during the strike, where did Mick get the money for paints? I don’t know much about art, but I know it costs a few bob for proper paper and paint.’ She couldn’t imagine any striking miner spending money on art supplies when there was no money for food or heating.
‘I don’t want to get anybody into trouble,’ she said.
Yeah, right. ‘It was twenty-three years ago,’ Karen said flatly. ‘I’m really not interested in small-scale contra from the time of the miner’s strike.’
‘One of the art teachers from the high school lived up at Coaltown. He was a wee cripple guy. One leg shorter than the other and a humphy back. Mick used to do his garden for him. The guy paid him in paints.’ She gave a little snort. ‘I said could he not pay him in money or food. But apparently the guy was paying out all his wages to the ex-wife. The paints he could nick from the school.’ She refolded her arms. ‘He’s dead now anyway.’
Karen tried to tamp down her dislike of this woman, so different from the daughter who had beguiled her into this case. ‘So what was it like between you, before Mick disappeared?’
‘I blame the strike. OK, we had our ups and downs. But it was the strike that drove a wedge between us. And I’m not the only woman in this part of the world who could say the same thing.’
Karen knew the truth of that. The terrible privations of the strike had scarred just about every couple she had known back then. Domestic violence had erupted in improbable places; suicide rates had risen; marriages had shattered in the face of implacable poverty. She hadn’t understood it at the time, but she did now. ‘Maybe so. But everybody’s story’s different. I’d like to hear yours.’
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