Free The Valley by Richard Benson Page A

and take him out, steering and supporting him, as she did in Shirebrook.
    The night before the wedding, she takes her father outside for a short walk. As they pause by the chapel before heading back, he opens his mouth to speak, but cannot think what to say. In the darkness he lays a hand on her forearm.
    ‘Are you sure about this, love?’ he says.
    ‘I think so.’
    ‘Do you only think so? Because you can still not marry him and stay with us, you know.’
    ‘No,’ she says, looking at him, ‘I’m sure.’
    Walter nods without speaking, his breathing is uneven. ‘He’ll be a trial for you. He might be a good lad underneath, Winnie, but he’ll be a trial for you. Tha’ll have to be strong tha knows. Tha’ll have to master him.’
    She says nothing and, feeling tears welling up in her, looks down. She senses that he is right, but she does not know how to be strong with a man, let alone master one.
    *
    The wedding party is small, just the Hollingworth and Parkin families, Winnie’s friend Mabel and a mate of Harry’s called Lanc. After the signing and the rice-throwing at Doncaster, they cram themselves into two cars and ride back to the Parkins’ where Annie and her daughters have prepared a wedding breakfast of cold roast chicken, a boiled ham, salad and hard-boiled eggs. Lanc, a tall, gangly miner from Lancashire, is instructed by Millie, eight months pregnant but organising everyone nevertheless, to fetch a crate of beer. As they eat and drink, Harry takes two spoons and taps out jazz beats on the crockery, occasionally crooning lines from songs, and Millie joins in.
    After an hour of awkward knee-plate eating, the two of them stand up before the range and begin singing whole songs. The younger guests sing along and Harry cajoles Annie (‘Come on, Nance, gi’e us a tune as t’ mother of t’ bride!’) into a duet of ‘ You Made Me Love You’ .
    At the end of the afternoon Millie, flushed and enormous, tops everyone with a solo performance of ‘ Till We Meet Again’ , and then Winnie and Harry kiss and shake hands with their guests, and walk together to the house where they have taken lodgings. Their rooms are in a dark, damp three-bedroom terraced house in Goldthorpe owned by Mr and Mrs Skelling, a couple in their fifties. Short of money, the Skellings have let out their front room and a spare bedroom, leaving themselves with three rooms to live in. Embarrassed by her poverty, Mrs Skelling speaks to Winnie and Harry with a spite that reminds them of their inferior status. When the newly-weds arrive, she gives them no congratulations, speaking only to remind them of some house rules, and to warn Winnie not to make a row when they go upstairs.
    Even on her wedding night Winnie is losing out to music. Harry has bought, by mail order, a self-assembly crystal set so they can hear some tunes. He sits on the lumpy horsehair sofa with the circuit diagram laid out on the thin rug, trying to connect wires and junctions, and keeps telling his new bride that he’ll soon be done. At nine o’clock he goes to get help from Lanc, who lives in the next street down and has made crystal sets before. An hour and a half later, Winnie climbs into the iron bed on her own and listens as her husband brings into the gas-lit sitting room downstairs strange electronic noises, snatches of American music, and foreign voices from far, far away in the night.
    *
    Marriage is uneven, a change for the women who leave work, but for some men little more than the swapping of housekeepers. The unevenness is clear to Winnie on the first Monday of their married life. Harry usually works early or day shifts (six in the morning to two in the afternoon), avoiding ‘afters’ (two until 10 p.m.) and nights (ten until 6 a.m.) so that he is free in the evenings to perform in the clubs or go to the pub. He and Winnie are woken for the day shift by the knocker-upper, a man crippled in a mining accident who makes his living scratching the morning