A Darker Domain

Friday 14th December 1984; Newton of Wemyss

‘I’ll be back for my tea,’ Mick Prentice said, slinging the big canvas bag across his body and grabbing the slender package of his folded easel.

‘Tea? What tea? There’s nothing in the house to eat. You need to be out there finding food for your family, not messing about painting the bloody sea for the umpteenth time,’ Jenny shouted, trying to force him to halt on his way out the door.

He turned back, his gaunt face twisted in shame and pain. ‘You think I don’t know that? You think we’re the only ones? You think if I had any idea how to make this better I wouldn’t be doing it? Nobody has any fucking food. Nobody has any fucking money.’ His voice caught in his throat like a sob. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. ‘Down the Welfare last night, Sam Thomson said there was talk of a food delivery from the Women Against Pit Closures. If you get yourself down there, they’re supposed to be here about two o’clock.’ It was so cold in the kitchen that his words formed a cloud in front of his lips.

‘More handouts. I can’t remember the last time I actually chose what I was going to cook for the tea.’ Jenny suddenly sat down on one of the kitchen chairs. She looked up at him. ‘Are we ever going to get to the other side of this?’

‘We’ve just got to hold out a bit longer. We’ve come this far. We can win this.’ He sounded as if he was trying to convince himself as much as her.

‘They’re going back, Mick. All the time, they’re going back. It was on the news the other night. More than a quarter of the pits are back working. Whatever Arthur Scargill and the rest of the union executive might say, there’s no way we can win. It’s just a question of how bloody that bitch Thatcher will make the losing.’

He shook his head vehemently. ‘Don’t say that, Jenny. Just because there are a few pockets down south where they’ve caved in. Up here, we’re rock solid. So’s Yorkshire. And South Wales. And we’re the ones that matter.’ His words sounded hollow and there was no conviction in his face. They were, she thought, all beaten. They just didn’t know when to lie down.

‘If you say so,’ she muttered, turning away. She waited till she heard the door close behind him, then slowly got up and put her coat on. She picked up a heavy-duty plastic sack and left the freezing chill of the kitchen for the damp cold of the morning. This was her routine these days. Get up and walk Misha to school. At the school gate, the bairn would be given an apple or an orange, a bag of crisps and a chocolate biscuit by the Friends of the Lady Charlotte, a rag, tag and bobtail bunch of students and public sector workers from Kirkcaldy who made sure none of the kids started the day on an empty stomach. At least, not on school mornings.

Then back to the house. They’d given up taking milk in their tea, when they could get tea. Some mornings, a cup of hot water was all Jenny and Mick had to start the day. That hadn’t happened often, but once was enough to remind you how easy it would be just to fall off the edge.

After a hot drink, Jenny would take her sack into the woods and try to collect enough firewood to give them a few hours of heat in the evening. Between the union executives always calling them ‘comrade’ and the wood gathering, she felt like a Siberian peasant. At least they were lucky to live right by a source of fuel. It was, she knew, a lot harder for other folk. It was their good fortune that they’d kept their open fireplace. The miners’ perk of cheap coal had seen to that.

She went about her task mechanically, paying little attention to her surroundings, turning over the latest spat between her and Mick. It sometimes seemed it was only the hardship that kept them together, only the need for warmth that kept them in the same bed. The strike had brought some couples closer together, but plenty had split like a log under an axe after those first few months, once their reserves had been bled dry.

It hadn’t been so bad at the start. Since the last wave of strikes in the seventies, the miners had earned good money. They were the kings of the trade union movement - well paid, well organized and well confident. After all, they’d brought down Ted Heath’s government back then. They were untouchable. And they had the cash to prove it.

Some spent up to the hilt - foreign holidays where they could expose their milk-white skin and coal tattoos to the sun, flash cars with expensive stereos, new houses that looked great when they moved in but started to scuff round the edges almost at once. But most of them, made cautious by history, had a bit put by. Enough to cover the rent or the mortgage, enough to feed the family and pay the fuel bills for a couple of months. What had been horrifying was how quickly those scant savings had disappeared. Early on, the union had paid decent money to the men who piled into cars and vans and minibuses to join flying pickets to working pits, power stations and coking plants. But the police had grown increasingly heavy-handed in making sure the flyers never made it to their destinations and there was little enthusiasm for paying men for failing to reach their objectives. Besides, these days the union bosses were too busy trying to hide their millions from the government’s sequestrators to be bothered wasting money in a fight they had to know in their hearts was doomed. So even that trickle of cash had run dry and the only thing left for the mining communities to swallow had been their pride.

