keeping Britain’s coal mines open. Britain’s miners weren’t striking for a pay rise, but to stop pit closures, protect their jobs and save pit villages. Yet the press and most of Britain were against them. Being a miner’s son myself, who’d been raised in a pit village, this subject was close to my heart. I’m still proud that I made the first documentary shown on British television which supported the striking miners.
Later in that year-long strike I made a second television film in their support. In both of our documentaries we filmed the striking miners at home with their families, at their meetings, in their cars as we travelled with them to the picket lines. Unlike the television news footage of the picket lines, which was shot from behind the police and facing the miners, we were always with the miners, shooting from their viewpoint. I still feel angry when I recall those awful times. I remember laughing policemen waving fists full of the money they’d earned in overtime at miners now so hard up they had to rely on handouts from supporters to feed their families. I have memories of baton-wielding policemen on horseback charging into the ranks of legally picketing miners, many of who had wounds to the backs of their heads and on their backs from police batons, as they had tried to run away. Recently, while watching a BBC Yorkshire news programme, called Inside Out, I was stunned to discover that at the time we were filming the strike, high-ranking officers in the South Yorkshire Police Force had dictated identical statements to all police constables which said it was the miners who had attacked the police, rather than the other way round. As a result of those false police statements, decent hardworking miners were charged with the offence of rioting and faced life imprisonment.
Events from filming that strike still stay with me. One day tears rolled down my face as we filmed the miners, their wives and their children as they walked beside the colliery union banners, a brass band playing. My tears weren’t sentimental, rooted in some romantic idea of a ‘salt of the earth’ community. What I found so moving was the overwhelming sense of admiration I felt for the people whose background I shared. To me the union banners and brass band spoke of the long struggle of our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, for safer conditions and decent wages, in the dangerous industry around which our mining communities had been built. Now the miners and their families had been forced into a fight to save their livelihoods and the livelihoods of their children. I vividly recall a woman being arrested on a picket line and thrown into the back of a police van. I was interviewing her through an open window when a policeman banged the window shut. As the police van sped away the woman opened the window again and shouted: ‘Tell my husband I’ve been locked up.’ There were other moments when I was inspired and moved, such as when we filmed a group of miners’ wives singing:
We are women, we are strong, we are fighting for our lives
Side by side with our men, who work the nation’s mines.
United by the struggle, united by the past
And it’s ‘here we go’, ‘here we go’,
for the women of the working class.
I’ll never forget those women. They valued the sense of community that existed in their mining villages, where people greeted each other in the streets and the shopkeepers knew your name. They also understood the pride and the camaraderie instilled in their menfolk from working in dangerous conditions deep underground. Yet I suspect, along with many of the miners themselves, that most of the women would have preferred their sons not to follow their dads down the mine. But as the Conservative government closed one colliery after another unemployment had risen to an all-time high, and alternative jobs were extremely difficult to find. Keenly aware of this, the women stood beside their menfolk as they fought for their livelihoods. They supported the strike, and tried to help save the jobs of their husbands, brothers and sons, and preserve their historic century-old communities.
TWENTY-SIX
She was the dear companion of my travels and sorrows . . .
– Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe, 1676
In 1993, a quarter of a century after
I’d given up falconry, and with me aged forty-eight, we were living in Sheffield, just a few minutes’ drive from the moors. In early summer, patches of the moorland are turned white by cotton grass, and in August, when the heather blooms, the whole of the moorland is turned purple. I love the haunting sounds up there, the sad burbling song of the curlew, the forlorn call of the golden plover. Yet as much as I love those moors, I often found myself gazing into the distance, at the faint outline of Hoober Stand, a monument not far from Tankersley Old Hall. My fascination with that place had stayed with me.
On each visit to the ruined Hall, I’d gaze up at the nest hole where my two Keses and Freeman had hatched, walk my old haunts, and then visit my mother who still lived in Hoyland Common. After she’d made me a cup of coffee and cut me a piece of her home-made cake, I’d enjoy listening to the village news.
