‘What’s that?’ he cried, irritably. ‘Can’t yo’ give us a moment’s peace? Wait till I’ve swilled!’
He had his swill in the brewhouse, filling a tin bath with black soap-suds. The kite had become a grievance. ‘Nattering away . . .’ he muttered, with his head in a roller towel, ‘werriting about kites on a day that would make a pig sweat blood!’
Abner, who knew his father, got away without any further discussion, leaving Mrs Moseley to soothe him. He went out and played cricket in the sloping field above the pit where the ponies that have worked so long underground that they are blind are put out to green grass and to a white mockery that they get to know as daylight. When the boys came down to play, these shaggy creatures stood huddled in a corner and edged against one another, rubbing the coal-dust out of their matted coats. If they strayed over the field of play Abner and his friends pelted them with pieces of slag from the cinder heap behind the wickets. They also threw slag at a group of little girls who dared to look at them over the broken hedge. When the light faded so much that they could no longer see to play, and the beam-engine in the power-house ceased to grunt, the boys all lay down talking in the hedgerow, and the ponies wandered back to pull at the grass on either side of the pitch. At last Abner, who was the leader of the set, because he was the strongest, said: ‘Let’s go down the Dark Half-hour and scare some of ’em.’
On such a clammy evening there were certain to be many lovers. One of the boys produced a halfpenny packet of red Bengal-lights. Abner snatched them from him, left him crying, and with three others ran down to the mouth of the lane. In the hedge-side couples stirred uneasily. The tunnel under the elders was full of a hot odour of dust and nettles and some kind of mint. They crept forward through the darkness in Indian file. ‘Let’s try this one, kid,’ whispered a boy named Hodgetts, ‘him over there up agen’ the tree. ’Ere, where’s the bloody box?’
‘There’s somebody coming,’ whispered a woman’s voice.
They struck three lights together. The tunnel glowed like a furnace. Against the trunk of a tree a short man was leaning with a pale young woman clutched in his arms. Abner saw that it was his father. He dropped his match and ran.
The boy Hodgetts came panting behind him. He was shouting: ‘Kid . . . kid . . . did yo’ see who he were? It were your gaffer!’ Abner turned and swiped at him viciously as he ran. Joe Hodgetts crumpled up in the hedge howling. Abner went on blindly into the Cherry Orchard Road. His heart thudded in his throat like a water-hammer. He didn’t know where he was. He only knew that he was crying and that he had broken his knuckles on Joe Hodgett’s skull. He rubbed them in the black dust of the roadway, and that stopped the bleeding. But nothing, it seemed, could stop his tears.
The Second Chapter
When he reached home, half an hour later, he was ashamed of himself. It didn’t matter to him what his father did. He only hoped that John Fellows hadn’t recognised him, for that would make him sure of a belting. Still, he was glad that he had given Joe Hodgetts what for. He wasn’t going to have a fellow of his own age laughing at his father even if his father had let him down by making a fool of himself.
A year later John Fellows was married. In spite of Abner’s scorn the proceeding was natural enough. The man was under forty, and had been a widower for more than fourteen years. The new wife, the woman of the tunnel, was a girl named Alice Higgins, the elder daughter of an old friend of Fellows, the timekeeper at the colliery, who had lost his left leg many years ago in a crushing fall of coal. She was tall, slight, with a fair complexion and honey-coloured hair: in every physical particular the opposite of her swart and stubby husband. If such a thing had to be, Abner would have preferred the maturer charms of Mrs Moseley, whom he knew so well and liked, to those of any stranger. Indeed, from the day of his father’s marriage onward his life became more complicated.