by Beth Moran
Or not, as it turned out. The bridge, which stood in between the pub and the shops, was blocked off with concrete barriers, low enough for me to see that the stone structure had completely collapsed in the centre, leaving a gap of several metres where the Maddon flowed thick and grey beneath it.
I checked the maps on my phone, but couldn’t spot another bridge anywhere in the village. A woman was scurrying up the road towards me, head down, woolly hat pulled low and chin tucked into her scarf.
‘Excuse me?’
She jerked briefly to a stop, shaking her head at the pavement before hurrying past and into the off-licence. The rest of the street was deserted, so, quickly deciding to dismiss her strange response as perhaps mistaking me for a chugger, I followed her in.
Wow. It was like stepping into a nightclub, more like the kind of place I’d expect to find back in London than a rural village in the East Midlands. All the shop fixtures – the display cases, floor and counter, plus the walls and ceiling – were black. Backlighting caused the rows of spirits to glow in varying luminescent shades. In the centre of the room a glitter ball spun, pinpricks of light whirling around it. Techno music pumped from enormous speakers hung in the far corners, and behind the counter a man dressed all in black bounced his baseball-capped head slightly out of time to the beat.
‘All right?’ he asked the woman who’d entered before me, without breaking his stride. He looked about the same age as my dad, with a long, bleached ponytail dangling beneath the cap and a pair of headphones the size of grapefruit around his neck.
She leant her head so close to him that I couldn’t hear her reply, but he bent under the counter and fetched her a packet of cigarettes. Realising that it would look more than a little strange to be standing in this shop without buying anything, particularly with a baby, even if she was transfixed by the light show, I grabbed a bottle of wine. Sidling up as if queuing to pay, I tried to act as though it was a total coincidence me being here, rather than following the woman in immediately after she’d made it clear she didn’t want to talk to me.
‘So,’ I said, going for bright and breezy but ending up more along the lines of potentially-inebriated-while-in-charge-of-a-baby. ‘Lovely day. I mean, for this time of year. Well. Not really a lovely day, but at least it isn’t raining! I mean, that storm the other day – phew!’
While I was jabbering on, the woman had paid for her cigarettes and turned to go, head still ducked like an armed robber avoiding the CCTV. I took a slight step to the right to block her path, and before she could object gabbled, ‘Anyway, so the bridge seems to be blocked off. What’s the best way to get across the river?’
The woman froze, eyes swivelling from side to side as if she was preparing to brandish a weapon and demand the contents of the till.
‘I just needed some cigarettes!’ she blurted. ‘The Co-op’s run out of Jase’s brand and I didn’t have time to go anywhere else. I’m not sticking around.’
‘Wait, are you…?’ the man asked, his eyebrows shooting up into his cap. ‘I mean, I’m an open-minded fella. The bank doesn’t discriminate against the source of my poundage, after all. But I thought you must be from Middlebeck or summat. We don’t serve traitors and scabs or their scabby women in ’ere.’ He shook his head in disgust. ‘Better get back where you belong before I offer you a refund on them cigs.’
‘I know, I’m sorry. I’m leaving now!’ And with that, she pushed past me and fled. Utterly baffled, I dumped the wine on the nearest shelf and reversed the pushchair back out the door as fast as I could drag it.
‘You one o’ them too, are you?’ the shop assistant called after me. ‘Didn’t you see the sign in the window? No kids and no New Siders.’
By the time I’d manoeuvred the pushchair through the heavy door, the woman was scuttling back down Old Main Street. I ran after her, Hope’s wheels skidding on the damp pavement.
‘Hello!’ I called. ‘Hey! Can you please stop for a moment!’
To my surprise she did, although that turned out to be because her car was parked there. I upped my speed and reached her just as she wrenched the door open. ‘Please! I’m not out to have a go at you. If it makes you feel better, that guy just refused to serve me,’ I gasped.
She paused, her curvaceous frame half in and half out of the car. ‘You’re from the New Side, too?’ she asked, glancing around furtively. ‘And you came here with a baby?’
