No Man’s Land. Simon Tolkien
fight,’ one of them shouted and the rest took up the refrain. Adam glanced over at Ernest who nodded his understanding – Adam had at least succeeded in dividing Rawdon from his supporters. The fight would be between the two of them now – much better odds than they had been a moment before.
Slowly Rawdon got to his feet, his dark blue eyes fixed on Adam. He dropped his hands and then suddenly delivered a hooking punch up towards Adam’s jaw. Instinctively Adam pulled out of the way, but he still felt the full force of Rawdon’s follow-up blow, delivered hard to the chest with his other fist. He felt a dense pain followed immediately by a sharp nausea. But he refused to give into his hurt, remembering instead how his father had kept his head, fighting the huge gypsy in the Islington marketplace all those years before. Adam sensed he was his adversary’s equal in strength, and, remembering Rawdon’s limp, he knew he had an advantage in mobility if he could find a way to exploit it.
He moved back, shifting his weight from foot to foot, waiting for Rawdon’s next move.
‘What art thou then? Some sort o’ prancin’ ballet dancer?’ sneered Rawdon. ‘Did you learn that down in London too?’
The other boys laughed but Adam didn’t hear them. He had that rare ability to shut out all distraction when he wanted to, and to operate without emotion when the need arose. He was naturally brave and he had already put aside his anger. Fighting was about control – if he kept his self-control he sensed he could win.
He jabbed with his fist at Rawdon’s face, cutting him under the eye, and then danced back, easily avoiding Rawdon’s heavy-armed response. And then repeated the move again, aiming always at the same place, watching as the blood seeped out from under the skin and trickled down his enemy’s cheek. Now it was Rawdon’s turn to become enraged. He rushed at Adam, kicking out with his hard boots, reaching up to pull him to the ground. But Adam was too quick for him. He’d seen what was coming and stepped neatly out of the way, connecting with a hard punch to the side of Rawdon’s head that sent him sprawling on the ground.
He lay face down in the dirt for a moment and then started to get up with his fists clenched.
‘I’ll ’ave thee,’ he shouted, his bleeding face twisted in rage, but Ernest stepped between him and Adam, pushing him back with his outstretched hands.
‘That’s enough, Rawdon,’ he said. ‘You lost the fight and that’s an end of it. You must shake hands.’
‘I’ll be damned if I will,’ Rawdon shouted. But he had lost the support of his friends.
‘Ernie’s right. Shake ’is ’and, Rawdon,’ said the tallest of them, a handsome boy with jet-black hair, putting his hand on Rawdon’s shoulder.
Rawdon shook him off but, looking round, he knew the game was up, at least for now. Ernest gave him a searching look and stepped aside and Rawdon touched Adam’s outstretched hand with his own and then turned away. ‘Some o’ us ’round ’ere ’ave to go to work,’ he said, walking away towards the railway line. The rest of his friends followed him but the tall one stayed back, picking up the mathematics book from the ground and dusting off the dirt as best he could with his hand.
‘You fought well,’ he said, handing the book to Adam. ‘You’ve nowt to be ashamed of.’
‘Who was that?’ Adam asked, watching the boy walking quickly across the green to catch up with his friends.
‘Luke Mason. He’s all right. And the girls like him,’ said Ernest with a grin. ‘Most of the lads aren’t so bad when you get to know them, but Rawdon’s different. He’s angry all the time – it’ll be someone else’s turn tomorrow, I’ll be bound.’
Adam smiled, grateful for his friend’s attempt at reassurance, although he didn’t believe it was genuine. Rawdon’s antipathy had been deeply personal, not some offshoot of a general resentment against the world.
‘What did he mean about my father taking his father’s job?’ he asked.
‘Rawdon’s father, Whalen, wanted to be the union secretary when old Harris retired. It goes with being checkweighman, which is a nice job – good pay and up on the pithead, not down below. Whalen’s very political, very involved with the union, and he thought the job was his for the asking. But my dad wouldn’t have it – he wanted your dad after what he read about him in the paper. And what my dad wants is pretty much law down the pit.’
‘What paper?’
‘The Herald. They reported all about the strike your dad organized and about what happened to your mother …’ Ernest stopped, clearly embarrassed at his casual mention of Adam’s bereavement. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean …’
‘It’s all right,’ said Adam. ‘Thank you for helping me today. I won’t forget it.’ The bus had arrived while they were talking and he reached over and shook Ernest’s hand before he got on. He meant what he’d said – it was a long time since he’d felt he had a friend.
On Sunday Daniel took his son to church. Adam was surprised. He vividly remembered the division in the house in London between his mother’s devout Christianity at one polar opposite and his father’s outspoken atheism at the other. According to Daniel there couldn’t be a God who would allow the world he’d created to be so unfair, so cruel to the vast majority of those who had the misfortune to be born into it. And since his mother’s death Adam had been inclined to agree with his father. The God to whom he had once prayed to find his father work and watch over his family seemed like a foolish figment of his childhood imagination, a cardboard cut-out figure with his big white beard and all-seeing eyes.
‘Why are we going, Dad?’ he asked as they walked up the hill together in the cold bright morning, leaving the mine and the streets of grey terraced houses behind them.
‘Because your mother would have wanted it,’ said Daniel. ‘It’s one of the only ways we can honour her memory.’
Adam nodded, accepting the explanation. ‘Does Edgar know we’re going?’ he asked. Like many of the miners, Daniel’s cousin was not a religious man. Church for him was where the owners and the managers went: its doctrines of social respect and obedience were useful tools to buttress their control of the workforce.
‘Yes, he knows. And he understands why,’ said Daniel. But Adam sensed an unease in his father’s voice that belied the certainty of his response.
The church was beautiful. It was smaller and simpler in design than the church in Islington, made of an old silvery-grey stone that was cold to the touch. There was no stained glass and the morning light poured in through the high leaded windows of the clerestory. The brick floor of the nave was uneven, worn down by centuries of use, and the carvings on the oak-wood chancel screen were primitive and mysterious – flat ancient faces with thin mouths and opaque eyes. The building was timeless, far removed from the ugly excrescence of the mining town stretching out behind it down the hill.
It was a family church built and maintained through the centuries by the Scarsdale family. Their huge marble mausoleum surrounded by iron railings and encrusted with black names and dates dominated the churchyard; and inside, a baroque tomb of two seventeenth-century ancestors carved in relief, lying side by side on a stone bed in the south transept, struck the only unharmonious note in the church’s architecture.
The empty front pew was reserved for the present occupants of Scarsdale Hall who had not yet arrived when Daniel and Adam took their seats at the back of the church. They came in just before the service was about to start: the father, a straight-backed, thin-faced man in his fifties with a long aquiline nose and a short clipped grey beard and moustache, was dressed in the severe formal fashion of thirty years before, and had on his arm a younger wife, who moved slowly up the aisle, her movement sharply constricted by a wasp-waisted hobble skirt that reached narrowly down to her ankles. The wilting sleeves of her silk blouse dripped with expensive lace and a wide-brimmed hat covered with artificial flowers was perched on the front of her head at just the right angle to show off her conventionally pretty face.
They were