‘Here you are, little man,’ Ruby said. She flicked two bammy cakes onto a plate, drizzled them with syrup from a jug and slid them along the table. ‘Food for that empty belly.’
‘Are they drop scones?’ Eve said.
‘They are not. They are bammy cakes.’
‘Yes, but are they made t’same way – flour, sugar, eggs?’
Ruby shook her head, and looked almost as if she pitied Eve her ignorance.
‘The grated root of the cassava tree,’ she said.
Angus was already reaching for another, his eyes round with longing. Eve sighed and took one from the plate for herself. She would try Ruby’s bammies, and perhaps she would enjoy them, but nothing – nothing – would induce her to ask what a cassava was. That, she was determined to find out for herself.
A
mos had lost the knack of sleeping soundly, and because he blamed the Liberals for everything else, he blamed them for this too. This morning, he was stewing over the budget. It was killing him, very slowly, through sheer envy. In these irrational small hours before night became day he gave free rein to his bitterness at Lloyd George’s stroke of radical genius. Increases to land taxes, to duty on coal royalties, to death duties, to income taxes – Keir Hardie could have written it. Keir Hardie
should
have written it. If it wasn’t for the work put in by Labour over the past few years, the Liberal chancellor could never have made this sensational assault on the aristocracy. Lloyd George called it his war on poverty, but where had the first salvos been fired? In the Labour Party manifesto, that’s where: in the Labour Party’s social welfare demands.
Amos heaved himself over, from his back to his side. He had no strategies for countering sleeplessness; count sheep, Anna said, but Amos could never see the good in that – there weren’t enough sheep in the Yorkshire and Derbyshire Dales combined to distract him from his thoughts. Moonlight flooded the bedroom, because Anna liked to sleep with the curtains open, and on a clear night like this their bed was lit like a stage. Amos sighed, shifted, shifted again. He felt sorry for himself. These were restless, tormenting times for a socialist seeking justice and a modicum of public glory. Labour might have prepared the ground – ploughed the fields, tilled the soil and even cast the seed – but the Liberals were reaping the corn and claiming the harvest. This farming analogy struck him as not bad: he might use it in a speech, he thought.
Amos turned over again, away from the window, although the silver light actually occupied all the spaces of the room. He didn’t mind the dark: liked it, in fact. Thirty years as a miner had seen to that. But Anna preferred to be woken by degrees as the day dawned; she liked the daylight to steal across the bed and stir her from sleep naturally. There was a spare bedroom in this house, all made up and ready to use, and she’d suggested – nicely enough – that Amos might sleep there if he found her habits incompatible with his own. Not on your nelly, Amos had told her. He knew men who’d spent a night in the spare bed, for whatever trivial reason, and had never again regained admittance to the marital one. Anna had laughed at this, and told him he had her word that she would never bar him from their bedroom, but still, Amos preferred to occupy his rightful place in the double bed, curtains or no curtains. His wife was so doggedly independent, he thought, it wasn’t beyond her to change her mind and lay claim to the whole mattress.
Next to him, as he tossed and fidgeted and flipped the pillow cool-side up, Anna slept on, her hair spread out in a silken frame for her face, her fingers laced and resting on her chest like a stone angel. In repose she looked even younger than her twenty-eight years – and God knows, he thought, twenty-eight was plenty young enough. Amos had stopped counting at forty: this is what he liked to tell Maya, when she demanded to know his age. That, or, ‘Younger than fifty, but older than your mam.’ It wasn’t that he minded the age gap between him and his wife, just that he didn’t want it to grow. Illogical and impossible though it was, he sometimes felt he was heading for old age at a faster rate than she was leaving her youth behind.
Right now, for instance. The very fact that he woke three or four times every night while Anna slept the deep, unbroken sleep of the young was evidence to Amos of a widening gap between them. And her energy, her ideas, her enthusiasms: sometimes they made him feel elderly, grouchy, a stick-in-the-mud. He lay there, watching her sleep, envying her, loving her, and he leaned in and placed a quiet kiss on her right temple, half hoping it might wake her. It didn’t, of course. Short of the ceiling caving in, nothing would.
