What I Know I Cannot Say Read online

  My mother’s sister always seemed red and wet. She wore a pinafore each and every day as she scurried about, washing and boiling and cleaning what could never, what with mud and manure and black pats from the pit, along with its dirt, fetched in with the pit clothes, ever really be kept clean, though she tried. In the summer, or in the months of the lock-out after the general strike of 1926, I would take off into the fern-covered mountain slopes above the smallholding. Here was a rich loamy soil beneath the swathes of ferns which grew taller than a boy and spread unheeded in waving seas of fronds to hide me from sight. Green and upright as spears in summer, bronze and brittle when autumn came before winter laid them flat as bracken. But, again, though I can feel all that within me, I did not see it like that then; and I think it is only the way I came to draw and paint which makes me see it, now, in this way. It is imprinted in me, I suppose.

  We had lived, when I first became an add-on as a part of the Holcombe family, down in the valley, in a three-up three-down mid-terraced house on the flat, in a street that curled away like a distended entrail from the pit where Bob worked and where we three boys would, in turn, follow him one day. After the three-month strike and shut-down for part-time working in 1921, Bob had had a bump underground. A roof-fall trapped him under its stone and shattered his left leg, so that he never walked without a limp after that. I think it broke him in other ways, too. And, for sure, after convalescence it was why, Bob being unable to resume work as a collier and not able to afford the rent, we moved out of the terraced house into the old quarry workshop buildings. He did his best to make a home of them, but it was never enough to stop the cold and the damp, and making a smallholding out of the yard and field only made it, for human living, worse. But before that, when we were still living amongst other people and I was not yet five, he bought me a flat tin of coloured pencils, of good quality I think, and a large pad of plain white paper. I had been ill that winter and a chesty cough that wracked my body had lingered on. He placed me on a chest in front of a back bedroom window that looked out onto the mountains and helped me choose the colours – sienna brown, forest green, bright vermilion, burnt orange, lemon yellow, dark and light blues, a matte black – that might help my marks on the paper scratch out a semblance of what I saw. He must have bought the paper and pencils with his meagre wages, or perhaps he had taken a few shillings from the allowance by postal order which came for me, I later learned, every month until I started work proper at fourteen. I whittled those first pencils down to a stump, found black-leads to replace them and some lined blue notepaper to work with, and always, after that, carried paper and pens or pencils with me. I think they became my voice. I had nobody who was my own age around me. Yes, at school, but I was no longer from the streets then, and no one came to the smallholding. What was below us seemed faint, grew distant, noises-off you might say, away from the whirr and grind of the pit’s winding gear and the hollow, bronchial rasp of the colliery hooter. I was, in this sense, orphaned twice. Dogs were my company. We had mongrels, three or four at any one time, and none too friendly, though they tolerated me as I sought them out behind the corrugated zinc shed where Bob kept his tools and a few scrawny chickens who flapped and pecked to keep the dogs at bay and wary of them. So I was there, grudged and accepted, as an arrangement reached between sisters, though never explained to me since I was only the object of what had been settled between them.

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  HOW OLD WERE YOU WHEN YOU LEFT SCHOOL, STARTED WORK?

  Did I ever leave school? Or, to put it the other way, how could I leave something to which I did not go? Except when forced. By authorities, though only intermittently, since they could scarcely afford the regular services of any “whippereen” to chase down such as me. By my aunty, I suppose, if she was pushed to do so. By teachers who may have recorded and reported any absences and marked me out, correctly enough, as sullen or wilful or difficult. I was certainly, whenever I went, silent. It was all happening outside whatever bubble of self-containment I had made for myself, and the learning was as rote as it was rudimentary, with hard hands striking out at will.