‘No,’ I replied, then added quickly as the look of alarm reappeared and she made to slam the door shut. ‘I’m not from any side! I’m from Windermere, and London, and I’m currently staying at Damson Farm.’
‘So, what do you want?’ she asked, clearly eager to get away.
‘I want to get across the river so I can buy Hope some bananas. The mini-market’s run out and besides milk it’s her main food group.’
‘You can’t get across from the village. Have to go back to the main road. It’s miles away, though. It’ll take hours to walk there and back. And there’s no pavement for most of it.’ She looked up and down, sizing us up while still half in and half out of the seat. ‘Stick her in the back, I’ll take you.’
‘I thought you were short on time. In the shop you said that you didn’t have time to go anywhere else…’
She rolled her eyes. ‘Course I had time. I was bored and fancied a mission. Plus, don’t tell anyone in the village I said this – like, literally, don’t or they’ll lob a brick through my window or slash my tyres or something – but who in their right mind can be doing with a stupid old feud anyway? And the pleasure I get from knowing Jase is smoking cigs from the Old Side is worth the risk. He’d choke on them if he knew.’ She cackled, eyes glinting, and I started to wonder if a lift was a bad idea. But then she looked me directly in the eyes and said, ‘Trust me, he deserves it. I’m Alice, by the way.’ Her dark eyes were so lovely that I felt like I could trust her, so together we clicked the car seat part of Hope’s pram into the back of her Fiesta, loaded the frame into the boot and then I took my first voyage into the New Side.
‘So, I don’t know anything about this whole Old and New Side thing,’ I said as we sped out into the open countryside. ‘It seems a big deal, though.’
Alice grimaced. ‘It is a big deal. Or at least it was. See, Ferrington was a mining town. Apart from Old Main Street, New Road and a couple of the smaller side streets, every house in the village was built for the miners back in the fifties. Ferrington was just a bridge and a boathouse surrounded by a few farms before the mine opened. The pit is who we are. But in the strikes, back in eighty-four, the village was split. The Old Side of the river went on strike, and it was brutal. Some families starved. All of them froze. If it wasn’t for the help of the farms, who stayed neutral, whole families would have died. But the New Side, they wouldn’t strike. Said they needed to keep working to support their elderly parents, put shoes on their kids’ feet. And the worst part of it is, the entrance to the mine is on the Old Side, so every morning the New Siders had to cross the village to get to the picket line. It was their right to work, to keep earning a living, but the Old Side didn’t see it that way, so they thought it was their duty to stop them.’
‘And the only way to the mine was across the bridge.’
Alice nodded, slowing down to pull a sharp turn onto a dual carriageway. ‘They blockaded it, day after day. The New Siders had to push through, getting spat on and kicked and shoved. Plenty of times men ended up floating in the river, from both sides. New Side started using boats, but then one of them was tampered with, and an old guy died. As the Old Siders got hungrier and colder and angrier and more disheartened, the worse it got because they blamed the New Side scabs. It soon reached the point where you didn’t dare cross the bridge for any reason. Young women were getting hassled, people knocked off their bikes. Fights breaking out in the miners’ club, windows smashed and worse. And then, a year or so after the strikes were all over, we demolished the bridge. And that was the last time the whole village did anyt
hing together. Now, we’re two villages who happen to share a name. There’s a campaign to officially change to New Ferrington and Old Ferrington, but these things take time, and the powers-that-be don’t understand it so they aren’t exactly hurrying things along.’
‘Wow.’ I let all this sink in as we began to re-enter the village, on the other side of the river this time. Someone had scrawled ‘NEW’ in black spray paint on the Ferrington sign.
‘So, are both sides back working in the mine now?’ I asked.
‘You’re joking?’ Alice glanced at me. ‘You really aren’t from round here, are you? The mine closed in ninety-four. Over thirty-five years since the strikes, twenty-five since the mine shut for good, and we are still just an ex-mining town, because we don’t know how to be anything else, and we don’t have anything else to be.’