Resigning himself to wakefulness, he lay back with his hands behind his head and began to think about how much he hated the Liberal Party in general and Asquith in particular. This was not a good line of thought for a man who hoped soon to nod off, but there it was. He hated them more, perhaps, than he hated the Conservatives, because at least Balfour had never pickpocketed Labour’s social welfare policies and called them his own. Asquith, however, had no such scruples; last year he’d announced the old-age pension as if it had come to him in a flash of inspiration. It was typical of the prime minister, thought Amos, to produce it like a white rabbit from a top hat, and then leave Lloyd George to worry about the finances.
Outside, he could hear the first stirrings of the working day: pitmen leaving their hearth and home for another day at the seam. Terse greetings were exchanged – an ey up, or an ’ow do, gruffly issued, gruffly answered: they were an economical lot when it came to niceties. In his own mining days Amos had enjoyed many a silent walk down the pit lane in the dark, in the company of other men. There was something oddly companionable in being shoulder to shoulder with another miner, with whom you’d exchanged nothing friendlier than a curt nod of the head. You’d fall into step with another man and walk, smoke, say nothing much, but feel a brotherhood that Amos hadn’t found since, in the world outside a mine. Never had any trouble sleeping in those days, either. Ten hours hewing coal was a marvellous antidote to insomnia.
He sat up and swung his legs out of bed. Might as well be doing summat as doing nowt, he thought. There was paperwork waiting for him, after all; there was always paperwork. He would brew up downstairs and make a virtue of his sleeplessness. Already he felt more purposeful, less wistful. When he left the bed, Anna murmured something indecipherable and, still sleeping, rolled across into the warm hollow left by his body.
‘See?’ he whispered. ‘You’d ’ave my spot as soon as look at me.’
When Anna came down it was still too early for Norah, which Amos was pleased about because it meant he could pull his wife towards him at the kitchen range and give her a squeeze. She kissed him, too chastely for his liking, then studied his face. She looked concerned.
‘Have you been up for hours?’
‘Up for one hour, awake for three. Shall we go back to bed?’ He lifted her loose hair with his hands and kissed her neck.
‘Stop it,’ she said. ‘Is there any tea?’
‘Is there any tea? Is there any tea? When was there ever no tea?’ He let her hair fall and ran his hands down over her breasts. ‘Ahhh,’ he said into her ear, ‘you’re a torment.’
‘You torment yourself,’ she said, in her brisk voice. ‘Think about hot tea and pour one for me.’
She sat down and pushed back her hair, tucking it behind her ears in a perfectly ordinary gesture that Amos found quite mesmerising. He stared and she rolled her eyes at him.
‘So,’ she said, ‘what kept you awake?’
He poured tea into the coronation mug that Maya had once brought home from a bring-and-buy sale in Ardington parish hall. It amused him, not only that the sale had been in aid of the local Labour Party, but also that he was able to put Edward VII to work whenever he felt like it. High time, he thought, that the useless bugger contributed to the real world.
‘Herbert Asquith,’ he said. He passed her the tea. The king watched him, reprovingly.
‘Hmm, him again. Do you suppose that Mr Asquith loses sleep over you?’
‘Not likely. One day, ’appen.’
‘Perhaps you should cross the floor.’
She did this sometimes. He had learned not to rise, because by playing devil’s advocate, Anna wasn’t goading him: rather, she was confirming his beliefs.
‘And why would I do that?’ he said mildly.
‘Because then you could help implement these social policy changes, which you say are Labour’s ideas anyway. Don’t you want to be in government?’
‘Aye, I do,’ he said. ‘And I shall be, under Labour.’
‘Lloyd George seems decent enough. I think you could work with him.’
‘Aye, and if ’e wants to join us on t’Labour benches, we’ll all shove up for ’im.’
She sipped her tea, then, regarding him over the top of the mug, she smiled fondly, as if at a wilful child. ‘What’s to be done, though? If Mr Asquith stops you from sleeping, I mean?’
Amos studied the king, who looked back at him through heavy-lidded eyes.
‘Nowt, just yet. Except, maybe fresh air an’ a bit more exercise.’ He wasn’t joking, though he sounded to Anna as though he might be. With Amos, it wasn’t always easy to tell. ‘I might play some cricket this summer.’
‘For?’
‘New Mill pit team. Sam Bamford sent word: they need a fast bowler.’
‘Are you a fast bowler?’ She didn’t even know he played cricket, and it was admirable, really, how placidly she heard him out, when this scheme was entirely new to her.
‘I was, some time back. I reckon I could get my eye in soon enough.’
