ABNER FELLOWS was born in the front bedroom of Number Eleven Hackett’s
Cottages, a four-roomed house of old brickwork that stood in the middle
of a row of twenty-one, set diagonally across a patch of waste land on
the outskirts of Halesby. The terrace was fifty years old, and looked
older, for the smoke and coal dust of the neighbouring pits had corroded
the surface of the bricks, while the ‘crowning in’ of the earth’s crust
above the gigantic burrowings of the Great Mawne Colliery had loosened
the mortar between them and even produced a series of long cracks that
clove the house-walls from top to bottom like conventional forked
lightning. One of these lines of cleavage split the face of Number
Eleven and ran through the middle of a plaster plaque on which the pious
owner of the cottages had carved the words:—
_ISAIAH HACKETT_:
_GLORY BE TO GOD_, _1839_.
This plaque, together with the metal medallion of a fire insurance
corporation and two iron bosses connected with the system of stays by
which Mr Hackett’s descendants had tried to save their property from
collapsing, made the Fellows’s house the most decorative feature of the
row, and gave Abner a feeling of enviable distinction in his childhood
long before he knew what they meant.
His father, John Fellows, like the rest of the tenants, was a miner. He
had chosen to live in Hackett’s Cottages because they lay nearer to the
colliery than any other buildings in Halesby and were within a reasonable
distance of the cross-roads where stood his favourite public-house, the
Lyttleton Arms. Hackett’s Cottages, in fact, hung poised, as it were,
between two magnetic poles: the pit where the money was earned and the
pub where it was spent. To remain there contented would have implied a
nice equilibrium, had it not been that eastward of the cross-roads and
the Lyttleton Arms ran the Stourton Road, with houses on both sides of
it, and amongst them the Lord Nelson, the Greyhound, and the Royal Oak.
Next to the Royal Oak came the entrance of the Mawne United football
ground, and since John Fellows’s passion for football was only exceeded
by his devotion to ‘four-penny,’ the pull of the colliery was hopelessly
overbalanced by these delights.
At the side of the Royal Oak, on Saturday afternoons, the entrance to the
football ground swarmed with black coats; and the crowd of small boys, of
whom Abner made one, peering through cracks in the match-board palings
could see nothing but the backs of other black coats, or perhaps, above
the tilted heads of the spectators, the sphere of a football leaping
gaily into the dreary gray that passes for heaven in a black-country
winter. It cost threepence (ladies and children half-price) to enter the
football ground, and since John Fellows never wasted the price of a pint
on any one but himself, Abner had to be content with an occasional sight
of the football soaring above this or that quarter of the field of play
and with the hoarse waves of encouragement or derision that went up from
the crowd inside.
Later, in the happy days before his father’s second marriage and the
second family, John Fellows used to take the boy along with him to the
football field on Saturday afternoons, or rather Abner would trail behind
him as far as the gate and then pass through the turnstile in front of
him, wedged between his father’s trousers and those of the man in front,
breathing perpetually the acrid smell of oily coal-dust which he accepted
as the natural odour of humanity. Whenever he could get himself washed
in time John Fellows made a point of going early to the ground so that he
might place himself in his favourite position, immediately behind the
nearer goal-posts, so close to the net that he could talk with George
Harper, the Mawne United goalkeeper, who, before this translation, had
been a collier working in the same shift as himself, or under-mine the
self-possession of the visiting ‘custodian’ with jeers and abuse.
Even at these close quarters, where Abner felt the pressure of his
father’s protecting legs and heard him spitting into the net over his
head, there was no conversation between them. John Fellows kept his
speech for his mates, for George Harper, or, on occasion, for the
referee; but at half-time, when most of the players ran in to the
pavilion and the ball was free, he would give Abner a poke in the back
and his neighbours a wink, and the lad would slip under the wire roping
and plunge into the _mêlée_ of boys who were scrambling for its
possession. Once Abner had dribbled the ball away from the others and
sent a shot at the goal which George Harper, who had stayed behind
talking, moved mechanically to stop, and missed; a ripple of laughter had
spread round the field, and when Abner ran back under the ropes with his
face flaming, his father pulled him in by the ear and said with his clay
pipe between his teeth: ‘Damn’ little blood-worm yo’ are! Bain’t he,
George?’ And George Harper, staring down at him with his big, melancholy
eyes, said, ‘Ah . . .’
