Durham Trilogy 02. The Darkening Skies

by Janet MacLeod Trotter

  ‘Where do you want to be?’ he asked Sara.

  ‘South Parade - by the green.’

  He nodded. ‘I’ll drop you off on the way out - couple more stops. Just sit tight.’ He swung into his seat again and they pulled away, sending puffs of dust into the crowds of Saturday strollers.

  After South Street the road narrowed and the houses seemed to close in about the bus as if to stare curiously at its passengers, Sara thought. Grubby children stopped their skipping and football games to watch and wave, while hot-faced women came to their back doors and blinked in the strong sunlight. She saw small shops on every corner and a pale boy standing on one leg outside a barber’s, sucking a bright orange stick. The noise of voices calling in play wafted in through the window and a strange hissing and clanking of machinery that Sara could not locate.

  They stopped outside a large, square chapel and the fresh-faced sailor stood up.

  ‘I hope you like Whitton,’ he smiled at Sara. ‘The people are canny.’

  ‘Ta.’ Sara smiled back nervously. ‘And good luck on your ship.’

  ‘Enjoy the rest of your leave, Frank.’ The driver put out his hand as the young man swung down his duffle bag.

  ‘Ta-ra, Mr Parker,’ he grinned and disappeared down the steps.

  The bus stopped again at the top of the town just past some tall iron gates which led into the pit yard and revealed the source of the deafening, incessant noise. Towering above them were the massive buildings around the pithead, housing the engines that drove the caged wheels. They whirred furiously and steam hissed, while through the gates Sara glimpsed a trail of wagons shunting across a zig-zag of tracks and a pile of freshly-cut timber waiting to be moved. This must be the Eleanor pit where her uncle worked, Sara thought. Or was it the Beatrice? She was not sure. From up the valley she had seen the two Whitton Grange pits straddling the hillside like grim sentries keeping watch.

  Four men climbed on board and Sara smothered her gasp of horror. They were filthy black. Red-ringed eyes stared out from coal-blackened faces, their lips strangely pink and moving rapidly as they greeted Mr Parker. The bus driver seemed unconcerned when they sat their damp grey trousers down on his seats and continued their conversation. They were smallish men but broad-backed in their dusty jackets, with dirty strips of material around their coal-engrained necks in place of ties.

  ‘Grand day,’ one of them said, offering the driver a cigarette from a battered tin.

  ‘Champion,’ agreed Mr Parker, accepting the gift. He lit up before starting the engine again. ‘Grange were winning two-nil ‘gainst Waterhouses when we went through,’ he reported.

  ‘Bloody great!’ The younger smoker clenched his fist in triumph. ‘We’ll win the Pitmen’s Cup next week.’

  ‘Bet two bob we don’t,’ grunted a stoop-backed older man, aiming a spit out of the open door.

  ‘Five,’ the young man grinned.

  ‘Done!’ They shook on it.

  ‘Half a day’s wages!’ a third man exclaimed in a reedy, wheezing voice. ‘You’re daft, the pair o’ you.’

  Sara stared at their large, dirty, callused hands. She was used to seeing earth-ingrained working hands, but these men looked as if their whole bodies had been rolled in black flour. They smelt of rock and sweat, a musty, mineral smell.

  She was so transfixed by their appearance and their strange talk of tub loading and other mysteries of their craft, that she did not realise the bus had stopped for her.

  ‘South Parade, pet,’ Mr Parker prompted, lifting down her case. Sara eased herself past the miners, hoping her best summer frock of pale blue flowers would not catch their dirt. The young one touched his cap at her ironically, reading the distaste in her face. Sara blushed and climbed hurriedly down the steps.

  They were outside a row of modern semi-detached houses with tiny, neat gardens that faced on to a rough patch of ground that Sara took to be the green. Two skinny dogs with arching backs and pointed snouts were running across it ahead of a bulky youth in a too-tight jacket.

  ‘There’s your cousin, Colin Cummings,’ the driver pointed to the dog owner. ‘Never apart from those whippets, that lad.’ Sara stared at the retreating figure, but did not recognise him as the gangling boy she remembered from their distant holiday in Redcar. ‘Tell your uncle, Parker was askin’ after him - the old bugger!’

  ‘Aye - thanks,’ Sara stuttered in confusion, but returned his friendly smile. The tired engine of the bus revved once more and, with a wave from Mr Parker, roared off towards the dene, carrying its passengers to the Durham road.

