Free Another part of the wood by Beryl Bainbridge Page A

mine owners for their employees,
at the Herbert Arms. He could smell potatoes and gravy, and he
was aware of an intense hunger. He could hear the voice of the boss come up from Liverpool in his grand expensive car, the
car with the green hood, asking how he was. He struggled to touch the brim of his cap, and his wife was telling him he’d made
a fool of himself as usual, or was it his mother? ‘Drunk you are, Willie,’ she said, but how was a man to resist free drink,
dressed in his Sunday suit, brown with a white stripe in it, and the boss making a little speech, standing there on the stone-flagged
floor in a pair of plus fours the colour of tobacco, handing them all a cigar and telling them the directors were very pleased
with the work done. They dug barytes out of the ground and somewhere along the line it got put into gallons of paint – God
knows what it did, though no doubt it made someone a heap of old money. He didn’t doubt that. You didn’t give close on forty
men a hot-pot dinner and as much beer as they could drink, not to mention the cigars and that damn big car with the headlamps
shining, unless there was money in it somewhere. The boss only ever went into the mine once and that was to take his little
daughter down, and she put on a white helmet on her head with a candle at the front and all her hair falling down about her
shoulders. The little girl used to come to hot-pot do’s as well, and each year she got a little taller and her hair a little
shorter. He could still hear the rattling of the stall chains as the cows shifted about in the shed in the pub yard. He could
almost hear the sound of the men pissing against the wall and see the rivulets of urine running out across the yard. ‘Disgusting,’
the other folk in the pub called it, but who gave a damn after all that drink, and they wouldn’t let them upstairs to use
the lav. Couldn’t blame them for that. Anyway, the stairs in the pub were waxed like glass, weren’t they? There’d have been
nothing but broken legs and damaged skulls. There were quite a few breakages as it was. Mugs and the like and one or two plates
falling on to the stone floor and old Davis shouting out to be careful of that case of stuffed birds in the corner – a damn
big glass case full of birds, like none you ever saw in your life. Coloured like beetles they were, scarlet and blue
and bottle-green, all perched on a bit of tree. ‘Mind them birds,’ Davis would shout. ‘Just you be careful of them birds.’
Course he had a thing about birds – not live ones at all, but stuffed birds and painted birds on plates. Old Davis had a job
to get them out of the pub. Some of them would go right through to the back into the old kitchen and climb up the steps to
the loft to sleep the drink off, sleeping up there in the straw with the dog – nice little bitch, that dog – with the sides
of bacon hanging up on the beams to remind you flesh was mortal. They were grand times. The men worked hard enough, God only
knows, and they did have lonely lives. There seemed one long leap of loneliness from the time they were lads to the nights
of the hot-pot suppers. Most of them had been boys in the same school, such as it was – with church twice on Sunday, fishing
down at the river, a bit of football in the winter, a couple of outings to Shrewsbury – and then it was all over, and they
all went away from each other into houses in the village and took wives and got lads of their own. Then it was as if they’d
never been boys at all. Responsible they all were, men they all were, till hot-pot supper night. Everything was different
those nights, somehow. There was the church in the daytime you hardly even noticed, grown big as a cathedral with a graveyard
like a battlefield, and the ivy climbing up the side of Albert Price’s house and Albert at the window with his shotgun telling
them all to go to the devil. All the lads stumbling through the churchyard, shouting out to each other like