A Miner's Daughter

by Elizabeth Gill

Genres: Historical Fiction; Sagas

Synopsis

When Rosalind West leaves her native Durham for a job in London with the Doxbridge Motor Company she is determined to escape her background and build a new life. London is excitingly different and tantalisingly glamorous - especially when she meets the handsome and aristocratic Freddie Harrington, a rally driver, and the son of a once-wealthy Northumberland landowner. Against her friends' better judgement Freddie and Rosalind begin a relationship. But Freddie's family have plans for him which do not include marrying a Durham miner's daughter. Turning to a close companion for consolation, Rosalind suddenly finds herself torn between two men, both of strong passions, and fierce ambition.

Note: this book was previously published under the title Home to the High Fells.

Praise for Elizabeth Gill

'Original and evocative - a born storyteller' Trisha Ashley

'A wonderful book, full of passion, pain, sweetness, twists and turns. I couldn't put it down' Sheila Newberry

'Elizabeth Gill writes with a masterful grasp of conflicts and passions' Leah Fleming

'An enthralling and satisfying novel that will leave you wanting more' Catherine King

'If you love Catherine Cookson then you will love Elizabeth Gill' Northern Echo

Release date: May 5, 2016

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 288

Sample

The High Fells of West Durham, 1958

It always snows in February in Durham. The people there have a tendency to think that if they’ve got nicely through the New Year and had a mild January they’re home and dry, about to hit spring without any problem, and then down it comes, usually about Valentine’s Day. The old farmers call it lambing storms because it always seems to coincide with that most difficult time so that the lambs don’t get dried off properly. Sometimes they have to be dug out of snow drifts.

The snowdrops are already providing enough white under the trees and the daffodils have been unwise enough to come several inches through the ground and then the north wind sends the snow horizontally across the high fells. And it’s magic.

The stone-wall tops are like iced buns, the house roofs give Hansel and Gretel a run for their money, the bairns sledge down the Store Bank and snowmen appear in all the gardens. There are days off school if the snow becomes three or four inches deep and people try not to get to work so that they can sit over the fire and eat buttered toast and watch films on television in the afternoons, John Wayne saving the world from Red Indians or Germans. In the winter afternoons the darkness comes down fast and there is plenty of excuse to shut out the cold night and the draughts which try to creep in past the wooden windows.

It is a scarred land. Little pit villages grew there quickly in the mid-eighteen hundreds and although a great deal of money was made out of coal there are few signs of it here but it is beautiful too. On the very edge of the Durham coalfield, just before you plunge into the glories of the Durham dales, there is a little town which came into being in 1840 and there men mined coal from small pits just beyond the village.

Rosalind West’s family had been there from the beginning. They were not prosperous like the big coal-owners over on the coast but they made a living from it. By 1958 the coal was mostly gone or too costly to get out of the ground and her father was too old to move and start again even if he had thought of such a thing, which he never did.

Leonard West would not even spend a night away from the place he loved so much, her mother had to go on holiday (when she went, which wasn’t often) with her Auntie Eileen. Rosalind didn’t feel like that, she had been here for the whole twenty-four years of her life and she was desperate to get away.

One morning early in the year Rosalind looked out of the big bay window of her parents’ sitting room and gazed across the garden. The bungalow was set high up on the very edge of the village. It had been a field before her father bought it and built on it and it had big gardens around it and a view way across the fields from the front bedrooms and the sitting room.

To the right were more fields, to the bottom the football field, to the left the house where the local doctors lived and their surgery and more houses and the Mechanics’ Institute and then the sprawling of the small pit town where people like her father had made their living. It was no longer the thriving town it had been at the beginning of the century.

The tennis courts at the bottom of Ironworks Road below the Store Bank were neglected and knee high with grass. Few miners were to be seen coming home from work at teatime any more.

Three council estates had been built for the men coming back after the end of the Second World War and there was new housing but mostly people moved away to work or travelled. The steelworks was still going and employed sixty men and the house where the owner lived was just beyond Rosalind’s own, she could see from the window his children making a huge snowball on the lawn and the evergreen trees at the bottom of his garden were clothed in snow.

On Saturday nights there was little entertainment beyond dances in the Institute, the boys fighting outside, the girls egging them on with screams and laughter, broken bottles and sometimes the police. It gave the older people something to grumble about, the way that the music had gone on and on much too loudly and how the young people of today would never have survived a war as their generation had. Nobody was grateful for the freedom which had been achieved. Nobody cared any more.