  Sara turned nervously and looked along the row of tidy houses, their windows modestly covered in frilly nets against prying eyes. Number sixteen stood before her. The Cummingses lived at number thirteen. She gulped, dismissing the unlucky connotations of a dozen and one. Walking slowly up the street, she spotted the dark blue door of her uncle’s respectable residence, its front garden bedecked in straight rows of yellow pansies, behind them a crop of faded daffodils ruthlessly chopped off at the heads. Sara found her palms sweating and her grip on her case slippery. Her heart beat quicker the nearer she stepped. She tried to think of the good things her mother had told her she would find - piped hot water and an inside toilet and her seven-year-old cousin Marina to befriend. But all she could think of was how hemmed-in the house seemed, how orderly its pocket-sized garden, pinned in the middle of this large sooty sprawling town that the locals called a village.

  Sara told herself to show a bit of Pallister spirit. She would not be over-awed by this noisy place or its confident worldly inhabitants. Raising her small chin and taking a deep breath, Sara flicked open the catch on the blue-painted gate and marched up the path, aware of a downstairs net curtain disturbed out of its correct position. Sara knocked on the front door.

  ***

  Joe Dimarco roared up Hawthorn Street on his motorcycle with Pat Slattery whooping on the pillion at the scattering back-lane footballers. They spluttered to a halt outside number 28, home of their boxing coach, Sam Ritson, and dismounted.

  ‘Afternoon, Mrs Ritson!’ Joe called as he strolled through the backyard, catching a glimpse of Sam’s wife Louie at the scullery sink of the colliery house. ‘Mr Ritson at home?’

  ‘Hello, lads,’ the tall woman with the pasty round face replied, pushing back a wave of fair hair that had escaped its grip. ‘Sam’s in-by,’ she nodded beyond the scullery door, ‘he’s off to a meeting, shortly.’

  ‘How you keeping, Mrs Ritson?’ Joe asked pleasantly, pausing before going further. Louie smiled at the lanky youth with the lively dark eyes and goggles pushed up over spiky black hair. Of all Sam’s ‘boys’ who drifted in and out of their dilapidated home and its smoke-filled kitchen, she liked Joe the chatty Italian best, but tried not to let it show.

  ‘Oh, full of busy, Joe, thank you. How are your family - I hear Domenica’s getting married soon?’

  ‘Not soon enough!’ Joe grinned. ‘That’s all my sister ever talks about - Pasquale Perella and the wedding! Mam and Granny Maria are just as bad. You would think no one had ever got married before.’

  ‘Well, it’s a special time for a lass,’ Louie reproved, wiping her hands on her faded apron and hiding a smirk. ‘Don’t you go spoiling her fun. Hello, Pat,’ she acknowledged the other boy. ‘How’s your mother?’

  ‘Not too grand, Mrs Ritson.’ Joe’s red-haired friend pulled a face. ‘And my sister Minnie’s home again - more hindrance than help.’

  Joe saw Louie sigh with concern that Pat’s sister should have once again left her bad-tempered husband Bomber Bell and gone back to the Slattery home. Pat was the seventh in a family of eleven and Joe had no idea how many relations his friend had, just that he seemed to have far more than his fair share.

  ‘I’m sorry. Tell Minnie I’ll be over to see her next week,’ Louie said with a warning look, bustling them into the kitchen. ‘You’ll have a glass of ginger beer, lads?’

  ‘Aye, that’d be grand, Mrs Ritson,’ Jo
e smiled, stooping slightly to avoid the low doorway.

  He glanced round quickly and saw, with relief, that Louie’s Bible-thumping, white-haired father, Jacob Kirkup, was not occupying his worn armchair by the range. The old man, with his fierce blue eyes and tremulous voice, always made Joe feel he had sprouted devil’s horns and a forked tail in his presence.

  Sam Ritson sat at the kitchen table, brawny-shouldered in his vest, drinking a cup of tea and concentrating hard on a copy of the Daily Herald. He was barely forty, yet his square-jawed face was channelled with age, his dark hair receding in two peaks across his scalp.

  ‘Lads,’ he grunted at their arrival, his dour expression showing no surprise.

  ‘Going down the club this afternoon, Mr Ritson?’ Joe asked, straddling a stool at the table. Since he and Pat had been runny-nosed nine-year-olds they had haunted Sam’s boxing gym, watching him teach the older boys how to fight with discipline and aggression. Then it had been their turn and they had learned how to handle themselves in fist fights in the damp, leaking hut on Daniel Street that passed for a gym and which the club shared with the Pentecostalists.

