Simon Tolkien - No Man’s Land

‘You like her, don’t you?’ he added, laughing now at Adam’s discomfort. He’d noticed how the colour had risen to his friend’s cheeks each time he said her name. ‘Well, all I can say is: Don’t let her mother know how you feel or she’ll have you locked up. She’s an invalid, never leaves the house, but that doesn’t mean she’s not the one who wears the trousers in the marriage. The parson’s hard up and Mrs Vale wants her daughter to marry money so I suppose Brice Scarsdale would fit the bill.’

‘Don’t say that,’ said Adam fiercely. ‘She deserves better than him. He’s the worst of his kind – stupid, selfish, arrogant—’

He broke off, suddenly self-conscious, and Ernest looked at him curiously. He was unused to his friend becoming so emotional, spitting out his words like venom.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘No one likes Brice and Miriam’s a nice girl, but their lives aren’t like ours. The Parsonage and the Hall are close to where we live but they might as well be on a different planet. See what it’s like in church next time you go there: the poor and the miners at the back; the shopkeepers and the managers and the farmers in the middle; and Sir John up at the front. Everyone has their place in the world and you know where ours is.’

‘Well, I don’t accept that,’ said Adam. ‘She shouldn’t have to marry a worthless parasite like Brice just because her mother tells her to. She should be able to choose whom she wants when the time comes.’

They relapsed into silence, each lost in their own thoughts, interrupted only when Ernest produced two slices of his mother’s freshly baked fruit cake from his snap tin which they ate slowly, savouring the taste as they gazed down at the great house and the sun glinting on the golden weathervane up above the stone gables.

‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ said Ernest.

‘Yes.’

‘But paid for with so much suffering,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Look down there, outside the wall – see the farmworkers’ cottages all nicely thatched and weatherproof. Must make Sir John feel like he’s a model landlord when he drives past them in his Rolls-Royce, but the truth is they’re just a sideline. The real money comes from the mine and he never goes near that; leaves it instead to Atkins and the other managers to get their hands dirty. It’s over the hill and out of sight. And what you don’t see, you don’t have to feel responsible for.’

‘And I suppose it’s my dad’s job to try to make him see,’ said Adam.

‘Yes, that’s right, and I don’t envy him the task. With Whalen and my dad on one side and blind Sir John on the other, he’s got to feel like he’s being pulled apart by a couple of riled-up pit ponies,’ said Ernest, shaking his head.

‘Do you know who Whalen reminds me of?’ asked Adam, remembering his encounter with Rawdon’s father in the mine – the hard unforgiving voice and the cruel flinty eyes.

Ernest shook his head.

‘My dad – he used to be just like him. Any excuse to fight the oppressor and too bad if people got hurt in the process. He was a fanatic, a true believer, until my mother died. And then everything changed. He’s a better man now, more sensible, more reasonable, but it’s also like he’s lost his spark, his passion – whatever you want to call it. It’s like something in him died when she died. God knows how it’ll all end,’ he finished sadly, sounding like an astrologer who’d lost his ability to read the stars.

‘I’ll tell you how it ends,’ said Ernest, looking hard at his friend. ‘No, better – I’ll show you. Come on. It’s not far.’

They walked on quickly now with Ernest setting the pace. Over another hill and down into a valley where the path passed through the cool shadows of a beech wood, where bluebells grew in clusters beneath the gnarled mossy green trunks of the old trees. And then out into the open again as they climbed up the other side, walking between tall grasses under the cloudless azure sky.

‘You’re a liar,’ said Adam, stopping to wipe the sweat from his brow. ‘This is twice as far as we walked before.’

‘But worth it,’ said Ernest, beckoning to his friend to join him on the ridge. ‘Worth it to see what the end of the world looks like.’

Adam stood stock still, staring down into a bowl-shaped valley similar to the one containing the Scarsdale pit but smaller and with just a single headstock at the bottom that had toppled over on to one side. Its wheels were brown with rust and the shack-like buildings around the pithead were in a state of pitiful disrepair, left to rot amid a sea of weeds and strangling vines. And the same was true of the miners’ houses that stretched up the sides of the valley – the same mean streets as in the Scarsdale valley but built here of less durable materials which hadn’t stood the test of time. A few of the windows still had broken glass but most were just holes in the walls – openings into black empty interiors, home to rats and spiders.

‘What happened?’ Adam asked.

‘The seam was exhausted so they went down deeper; too deep, and the mine flooded. Some miners were drowned and the rest were laid off, so they moved to Scarsdale or other pits and the village died. Thorley it was called, and now the name means nothing.’

‘When did it happen?’

‘Fifteen years ago – same year I was born. In another fifteen there probably won’t be anything left and no one will even know that there was once a mine here and a village and a pub and a union. And one day Scarsdale will go the same way and there’s nothing my dad or your dad or Whalen Dawes can do to stop it.’

They had gone down the hill a little way to where a street of tumbledown houses began. On a whim Adam pushed open the rotted door of the first one they came to. It creaked on its rusted hinges and immediately a pair of angry black birds – rooks or crows, it was too quick to know which they were – flew past him up into the air where they were joined by a flock of others, rising in a whirr of wings from the eaves of the other houses. They circled overhead, cawing angrily at the interlopers.

‘Be careful,’ said Ernest, who had stayed back in the street. ‘The roof will cave in if you give it half a chance. A lot of them already have from the looks of it.’

But Adam didn’t respond. He had moved to the centre of the room, standing gingerly on the rotten joists that were all that was left of the floor as he listened intently to a sound of rocking that was coming from the upper floor. In the corner a rickety staircase was missing several of its steps. He didn’t need Ernest to tell him that it would be stupid to climb it and yet he didn’t think twice. He had to see who or what was making the noise above. He was halfway up when it stopped and the stairs began to give way beneath him. The nightmare memory of falling in the pit cage flashed across his mind and he reached out and grabbed the newel post at the top of the stairs and pulled himself up to safety just as the staircase collapsed behind him and the house seemed to tremble on its foundations.

He was in a square room, standing across from a small sash window that had long ago lost all its glass. Below the sill an emaciated black-and-white cat was standing, precariously keeping its balance on a rocking chair that was rocking violently to and fro again, responding to the shaking of the house. The animal was clearly enraged – its fur was standing on end, its back was arched and an angry snarl had exposed its teeth. Adam just had time to take a step back and put his hands up to protect his face before it sprang at him through the air, scratching his arms before it leapt down through the hole in the corner where the staircase had been and disappeared.