  We were all poor, and I looked the poorest of all, from hand-me-down short trousers and pullovers with holes at elbow and sleeve to the cardboard in my shoe bottoms. Not, as I say, that I was alone in this, nor in the cramp and pain of hunger, in the general misery of those years. We were all held in the waiting room which was school until we could be discharged, basically equipped, into the common fate of our wretched lives. And, you know, I am sure that what passes here for the rhetorical flourish of an old man looking back is, and I assert it again, what we knew for ourselves to be the truth, even then, and even if we would not have known how to say it for what it was.

  As for how old was I when I left, well – not thirteen, for sure, and still in the so-called Higher Elementary. I could read, though we had no books on the smallholding, and I could do my numbers, which is to say, work out how we never had enough pennies to turn them into shillings or silver to magic it into crinkly paper. One day, it would have been the summer, I just stopped going to school altogether and no one questioned it, and whatever went on in that red-brick and grey quarried-stone pen after that went on without me. Besides, by that time I had already been regularly out on the cart, sometimes day by day, with Bob, and had been so before the 1926 lock-out when everything that was bad for us all became worse.

  Bob Holcombe did not work in the pits again after his accident. Not underground anyway. He did some work on the surface. Moving drams about. Stacking timber. Tidying up the debris, the mess the pit shafts spew up. His injury, and I suspect the after-effect of the war, tested even his sinewy strength. I remember him digging in his allotment, pulling up potatoes and root vegetables to feed us. He would hang his old suit jacket on a post before he started to dig, but always kept a black waistcoat on, his shirt sleeves rolled up to the elbow, his hob-nailed, ankle-high boots caked in mud as he twisted and lifted the spade in that sodden soil. He wore a flat, dark cap on his head, whatever the weather. If I was watching he would grin and whistle, and pretend to tap dance on the earth until I laughed. I never called him “Uncle”, only Bob. And I was “Davy” to him. Somehow when the horses were sent up from pit bottom – once a year, to feel the air on their hides, to blink, half-blind in the light, to rummage in the grass – he acquired one that had no pit work left in him. It was mangy looking, bare in places, and skittish. Bob found a cart, or rather, the plank-bed of one, and made shafts and a plank seat and greased the iron rims over the wooden spoked wheels. He sold a few things. He pawned his watch and Aunty Rose’s so-called jewellery. Not her wedding ring. He bought bits and pieces for what he called his “Business”. He contracted out to a small mineral water maker in the town. He harnessed the horse – it never had a name – to the shaft and he put me on the seat beside him, for his surly sons showed no interest, and a few days a week we would set out together on what he grandly called “his rounds”. Like most things in my life, this, too, would end abruptly.

  When we had first started, Bob and me, we had been up before dawn, even before the twins needed to get up to work – when there was work, that is – and Bob would rake the fire, coax some life into its ashes, with me half-awake, a slice of stale bread slathered in flecked grey dripping in one hand and a chipped white mug of weak tea in the other. But it was hot and sweet. We sipped from it alternately. Then, outside in the half-light, with the street gas lamps fuzzy and ochre yellow in the valley below, he would lift me up on to the seat. He would already have harnessed the horse between the shafts; and with the reins hanging loose from Bob’s hands across the horse’s scabby back, he would click and clack his tongue to move it out of the yard onto the mountain path that led to a metalled side road, a leftover from quarrying days, which took us steeply down to the main road which ran from top to bottom of our valley, hemmed in on both sides by the snaking, tumbledown terraces which fell one on the other like dominoes laid out by a drunken hand. We would move on
the main road at a brisk pace. Of course, there were no cars to speak of in those days, just a few horse-and-carts like ours and an infrequent bus, usually empty at that time. Every Friday we would travel five miles down to the mouth of the valley to the railway halt where passengers needed to change trains and where the goods train from England would stop on its way to Newport, a town we never visited. By prior arrangement, Bob would have four wooden boxes of fish thrown down to him onto the platform. The rest of our day would be spent riding up and down the perpendicular streets of our part of the valley to sell the fish. It felt to me a special thing to be doing, splintering open the boxes marked “Grimsby” or “Lowestoft” and levering off the lids to see the fish, still silvery and blue on their beds of packed and crushed ice, and feeling their cold, dead weight in the hand. Bob would fillet most of them, put the fish heads in a burlap sack to keep for the pigs, and leave a few fish whole. Hake was a favourite of the colliers’ wives. And there was usually a cheaper box full of sardines, big ones, to sell whole. He would save some of these to fry for us as a tea-time treat at the day’s end. Bob had open crates of pop on the cart to sell as well. The bottles would be bought and returned on a weekly basis. Those colours, made up with God knows what, would shine when the sun came up, and the light was filtered through their gassy liquid. Raspberryade was more pink than red, and Cherryade had a deep, glossy tint to it. There was white Lemonade and a bilious green Limeade, a syrup-of-figs brown Dandelion and Burdock, and a strangely glaucous, almost opaque, vanilla-flavoured Cream American Soda that was thought to speak for the good taste and refinement of those who bought it.

