The Black Diamond

ISAIAH HACKETT: GLORY BE TO GOD, 1839.

This plaque, together with the metal medallion of a fire insurance corporation and two iron bosses connected with the system of stays by which Mr Hackett’s descendants had tried to save their property from collapsing, made the Fellows’s house the most decorative feature of the row, and gave Abner a feeling of enviable distinction in his childhood long before he knew what they meant.

His father, John Fellows, like the rest of the tenants, was a miner. He had chosen to live in Hackett’s Cottages because they lay nearer to the colliery than any other buildings in Halesby and were within a reasonable distance of the cross-roads where stood his favourite public-house, the Lyttleton Arms. Hackett’s Cottages, in fact, hung poised, as it were, between two magnetic poles: the pit where the money was earned and the pub where it was spent. To remain there contented would have implied a nice equilibrium, had it not been that eastward of the cross-roads and the Lyttleton Arms ran the Stourton Road, with houses on both sides of it, and amongst them the Lord Nelson, the Greyhound, and the Royal Oak. Next to the Royal Oak came the entrance of the Mawne United football ground, and since John Fellows’s passion for football was only exceeded by his devotion to ‘four-penny,’ the pull of the colliery was hopelessly overbalanced by these delights.

At the side of the Royal Oak, on Saturday afternoons, the entrance to the football ground swarmed with black coats; and the crowd of small boys, of whom Abner made one, peering through cracks in the match-board palings could see nothing but the backs of other black coats, or perhaps, above the tilted heads of the spectators, the sphere of a football leaping gaily into the dreary gray that passes for heaven in a black-country winter. It cost threepence (ladies and children half-price) to enter the football ground, and since John Fellows never wasted the price of a pint on any one but himself, Abner had to be content with an occasional sight of the football soaring above this or that quarter of the field of play and with the hoarse waves of encouragement or derision that went up from the crowd inside.

Later, in the happy days before his father’s second marriage and the second family, John Fellows used to take the boy along with him to the football field on Saturday afternoons, or rather Abner would trail behind him as far as the gate and then pass through the turnstile in front of him, wedged between his father’s trousers and those of the man in front, breathing perpetually the acrid smell of oily coal-dust which he accepted as the natural odour of humanity. Whenever he could get himself washed in time John Fellows made a point of going early to the ground so that he might place himself in his favourite position, immediately behind the nearer goal-posts, so close to the net that he could talk with George Harper, the Mawne United goalkeeper, who, before this translation, had been a collier working in the same shift as himself, or under-mine the self-possession of the visiting ‘custodian’ with jeers and abuse.

Even at these close quarters, where Abner felt the pressure of his father’s protecting legs and heard him spitting into the net over his head, there was no conversation between them. John Fellows kept his speech for his mates, for George Harper, or, on occasion, for the referee; but at half-time, when most of the players ran in to the pavilion and the ball was free, he would give Abner a poke in the back and his neighbours a wink, and the lad would slip under the wire roping and plunge into the mêlée of boys who were scrambling for its possession. Once Abner had dribbled the ball away from the others and sent a shot at the goal which George Harper, who had stayed behind talking, moved mechanically to stop, and missed; a ripple of laughter had spread round the field, and when Abner ran back under the ropes with his face flaming, his father pulled him in by the ear and said with his clay pipe between his teeth: ‘Damn’ little blood-worm yo’ are! Bain’t he, George?’ And George Harper, staring down at him with his big, melancholy eyes, said, ‘Ah . . .’

Next day, as a reward for his prowess, John Fellows took Abner with him on his afternoon walk, past the cherry orchard, past the stationary cages at the pithead and the silent engine-house of the Great Mawne Colliery, down between the smoking spoil-banks to the bridge over the Stour which separates the two counties of Worcester and Stafford, in either of which the police of the other are providentially powerless. Here, on a cinder pathway shaded by the sooty chestnuts of Mawne Hall, there was racing between the limber fawn-skinned whippets that the miners fancy: timid, quivering creatures, with their slim waists bound in flannel jackets like frail women in their stays. It was thrilling to watch them slip from the leash, race with their pointed heads converging, and roll over at the finish in a cloud of cinder-dust.

On that Sunday the police of Staffordshire were quiescent. George Harper was there, his massive thighs bulging striped cashmere trousers. There was joking between George and Abner’s father about the goal that the boy had kicked. John Fellows won five shillings on a dog called Daisy, and Abner trailed home behind him at six o’clock, when the steam in the engine-house was beginning to hiss from its exhaust in preparation for Monday’s work. John Fellows retired to the Lyttleton Arms with his five shillings and spent a dozen more, while Abner went home, too tired to play and clammed for his tea. It surprised him to find number eleven locked up, though he ought to have remembered that before they went out dog-racing his father had left the key with Mrs Moseley, who did the housework, and cooked their dinner; but when he walked round to Mrs Moseley’s he found that she had gone to church and forgotten to take the key out of her pocket. He tramped back home again and fell asleep on the doorstep.