Well, I could relate to that…
‘When the mine shut, it broke us. I mean, don’t get me wrong, there are towns and villages all over who faced the same. No jobs, no purpose, defined by a miserable past, with no hope of a future. I’d not let anyone else hear me say it, but it’s not as though mining is all that. Dangerous, dirty, knackering work with crap pay. But it’s like even people my age, who weren’t born when the strike happened, we’ve grown up feeling wronged, like we’re the bottom of the slag heap, abandoned and left to rot. Maybe the anger will fizzle out, die with the mining generation. But I think it’s more likely we’ll still be angry – no jobs, no money, no help – just no one will remember how we ended up here.’
And I’d thought my life was depressing…
We pulled up then at the Co-op. The road mirrored Old Main Street almost perfectly. There was a Gregg’s and a hairdresser, only the off-licence was a betting shop and instead of Pepper’s Pizza, it was the Ferrington Fish and Chippy. Opposite the Old Boat House stood the Water Boatman pub, and instead of a replica old church, a white Methodist chapel squatted.
Alice waited in the car while I nipped in for the bananas, and this time I noticed the glances from other customers as I whizzed round, choosing the self-checkout to avoid an interrogation by the glowering older woman behind the till.
‘So, were your family miners?’ I asked as she drove us back to the farm, fascinated by this woeful tale of a village split in two.
‘My dad was nineteen. He kept working because he wanted to marry my mum. His dad mined too, of course. My uncle had three kids, one with cystic fibrosis, so he kept working. Mum’s dad had retired with bad lungs, so that was another reason for Dad to keep earning, to help her family out. It wasn’t that they didn’t sympathise, or get why people did strike, but they never believed it would work. And turned out they were right.’
‘So in the end the strikers did it all for nothing?’
‘Yep.’
‘And Jase, is he your husband?’
Alice shrugged. ‘We moved in together a few months ago. To be honest, it was a rush decision and if he doesn’t pull his finger out soon I’ll be reconsidering. Only problem is, working in the Water Boatman doesn’t make nearly enough to get my own place, and however much I love her, and everyone who knows me knows I do, I can’t face going back to sharing a bedroom with my Nana.’
‘You what?’
And right there I had made myself a new friend.
11
I arrived back at the farmhouse just after five. Alice had dropped me off at the end of the lane, leaving us to enjoy the last few minutes of daylight as I bumped Hope’s pushchair the short distance up to the yard. Daniel’s Jeep was parked in its usual place, and the cosy glow of lights from the hallway welcomed us back. Unclipping Hope and shrugging her out of the orange snowsuit, I expected Daniel to appear any second – or at least to call hello. Instead, I found him in the study. He was stretched out across the sofa, top two shirt buttons open to reveal a smattering of chest hair, one shoe kicked off, the other still dangling precariously from the end of his foot. One arm splayed out into open space, he looked as though he’d fallen asleep mid-air. His features had softened in sleep, the pucker between his brows smoothed out and his mouth carrying the hint of a smile. I could see Charlie there, only, perhaps Charlie on a bad day. His complexion was stark against unruly dark hair, the shadows from the sidelamp emphasising hollows beneath his cheekbones. He looked like a man with seven months’ worth of sleep to catch up on.
It was nearly nine by the time he appeared, skidding into the kitchen in his socks, hair gloriously dishevelled, one side of his shirt hanging out.
‘Eleanor! Hi!’ His scrunched-up eyes darted around the kitchen.
‘She’s out for the count,’ I replied, unable to keep from smiling.
‘She’s okay? Everything went okay? Has she had her milk, and bedtime porridge?’ he gabbled, eyes still searching for evidence.
‘Yep.’
‘You didn’t give her a bath? Because she’d be fine with a clean nappy and change into a sleepsuit.’
‘She had a bath. We splashed and sang and squirted her blue whale. It was a very lovely time. And then a story, milk and she settled straight down.’
He stared at me, this new information flitting across his face like data on a computer screen. ‘Why… why didn’t you wake me?’
‘You looked like you needed the sleep.’
‘But you’ve had her all day.’
‘It was fine. We enjoyed it. Here.’ I fetched a bowl and scooped out a ladleful of minestrone from the pot simmering on the stove. ‘This is what real soup tastes like. And there’s fresh bread on the table.’