The crazy-paving patio where her mother sat and sewed in the summer while her father gardened was also covered in several inches of snow and from there the garden fell away sharply. At the bottom, where the beech trees made a perfect windbreak across the lawns, little drifts had played into spirals.

Beyond that she could see down the valley to the big sheds of the steelworks, the council estate beyond the football field, the outskirts of the village marked by a few trees and then the fields going on and on. On a good day, it was said, you could see to Yorkshire but she was irritated with it. She wanted to go much further than Yorkshire.

She was bored here. She felt it to be a small life. Her parents seemed to have settled for it and were content with their small group of friends. Her mother ran a sewing circle, her father drove a few miles most evenings to a pub in the country and had a couple of pints and came home. She could see herself, if she stayed here, marrying somebody very like her father and living the same kind of existence and there was a world beyond it which she was quite desperate to be a part of.

As she sat on her mother’s well-upholstered flowered sofa her father came through from the back of the house. He was a tall, lean man, given of late to wearing cardigans, which made him look longer and thinner than he was. She had always adored him. Recently he had aged a great deal and she knew that they had financial problems. The lines of worry were etched on his face.

The Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, would soon tell people they had never had it so good but it wasn’t true around here, there had been a lot better times for her family and for many others before the pits were worked up. Fifty years ago had been the heyday in Durham. Now pits were closing and people found that they must move away from the communities they had lived in all their lives, some from their families and go to new places in search of work. Many of them went south and that was exactly what she wanted to do.

Her father smiled patiently at her as she waved the letter. That single sheet of paper spelled her freedom.

‘It’s a letter from the motor company in London. I got the job.’

‘I knew you would,’ he said and she could see him holding the expression on his face so that she would not see the disappointment. He wanted her to be happy but he didn’t want her to leave. He wanted them to stay there and for life to go on but as it had gone on when she was a little girl and had gone to the small private school three miles into the dale, when he had had plenty of work and they had been relatively prosperous and he had not been fifty and realized that he would never gain the success which she felt sure he had wanted so keenly when he had been younger.

‘I’m so excited.’

‘Your mother doesn’t want you to go,’ he said.

‘And you?’

‘Can’t wait to get rid of you.’

She had to stop herself from getting up and flinging herself at him. When she had been a small child he would throw her up to the ceiling and catch her when she came down. He had been busy then. Now he kept himself busy, in the garden, at the house. He went to work less and less.

‘She wants me to marry Edward Holmes,’ Ros said.

‘He is the bank manager’s son,’ her father pointed out. He never made fun of his wife but her social ambitions were trying for him. ‘He is also about to become a dentist.’

‘He’s very nice,’ Ros said.

‘That’s what you have said about every eligible young man for miles,’ her mother said from the doorway.

Ros looked apologetically at her and waved the letter. ‘It’s a good job with the Doxbridge Motor Company.’

‘London is no place for decent girls to be alone,’ her mother said. ‘Where would you live?’

‘I could stay in a B and B until I find a room.’

The excitement of having a place of her own, however small, and a job in a big city carried her through her mother’s disapproval and her father’s disappointment.

‘And it’s good money,’ she said.

‘That sort of money won’t keep you well in London,’ her mother said as though she knew. ‘And there are teddy boys.’ She shuddered. ‘People are attacked and the walls are all written on and there are riots. Why you can’t find a nice man, get married, settle down and have a family like other girls do I can’t imagine. You’ve had half a dozen offers.’

She hadn’t. There had been three and she had felt not a spark of excitement over any of them but she knew that her parents’ fear was that she would stay in London. She was their only child and effectively they would lose her. She wished in one way that she could be satisfied with what they wanted for her but she knew that she couldn’t be, that if she stayed here she would grow to resent them and the rest of her life.

‘London is dirty and noisy and nobody knows anybody’s name. Southerners don’t even speak to their neighbours,’ her mother said. ‘You’ll wish you hadn’t gone five minutes after you get there. You’ll be all by yourself in some nasty little room and you’ll be living off tea and bread buns. They’ll work you to death for a pittance and you’ll be treated like a skivvy.’

*

Her father saw her off at the station some weeks later. Her mother would not come and had stood tearfully by the door of the house as they drove away. Leaving was hard. At that point she would have given anything to go back and when she had to get on to the train she faltered. Her father got on with her and stowed her luggage and then he kissed her and got off the train, waving her out of sight. But ten minutes later she was already glad she had left and by the time she reached King’s Cross some three hours later she wanted never to go back home. London beckoned and all the excitement.