In the summer of 1993, my mother was diagnosed with stomach cancer and I visited her daily in Sheffield’s Northern General Hospital. One evening my heart ached as she asked me to hold up her compact mirror, after weeks of being too ill to bother. ‘I don’t look too bad, do I?’ she’d said, and she didn’t. She even talked of her plans for the future that evening, of what she was going to do when she got out of hospital. Although she knew it, earlier she’d asked me to write my telephone number on a piece of torn napkin which she’d put in her glasses case. As I left the ward I saw her fear returning. She was clutching her glasses case with my telephone number in it to give her comfort.
The next evening, Mother had been moved from a shared hospital ward into a room of her own. Once installed, she asked me to help her move into a position that would let the air get to a deep bedsore on her leg. She said she needed to get it better, but I knew it would never heal. The doctor had told me Mother was in the last hours of her life. She became increasingly confused, and when Jackie smeared cream on her dry lips she asked her if she’d taken up nursing, which made us both smile. Moments before Mother became unconscious she’d been hallucinating. I’d hoped the imaginary person she’d been speaking to was Dad, but her tone suggested she was speaking to a friend she hadn’t seen for a while. ‘I’ll miss Richard . . . I’ll miss Barry,’ she said, and then fell silent. I glanced at my watch, then, recalling something, I looked through the window. Mother had lost consciousness at the same time and on the same day and month as Dad had died thirty years earlier, and, once again, it was a beautiful late summer’s night, with a large full moon in the sky.
Later Barry arrived and Jackie went home in a taxi to check our kids were all right. After he’d rung to check on Mother and I’d told him how seriously ill she’d become, Barry had flown home from holiday in Italy and come straight to the hospital from the airport. He was tired from travelling and suffering from a hornet sting he’d got in Italy. Barry lived in Sheffield now, too, so after we’d sat with our mother for an hour or two, I suggested that he go home for a sleep while I stayed with her through the night. As I sat alone with my unconscious mother I noticed her small suitcase on top of a wardrobe. The thought of her suitcase being repacked with her clothes and personal possessions and carried back home without her brought tears to my eyes.
Next morning the nurses told me they wanted to give Mother a wash and change her bedding and suggested I go home for breakfast. I’d only been home a few minutes when the telephone rang. Mother had died while the nurses were changing her, and when Barry and I entered her hospital room she lay in her clean nightgown on a dazzling white bedsheet.
Mother’s home was still in Hoyland Common, and within an hour or two of her death I drove over there to walk in the surrounding countryside. The following day I awoke at dawn. For the last seventy-six years the sun had risen on a world in which Mother was alive; this morning I watched it rise on a world in which she was no longer alive and once again felt compelled to visit my old haunts. Day after day I was drawn to walk through woods whose leaves had unfurled from buds when Mother was alive, to walk beside fields of golden wheat planted when she was alive. One morning I found a chaffinch’s nest lying on a path, and as I examined the moss, roots and horsehair woven into it I thought I heard Mother calling my name, her voice carried on the warm September wind. At home one evening I turned and saw her sitting on the sofa with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, momentarily rescued from death by my imagination.
After my dad’s death, nothing had been left unsaid; no questions had been left unanswered. And on that sunny September day, when the grass had glistened with dew as my dad’s coffin was lowered into the ground, the robin’s song had caught perfectly the sad, sweet yearning that I’d felt at the loss of my beloved dad. I felt no sad, sweet yearning after Mother’s burial. Instead I felt hurt and angry.
On the morning of her funeral I stood looking up the road. Recently I’d seen her tentatively cross this road wearing a headscarf, but this morning she’d glided down it in a coffin lying in a black hearse. A neighbour from our childhood, our mother’s friend of over fifty years, was too old and infirm to attend the funeral, so later that day Barry and I had called to see her. Two hours earlier I’d seen my mother lowered into her grave. Yet our old neighbour chose that time to make a heartbreaking revelation. Mother, she said, had once told her that Barry was everything to her, the most important thing in her life.
Later, when the family visited the grave to admire the flowers and read the tributes of love and respect, I stood in sullen silence. On the previous day in the Chapel of Rest I’d been unable to bring myself to leave Mother. I’d take a last look at her, close the door, then, unable to bear the thought that I’d never see her again, I’d go back in for one last look. Once, twice, maybe a dozen times. But now I felt betrayed. Only hours after her burial, as she lay in the silent blackness, I felt no tenderness or pity, only a selfish, impotent rage at not being able to confront her about what her friend had said. Too late now. Her chance to reflect, to explain, to reassure, had gone forever.