Next day, as a reward for his prowess, John Fellows took Abner with him
on his afternoon walk, past the cherry orchard, past the stationary cages
at the pithead and the silent engine-house of the Great Mawne Colliery,
down between the smoking spoil-banks to the bridge over the Stour which
separates the two counties of Worcester and Stafford, in either of which
the police of the other are providentially powerless. Here, on a cinder
pathway shaded by the sooty chestnuts of Mawne Hall, there was racing
between the limber fawn-skinned whippets that the miners fancy: timid,
quivering creatures, with their slim waists bound in flannel jackets like
frail women in their stays. It was thrilling to watch them slip from the
leash, race with their pointed heads converging, and roll over at the
finish in a cloud of cinder-dust.
On that Sunday the police of Staffordshire were quiescent. George Harper
was there, his massive thighs bulging striped cashmere trousers. There
was joking between George and Abner’s father about the goal that the boy
had kicked. John Fellows won five shillings on a dog called Daisy, and
Abner trailed home behind him at six o’clock, when the steam in the
engine-house was beginning to hiss from its exhaust in preparation for
Monday’s work. John Fellows retired to the Lyttleton Arms with his five
shillings and spent a dozen more, while Abner went home, too tired to
play and clammed for his tea. It surprised him to find number eleven
locked up, though he ought to have remembered that before they went out
dog-racing his father had left the key with Mrs Moseley, who did the
housework, and cooked their dinner; but when he walked round to Mrs
Moseley’s he found that she had gone to church and forgotten to take the
key out of her pocket. He tramped back home again and fell asleep on the
doorstep.
In later years, when the conflict with his father began, he always
remembered these untroubled days with regrets: the Saturday football
matches; the Sunday whippet-racing and terrier-fighting, together with
certain afternoon walks along the tow-path of the canal, where the bodies
of puppies that were old enough to be taxed floated into beds of
loose-strife and willow-weed, and jack-bannocks hung swimming in shoals
through the yellow water. In all these memories John Fellows was a
benignant figure; and this one would hardly have guessed, for John
Fellows was not prepossessing. He was a short man with a low-set head
and an immense shoulder-girdle. His eyes were small and lost in deep
orbits, so that when his face was ingrained with carbon the white of the
sclerotics was intensified in a way that made them seem grudging and
malignant. Walking home in his pit clothes, bow-legged and with the
dazed and hampered gait which is the mark of men who labour underground,
he always looked as if he had been drinking. Generally he _had_ been
drinking, but at his soberest he was an ugly customer, and the blue
enamelled tin pot in which he carried his tea struck one as a dangerous
weapon.
Poverty their household never knew. John Fellows could reckon on picking
up his three pounds a week, and spent every penny of it. There was
always meat in the house, and Mrs Moseley knew better than to serve him
with food that was not freshly cooked. In his way he was an epicure.
Although the Lyttleton Arms was the nearest public-house, Abner would
often be sent out with a jug to fetch his father’s supper beer from the
Greyhound, or even from the Royal Oak, next the football ground, where
they kept Astill’s Guaranteed Old Stingo. John Fellows had no use for
bottled beer. Bottled belly-ache, he called it. He rarely smoked a
pipe, for lights were forbidden in the pit, and the habit of chewing
plug-tobacco had made him prefer his nicotine neat.
