Durham Trilogy 01. The Hungry Hills

by Janet MacLeod Trotter

  THE HUNGRY HILLS

  A poignant story of one woman’s fight for the people she loves: the first in The Durham Trilogy

  Janet MacLeod Trotter

  ˜ ˜ ˜

  THE DURHAM TRILOGY

  Heartrending sagas set in Durham’s bygone mining communities

  ˜ ˜ ˜

  THE HUNGRY HILLS was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award.

  Copyright © Janet MacLeod Trotter, 1992, 2011

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the Publisher.

  Published by MacLeod Trotter Books

  eBook edition: 2011

  ISBN 978-1-908359-06-3

  www.janetmacleodtrotter.com

  (The photograph used on the cover is of Janet’s maternal grandmother)

  eBook conversion by eBookpartnership.com

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  The Hungry Hills

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The Durham Mining Trilogy

  Bonus Chapter: THE DARKENING SKIES

  About the Author

  Janet MacLeod Trotter was brought up in the North East of England with her four brothers, by Scottish parents. She is a best-selling author of 15 novels, including the hugely popular Jarrow Trilogy, and a childhood memoir, BEATLES & CHIEFS, which was featured on BBC Radio Four.

  Her novel, THE HUNGRY HILLS, gained her a place on the shortlist of The Sunday Times’ Young Writers’ Award, and the TEA PLANTER’S LASS was longlisted for the RNA Romantic Novel Award.

  A graduate of Edinburgh University, she has been editor of the Clan MacLeod Magazine, a columnist on the Newcastle Journal and has had numerous short stories published in women’s magazines.

  She lives in the North of England with her husband, daughter and son.

  Find out more about Janet and her other popular novels at: www.janetmacleodtrotter.com

  By Janet MacLeod Trotter

  Historical:

  The Jarrow Trilogy

  The Jarrow Lass

  Child of Jarrow

  Return to Jarrow

  The Durham Trilogy

  The Hungry Hills

  The Darkening Skies

  Never Stand Alone

  The Tyneside Sagas

  The Tea Planter’s Daughter

  The Suffragette

  A Crimson Dawn

  A Handful of Stars

  Chasing the Dream

  For Love & Glory

  Scottish Historical Romance

  The Beltane Fires

  Mystery:

  The Vanishing of Ruth

  The Haunting of Kulah

  Teenage:

  Love Games

  Non Fiction:

  Beatles & Chiefs

  In memory of our son Stanley – with love

  *****

  Praise for THE HUNGRY HILLS:

  ‘I read The Hungry Hills with pleasure…Not only a good read but a vivid picture of the coalfield. All the misery and class division are there but so are the warmth and courage of the people. You’ll believe you are there.’

  Denise Robertson

  ‘Truly a novel for saga lovers … weaving together the lives of her many characters with compassion, skill and affection.’

  Northern Echo

  ‘An unforgettable saga of life in the 1920’s’

  Worcester Evening News

  ‘When Janet MacLeod Trotter writes about the North East she knows what she is talking about … set in the Durham coalfields, her latest novel is full of warmth and courage and tales of class differences.’

  Sunderland Echo

  ‘My children are unfed, the clothes unwashed, ironing undone … This is a wonderful book …if you don’t mind losing sleep as you read by torchlight into the night, do get this book.’

  The Miscarriage Association

  THE HUNGRY HILLS

  Youth walked last night among rich meadows,

  Breathing scent of Nature’s bloom,

  And lingered in the woodland shadows,

  Where evening birds called through the gloom.

  He climbed the walls on Highfell Moor,

  Fringed around by noble trees;

  Drank from streams of water pure,

  Felt the kiss of Evening’s breeze.

  Youth watched the sunset spill its fire

  Upon The Grange where he did dwell,

  And felt again the heart’s desire,

  That months of war could not dispel.

  He saw them playing on the lawn,

  The carefree ghosts of boyhood years,

  Until they vanished in the dawn,

  The spangled dew their farewell tears.

  Youth woke, still thirsty for his past,

  Those hills that hungered for his tread,

  But now the die of Fate was cast,

  And he must follow Age instead.

  Rupert Seward-Scott

  June 1916, France

  Chapter One

  1924

  Louie half crouched on the three-quarter bed she shared with her sister Hilda and cousin Sadie, and gazed down the back lane. The midden men, ‘shit-shovellers’ as her brother Davie called them, moved like shadows in the grey light, flickering between their cart and the back yards like silent jerking figures in a moving picture. They hurried to remove yesterday’s refuse and filth before the July sun could cook up a sizzling stench from the middens. As the early birds began to chatter, the horse-drawn cart clip-clopped away down the back street, led by its phantom masters. Louie saw young Sadie scamper across barefoot to the outhouse.

  ‘Hildy,’ Louie hissed, ‘it’s time to get up. Hildy, it’s the Big Meeting today!’

  The Big Meeting! Today was the day every pitman in County Durham took to the road, along with his family, and marched in solidarity on the ancient citadel of Durham City, in celebration of their oneness as miners. In the downstairs rooms of the opposite terraced row, oil lamps were being turned up and their yellow glow spread up the street.

