Philip Hensher - The Northern Clemency

‘I say,’ Andrew said – he was addicted to this archaic opening style, odd in his Sheffield voice, or in any voice, these days, and had once asked Francis shyly if he had ever heard of a book called Jennings, ‘it was before you came, you know,’ a tactful way of saying the unmentionably rude, alluding to a time when your friend didn’t exist, ‘but our last teacher in Two CL, she was ill once a whole week and we had Barker, and she just came in and lectured like she does now, and we were meant to do maths and geography, all sorts. Well, she said then that once she were out on the moors driving with a friend, she said, and she sees a little boy by the side of the road and she, they stop and, and they say, “Can I give you a lift?” and the little boy says, “No, me mam says don’t take lifts off strangers.” And she said, “Well, isn’t that a shame, that you can’t offer a child a lift, when he’s on his own, out on the moors?”’

‘I wouldn’t get in a car with that Barker,’ Francis said boldly, and they all laughed.

‘That’s it,’ Andrew said, quite seriously. ‘I told m’dad, and he reckons that, you know the Moors murders, when they done them kids in, over Manchester, he reckons that after them, they were shut up, there were some more murders, and he reckons they didn’t get all the murderers. So m’dad, he says, do you think that old Barker, she’s one of the Moors murderers and she never got caught?’

He was so serious in his face, and it made Francis jump when Sally gave him a scoffing push. ‘Your dad never said that,’ she said. ‘Not your dad. You’re mental, you.’

‘No, though,’ Anthony joined in, quite crossly, ‘there were this kid, right—’

‘Oh, shut up,’ they all said, and went to play the game.

The girl who sat behind Francis was called Frances, and beside her, her best friend was called Tracy. They had been each other’s best friends since the very first day at infants’, when they’d been sat next to each other, and they’d always be best friends. They had each other, bossing and sniping, and Tracy thought Frances the loveliest name in the world. She wished she was called – well, not Frances, that wouldn’t make sense, but a name that was lovely just like Frances was a lovely name. She thought about it all the time, about not being called Tracy.

‘Why did you call me Tracy?’ she said to her busy mother in the hall of their Crosspool house. It wasn’t the first time she’d asked.

‘I just liked the name,’ her mother said. ‘Are you putting your coat on, or do I have to do it for you?’

‘I wish I was called something else,’ Tracy said.

‘You’ll be late for Sunday school,’ her mother said, ‘if you don’t get a move on.’ They were out of the house now, the door shutting tight behind them, her mother taking Tracy’s hand.

‘Why’s m’dad not coming to church?’ Tracy said.

‘He’s got to work today,’ her mother said.

‘I wish,’ Tracy said, but she stopped herself; she was about to say that she wished her dad didn’t work in a coal mine. ‘I wish I was called something else.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with “Tracy”. It’s a nice name,’ her mother said, not knowing what Tracy had been going to say.

I wish my dad didn’t work at the mines, she thought. It took all those explanations. What does your dad do? He works for the Coal Board – not down the mines, he’s not a miner, but he works at the mines, he works up at the top, he only goes down the mine sometimes, he doesn’t work down the mine. She wished he had another sort of job, a job like, for instance, the job Frances’s father had, managing a supermarket. What does your dad do? ‘Oh, he’s a bank manager,’ she heard herself saying. ‘I wish I was called Sara,’ she said out loud.

‘Sarah?’ her mother said. ‘Why the heck is being called Sarah better than being called Tracy?’

‘Not Sarah, Sara,’ Tracy said. ‘There’s no h, you say Saaara.’

‘The heavens preserve us,’ her mother said, ‘and what’s that on your face? My Lord—’ and outside the church, she whipped out a handkerchief, spat on it, and rubbed briskly at Tracy’s face. ‘How you manage to get a smut on your face ten seconds after leaving home, I’ll never understand.’

‘Frances doesn’t go to church,’ Tracy said. ‘She says they don’t believe it. They go to the garden centre usually.’

‘I dare say,’ Tracy’s mother said, not hearing this for the first time, ‘but in this family, we go to church.’

‘Is Frances going to go to hell?’ Tracy said.

‘I’ve had enough of your cheek for one morning,’ her mother said, hissing under her breath as they took their places in one of the back pews.

So on Monday morning Roy, Tracy’s father, set off for work with a feeling of rank injustice at having had no weekend. On a Sunday, too, he observed. It wouldn’t have been so bad, but living right on the other side of Sheffield, it was a good half-hour in the car even on a Sunday morning, and for what? Sometimes he felt like insisting on moving back to where he’d come from, five minutes from the pit. But she was right, really; the schools were better on that side, and with the way he’d moved up from the job his father had done, hacking away in the dark, to a job up top, managing and holding meetings, making decisions in a suit and a tie every morning, it was as well to live somewhere else. These days, particularly. It used to be that the managers lived a street or two from the men, but nowadays those bigger houses, imposing as they were, were lived in by miners just the same or lay empty.

The traffic wasn’t too bad, apart from the roadworks on the Wicker, which had been going on for months now, and he was in the car park at quarter to nine, locking the yellow Capri and striding into the office with his hard black lockable briefcase. The car park was full; the men, too, had their cars now, and they’d had to reserve the management’s places, each job described with white paint on the asphalt. The charcoal buildings, the meccano towers and conveyor belts had a temporary air, like the great heaps of slag all about; even the sign at the entrance and the gates were cheap and temporary, like the signs on building sites.

He said a quick good morning to Carol and Norma. ‘You’re meeting John Collins at eleven thirty,’ Norma called after him.

‘I’d not forgotten,’ he said, as he shut the door to his office. Collins was the NUM man, not as bad as some; they were the same age, they’d been at school together, and they got on as well as could be expected after last year’s shenanigans. After all, Roy was a miner, had been, and his father; that still counted for something. ‘I’m down below first, if anyone wants to know,’ he called, already pulling off the jacket of his suit, hanging it carefully on the coat hanger on the hook behind his chair.

There was nothing particularly wrong; Hoppelton, the mine manager, liked the management to go down the pit at least once a week, whatever was up. Some of them did it at the same time each week; Roy liked to be a bit spontaneous, talk to the men, keep them on their toes. Monday morning was as good as any other time. The girls knew not to come into the office without knocking firmly on the plywood door and waiting for a response. He opened the door of the grey metal locker where the miner’s outfit was kept. He neatly untied his tie, undid his tiger’s-eye cufflinks – they matched the fat orange-and-brown tie, Tracy’s present to him last Christmas though chosen with her mum (they smiled at him from a frame on his desk). He undid his shirt, hung it up, his trousers on the hanger, bouncing them a little to keep them pressed, and then his vest, pants and socks, folding them neatly and placing them neatly, with the rest of his clothes, in a suit-carrier to take over to the pit baths.