He was shaved once a week, on Saturday nights, and upon this function
depended another of Abner’s special joys: the privilege of going with him
to the barber’s shop, a low, boarded room heated by gas-jets and the
breath of expectant, expectorant men. Here, wedged upon a bench at his
father’s side, he would read the comic papers that Mr Evans provided for
his customers. Some were printed on pink paper and some on green; and
while Abner absorbed the adventures of two alliterative tramps, he would
hear the sing-song of Mr Evans, a Welshman from some remote Radnorshire
village, as he talked to the victim of his razor and the other waiting
customers. Mr Evans was a great authority on local football, and
subscribed to a news-agency that sent him a sheet of half-time and final
scores long before the evening edition of the _North Bromwich Argus_
arrived. His knowledge of football politics and personalities was all
the more remarkable because Saturday was his busiest day, and for that
reason he could never see a game of football played. Abner envied him
this abstract knowledge of the game; but more than Mr Evans he envied a
small boy with pink face and plastered hair who, wearing a long white
jacket, lathered the customers’ chins, and when Mr Evans had scraped
them, sprayed their faces with bay-rum. At last, with dramatic
suddenness, this entertainment was withdrawn. John Fellows developed a
rash on his chin which Mr Ingleby, the chemist, declared to be barber’s
itch, and Mr Evans became the object of his most particular hatred.
‘That bloody Welshman!’ said John Fellows. ‘I reckon shaving’s a dirty
business.’
And so he grew a beard . . . but he wouldn’t let that Evans trim it, not
he!
All Abner’s early pleasures were in some way or other related to his
father. It was natural that John Fellows should take a pride in his only
child. He didn’t talk to him much—a man who chews tobacco has better
work for his jaws than talking—but he was sometimes amused by his company
and proud of his sturdiness and capacity for mischief. He rejoiced that
his son was a ‘bloodworm’ much in the same way as his mates rejoiced that
their terriers were good fighters. He liked him to be hard, and boasted
that Abner could take the strap (as he called it) without yelling.
Indeed there was something to boast about in this, for the miner
chastened his son with a brown leather belt which, as the buckle
witnessed, had once belonged to a member of the South Staffordshire
Regiment. This belt, he sometimes affirmed, had been all round the world
before it came into his possession; but Abner was too well acquainted
with its other qualities to pursue the history of this.
In spite of his weekly lickings Abner’s life was generally happy. He had
no cares for the future. He knew that when his schooling was over he
would be sent to work at the pit. He wouldn’t be sorry for that, for it
seemed to him quite natural to work underground, to earn big money and
spend it freely. When that day came he felt that he and his father would
be able to drink together on equal terms. By the time that he was
fourteen he was already taller than John Fellows, and meant to grow a lot
taller still. He was going to be strong and to learn boxing: perhaps, in
a few years’ time, he would be able to strip and fight in one of the
boxing-booths at the wakes: perhaps, in stripes of chocolate and yellow,
he might even play football for Mawne United and talk like a brother with
the great George Harper.
In this manly, indefinite future, women had no place. He had never had a
sister; as far as he remembered he had never had a mother; and so he
followed the example of his father whose domineering attitude towards the
widow, Mrs Moseley, was beyond any doubt correct, while Mrs Moseley, who
had her living to make, accepted it without protest, as a woman should
do. Towards girls themselves Abner felt no positive hostility, though he
passed them in the street as a well-mannered dog passes cats, with a
solid appreciation of their potential evil; but for members of his own
sex who dallied with emasculating tendernesses he and the boys with whom
he played were full of scorn and even of active malice. The worst libel
that any of his companions could suffer was a chalk inscription on his
own back door of the words: ‘Tommy So-and-so goes with Cissy
Something-else.’
Abner and his friends even went so far as to pester these votaries of
passion in their own most sheltered haunts. Above the pithead of the
Great Mawne Colliery runs a lane skirting the ancient cherry orchard of
Old Mawne Hall. It is short: at the end of it the pit-mound stands up
black, and over beyond the Stour valley a desert of blackness stretches
westward, with smoke-stacks thronging thick as masts of shipping in a
harbour. Over its hedges, in the dusk, light clouds of cherry-blossom
may be seen, but even before the wind has tumbled the petals down they
are blackened by smuts from the colliery chimney. This lane, indeed, was
a decorous walking place where one might hear a patter of moving feet and
low laughter on any evening in May; but lower down the slope, past the
colliery, it turned into another, shadowed with hot-smelling elder,
stunted hawthorns and oak-apple trees, which had a darker reputation.