  These bottles, from this local firm, did not have the more widely used elsewhere flip-up metal attachments whose rubber seals and china tops served to keep the pop stoppered in. Those who favoured this local brand preferred the heavy rubberised screw tops which let out the hiss of the fizz inside the bottle when you turned them between thumb and finger. I would knock on doors. Take the orders. Run back to the cart waiting in the middle of the street. Stand at Bob’s side as he prepared the orders. And, with a square leather bag of coins strapped around my neck and hanging low to my waist, I would scamper to deliver the pop. I cannot describe the happiness we felt when we did all this, together. I cannot, of course, because it only resides, inert, in my memory. Saying it is not it at all. These details will not, I’m sure, be what you want me to say; these moments that surface indiscriminately, yet selected, too, because they are – have been left – in my head, when so much else, more important things, have gone. So why do I know, still, that exact sensation of holding the wet fish, slippery and glutinous, their scales flaking off but grippy, clingy amongst the melted ice in the bottom of their wooden boxes? The way they so quickly soaked their dank odour of seawater and death into the newspapers. The newspapers I had collected to scissor into squares the night before. Headlines, newsprint, those grainy news photos, all blurred and softened back into pulp.

  When we were home, in front of a fire banked up all day with small coal, I would sit at Bob’s feet to unpick from the backs of his hands and out of the cuticles of his fingernails the fish scales that had come to cover him when he slit open the fish to gut and fillet them. I would unglue a fantail of sticky, transparent platelets, papery souvenirs of a now useless armoury. The business enterprise such as it was could only survive in the reasonably good times. Our expeditions ended with the shrinkage of everything in the wake of the stoppages: the nine days of the general strike and the six months of the miners’ lockout, in 1926. The pennies which had once been paid out for the small delights of fish and pop had dried up. No more fish came and, in the valley, soup kitchens flavoured their vats of hot water with diced vegetables and the bubbling scum from the fat of cheap cuts of neck and belly and offal which drifted in white skeins on the surface.

  Our own pigs were killed, one by one. Bob did it himself. The chickens were long gone. I cannot tell you, other than by just stating it, how hunger gnawed at us, as if it was itself eating us to feed itself. Bob lay in bed most of the time. The twins brought home what they could, food or coal, scavenged from the town, or a sheep taken from a mountain farm at night and, once shorn, boiled in an old tin bath. They had lost the strength, or maybe the will, to bother me. I do not know how we lived through that autumn into the winter, though in the summer, the weather so hot that year, the hunger had been bearable, what with wild fruits and hedgerow leaves we called bread-and-cheese to pluck and eat, and what we could grow in the allotment to parcel out and to store.

  Soon after the end of the lockout in November 1926, when I was nearly eleven, Bob took to his bed for good. No doctor was ever called. I’d say now that he just gave up, had had enough: the hopelessness of being hopeful. The horse went to the knacker’s yard. Nobody missed it. The cart was dismantled, back to basics, but with the shafts still in place. It pitched backwards in the yard, up in the air. At first, I took to pulling it. I could not go all over, as far as Bob had taken us with the horse plodding up and down, but I knew the streets by then, and I had fully left school behind me. I missed Bob being with me, the first thing in my life I had ever known as something to be missed, and I cried to myself when, at first, I went out on my own, straining to pull between the shafts.