She nodded. ‘Well I never,’ she said. But she liked the idea, and in her mind she already had him in cream flannels.
They made a pilgrimage to Netherwood: Amos, Anna and Maya. Anna wanted to see how Daniel was faring and Maya never lacked a reason to see Ellen. Amos, though he’d mooted the outing in the first place, had no particular reason to go except that he wanted to. Sam Bamford was cited as his official business, but he missed his old home town, that was the truth of the matter. Ardington was similar in many ways to Netherwood, but in just as many it was different. Like Netherwood it had three inns, a school and two churches – one high, one Methodist – and like Netherwood its community was close-knit, which wasn’t to say people were universally friendly, just that they showed a keen interest in everyone else’s private affairs. Being nearer to Barnsley, though, Ardington had less of its own identity and the insidious sprawl of new housing on its outskirts had blurred its edges even further. There was one colliery here and, like Netherwood, coal had originally put Ardington on the map. But it didn’t feel like a coal town these days, because plenty of people worked in Barnsley, in its shops and offices. In Netherwood, if a man didn’t work at one of the pits, he probably didn’t work at all.
They had decided to walk, though it was a distance of four miles. The footpath ran parallel to the railway track, and every so often the little band of pilgrims was taunted by the possibility – now foregone – of covering the journey in an easy ten minutes. However, Anna carried a knapsack of treats and Amos, from time to time, carried Maya, hoisting her up on to his shoulders with exaggerated effort, as if she weighed a ton. It was an old gag, but it always made her squeal in indignation and bat him round the ears with hot little hands.
In Netherwood they parted company. Anna and Maya continued on through the town to Netherwood Hall where, somewhere or other in the grounds, they would find Daniel. Amos took the cinder track to New Mill Colliery, where he hoped to see Sam. He took his time. It was a long time since he’d trodden this particular path and he slowed down to savour it; he liked the hollow crunch of the cinders under his boots. There were ghosts on this path, and two in particular that seemed to fall into step with him now: Arthur Williams, Eve’s first husband, and Lew Sylvester, who’d always had the knack of rattling Amos’s cage. The times were legion that they had tramped along this path together, blowing Woodbine smoke into the cold morning air, Amos snarling at Lew, Lew buttering up Arthur, Arthur keeping out of it. Lew and Arthur were names on the miners’ memorial now, the brass statue in the town centre that had been commissioned by the sixth earl as part of his attempt to atone for a lifetime of indifference: this was Amos’s interpretation, at least. Also, it was one he kept largely to himself. The earl’s untimely death had resulted in his virtual canonisation among some of the locals.
‘Amos Sykes, my comrade in t’struggle!’
Sam Bamford emerged from the deputy’s office as Amos entered the pit yard. His greeting sounded ironic, but it wasn’t. Sam, whom Amos considered a political protégé, seemed to move ever leftwards in his views, so that by degrees even Amos was beginning to feel like part of the establishment.
‘Tha’s come to tell me tha’ll play?’ Sam was as keen on cricket as he was on revolution: the finest judge of off stump Amos had ever seen.
‘Aye,’ said Amos. ‘I’ll need some practice, mind.’
‘Tha’ll get it. Tuesdays and Thursdays, back o’ t’miner’s welfare.’
Amos looked Sam over. He was a young man, by Amos’s standards – thirty, perhaps – with a serious face and, when he applied it, a serious mind. He had a safe job these days, deputy to the deputy, keeping accounts and dealing with the Coal Exchange. He’d developed severe claustrophobia after a rockfall trapped him for a day and a half in a space not much bigger than himself. It had got him out of the pit, this new fear of confined spaces; he never shut his office door, though. Sam liked to know his means of escape.
‘Nowt muckier than ink on your fingers these days, eh?’ Amos said.
Sam said, ‘You can talk, Sykes,’ and Amos held up his hands in submission.
‘I know, I know. Pen-pushers, both of us.’
‘Aye well, tha can still plan a revolution from behind a desk.’
‘Trouble is, there’s not much appetite for it at New Mill, is there?’
This was true: they were a moderate lot here. Plus, the way the Netherwood collieries were run these days was exemplary: union membership was permitted, the eight-hour day had been introduced before the previous year’s legislation and all the latest safety innovations were in place. It must be annoying, thought Amos, to be an agitator at a pit where the men were content. Sam shrugged.