  ‘Hilda, man!’ Louie twisted her long plait impatiently and gave the younger girl a prod. Hilda carried on sleeping, whistling through her teeth like an old kettle.

  They were obviously sisters, even Louie could see the resemblance; tall and long-limbed like their father, both with the round cheeks and small chin of their mother, and stubby no
ses that looked as if they had not been finished off properly. Like their three elder brothers, the girls had the bright-blue Kirkup eyes, arresting but too deep-set to be bonny, as Mrs Parkin often told their mother.

  ‘Shame they don’t have your brown eyes, Fanny,’ Louie could picture their neighbour say to their mother as she leaned her large apron-bound bosom over the yard gate. ‘Still, they’re canny lasses, Fanny, and pretty faces don’t get the washing done, now do they?’

  At least she did not have Hilda’s small mouth, overcrowded with teeth just as her head was overstuffed with fanciful ideas from all the books and magazines she read, and she still only twelve! She would grow out of it, Louie consoled herself.

  Downstairs she could hear her mother moving about preparing for her husband’s return from the night shift with their second son, John. Having snatched a few hours sleep in her parlour bed, she would be boiling up the water for their baths in front of the kitchen fire. The heady, salty smell of bacon already filled the house. Today they could all have a leisurely breakfast together, not like the surly, subdued meals that usually preceded the men going to the pit.

  Reluctantly Louie admitted to herself she should be helping. She pulled at the curtain which separated off the girls from their brothers’ half of the upstairs room. Ebenezer, the eldest, lay with his pillow over his head. Ever since his return from the war in Flanders five years ago he had slept like this; Eb was quiet and a bit odd. Of all the sandy-haired Kirkups, he was the fairest, thin wisps covering his baldness and eyebrows so pale they were only noticeable when covered in coal dust.

  Eb worked day shift on the pit bank, sorting stones from the coal with the old men and boys; a war hero demoted to the screens. It annoyed Louie that such menial work did not seem to bother him. She had been so proud of her big brother when he had been a hewer of coal, elite among the pitmen and a hero from the Front. But she remembered the day they had brought him screaming out of the pit, held down by three men, crying like a bairn in front of the neighbours. So he exchanged his pick and explosives for the pit bank and a lesser wage, and spent his evenings in the allotment, content if not happy.

  A snore rasped out from the figure slumped next to Eb, and Louie grinned. Davie was another matter. He was happy mad. His spiky hair grew like the yard brush, exuberant as himself; he was forever trying to damp it down with water when he went out.

  ‘Our Davie was born smiling,’ their mother would say affectionately. Life to him was a joke at the corner of the street with the other lads, a packet of Woodbines or a pint at the club; a kiss round the back of the stores’ warehouse with one of the girls in drapery, or a dance at the chapel hall.

  Davie was as uncomplicated and playful as a pup, at times as wild as a pit pony dragged into daylight, for ever incurring the sharp-tongued censure of their chapel-going father. Jacob Kirkup abhorred the demon drink, smoked a pipe twice a year - at Christmas and Big Meeting - was a faithful union man and a lay preacher at the Methodist chapel, known among the drinking fraternity as a ranter. He exhorted his sons to read and improve themselves, pointing with reverence to Gladstone on the wall of the parlour as their model, a God-fearing Liberal. Louie’s father was one of the most avid readers at the Miners’ Institute, self-taught and self-enlightened. He cried over Dickens, was wary of Marx and knew the Bible like the seams of the Eleanor and Beatrice pits which he had helped sink in the 1890s and worked ever since.

  ‘Davie,’ Louie shouted, ‘it’s time to get up. Mam’s cooking breakfast. Haway, Davie, are you awake?’

  There was a grunt from the dark side of the room but nothing stirred. Louie huffed indignantly. Why did he have to go drinking the night before the Big Meeting? She knew he had because he had come home smelling of liquorice to hide the wafts of stale beer. Their mother had not been fooled, but she never told him off now he was a working man of seventeen and bringing money into the house. Discipline was a matter between Davie and his father and as the latter was on night shift, there was no harm done.

  ‘Parkin’s pig is loose in the lane!’ Louie taunted loudly. Eb jerked up in panic at the urgent voice, and Hilda’s hissing-kettle breath came to the boil as she awoke, but Davie lay unmoved.

  Louie stood in annoyance, pulling her bed-shawl around her. Parkin’s pig usually provoked a reaction. Davie had once let it loose from their neighbour’s yard out of sheer devilment and it had charged off towards the dene with delighted squeals. All the children from five rows round about had chased it down to the burn, with Mrs Parkin and her snotty-nosed son Wilfred in pursuit. Finally they had caught up with it when the fat beast had got stuck between two tubs on a railway siding, parallel to the leafy dene. PC McGuire had dealt out summary justice and given Davie an on-the-spot hiding, which was nothing to the one Parkin had given him on his return from the blacksmith’s shop at the pit yard. He had muscles like forged iron and a ruddy face that panted like bellows when he shouted, and Davie had not been able to sit down for a week.

  ‘Parkin’s pig?’ Hilda looked up in bleary-eyed astonishment.