Jenny had swallowed plenty of that over the past nine months. It had started right at the beginning when she’d heard the Scottish miners would support the Yorkshire coalfield in the call for a national strike not from Mick but from Arthur Scargill, President of the National Union of Mineworkers. Not personally, of course. Just his yapping harangue on the TV news. Instead of coming straight back from the Miners’ Welfare meeting to tell her, Mick had been hanging out with Andy and his other union pals, drinking at the bar like money was never going to be a problem. Celebrating King Arthur’s battle-cry in the time-honoured way. The miners united will never be defeated.

The wives knew the hopelessness of it all, right from the start. You go into a coal strike at the beginning of winter, when the demand from the power stations is at its highest. Not in the spring, when everybody’s looking to turn off their heating. And when you go for major industrial action against a bitch like Margaret Thatcher, you cover your back. You follow the labour laws. You follow your own rules. You stage a national ballot. You don’t rely on a dubious interpretation of a resolution passed three years before for a different purpose. Oh yes, the wives had known it was futile. But they’d kept their mouths shut and, for the first time ever, they’d built their own organization to support their men. Loyalty, that was what counted in the pit villages and mining communities.

And so Mick and Jenny were still hanging together. Jenny sometimes wondered if the only reason Mick was still with her and Misha was because he had nowhere else to go. Parents dead, no brothers or sisters, there was no obvious bolthole. She’d asked him once and he’d frozen like a statue for a long moment. Then he’d scoffed at her, denying he wanted to be gone, reminding her that Andy would always put him up in his cottage if he wanted to be away. So, no reason why she should have imagined that Friday was different from any other.

Thursday 28th June 2007; Newton of Wemyss

‘So this wasn’t the first time he’d gone off with his paints for the day?’ Karen said. Whatever was going on in Jenny Prentice’s head, it was clearly a lot more than the bare bones she was giving up.

‘Four or five times a week, by the end.’

‘What about you? What did you do for the rest of the day?’

‘I went up the woods for some kindling, then I came back and watched the news on the telly. It was quite the day, that Friday. King Arthur was in court for police obstruction at the Battle of Orgreave. And Band Aid got to number one. I tell you, I could have spat in their faces. All that effort for bairns thousands of miles away when there were hungry kids on their own doorsteps. Where was Bono and Bob Geldof when our kids were waking up on Christmas morning with bugger all in their stockings?’

‘It must have been hard to take,’ Karen said.

‘It felt like a slap in the face. Nothing glamorous about helping the miners, was there?’ A bitter little smile lit up her face. ‘Could have been worse, though. We could have had to put up with that sanctimonious shite Sting. Not to mention his bloody lute.’

‘Right enough.’ Karen couldn’t hide her amusement. Gallows humour was never far from the surface in these mining communities. ‘So, what did you do after the TV news?’

‘I went down the Welfare. Mick had said something about a food handout. I got in the queue and came home with a packet of pasta, a tin of tomatoes and two onions. And a pack of dried Scotch broth mix. I mind I felt pretty pleased with myself. I collected Misha from the school and I thought it might cheer us up if we put up the Christmas decorations, so that’s what we did.’

‘When did you realize it was late for Mick to be back?’

Jenny paused, one hand fiddling with a button on her overall. ‘That time of year, it’s early dark. Usually, he’d be back not long after me and Misha. But with us doing the decorations, I didn’t really notice the time passing.’

She was lying, Karen thought. But why? And about what?

Friday 14th December 1984; Newton of Wemyss

Jenny had been one of the first in the queue at the Miners’ Welfare and she’d hurried home with her pitiful bounty, determined to get a pot of soup going so there would be something tasty for the tea. She rounded the pithead baths building, noticing all her neighbours’ houses were in darkness. These days, nobody left a welcoming light on when they went out. Every penny counted when the fuel bills came in.