After Mother’s death, on one of my compulsive early morning walks around the pit village, I stopped to sit on a wooden bench beside Tankersley church. With our new spaniel, Floss, lying beside my boots, I remembered an occasion from my childhood when Barry had accused Dad of favouring me. Dad had replied that he only made a fuss of me because I was the youngest, before adding, ‘Anyway, your mother makes enough fuss of you’. At the time it had seemed a strange thing to say, because I hadn’t been aware of Mother treating Barry and me differently. Yet, by making more of a fuss of me than Barry when I was little, perhaps Dad was trying to provide the affection he sensed I was missing from Mother. It all suddenly seemed to make sense. The neighbour’s comment about Mother’s feelings about Barry must have unearthed some long forgotten, unconscious childhood hurt. Memories flooded into my mind. I recalled the overheard argument, before he’d apologised, in which Dad had accused Mother of only wanting me to pass the exam to go to grammar school because it would have been a feather in her cap. I searched for better memories. An incident came to mind which I probably hadn’t thought about since it happened. When I was a child, as she’d tried to help me with my maths, Mother had put a full stop after a number. I’d told her that wasn’t right and that it looked like a decimal point. She stared at the book a moment then opened her mouth as if to speak. The words she wanted to say wouldn’t come, and, frustrated, she snatched up a duster. As I sat on the bench beside the church I wondered if it was Mother’s embarrassment at her lack of education, her anger at her blighted life chances, which had set her off dusting so furiously. For centuries her ancestors had worked the fields and coal mines and served in the big houses of the rich, as had she. I conjured up an image of Mother as a young woman, anxiously looking up the lane for the postman, waiting to discover if Barry would break this legacy of hard labour and deference by gaining a place at grammar school. His success would confirm the restless intelligence she suspected she had. I convinced myself that she’d made those hurtful comments when she was wretched with concern about Barry’s future. But I
was kidding myself.
When I told Barry how upset I was he was understanding and kind. He then reminded me that he wasn’t the only first-born child Mother had been obsessed with. She had been obsessed with his first-born child. She had been obsessed with our first-born child, John. So much so that our daughter, Katie, had almost rebelled and confronted her about her obvious favouritism. Yet when Katie had visited her grandmother in hospital, and had seen her with oxygen tubes up her nose, with hardly the strength to moisten her parched lips, and Mother had told her she couldn’t die because she wanted to see what she did with her life, and that she loved her, Katie was glad she had never known her seething rage.
I had never shown affection towards my mother. At her seventieth birthday party, for instance, softened by the occasion she had sought out family members to kiss. When I saw her heading towards me I’d glanced around in panic, desperate to escape. Sometimes, when I’d called in to see her, she’d sought compliments by saying, ‘You’ll miss me when I’m gone’. I don’t know why, but her saying that infuriated me and I never gave her the answer she was looking for. But she was right, I did miss her. And the intensity of my grief, and the tender way I touched her medical card as I handed it to the registrar when registering her death surprised me.
‘It’s not unlike a throstle,’ Mother had said when I’d carried Kes into the house in 1965. Twenty-eight years later, on my compulsive walks, I’d stop and gaze at the now-exposed nest ledge in the ruins of Tankersley Old Hall, and remember those words and the fond way Mother had looked at my first hawk. In the midst of the ruins is an impressive fireplace, built of narrow bricks in a herringbone pattern. One day, as I stood on the cart track gazing at the Old Hall, I thought about Sir Richard and Lady Fanshawe sitting around this very fireplace with their daughter Ann. In her memoirs Lady Fanshawe wrote of how she and her husband had lived here ‘with great content’ until something happened which made them ‘both desirous to quit that fatal place’. In July 1654 Ann had died of smallpox and Lady Fanshawe wrote, ‘She was between nine and ten years old, very tall, and the dear companion of my travels and sorrows’. When Ann was buried in Tankersley church, Lady Fanshawe and Sir Richard had ‘both wished to have gone into the same grave with her’. Almost three and a half centuries later, as I grieved for my mother and gazed at the brick fireplace, I recognised the sense of loss the Fanshawes would have felt. And I felt we had a strange connection across the centuries.
No Way But Gentlenesse Page 21