  To make it easier for me the shafts were taken off by the twins under Bob’s instructions, shortened and refitted at the back as handles so I could push the cart. What stock Bob had left, just small things now, were piled into cardboard boxes and stacked in the cart. Nothing was to cost above a penny. Small wooden reels entwined with cotton, white and black only. A cask of malt vinegar for pouring through a funnel into paper-plugged empty milk bottles. Cards of twined string. Packets of white lime. Rough hewn chunks of carbolic soap. And for all these things, with buttons and marbles going for only farthings and ha’pennies, I was given big round brown pennies with Edward or George, or even Victoria, rubbed smooth on the front and with Britannia still raised in slight relief on the back with the embossed date to stare at. Very rarely an occasional silver thruppeny bit glinted amongst the copper which stank my hands as I shuffled it in its thin layers at the bottom of my leather bag.

  I gave the money to Aunty Rose as Bob told me to do. Once, he sat up in his bed when I came back from tramping the streets, and said he wanted to give me something. He took an old biscuit tin out of the drawer of a rickety bedside table and removed the red-and-gold embossed lid. He smiled at me and said to look at this. In his hand he held out a flat piece of dull slag about two inches thick and six inches long. The slag was in two separate pieces. Bob took the top layer off. On the bottom half, protected by its own lid, was the shiny, black and indented impression of a fern. No, not an impression. The real thing, compressed and flattened, but transfigured so that its fine tracery of leaf and stem was splayed out in all its delicacy. It was still of the swamp forest from which it came before streams and silt had deposited the successive layers which were to be folded and crushed and buckled into the coal seams which later brought us all to this place. And now, all of us, fossils from another time. Bob said it was the finest example of a proper fern he’d ever found or seen underground. He’d kept it with him through the war, wrapped in cloth in his knapsack. A charm. A keepsake. A reminder. He wanted me to have it. I treasured it and took it away when I, too, went.

  When Bob died, not long after this and just before the spring came, I kept the cart and managed the rounds for a while, until there was nothing left to sell to those who could scarcely find pennies any more with which to buy anything. Then a wholesale butcher in the valley took me on as an errand boy. I was fed, not paid, doing whatever a boy could do. I slept above the slaughterhouse. No one on the smallholding had tried to detain or dissuade me. But in the valley I was alone, an outsider, and for a long time this would be the mark of my life.

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  TELL US ABOUT WORK UNDERGROUND, IN THE PIT.

  There are few left who could do that. Few of us left who once worked as miners bef
ore mechanisation, before conveyor belts and power-loading and steel supports for the roof and pithead baths. Pit props notched and put in place by master craftsmen who could hear a creak and know whether to flee or trust their handiwork. Coal that was worked by mandrel and shovel by men who could read the coal seams for the habits and inclination of that hard-won mineral. Drams that were expertly raced with lump coal to make them as full and laden as possible. And a lexicon of technical terms and a glossary of slang to trick it all out as a lost, secret world. You see, Bran, where I could be going here, don’t you? And I won’t, or can’t, play that game, make us more glamorous and less ordinary, and not just what we were, who we were, condemned to do what we did, with only a few fools luxuriating, for a short time of youth and health, in the vigour of what they did. But it is not a kind of Meccano set to recall the wing nuts and bolts and flat-headed screws, and the ingenuity of what was done. It was, in fact, a kind of hell, one made all the more so by its being literally below the earth’s surface, and it killed you, piece by piece, or in an instant, and there was no let-up to the demands it made on both mind and body. The awful thing, of course, was that in the early thirties we yearned for it. Work, I mean. For there were no wages or a living any way half-decent without it.