  ‘Yes, Parkin’s pig.’ Louie winked back. So began a chorus of ‘Parkin’s pig, Parkin’s pig!’ until a pillow came hurtling out of the gloom. Hilda hurled it back and a battle ensued.

  ‘I’ll give you bloody Parkin’s pig,’ Davie grunted, and felled Louie with a swipe from his pillow. It burst and feathers flew up everywhere, covering his sisters in a soft, tickling shower.

  ‘Eee, there’ll be hell on.’ Louie stifled a giggle. ‘It’s all your fault, Davie.’

  ‘Isn’t it pretty?’ Hilda cried, chasing the elusive feathers round the cramped room as they swirled down behind the wooden chest of drawers and were sucked in under the beds by the draught. ‘Like fairy snowflakes, they are.’

  ‘You do talk nonsense,’ Louie scoffed, taking charge. ‘Push them under the mat, Hilda, we’ll have to sweep them up while Mam’s busy making the picnic.’

  Davie laughed at their concern, and without embarrassment swung out of bed and pulled on his trousers. ‘By, I’m ready for that breakfast. Haway, Eb, you cannot play the euphonium all day on an empty stomach.’

  ‘Can I help you put out your best clothes, Davie?’ Louie asked excitedly.

  ‘Aye,’ he grinned back, ‘and Hildy can mend the tear in my shirt - it’s just a small one, but she’s canniest with a needle.’

  Louie felt peeved that Davie had not asked her, but then Hilda’s stitching was always neat; it was the one practical skill she seemed to have inherited from their mother.

  Dawn light was now seeping in at the small window and they heard the scrape of boots in the back yard. Without looking, Louie cried, ‘That’s Da and John home. Come on, Hildy, we should be helping.’

  The sisters pulled back the dividing curtain while they dressed hurriedly in work-a-day clothes. Later they would put on their Sunday best. Hilda had helped Louie alter the waist on her summer dress to make it more fashionable and had added some old lace from their mother’s wedding gown to the collar. She would wear it with a straw boater and her fair hair gathered up at the front off her face and pinned at the back, now she was fifteen and no longer a schoolgirl.

  The sisters flew downstairs, avoiding the men’s shoes that they had polished last night and placed each pair to a step like orderly members of the colliery band. A pile of pit clothes lay like a spoil heap in the narrow corridor; the men’s jackets and cut-off hoggers that enabled them to crawl in tunnels two feet high.

  Without a word said, the girls picked up the coal-ingrained clothes, took them into the yard and beat them against the back wall. Hilda coughed at the dust clouding around them, and within seconds their starched white pinafores were grimy with black flecks.

  ‘Fancy John being allowed to carry the banner this year.’ Hilda stopped and smiled a dreamy smile.

  ‘He’s not carrying it, he’s holding one of the cords,’ her sister corrected, smearing her forehead as she pushed a loose strand of hair from her eyes.

  ‘Still,
that’s a grand thing to do - like a Roman soldier marching into battle under the legion’s eagle.’

  Louie looked sharply at her sister, gangly as an overgrown runner bean, her long sandstone-coloured plaits unravelling about her plump cheeks. Hilda’s blue eyes sparkled, though, when she talked her funny talk, and Louie wished her eyes could shine in such a way.

  ‘Where do you get such notions?’ she demanded incredulously.

  ‘Books; Miss Joice lends them to me.’

  ‘I’ve never seen you read them.’ Louie was suspicious.

  ‘Eb lets me keep them in the shed at the allotment,’ the younger girl answered triumphantly. ‘Sometimes I read to him while he gardens.’

  Louie’s mouth dropped open in amazement. Eb was a dark one, that was for sure.

  ‘Don’t tell Mam or Da mind, Louie, promise?’ Hilda’s face puckered in concern. Louie’s face tightened, then relaxed.

  ‘Hurry up with these clothes now, we’ll make everyone late.’

  ‘Promise, Louie?’ Hilda put her long fingers on her sister’s arm.

  ‘All right - but it’s not good for you, Hildy, learning isn’t for girls, not more than a bit of readin’ ‘n’ writin’ and addin’ up for the housekeeping.’ Louie warmed to the advice-giving as she dashed her father’s jacket against the brick. ‘Lads don’t like a lass with too much learning in her head; they’d think you was odd. Lasses with knowledge end up as spinsters, Hildy. Now you don’t want to be a spinster, do you?’ The older girl stressed the word as if it were some grave disorder.

  There was too much of it around these days, as her mother said, too many men killed in the War and too few husbands to divvy up. Louie shuddered at the thought that there might be another conflict to carry off the young lads of her generation. Imagine living on at home for ever like the four Dobson sisters in Railway Terrace, looking after their ageing mother. Never, thought Louie! Her mother was already preparing her ‘bottom drawer’, filling it with pieces of linen, sheets and tablecloths. They would take them out from time to time, smelling of mothballs, and embroider flowers and initials on to a napkin or sew lace on to an antimacassar. Louie’s nostrils would fill with the musty, spicy smell of her treasure, conjuring up in her mind the day when they would come out for good and adorn a colliery cottage of her own, or, if she was lucky, one of the more spacious council houses that were being built beside the village green.