After a few seconds of him staring at me, I placed the bowl on the table and pulled out his usual chair, before coming to sit down opposite.
‘Wine?’ I asked indicating my half-finished glass.
‘I’ll get myself a beer in a moment,’ he said, slowly, picking up a spoon and eyeing the soup as though he didn’t know where to start.
I got up and went to the fridge, twisting off the top of a beer and placing it in front of him.
‘I can fetch my own beer.’ He looked up, frown firmly back between his eyebrows.
‘I’m aware of that.’ I shrugged.
‘You’ve done more than enough for me today.’
I took a nonchalant sip of wine. ‘I don’t understand why you sound angry about that.’
That was a teensy fib. I did understand, but I wanted him to acknowledge it.
‘I’m not angry. I’m just… uncomfortable. I didn’t need you to bath Hope and put her to bed. You should have woken me up. And now you’ve made soup and baked bread and you’re handing me beer. I really appreciate you watching her, but I don’t need you to step in and start mothering me. We can manage fine. We have been – we are – coping fine. If I was a woman, no one would think twice about whether I could balance a job and a baby and then cook myself dinner at the end of the day. Single women do it all the time. Why is it that because I’m a man, because I’m not Hope’s biological dad, people assume I can’t do this, that I need help?’
‘Daniel, it’s quite clear that you can do this. Even if it is grinding you into a total wreck. Although plenty of single parents have cleaners. And childcare! I didn’t help because you needed me to, I put Hope to sleep because it was one of the loveliest things I’ve got to do in months. Years, probably. I love cooking. And I didn’t bake the bread, I got it from the Co-op. They sell fresh food over on the New Side, did you know that?’
‘What, you went to New Side?’ Daniel took a long swig of his beer to alleviate the shock.
‘Yes. And we survived.’
‘You took Hope to New Side?’ His voice had risen a few notches. Another swig.
‘I thought you were neutral in the Feud of Ferrington.’
He shrugged. ‘No one’s really neutral.’
‘Well, I am.’ I gave him a pointed look. ‘Anyway, what I was saying is, I loved helping. But there’s more to this. I’ve been freeloading off you for over a week now, eating your food and using up your hot water. I think we n
eed to talk about what happens next.’
He put down his spoon and looked at me steadily. ‘I said you’re welcome to stay as long as you want.’
‘That’s ridiculous. You don’t even know me.’
‘I know that you left London in the middle of the night and drove through a storm to get here with nothing but a few jumbled bags of clothes, even though you’d not heard from Charlie in well over a year. So, whatever the reason for that might have been, unless it might follow you here, or if there’s any possibility I might end up in trouble for harbouring a criminal… Apart from that…’ He paused to glance at me then, and to my shame, I simply nodded. ‘You can stay here as long as you need to.’
‘Thank you.’ I swiped at the tears now spilling over onto my cheeks, and Daniel gave a small smile to show that he knew how much I meant it. ‘But if I’m going to stay then we need to work something out. Rent. Bills. Food.’ I offered a figure that seemed reasonable, and to my surprise, he nodded his agreement.
‘Fine. But if you’re going to continue acting like my housekeeper and Hope’s impromptu nanny, then I need to pay you.’ He quirked one eyebrow before, predictably, offering me almost twice the amount I’d offered to pay in rent.
‘No.’ I shook my head.
‘If you’re going to insist on me paying you mate’s rates, then I’m going to charge you mate’s rates.’
‘How about we call it even? It’s exactly what Charlie would have done.’
Daniel finished off his drink while he thought about that.
I took a fortifying breath. ‘Or… I have another proposition for you. Another idea of Charlie’s…’
And then I got out the notebook, and it was a good job Daniel took that extended nap because by the time we finished talking it was hardly worth going to bed.
12
I had a lot of reasons for leaving London, resigning from my job and abandoning all of my stuff bar the bare essentials. I’d been gathering the courage to move on for a few weeks, as the growing rumble of discontent gradually gained volume every time I sat down to write, but then a parcel arrived on my doorstep, and the rumble became a blaring siren, drowning out all other thoughts.