Dipping down over the hillside this lane climbs back upon itself and
opens out again into the orchard road. This loop, which is called in
Halesby the ‘Dark Half-hour,’ was the favourite hunting ground for Abner
and his friends. Carrying the smelly dark-lanterns that are sold on Guy
Fawkes’ day, they would creep as quietly as possible under the shadows of
the trees, selecting at a signalled moment some unfortunate couple locked
in each other’s arms whom they might shame with their lights. Often they
got their heads smacked, but this only served to reinforce their opinion
that lovemaking which shrank from publicity was discreditable.
One evening in summer when Abner was fourteen he took part in one of
these expeditions. The day had been hot. His father had promised him
that he would make him a kite in the evening. The split lath lay ready
on the table with a roll of blue paper. Mrs Moseley had boiled some
paste, and Abner had borrowed enough string and folded newspaper to make
a tail. As the heat of the afternoon declined a gusty wind began to blow
from the west, filling the street with dust and scraps of paper. At six
o’clock John Fellows came back from the pit. The dust had blown into his
eyes, that were never very strong. Tears and sweat together were
tracking down through the grime on his cheeks. He seemed to have
forgotten all about Abner’s kite.
‘What’s that?’ he cried, irritably. ‘Can’t yo’ give us a moment’s peace?
Wait till I’ve swilled!’
He had his swill in the brewhouse, filling a tin bath with black
soap-suds. The kite had become a grievance. ‘Nattering away . . .’ he
muttered, with his head in a roller towel, ‘werriting about kites on a
day that would make a pig sweat blood!’
Abner, who knew his father, got away without any further discussion,
leaving Mrs Moseley to soothe him. He went out and played cricket in the
sloping field above the pit where the ponies that have worked so long
underground that they are blind are put out to green grass and to a white
mockery that they get to know as daylight. When the boys came down to
play, these shaggy creatures stood huddled in a corner and edged against
one another, rubbing the coal-dust out of their matted coats. If they
strayed over the field of play Abner and his friends pelted them with
pieces of slag from the cinder heap behind the wickets. They also threw
slag at a group of little girls who dared to look at them over the broken
hedge. When the light faded so much that they could no longer see to
play, and the beam-engine in the power-house ceased to grunt, the boys
all lay down talking in the hedgerow, and the ponies wandered back to
pull at the grass on either side of the pitch. At last Abner, who was
the leader of the set, because he was the strongest, said: ‘Let’s go down
the Dark Half-hour and scare some of ’em.’
On such a clammy evening there were certain to be many lovers. One of
the boys produced a halfpenny packet of red Bengal-lights. Abner
snatched them from him, left him crying, and with three others ran down
to the mouth of the lane. In the hedge-side couples stirred uneasily.
The tunnel under the elders was full of a hot odour of dust and nettles
and some kind of mint. They crept forward through the darkness in Indian
file. ‘Let’s try this one, kid,’ whispered a boy named Hodgetts, ‘him
over there up agen’ the tree. ’Ere, where’s the bloody box?’
‘There’s somebody coming,’ whispered a woman’s voice.
They struck three lights together. The tunnel glowed like a furnace.
Against the trunk of a tree a short man was leaning with a pale young
woman clutched in his arms. Abner saw that it was his father. He
dropped his match and ran.
The boy Hodgetts came panting behind him. He was shouting: ‘Kid . . .
kid . . . did yo’ see who he were? It were your gaffer!’ Abner turned
and swiped at him viciously as he ran. Joe Hodgetts crumpled up in the
hedge howling. Abner went on blindly into the Cherry Orchard Road. His
heart thudded in his throat like a water-hammer. He didn’t know where he
was. He only knew that he was crying and that he had broken his knuckles
on Joe Hodgett’s skull. He rubbed them in the black dust of the roadway,
and that stopped the bleeding. But nothing, it seemed, could stop his
tears.