David Storey - Saville

He had hit the bonnet in the middle and had been flung over the top of the car, crashing down on the boot before being flung off into the road.

The driver of the car took him to hospital in a near-by village, and a few hours later, after his mother had telephoned the colliery to find out where he was, a policeman came with the news of the accident and she went out again, leaving Steven and himself with Mrs Shaw, to telephone the hospital and find out how seriously he was hurt.

He came home a few days later in an ambulance. He had broken both his legs, an arm, and had damaged several ribs. He seemed, as he got out of the ambulance, more cheerful than he had been for a long time, particularly since his trouble with his uniform. He was carried in on a stretcher and put straight to bed.

He only stayed there a few days. The plasters on his legs had been made in such a way that they could support his weight: they passed down in iron rings under his feet so that he appeared, suddenly, several inches taller. With the aid of these and a stick he walked down the stairs.

It was his ribs that caused him most discomfort. He would lie in the chair by the fire, holding his chest and groaning, breathing slowly in and out.

‘You don’t have to tell me,’ he said whenever his mother complained. ‘I’m lucky to be alive,’ adding, ‘but then, lying in that bed I might as well be dead.’

Other times he would lie back, his eyes searching the ceiling, wild, half-tormented, and say, ‘The number of times the roof’s broken and I’ve been nearly buried, my back broke and God knows what else, and then when it really comes where am I? On an open road wi’ nothing else in sight.’

The baby was crawling now and he would give it rides on his pot leg like a rocking horse, stooping forward, stiffly, to hold Steven’s hand, bouncing him up and down.

Sometimes too he would stand at the window, balancing on the hoops, staring out at the backs, sometimes holding to a cupboard and hitting the pot on his legs with his stick. He had, over the year, been trying to save ten pounds for a holiday and now it had all gone. He would beat the wall with his fist while his mother looked on, her hands clasped together.

‘The thing to do now is get you better,’ she said. ‘Not complain.’

‘Complain?’ he said. ‘With my life draining away.’

‘It’s not draining away by the sounds of it.’

‘Isn’t it? Isn’t it?’ He would throw the stick on the floor, trying to break it only, a moment later, having to ask her to pick it up because he couldn’t move without it. ‘Last time I broke my leg, you know, I damn near lost my job,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But now there’s a war, and everybody’s wanted.’

‘Everybody’s wanted. And what have I got? Two pot legs.’

Earlier in his life, just before he had got married, he had lost his job when it was impossible to get a job at all. He had been helping to sink the shaft at the colliery where he now worked when, at the bottom of the shaft, while it was still being dug, he had fallen out of the cage and twisted his leg.

It was only as he cycled home that it had begun to swell, particularly around his ankle. He bandaged it up and went to work for another week, afraid to have his leg examined in case it might be more seriously injured than he thought. At the end of the week he could scarcely bear to put his foot to the ground and it took him almost two hours to push his bike to work. Finally, he collapsed one morning in the lane leading to the pit and lay in the road groaning, his bike fallen over him.

The foreman of the site sent him to hospital on the back of a coal cart. He was in for three weeks.

‘Another day and they’d have had to take off my leg. They couldn’t understand how I’d managed.’

‘How did you manage?’ Colin said. Each day now, when he came home from school, his father would tell him some different incident from this episode, or from others not unlike it.

‘If you had my job you’d know how,’ his father said, laughing. ‘As soon as I came out I went straight back and reported for work. “I thought you were dead, Harry,” the foreman said. “We’ve given your job to another man now.” “What man?” I said. “Why, that man,” he said. “The one that told us you were dead.” Would you believe it? He had him brought up in the cage. An Irishman he was, as big as a house.’

‘What did he say?’ Colin asked him.

‘What could he?’ his father said. ‘“There’s two of you and only one job,” the foreman said. “I’ll give you five minutes to settle it between you.”’ His father paused. ‘We went round the back of the foreman’s hut and after five minutes only one of us came back.’ His eyes lighted, smiling, as he watched his face.

‘And which one was that?’

‘I’m not saying,’ his father said, laughing. ‘But I’ve worked there ever since!’ He burst out laughing once again, with his mother, watching his expression.

His father was always having fights as a young man, and he was often drunk. He never lost a fight and he was never so drunk as to lose out on any situation.

‘Oh, he was a devil when I met him,’ his mother said. ‘When people heard his name they used to rush in their houses and lock the doors.’

‘How do you mean?’ his father said. ‘I could always look after myself. I mayn’t be very big, but the thing was I could move very fast.’

‘Yes,’ his mother said. ‘Particularly when he saw trouble coming.’

His father would smack his stick on the table, his face reddening. I’ve never run away from nought. Never.’

‘No. No. I know,’ she’d add, leaning down to kiss him.

His father was often angry, but just as easily appeased.

Perhaps it was the accident that made him decide to leave the pit where he was and go to the one in the village.

Colin had never really thought of his father working underground at all. He had never even seen the colliery where he worked, though he had heard him describe it many times and the men who worked there, Walters, Shawcroft, Pickersgill, Thomas; each one of them brought some particular image to his mind, large men who in some way, because of their strength, submitted to his father’s authority whenever there was a crisis or a situation they didn’t understand.

‘I’m surprised that that pit’s still working while you’re away,’ his mother said when, after a week or so, she began to grow tired of his stories. She would hold Steven over one shoulder while she changed his nappy, kneeling to the hearth then to lay him down and looking at his father with the pins in her mouth. Since his accident she had grown much stronger, and now Steven slept virtually the whole night through.

His father would get up at these moments and go to the window, rocking on the irons with the aid of his stick. Perhaps it hurt him that the battles he had fought at work, the roofs collapsing, the men he had saved, the instinct that had led him one way rather than another whenever a rock fell, that none of this could be reported to her other than by himself: Walters, Shawcroft, Pickersgill and Thomas all lived in other villages. It might have been this that finally decided him, so that Mr Stringer and Mr Shaw, and perhaps even Mr Batty could report to her the things which, one way or another, he did to save life and increase production almost every day at the pit.

A few doors down the terrace lived Mr Reagan. He worked in the office at the colliery, and every day went to work in a dark suit, wearing yellow gloves and a bowler hat and carrying a rolled umbrella. He was a tall man with a red face, and had a light Irish accent. His wife would hold open the front door every morning when he left for work, standing there with her arms folded, gazing after him until he reached the corner of the street and disappeared. He never waved nor looked back, yet she never moved until he had gone. Shortly before he came home again in the evening she would re-appear at the door very much as if, in the interval, she hadn’t stirred at all, holding the door for him to enter, which he did at the precise moment that he removed his bowler hat. They had one son. He was called Michael and played the violin. He was built like Mrs Reagan, with a large head which jutted out at the back, a narrow body and thin legs. His father, Mr Reagan, would have nothing to do with him. In the evenings, whenever the men were playing cricket in the field, he would stand by the fence at the end of his garden, his waistcoat open, his white collar removed, and shout, ‘ Hit it, for Christ’s sake! Hit it harder,’ while behind him, from the open window, would come the sound of the violin.