VI
I
had
made inquiries and one Saturday night I heard that d**k Belcher played in a Pitch and Toss school over Bescot way on Sunday mornings. The following day I put on my best suit and went out there. It is rolling country, tall green grass, and then pit mounds. You can see the hill at Wednesbury with the big black church on it and the high roofed foundry at Old Park. All round it are chimney stacks and slag-heaps. It is a wild place at night time with the furnace glow hanging over it, and almost as wild on a bleak Sunday morning with the harsh wind sweeping across it. Yet it is full of hollows where a man might crouch away from the weather and it was in one of these hollows that a group of men were crouched, playing Pitch and Toss.
There were six of them, raw-boned labourers, Scots
