Page 19 of The Way We Are Now

‘Oh, nice girl. You bring her home with you, yes. What’s this about MP ringing you?’

‘Or not ringing me. I did give them your phone number when I wrote to them and really hoped they’d get back to me, but they haven’t. I really want to be in London, Dad.’

‘Pah! London!’ Dad almost spat the words. ‘You stay here in God’s own country.’ That made me want to laugh. Despite Dad being born in Warsaw, he was now a Yorkshireman through and through, supporting everything Yorkshire from Michael Parkinson and Dickie Bird to Huddersfield Town football club and cricket at the Headingley ground, not far from my student house. ‘Listen, Anna, there going to be fight. Big fight.’

‘A fight? Who’ve you fallen out with?’

Dad tutted. ‘You not heard news? On Look North?’

‘No, we tend not to watch the news. Usually Dynasty…’

I trailed off as Dad tutted once more. ‘That Margaret, she just announce she going to get rid of twenty coalmines.’

‘No!’ While Dad had been talking about this for months, worried that his beloved mine was going to be in trouble, that he and my brother, my uncles, cousins and neighbours, the whole village I’d grown up in, were going to be thrown on the scrap heap and on the dole, I never really thought it would happen.

‘And yours is one of them?’

‘Aye, love, very probably.’ Mum, who was obviously sharing the receiver with Dad, now spoke up.

‘You come home for your year, Anna,’ Dad said. ‘You want something political? You got it right on your doorstep. Right here, in Rothersley.’

6

The weeks that followed saw the long and dreary Yorkshire winter begin to loosen its miserable grip, the city stirring itself with a noisy anticipation of the season to come. The dawn chorus outside my bedroom window excelled itself and, while the other girls in the house complained of the virtual orchestra revving up at 4 a.m., I loved it, welcoming it as a sign of new beginnings, new steps forwards.

The very rhythm of the city was shifting, and I felt restless and longing for something I couldn’t quite put my finger on, unable to recognise and name what it was, even to myself.

Fliss was obviously as much in tune to the coming springtime as me, taking more than her fair share of hot water, sloughing off the winter blues before leaving the house in a constant stream of new outfits most evenings during the week. She’d disappeared altogether one weekend, and I had to push down feelings of envy at her off somewhere with him. When she wasn’t out, she was busy in her room or the library, arriving back in her Mini only when the library closed and not joining us in the lounge in front of the telly, but heading instead for her room.

Where the four of us had often taken it in turns to cook, cobbling together some version of a jacket potato or pasta dish – spaghetti and a bottle of tomato sauce covered in cheap cheddar was a staple – Fliss now rarely took her turn, or even joined us in the kitchen. I missed her, missed her energy and humour, missed our conversations. We’d been so close for over a year, had done everything together and now she was off out most evenings without me. When she was at home, she was in her room, furiously catching up on her coursework, but often popping out to the phone box down the road. She seemed to have made up with her dad, going down to London to stay with him for the weekend on more than one occasion.

‘That’s what happens when there’s a man involved,’ Katy said, somewhat snidely and, although I argued the toss, saying Fliss wasn’t like that, it would appear that she was. The couple of times I’d gone up to her room for a chat, ready to ask her all about Theo and where she’d been with him, she’d just laughed coyly and said it was all a bit hush-hush as he was still involved with that girl we’d seen him about to play squash with and needed to let her down lightly. I wasn’t impressed with that little observation. Theo Mandeville was obviously a player. But then, wasn’t Fliss a self-confessed player herself? Anyway, she was obviously enjoying the chase, had, perhaps, even fallen hard for him and, as the weeks stretched into late March, she either came home very late, in the early hours of the morning, or not at all.

When I asked her if she’d like to come home with me for reading week, she didn’t meet my eye, said she’d have loved to – and to tell my parents a big thank you – but she was so busy… She’d trailed off, not wanting to admit to me, I saw, that she’d fallen head over heels for Theo Mandeville.

And I suppose it was then I recognised my own restlessness for what it was. I wanted to be in love, I wanted other things to think about than finding a bloody work experience year – which looked like I was going to have to accept something back home in Rothersley after all. Dad had had words with someone in charge at the NUM headquarters and, with what was kicking off, they’d told him they’d welcome anyone who wanted to come and work with them as long as they were prepared to get stuck in and do their bit.

‘Will they be able to pay me something, Dad?’ I asked in yet another phone call from the rancid phone box on St Michael’s Road.

‘I don’t like to ask that, Anna,’ Dad replied, slightly embarrassed I could tell. ‘Any money union has is to be used to fight Margaret and pit closure, helping us, now we’re out on strike. And you stay here, Anna, at home with Mum and me and Les, just like you do before you go to Leeds. When you little girl. But big girl now, working for union!’ As always, when Dad became animated, his Polish accent came to the fore.

‘But I won’t have a grant for my year out, you know, Dad,’ I said down the phone. ‘I can’t expect you to keep me for the time I’ll be there… What am I going to live on?’

‘You no worry, Anna, we sort it. Mum and me and union, we sort it for you. Yes?’

‘Thanks, Dad,’ I said, feeling despondent. Fed up. I didn’t want to go back home, back home to the little box room that was my bedroom. I wanted to go to London, to Westminster, to be right at the centre of political thinking and action.

‘Blimey, Anna, you’re lucky to have something,’ Katy admonished when I said as much to her. ‘And with what’s kicking off in Rothersley? In the rest of Yorkshire? You’ll be bang in the middle of it all. History in the making. You’ll be able to write your final dissertation on it all.’

‘I know, I know,’ I said. ‘It’s just, I’ve come to uni in Leeds – just twenty miles from home – and it looks like I’m going to end up back there now as well. I want to see a bit of the world, not be back in my old bedroom with my posters of Dexys Midnight Runners and Culture Club, going down to the Miners’ Social Club with my mum and dad.’

When Katy saw my face as I peeled potatoes for the shepherd’s pie I was making for the three of us, she patted my arm sympathetically. ‘OK, I get that, I suppose.’ She poked at the pan. ‘What are these things in the meat?’ she asked suspiciously.

Not a brilliant cook, shepherd’s pie was my go-to dish. Running out of cash and not convinced there was a huge amount left in my account anyway, I’d bulked out the small amount of minced beef I’d bought at the local butcher’s with a packet of ancient red lentils I’d found in the cupboard. What it would taste like, God only knew. Plenty of onions, tinned tomatoes and Bisto in the pan, and it’d be fine, I told myself.

‘Don’t suppose Fliss will be joining us?’ I asked now. ‘Have you seen her today?’

Katy shook her head. ‘She didn’t come home last night. Again.’