*

On the first day of her new job she felt sick with apprehension. All she knew was that she was to be secretary to their chief designer. The interview had taken place in a hotel. She had not been to the large and splendid offices of the Doxbridge Motor Company in south London. It was modern, all glass and bricks, and everything about it spelled money and success.

She was walked down the corridor to meet her new boss by the chairman’s secretary, a young woman of about her own age called Bernice Fortune, to whom she had spoken over the telephone and who was putting her up in her bay-windowed terraced house just until Rosalind found somewhere to live. She said she didn’t think Rosalind ought to stay in a bed and breakfast by herself and although Rosalind could hear echoes of her mother she liked Bernice and it was very pleasant not to be by herself when she didn’t know anybody.

Bernice lived alone and Rosalind thought it must be wonderful to have a house which was yours and Bernice had a top job with the company and was inclined to sing its praises and Rosalind was very proud to know her and to see how other young women could succeed in the city.

Rosalind could not help admiring her fashionable look, formal for work, a two-piece suit with cream, brown and green squares, the top sleeveless because the building was so warm, falling to hip length, a V-necked top, wide-pleated skirt and cream shoes.

They walked into the office and she was announced to her new boss and then she was left alone with him and it was impossible not to stare. She knew him. She hadn’t seen him in at least ten years. He must be twenty-five or six and the last time she had seen him he was just a scruffy boy standing on a street corner with his mates, smoking and jeering at the local girls. She could not believe she had come all this way to work for a man she had known when they both lived in a tiny mining village on the Durham moors.

He had changed. He was taller than she remembered, slender, and had about him a confidence that had not been present before. He was dark as some northern men were dark. Was it Scottish influence? He had black hair and black eyes, pale skin and was only just recognizable, so prosperous-looking. He wore expensive, perfectly-fitting dark clothes and had well-kept hands, something no village boy had ever had, long fingers, neat nails.

He also had this huge office with a smaller one for his secretary beyond. He had done what her mother would be pleased with but her mother would not have liked her anywhere near him, he had been the vulgar, common boy, well beneath her in the strict class system of a northern mining town.

His mother had been a tiny busy chapel woman. His father had owned a small bus company but had originally been a pitman and they had lived in a terraced house next to the garage. She remembered vaguely that he had been the exception, a grammar-school boy, cleverer than the rest. The transformation was not quite complete. He greeted her with a still discernible northern accent, something she did not retain, due to elocution lessons.

‘Why, it’s Rosalind West,’ he said with a smile and she knew that he was not surprised to see her, he had been expecting her. She wasn’t quite happy with the idea. ‘Hello. Do come in.’

She couldn’t remember his name. On the door it had said nothing but ‘J. Neville’. John? James?

‘Jack,’ he said to her polite pause.

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Let me show you around,’ he said.

It was strange to see him perfectly at home here, and obviously very well respected, so important apparently that there was nothing but his name on the door. The huge windows in the office looked out across the wide London street and there was what looked to her like half an acre of floor, easy chairs for visitors, an enormous desk and all very modern, clean lines and as though he had deliberately not filled the space there, as though he needed the emptiness in which to work. The furniture looked expensive too and it was the first time she had thought of an office as somewhere which would impress people, a showplace rather than just a workplace.

Jack Neville’s office was an indicator of how well the company was doing and it was obviously doing very well and he was organized, efficient, maybe even more than that and considering she would be working for him it was rather frightening. She had worked for various people before but in cosy, cluttered, modest places, the local solicitor’s to begin with, then a carpet factory in Durham and finally local government where she had swiftly become bored.

He chatted about home which put her at ease but the shock of finding him there tainted her getaway somehow, as though he was about to report back, judge her by some village standard, or worse still think that because she was from his past life she would not do, but he conveyed none of this and she thought, no, he was shrewd, he would know exactly who she was and what her qualifications were so he had been armed from the beginning, had even perhaps chosen her on purpose.

She was very good at her job. She tried to look as confident as he appeared but it wasn’t easy. He introduced her to people and Rosalind smiled and tried to say all the right things. The adventure was beginning.

That night she went home with Bernice well pleased with her new job.

‘And what did you think of our chief designer?’ Bernice said with a sideways look.

‘He’s northern.’

‘And that’s a mark against him? He’s going a long way and some lucky girl is going with him. He smells of potential money, don’t you think?’