When she turned in at her gate, she nearly jumped out of her skin. A shadowy figure rose from the darkness, looming huge in her imagination. She made a noise halfway between a gasp and a moan.

‘Jenny, Jenny, calm down. It’s me. Tom. Tom Campbell. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.’ The shape took form and she recognized the big man standing by her front door.

‘Christ, Tom, you gave me the fright of my life,’ she complained, moving past him and opening the front door. Conscious of the breathtaking chill of the house, she led the way into the kitchen. Without hesitation, she filled her soup pan with water and put it on the stove, the gas ring giving out a tiny wedge of heat. Then she turned to face him in the dimness of the afternoon light. ‘How are you doing?’

Tom Campbell shrugged his big shoulders and gave a halfhearted smile. ‘Up and down,’ he said. ‘It’s ironic. The one time in my life I really needed my pals and this strike happens.’

‘At least you’ve got me and Mick,’ Jenny said, waving him to a chair.

‘Well, I’ve got you, anyway. I don’t think I’d be on Mick’s Christmas card list, always supposing anybody was sending any this year. Not after October. He’s not spoken to me since then.’

‘He’ll get over it,’ she said without a shred of conviction. Mick had always had his reservations about the wider ripples of the schoolgirl friendship between Jenny and Tom’s wife Moira. The women had been best pals forever, Moira standing chief bridesmaid at Jenny and Mick’s wedding. When it came time to return the favour, Jenny been pregnant with Misha. Mick had pointed out that her increasing size was the perfect excuse to turn Moira down, what with having to buy the bridesmaid’s dress in advance. It wasn’t a suggestion, more an injunction. For although Tom Campbell was by all accounts a decent man and a handsome man and an honest man, he was not a miner. True, he worked at the Lady Charlotte. He went underground in the stomach-juddering cage. He sometimes even got his hands dirty. But he was not a miner. He was a pit deputy. A member of a different union. A management man there to see that the health and safety rules were followed and that the lads did what they were supposed to. The miners had a term for the easiest part of any task - ‘the deputy’s end’. It sounded innocuous enough, but in an environment where every member of a gang knew his life depended on his colleagues, it expressed a world of contempt. And so Mick Prentice had always held something in reserve when it came to his dealings with Tom Campbell.

He’d resented the invitations to dinner at their detached house in West Wemyss. He’d mistrusted Tom’s invitations to join him at the football. He’d even begrudged the hours Jenny spent at Moira’s bedside during her undignified but swift death from cancer a couple of years before. And when Tom’s union had dithered and swithered over joining the strike a couple of months before, Mick had raged like a toddler when they’d finally come down on the side of the bosses.

Jenny suspected part of the reason for his anger was the kindness Tom had shown them since the strike had started to bite. He’d taken to stopping by with little gifts - a bag of apples, a sack of potatoes, a soft toy for Misha. They’d always come with plausible excuses - a neighbour’s tree with a glut, more potatoes in his allotment than he could possibly need, a raffle prize from the bowling club. Mick had always grumbled afterwards. ‘Patronizing shite,’ he’d said.

‘He’s trying to help us without shaming us,’ Jenny said. It didn’t hurt that Tom’s presence reminded her of happier times. Somehow, when he was there, she felt a sense of possibility again. She saw herself reflected in his eyes, and it was as a younger woman, a woman who had ambitions for her life to be different. So although she knew it would annoy Mick, Jenny was happy for Tom to sit at her kitchen table and talk.

He drew a limp but heavy parcel from his pocket. ‘Can you use a couple of pounds of bacon?’ he said, his brow creasing in anxiety. ‘My sister-in-law, she brought it over from her family’s farm in Ireland. But it’s smoked, see, and I can’t be doing with smoked bacon. It gives me the scunners. So I thought, rather than it go to waste…’ He held it out to her.

Jenny took the package without a second’s hesitation. She gave a little snort of self-deprecation. ‘Look at me. My heart’s all a flutter over a couple of pounds of bacon. That’s what Margaret Thatcher and Arthur Scargill have done between them.’ She shook her head. ‘Thank you, Tom. You’re a good man.’

