Never Such Innocence Again

Chapter 3

THREE

Gnawed at his vitals like a rat at a granary door.

Just as Mary nodded off again in her rocking chair, hoping to catch a few minutes quiet nap, the back gate clattered on its hinges and the weary scrape of hob-nailed boots echoed across the yard and splintered the sharp silence of her sleep like a broken mirror.

‘Morning Mam’, Edgar Garforth said as he clumped in from night shift and hung up his cap on the back of the door. ‘Is me bath ready?’ he asked and turned away to unlace his boots, thinking how tired she looked, but then she always looked tired, and he gave no further thought just how drawn and exhausted Mary really was.

‘It'll not be but a minute, pet. Bring us in the tub. Some water’s already hot and I'll put some more on an' all.’

Wearily, she dragged herself up, holding her aching back, her knees creaking in protest, but glad of something to do to take her black-cloaked mind off her worry about Jack.

Edgar brought in the tin bath from the backyard, where it had been hanging up on a nail on the side wall by the privy and set it in front of the fire. Mary poured the hot water from the pans on the stove and set more pans of water on the stove to heat up. When the bath was ready, she draped blankets over cords hanging from the ceiling to screen Edgar off as he bathed.

After he had bathed, and finished his breakfast, Edgar slowly climbed up the steep narrow stairs to the front bedroom. He kicked the twins, Isaac and Saul, out of the double bed; they would have to get up soon for school anyway. Harold was lying diagonally across most of the bed and Edgar unceremoniously pushed him over to make room.

‘Watch what tha's bloody doing, buggerlugs, else tha'll get a clip round your ear'ole,’ Harold grumbled, still half asleep, supposing that it was either Isaac or Saul who had shoved him.

‘Who're thee calling buggerlugs?’

‘Oh, it’s thee, is it Edgar? Still, who does tha think you’re pushing?’

‘Get yourself over, Harold. Man comes in from his shift, he wants to get some kip, not bugger about with thee trying to find room.’

‘You’ve got stacks of room, man,’ Harold grumbled in a whiney voice, but he moved over anyway as Edgar, in clean long johns and vest, climbed into the bed, ancient springs creaking in protest, and settled down to sleep on the lumpy horsehair mattress.

Harold would soon be up in any case, before he went on his shift. He liked to take his rod and go down to the river, hoping to catch a trout or two for his supper before the sun got too high and the fish stopped feeding.

Even though tired after his long shift down the mine, sleep would not come to Edgar; he tossed and turned and, eventually, with a grunted curse, Harold got up and pulled on his trousers and shirt and clumped downstairs, banging the bedroom door loudly as he did so.

‘Bastard,’ Edger hissed through his teeth after him, and turned over again to try to find a more comfortable lie.

Edgar still could not get to sleep, his mind seemed incapable of accepting the fact that his body was tired, and no matter how much he tossed and turned in the bed, it remained uncomfortably lumpy. He plumped out his pillows again and wrapped one around his head but the hard morning light filtering through the tiny dormer window still seemed blinding and every tiny noise took on deafening proportions.

He kicked off most of the covers and lay with only the top sheet over him, but that made no difference. Despite eyes heavy with fatigue, and the solid ache in his back and shoulders from pushing loaded tubs of coal up and down the underground roads, sleep still refused to come; it hovered shyly around the outer limits of his consciousness, like a reluctant dance partner.

He turned over again, bouncing down hard into the mattress, and heard the clatter of the headboard rattling against the wall. 'Bloody shitting hell,' he mumbled to himself angrily, his frustration only adding to his unsettled mental state, as his brain, as if super-charged, fizzled and popped like soda water bubbling over the rim of a shaken-up bottle.

Edgar Garforth was just 18 years old; his 18th birthday had been a month or so ago, in May, but even so he had been down the mines for more than four years and now worked as a 'putter' with George Hindle, whose son, William, was engaged to Mary Margaret.

But until a place became available on the coalface as a hewer, that was as far as he could go, and a place only became available through death or retirement and, even then, it might not go to Edgar. Many other men had been down the mine longer and had far stronger claims to any hewers’ job coming free. Edgar could be working as a putter for 20 years or more before getting onto the top paid job. He might never get to be hewer. Jim Comby, his Dad’s putter, was nigh on 45 years old and would likely now never get to be hewer.

'Damn it,' he thought. 'There’s got to be more to life than pushing a bloody tub of coal up and down the mine for the next forty sodding years.' He desperately wanted more than that from life but had no idea how this might be achieved, or even what it was he wanted to achieve. He simply knew, deep inside, that life was cheating him, that there had to more to man’s existence than that. Frustration gnawed at his vitals like a rat at a granary door and the more he thought about it the worse it became.

But things were stirring in the air—he could feel it—there was an almost intangible sense of excitement, a crackling zest, like far off lightning … excited talk of war … a sense that after what might come, things would never be the same again and Edgar was determined to be part of that change.

Whatever it was.

Eventually, as it had to, the fatigue of hard physical labour took over and Edgar drifted off to sleep, stretching out fully in the luxury of for once having the bed to himself.