  ‘Got a lodge meeting,’ Sam shook his head. ‘There’s a lad speaking who’s just been released by Franco’s fascists - fought in the civil war. And there’ll be discussion about this conscription business.’ Sam waded into the subject that was uppermost in his mind. ‘There’ll be a formal protest from the union, of course - people say it makes war more likely - but I’m not so sure Churchill doesn’t have a point this time - bullies need to be stood up to.’

  ‘Churchill!’ Louie scoffed as she entered with two glasses of home-made ginger beer. ‘Sam Ritson. I never thought I’d hear the day when you’d praise him!’

  ‘I’ll never forgive him for the harm he did us in ‘26,’ Sam was defensive. ‘I’d have tipped him in the Thames for helping to break our strike, if I’d got my hands on him then, so I would. But this foreign business is different, Louie. Look at the way the Nazis have persecuted the trade unions - and what do our government do? Bugger all, that’s what!’

  Joe took the proffered glass from Mrs Ritson and exchanged an amused glance with Pat. It had been like this in the Ritson household for as long as they had been coming here, begging Louie’s biscuits and making themselves at home by her fireside, playing cards with her nephew Raymond Kirkup in this cramped musty cottage when it was too wet to kick a football against the wall in the back lane.

  Over the years they had half listened to Sam’s political outbursts against the government and coalowners who had kept him unemployed for most of the decade, and against the fascists in Spain and Germany. Joe and Pat had helped him in door-to-door collections in support of Spanish workers, then Czech workers, Austrian political refugees and German Jews, not because they understood half of what Sam said, but because they admired him for his robust strength and loved him for the unsentimental way he took an interest in lads like them, when everyone else was belting them for getting in the way.

  ‘It could’ve been me - that Spanish prisoner - he was with the International Brigade.’ Sam reverted to his original topic. ‘An unemployed pitman,’ he added pointedly, as Louie refilled his cup.

  ‘Don’t start that again,’ she said wearily.

  Three years ago, as fourteen-year-olds and willing pupils in Sam’s boxing club, Joe and Pat had taken Louie’s side and protested against Sam going to Spain to fight for the Republicans. They had won, but a thwarted Sam had disappeared for a month on a hunger march to London and then stood unsuccessfully in the 1937 elections for the Independent Labour Party. Bad-tempered in defeat and frustrated by his impotence, Sam filled his idle days with political crusades and took out his anger on the boxing bag.

  Louie had once let slip that the coalowners, the Seward-Scotts, would never let Sam work in any of their mines again, after his leadership in the 1926 strike. For years he had been known as Red Sam Ritson, feared even within the union for his radicalism and in the boxing ring for his right-hand punch. Sam was a rebel who had once been imprisoned and Joe, forever in trouble with his law-abiding parents, came close to hero-worshipping him.

  Only once, when Joe was thirteen, had his adoration of Sam Ritson been tarnished; when the Italians bombed their way into Abyssinia. Joe’s Italian parents had sent precious money and jewellery to finance the Italian effort, swelling with pride that their country was now returning to its days of Roman glory, while Sam had fulminated against the butchering of defenceless Africans by fascist thugs. Joe’s loyalty to his family had led him into a bitter argument with his coach, bragging about Mussolini being a modern-day Roman emperor. Sam had battered him relentlessly with evidence of Italian atrocities and Joe, his pride and feelings severely wounded, had withdrawn and stayed away from the club for several months.

  Only when Louie had invited Joe round for tea on her nephew Raymond’s eleventh birthday had they patched up their quarrel in front of a cosy fire in Louie’s homely, threadbare kitchen and Joe had volunteered to deliver leaflets for one of Sam’s endless causes. So Joe knew better than to enter the fray when Sam’s temper was roused.

  ‘Raymond playing footy tomorrow?’ Joe changed the subject.

  ‘Aye,’ Louie nodded, pouring a second cup from the stewed pot and allowing herself to sit for a minute. ‘Boys’ Brigade. He’s out practising now. Either of you playing for the Catholics?’

  ‘Not picked,’ said Pat.

  ‘I’ll be working,’ Joe answered, slurping at the pop.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be out now selling that ice-cream of yours on a sunny afternoon like this?’ Louie asked suspiciously.

  ‘I am,’ Joe laughed, unconcerned. ‘Pat’s helped me fix up a drum on the motorbike - like a sidecar. We’re on our way to the park for a bit of business.’