He looked away, unsure what to say or do. His eyes fixed on the clock. ‘Do you not need to pick up the bairn? I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking about the time when I was waiting, I just wanted to…’ He got to his feet, his face pink. ‘I’ll come again.’

She heard the stumble of his boots in the hall then the click of the latch. She tossed the bacon on to the counter and turned off the pan of water. It would be a different soup now.

Moira had always been the lucky one.

Thursday 28th June 2007; Newton of Wemyss

Jenny’s eyes came off the middle distance and focused on Karen. ‘I suppose it was about seven o’clock when it dawned on me that Mick hadn’t come home. I was angry, because I’d actually got a half-decent tea to put on the table. So I got the bairn to her bed, then I got her next door to sit in so I could run down the Welfare and see if Mick was there.’ She shook her head, still surprised after all these years. ‘And of course, he wasn’t.’

‘Had anybody seen him?’

‘Apparently not.’

‘You must have been worried,’ Karen said.

Jenny shrugged one shoulder. ‘Not really. Like I said, we hadn’t exactly parted on the best of terms. I just thought he’d taken the huff and gone over to Andy’s.’

‘The guy in the photo?’

‘Aye. Andy Kerr. He was a union official. But he was on the sick from his work. Stress, they said. And they were right. He’d killed himself within the month. I often thought Mick going scabbing was the last straw for Andy. He worshipped Mick. It would have broken his heart.’

‘So that’s where you assumed he was?’ Karen prompted her.

‘That’s right. He had a cottage out in the woods, in the middle of nowhere. He said he liked the peace and quiet. Mick took me out there one time. It gave me the heebie jeebies. It was like the witch’s house in one of Misha’s fairy stories - there was no sign of it till suddenly you were there, right in front of it. You wouldn’t catch me living there.’

‘Could you not have phoned to check?’ the Mint butted in. Both women stared at him with a mixture of amusement and indulgence.

‘Our phone had been cut off months before, son,’ Jenny said, exchanging a look with Karen. ‘And this was long before mobiles.’

By now, Karen was gagging for a cup of tea, but she was damned if she was going to put herself in Jenny Prentice’s debt. She cleared her throat and continued. ‘When did you start to worry?’

‘When the bairn woke me up in the morning and he still wasn’t home. He’d never done that before. It wasn’t as if we’d had a proper row on the Friday. Just a few cross words. We’d had worse, believe me. When he wasn’t there in the morning, I really started to think there was something badly wrong.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I got Misha fed and dressed and took her down to her pal Lauren’s house. Then walked out through the woods to Andy’s place. But there was nobody there. And then I remembered Mick had said that now he was on the sick, Andy was maybe going to go off up to the Highlands for a few days. Get away from it all. Get his head straight. So of course he wasn’t there. And by then, I was really starting to get scared. What if there had been an accident? What if he’d been taken ill?’ The memory still had the power to disturb Jenny. Her fingers picked endlessly at the hem of her overall.

‘I went up to the Welfare to see the union reps. I figured if anybody knew where Mick was, it would be them. Or at least they’d know where to start looking.’ She stared down at the floor, her hands clasped tight in her lap. ‘That’s when the wheels really started to come off my life.’

Saturday 15th December 1984; Newton of Wemyss

Even in the morning, without the press of bodies to raise the temperature, the Miners’ Welfare Institute was warmer than her house, Jenny noticed as she walked in. Not by much, but enough to be perceptible. It wasn’t the sort of thing that usually caught her attention but today she was trying to think of anything except the absence of her husband. She stood hesitant for a moment in the entrance hall, trying to decide where to go. The NUM strike offices were upstairs, she vaguely remembered, so she made for the ornately carved staircase. On the first-floor landing, it all became much easier. All she had to do was to follow the low mutter of voices and the high thin layer of cigarette smoke.

A few yards down the hall, a door was cracked ajar, the source of the sound and the smell. Jenny tapped nervously and the room went quiet. At last, a cautious voice said, ‘Come in.’