In later years, when the conflict with his father began, he always remembered these untroubled days with regrets: the Saturday football matches; the Sunday whippet-racing and terrier-fighting, together with certain afternoon walks along the tow-path of the canal, where the bodies of puppies that were old enough to be taxed floated into beds of loose-strife and willow-weed, and jack-bannocks hung swimming in shoals through the yellow water. In all these memories John Fellows was a benignant figure; and this one would hardly have guessed, for John Fellows was not prepossessing. He was a short man with a low-set head and an immense shoulder-girdle. His eyes were small and lost in deep orbits, so that when his face was ingrained with carbon the white of the sclerotics was intensified in a way that made them seem grudging and malignant. Walking home in his pit clothes, bow-legged and with the dazed and hampered gait which is the mark of men who labour underground, he always looked as if he had been drinking. Generally he had been drinking, but at his soberest he was an ugly customer, and the blue enamelled tin pot in which he carried his tea struck one as a dangerous weapon.

Poverty their household never knew. John Fellows could reckon on picking up his three pounds a week, and spent every penny of it. There was always meat in the house, and Mrs Moseley knew better than to serve him with food that was not freshly cooked. In his way he was an epicure. Although the Lyttleton Arms was the nearest public-house, Abner would often be sent out with a jug to fetch his father’s supper beer from the Greyhound, or even from the Royal Oak, next the football ground, where they kept Astill’s Guaranteed Old Stingo. John Fellows had no use for bottled beer. Bottled belly-ache, he called it. He rarely smoked a pipe, for lights were forbidden in the pit, and the habit of chewing plug-tobacco had made him prefer his nicotine neat.

He was shaved once a week, on Saturday nights, and upon this function depended another of Abner’s special joys: the privilege of going with him to the barber’s shop, a low, boarded room heated by gas-jets and the breath of expectant, expectorant men. Here, wedged upon a bench at his father’s side, he would read the comic papers that Mr Evans provided for his customers. Some were printed on pink paper and some on green; and while Abner absorbed the adventures of two alliterative tramps, he would hear the sing-song of Mr Evans, a Welshman from some remote Radnorshire village, as he talked to the victim of his razor and the other waiting customers. Mr Evans was a great authority on local football, and subscribed to a news-agency that sent him a sheet of half-time and final scores long before the evening edition of the North Bromwich Argus arrived. His knowledge of football politics and personalities was all the more remarkable because Saturday was his busiest day, and for that reason he could never see a game of football played. Abner envied him this abstract knowledge of the game; but more than Mr Evans he envied a small boy with pink face and plastered hair who, wearing a long white jacket, lathered the customers’ chins, and when Mr Evans had scraped them, sprayed their faces with bay-rum. At last, with dramatic suddenness, this entertainment was withdrawn. John Fellows developed a rash on his chin which Mr Ingleby, the chemist, declared to be barber’s itch, and Mr Evans became the object of his most particular hatred.

‘That bloody Welshman!’ said John Fellows. ‘I reckon shaving’s a dirty business.’

And so he grew a beard . . . but he wouldn’t let that Evans trim it, not he!

All Abner’s early pleasures were in some way or other related to his father. It was natural that John Fellows should take a pride in his only child. He didn’t talk to him much—a man who chews tobacco has better work for his jaws than talking—but he was sometimes amused by his company and proud of his sturdiness and capacity for mischief. He rejoiced that his son was a ‘bloodworm’ much in the same way as his mates rejoiced that their terriers were good fighters. He liked him to be hard, and boasted that Abner could take the strap (as he called it) without yelling. Indeed there was something to boast about in this, for the miner chastened his son with a brown leather belt which, as the buckle witnessed, had once belonged to a member of the South Staffordshire Regiment. This belt, he sometimes affirmed, had been all round the world before it came into his possession; but Abner was too well acquainted with its other qualities to pursue the history of this.

In spite of his weekly lickings Abner’s life was generally happy. He had no cares for the future. He knew that when his schooling was over he would be sent to work at the pit. He wouldn’t be sorry for that, for it seemed to him quite natural to work underground, to earn big money and spend it freely. When that day came he felt that he and his father would be able to drink together on equal terms. By the time that he was fourteen he was already taller than John Fellows, and meant to grow a lot taller still. He was going to be strong and to learn boxing: perhaps, in a few years’ time, he would be able to strip and fight in one of the boxing-booths at the wakes: perhaps, in stripes of chocolate and yellow, he might even play football for Mawne United and talk like a brother with the great George Harper.