Never Such Innocence Again

Chapter 1-2

Jack was a small compact man, as strong and wiry as a bull terrier, and he seemed lost in the big four-poster bed, like a baby curled up in the corner of a cot. He was snoring lightly and, as she looked down on him, Mary felt a surge of affection for him run through her like static electricity. He had been a good man to her, better than she deserved, a good husband and provider who had been there for her when she had needed someone—desperately needed someone.

Life with Jack had been hard, would remain hard, there was no denying that, but the lot of any miner’s wife was hard, but when he had a good cavil, a good thick seam to work at; money was adequate, he didn't beat her as some men beat their wives, and he was not much taken for the drink. A pint or two at the 'Green Tree' to wash down the dust, but that was all, and who would deny him that?

Reaching over, she shook him by the shoulder. ‘Jack. Jack. It’s time.’

‘Uhhh? What?’

‘Time, Jack. Time!’

She could see him struggling to wake, coming up through the layers of sleep, coming up from the depths as if coming up from underground in the mine cages. He yawned and stretched and coughed and sneezed and farted, all at the same time, and then rubbed at his eyes before swinging out his legs from under the covers and sitting up straight.

‘Aye, right then Mary. Be with you in a minute,’ he said as he stretched again. ‘You get us me breakfast on, though I doubt you've a deal left.’

‘Bread. There’s always bread, you know that. And I’ve still got a bitty bacon rind and fat. I can fry it up with your bread. And you've got jam for your bait.’

‘That'll do grand, Mary. And choose us the book, will you?’

‘Owt special, pet? I'll put it by your plate?’

‘Nay, you choose. Right, best be getting on I suppose, else Billy Bedlam will be here, and the day has yet to come when I'm still in my bed when Billy comes by.’

Even as he spoke, they could hear a cry at the head of the street, ‘LAD AWAAAY. UP. UP. LAD AWAAAY. GET UUUP, GET UUUP. UP, UP,’ as Billy Belledame, better known as Billy Bedlam, the caller, came down to rouse those men on early shift.

Mary put on the bacon rind and bread to fry together, glad she had been able to eke out that last piece of flitch. The miners had been on strike, coming out in sympathy with the building workers, and although the Union had sent a delegate to the Institute to explain it to the men, and Jack had tried to explain it to her, Mary could not understand, refused to understand, why she should have to put her family on short measures out of sympathy for the building workers. Times were hard enough when Jack and the elder boys were working, let alone when they were on strike.

Two weeks they had been out and even now they had gone back, had been back for 10 day,s there was no money in the house. They would still not get paid until Saturday, which meant four weeks without a penny coming in. And for what? Going on strike to improve your own lot, that she could understand, striking to get a better rate for the coal produced, since the men at the face were paid 'by the weight of mineral gotten' as the Act put it, that she could understand, but to strike, to make her children go hungry merely to help some unknown building workers in another part of the country? That she could not accept, and it still made her angry to think about it.

She poured a big mug of tea, set his fried bread and bacon on a plate, leaving it by the hob to keep warm, and crossed over to the wooden bookshelf on the opposite wall. Jack liked to read for 10 -15 minutes before going to work. ‘Sets me at ease,' he had told her. 'Gives me something to think about, some'at to mull over in my mind when I'm at the face. Why, you'd go daft else, nothing to take your head up with, nothing to think on except the hewing.'

He had a full set of Dickens, green morocco leather-bound, gold-embossed, that he had found in a bookseller in Durham. They had not been new when he had bought them, years and years ago, not even secondhand, third- or fourth-hand maybe, but they were his pride and the day would not go past that he did not read from them. He liked for Mary to pick a volume at random and lay it by his place and he would open it at any page and read for a while.

Mary did not think he had ever read a book the whole way through, but that did not matter to him. The three or four pages he read before his shift would last him the whole day as he turned over the phrases and characters in his head; in his mind’s eye he could see Little Nell or Mr Bumble the Beadle, Pickwick or Micawber, Jacob Marley, Wackford Squeers, or Bill Sykes, and with them in his mind to keep him company, the hours underground hacking at the coalface soon sped past.

Mary didn't even look at the titles as she reached up and took the first book that came to hand and laid by his place, next to his mug of tea.

Jack came back from the privy, his braces dangling from his waist, washed his hands and splashed water into his face, and sat down as Mary laid his breakfast in front of him. He opened the book where it would and began to read, tracing the words with the forefinger of his left hand, mug of tea held by the other, munching his bread to the rhythm of his reading.

‘Is there more tea, Mary?’ he asked shortly.

As she bent over to fill his mug, the close written words of the pages seemed to leap out at her, and she almost dropped the tea pot in shock. ‘Something will come of this,' she read. 'I hope it may'nt be human gore.' And the horrible premonitions she had earlier, swept over her once more, like a tidal wave of ice, shudders of panic clattering at her heart.

‘Which, which one is that, Jack?’

He put his finger in the pages to mark his place and folded the book over to read the spine. ‘Barnaby Rudge. Why, you want to read it? Here, take it now, time I was off, anyhow.’

‘No, I just wondered, that’s all.’ She hesitated, wanting to hold him tight to her, to feel his strength and for him to tell her she was being foolish, but she could not. ‘Take care Jack,’ was all she could say as she walked with him to the back gate. No miner’s wife would ever let her man go without seeing him off, no miner’s mother would ever fail to see her sons to the gate, as the possibility that it might be the last time they ever saw them was all too real.