  ‘To watch football, more likely!’ Louie commented with a wry smile.

  ‘I thought you were going to the club?’ Sam stood up and pulled on his shirt. He was a head smaller than Joe, but his muscled body was alert and powerful. The boys stood up too.

  ‘Later,’ Joe said, finishing off his drink in a gulp. ‘If my slave-driving father ever gives me a minute off.’

  Louie snorted. ‘Mr Dimarco’s one of the kindest men I’ve met - and I don’t know how he puts up with you racing around on that motor machine all day long. You live the life of royalty.’

  Joe laughed, enjoying her teasing disapproval.

  ‘Haway, Joe, let’s go and put Raymond off his practising.’ Pat pulled at his arm. ‘Ta for the drink, Mrs Ritson.’

  ‘Off you go and keep out of trouble.’ Louie waved them out of her kitchen.

  ‘Ta-ra, Mrs Ritson,’ Joe smiled. ‘Mr Ritson.’

  ‘I’ll come out with you,’ Sam said, putting on his jacket. ‘Be back for tea, pet,’ he told his wife and led the boys into the yard, his mind already on the afternoon’s agenda.

  ‘Want a lift, Mr Ritson?’ Joe asked. ‘Pat can walk.’ Pat stifled a protest.

  ‘Nowt wrong with my feet, is there?’ Sam answered with a grunt, unimpressed by Joe’s ancient but cherished Triumph. ‘You lads should do more walking - I used to walk ten miles a day as well as a hard day’s graft before they closed the Cathedral pit by Ushaw.’ They had heard him say so dozens of times before, but Joe could not remember ever seeing Sam dirty from pit work like old Jacob Kirkup or Pat’s elder brothers. Pat scrambled back on to the bike with relief.

  ‘I’ll be down the club Monday. Thinking of putting on a fight for the Carnival, if you’re interested?’

  ‘Aye!’ the boys answered together. Joe pulled down his goggles and started up the noisy machine. He revved it for a moment in front of an admiring crowd of curious children, enjoying the attention, and then swerved around, scattering them like startled chickens. He picked up speed down the bumpy terraced street and rode off in search of excitement and Olive Brown, last year’s Carnival Queen.

  Chapter Four

  Sara’s knock on the freshly painted door of 13 Sou
th Parade was answered at once by a small girl with plaited brown hair and a quizzical frown. She stood defensively on the sanded doorstep and stared hard with close-set blue eyes.

  ‘Are you Sara?’ she demanded suspiciously.

  ‘Aye,’ Sara smiled, although nervousness tugged at her stomach. ‘And you must be cousin Marina?’

  The girl continued to appraise her with shrewd eyes. ‘I’ll get Mam,’ she said at last and dosed the door. Sara hardly had time to recover from this rebuff when the door opened again and Aunt Ida appeared. She was smaller than Sara had remembered, but the crinkly brown hair and pale blue eyes set close to the bridge of her nose were unmistakably Aunt Ida’s.

  ‘Come in, Sara,’ she said hastily, but without reproving her daughter for her rudeness. ‘You must be tired after your journey. It’s too hot out there for my liking. Is that all the luggage you have?’ Her florid face showed surprise. ‘Never mind, come away. Colin!’ She turned and called timidly over her shoulder, ‘Come and help Sara with her case.’

  Sara did not like to say she had seen Colin escaping across the green just moments before. ‘You’ll be sharing a room with Marina and I’m sure you’ll get on like a house on fire. Colin!’

  Sara nodded, but caught sight of her young cousin’s resentful face peering round her mother’s crisp pink-and-yellow patterned frock.

  ‘That boy’s never around when he’s needed - always under my feet when he’s not,’ she fussed.

  ‘I can carry it,’ Sara insisted, looking around with interest.

  The small hallway was decorated in green and orange triangles and the gleaming, polished floor was covered in a strip of carpet with orange and brown swirls that snaked away up the steep staircase ahead of them. A small table displayed a large black telephone and a note pad beside it, otherwise the floor was empty. Everything seemed to have taken to the walls, Sara thought in astonishment. They were covered in embroidered pictures and china ducks in flight, while the high dado rail was crowded with jugs in the shape of fat-faced men and jolly monks jostling for space. Catching sight of herself in a round, gilded mirror Sara was dismayed to see her pink face perspiring and her fair hair trailing loose under her beret.