She slid round the door like a church mouse. The room was dominated by a U-shaped table covered in tartan oilcloth. Half a dozen men were slouched around it in varying states of despondency. Jenny faltered when she realized the man at the top corner was someone she recognized but did not know. Mick McGahey, former Communist, leader of the Scottish miners. The only man, it was said, who could stand up to King Arthur and make his voice heard. The man who had been deliberately kept from the top spot by his predecessor. If Jenny had a pound for every time she’d heard someone say how different it would have been if McGahey had been in charge, her family would have been the best-fed and best-dressed in Newton of Wemyss. ‘I’m sorry,’ she stuttered. ‘I just wanted a word…’ Her eyes flickered round the room, wondering which of the men she knew would be best to focus on.

‘It’s all right, Jenny,’ Ben Reekie said. ‘We were just having a wee meeting. We’re pretty much done here, eh, lads?’ There was a discontented murmur of agreement. But Reekie, the local secretary, was good at taking the temperature of a meeting and moving things along. ‘So, Jenny, how can we help you?’

She wished they were alone, but didn’t have the nerve to ask for it. The women had learned a lot in the process of supporting their men, but face to face their assertiveness still tended to melt away. But it would be all right, she told herself. She’d lived in this cocooned world all her adult life, a world that centred on the pit and the Welfare, where there were no secrets and the union was your mother and your father. ‘I’m worried about Mick,’ she said. No point in beating about the bush. ‘He went out yesterday morning and never came back. I was wondering if maybe…?’

Reekie rested his forehead on his fingers, rubbing it so hard he left alternating patches of white and red across the centre. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he hissed from between clenched teeth.

‘And you expect us to believe you don’t know where he is?’ The accusation came from Ezra Macafferty, the village’s last survivor of the lock-outs and strikes of the 1920s.

‘Of course I don’t know where he is.’ Jenny’s voice was plaintive, but a dark fear had begun to spread its chill across her chest. ‘I thought maybe he’d been in here. I thought somebody might know.’

‘That makes six,’ McGahey said. She recognized the rough deep rumble of his voice from TV interviews and open-air rallies. It felt strange to be in the same room with it.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘Six what? What’s going on?’ Their eyes were all on her, boring into her. She could feel their contempt but didn’t understand what it was for. ‘Has something happened to Mick? Has there been an accident?’

‘Something’s happened, all right,’ McGahey said. ‘It looks like your man’s away scabbing to Nottingham.’

His words seemed to suck the air from her lungs. She stopped breathing, letting a bubble form round her so the words would bounce off. It couldn’t be right. Not Mick. Dumb, she shook her head hard. The words started to seep back in but they still made no sense. ‘Knew about the five…thought there might be more…always a traitor in the ranks…disappointed…always a union man.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘He wouldn’t do that.’

‘How else do you explain him not being here?’ Reekie said. ‘You’re the one that came to us looking for him. We know a van load went down last night. And at least one of them is a pal of your Mick. Where the hell else is he going to be?’

Thursday 28th June 2007; Newton of Wemyss

‘I couldn’t have felt worse if they’d accused me of being a whore,’ Jenny said. ‘I suppose, in their eyes, that’s exactly what I was. My man away scabbing, it would be no time at all before I’d be living on immoral earnings.’

‘You never doubted that they were right?’

Jenny pushed her hair back from her face, momentarily stripping away some of the years and the docility. ‘Not really. Mick was pals with Iain Maclean, one of the ones that went to Nottingham. I couldn’t argue with that. And don’t forget what it was like back then. The men ran the game and the union ran the men. When the women wanted to take part in the strike, the first battle we had to fight was against the union. We had to beg them to let us join in. They wanted us where we’d always been - in the back room, keeping the home fires burning. Not standing by the braziers on the picket lines. But even though we got Women Against Pit Closures off the ground, we still knew our place. You’d have to be bloody strong or bloody stupid to try and blow against the wind round here.’

It wasn’t the first time Karen had heard a version of this truth. She wondered whether she’d have done any better in the same position. It felt good to think she’d stand by her man a bit more sturdily. But in the face of the community hostility Jenny Prentice must have faced, Karen reckoned she’d probably have caved in too. ‘Fair enough,’ she said. ‘But now that it looks like Mick might not have gone scabbing after all, have you got any idea what might have happened to him?’