Mary, the black wings of her premonition hovering over her like a monstrous bat, tried to blink away her tears; she could not let Jack see her like this, she could not disgrace him front of his workmates, and especially she could not disgrace him in front of Nellie Spearman, who lived next door. She had a nose for gossip like a rabid bloodhound and would be certain to make something out of the sight of Mary crying at the gate. What Nellie didn't know, she would guess at, well, invent would be a better word and in next to no time, all manner of stories would by flying round the village, sped on their way and nourished by the spite of Nellie’s vindictive tongue.

‘Morning Nellie, morning Charlie,’ she managed to say with a smile, the words like choking feathers in her throat. ‘Ta-ra then pet,’ she said to Jack, laying her hand on his arm, desperate for a (final?) touch on him.

‘Aye, be seeing thee, lass. And tell Isaac and Saul, if I hear they’ve been in trouble again, they'll be feeling me belt to their arses. Soonest they get working down the pit, the better, where I can keep an eye on 'em, the young buggers … they'll have no time for their tricks then.’

Jack pulled on his flat cap, tugged at the peak to settle it squarely on his head, and fell into step with Jim Comby and Charlie Spearman, the sound of their hob-nailed boots ringing off the cobbles and echoing around the morning damp walls of the back passage.

Mary watched him for as long as she could without inciting comment from Nellie Spearman and then hurried back indoors to kneel by the side of the bed, praying for Jack to be kept safe, unable to rid herself of the hard knot of tension that weighed on her stomach and heart like a ball of iron.

She was so tired that not even the hard clogging weight of apprehension could stop her from nodding off and as she dozed in her chair, waiting for Edgar to come in from night shift, something Billy Bedlam had said a few days ago coming to mind. Billy had claimed that war was coming, said he could smell war in the air. He had said it even before that Grand Duke Ferdinand had been assassinated on June 28th, nearly two weeks ago, shot in some place that nobody had ever heard of, somewhere across the other side of Europe, but then everyone knew that Billy was touched, had been for years.

Mary hoped that it would not come to a war. She had a brother, Norman Blackett, an infantryman in the Royal Durham Regiment. She could hardly remember Norman, Mary was seven years old when he had run away from home at the age of 13, choosing, like so many boys, the apparent glamour of the Army to the rigours and danger of life underground. Even when he was home on leave, she barely saw him.

Even though he lived a mere 16 miles away, at Mangdon Heath on the other side of Durham with his wife Olive when not in Barracks, she doubted if she would recognise him if he were to walk through the door that very minute. Even so, blood was blood, thicker than water and war could mean he might have to go and fight, and so she added a little prayer for Norman as well.

But the idea of a war involving England was nonsense anyway. Who on earth cared what happened to some Grand Duke or other? It made no sense, no sense at all, to say that war would reach England, even if a few Serbs and Austrians and Hungarians did get to fighting in the Balkans or Bosnia, or wherever. How could that possibly affect us?

No, Billy Bedlam was touched and that was the end of it.

Billy Bedlam’s name was obviously a corruption of his surname, Belledame, (which he claimed was French and swore that his ancestors were aristocrats fleeing from the French Revolution and the guillotine, but why the offspring of French aristocracy came to be Durham miners was something Billy had never been able to satisfactorily explain). Some said he was called Bedlam because of the noise he made when calling the shifts, others said it was because he belonged in Bedlam, an asylum for the mentally insane (Bedlam, in itself, a corruption of Bethlehem).

Whatever the case, no-one disputed that Billy had never been the same since there had been a collapse of the north-east boards back in 1894. Billy had been working as a putter then, moving full and empty tubs up and down the roadways of the mine. Hearing the rumbles and the screams as the tunnels began collapsing behind him, he had scrambled headfirst into a small side passage, and screamed and screamed in helpless terror as the roof caved in around him, entombing him as the coal dust wrapped around his face, clogging up his eyes and nose and throat. He thought he would die of suffocation and screamed again, wishing he had not been so stupid as to dive into the passage; at least, if he had been crushed, it would have been quick and painless, not this, not to be slowly suffocated in coal dust as his air ran out.

The collapse could not have been total, or else there was a bigger air pocket than he realised because Billy Belledame was dug out alive 27 hours later, almost crazed with thirst, his throat a raw mass of emery-papered flesh from screaming and the dust.

He did not speak for nearly a month, and then only in a whisper. His hair had turned as white as the snow on the high valley sides in January, and when he walked in through his door, his wife thought him a ghost and screamed and fainted. He never went underground again, could not even bear to go near the steel stairway that led to the cages at the pit head.

It was thought that Billy’s vocal cords had been ruined forever and it had been Abel Poskit’s perverted idea of a joke to suggest to the Under Manager that Billy be given a job as caller.

When he heard of this, Billy had just smiled, taken a deep breath and yelled out, ‘You bugger you, Abel Poskit,’ in a voice fit to wake the dead. He grinned again and said simply, ‘I knew the bugger were there somewhere, just didn't know where to find him.’

Billy had been a caller ever since, but even though he'd found his voice again, no-one doubted but that he'd left his wits in the dust underground, for who but a fool can claim to smell war in the air?