‘I didn’t come all the way to London to get involved with a boy who lived in the same village,’ Rosalind said and then regretted it. It wasn’t a good idea to talk about her boss that way, especially as ‘a boy’ since Jack was obviously young but with plenty of talent, but Bernice only laughed and said that she had a point and with looks like hers Bernice didn’t doubt she could have anybody she wanted.

She regretted being nasty about him the next morning too when he said to her that if she wanted somebody to go and look at flats with he would be happy to go with her, which she thought was unnecessarily kind of him. Bernice was busy, she was getting married soon and there were lots of arrangements to make and although she had said she would go with Rosalind it was nice to think she would have somebody else to ask. She was looking forward to having some place of her own, however small. Her independence had become so important to her. She couldn’t wait.

Jack stood in the chairman’s office with his hands in his pockets and there was satisfaction in that, when he thought about it. His mother had spent most of his childhood telling him to take his hands out of his pockets. Jack felt triumph.

In a way maybe he had known even then that his hands did have something to hide and in another way he wished now that he could and it was a futile gesture because what his hands had done Sir Trevor held in manicured fingers. They didn’t look like they should have been cared for, Trevor’s hands and nails, they were working man’s hands, short and stubby, and he was to the world Sir Trevor Bailey, known to those beneath him in his company, the Doxbridge Motor Company, as Bayonet because of the aggressive way he went about the production of cars, the way that he had done what the newspapers called ‘taking the motor industry by storm’.

Bayonet had brought them all to where they were today, the most successful car-production company in the country, possibly in the world. If it had been that long time ago when knights and soldiers and the like laid down their lives for their liege lords, Jack thought, he would have done that for Sir Trevor because of the way that Trevor held the papers which were detailed sketches, intricate drawings, minute detail.

Yet when Jack had created them he had been unaware of the effort – he had been able to see what was required at the back of his mind, beyond his consciousness, beyond anything, and he was waiting now for Trevor’s verdict on the work which had had his attention for many months, and he was beginning to realize by the way Trevor held them, as though they were sapphires, the holy grail, the end of the holy grail, whatever it was you got at the end of it, that he was pleased with the work Jack had done. Trevor wasn’t smiling but Jack was used to that. He wasn’t saying anything yet either so Jack wandered across to the window to distract himself.

Outside it was raining. When it rained in London it seemed to him that the pavements held the water. It was not like at home on the Durham moors where the fells and the fields absorbed the rain, needed it, here it was an inconvenience, all umbrellas and complaints and shiny streets. He liked the rain.

You could work better when it rained, the cars and lights all reflected in the shop windows, running colours and you could sit there with the heating on and know you were missing nothing by being inside and the work took on its own shape beneath your fingers.

This was the end of two years’ work and the beginning of what? It was the strange emptiness after the long struggle towards the idea he had been tearing from his mind but he could see by Sir Trevor’s steady gaze that it was just the start, as Trevor rustled the papers back together and Jack turned around.

‘Sir?’

As a child, as a student he had called many men ‘sir’ but he had never called anyone ‘sir’ like he did with Trevor. ‘Sir’ was part of Trevor’s name, it attached itself to him as no other man Jack had ever met. Trevor Bailey was God to him.

‘You go ahead and do it, Jack.’

‘What about the money?’

‘I’ll sort that out.’

They were the sweetest words in Jack’s world and he knew that Trevor made no idle boast. He had opened doors that other men feared, he had seen the stars that other men cowered beneath with their eyes closed. Two years ago Trevor had come to him with an ambition.

‘I want a car that every man can aspire to, a car that will seat four people in comfort, take their luggage, that they won’t be ashamed of outside their houses, I want it built so that they can all afford it, a small, neat, reliable, a proper car. We need something which uses less petrol but which has more dignity than what is on offer to the public at present, something small, and soon, Jack, I want it soon.’

It had not for those minutes before Trevor spoke to him seemed possible to Jack. He had agreed to it of course, he had gone home and imagined it and gathered in his mind a design team and then he had woken up in the middle of the night and seen the impossibility of it and been afraid. He saw himself going to Trevor and admitting failure, or worse still submitting sketches and seeing the disappointment in the man’s face.

Jack tortured himself with images of failure through those long months while he worked and sweated and tried not to be short-tempered with the others and himself and discarded a hundred ideas and then a hundred more and the days and weeks and months ticked past and he imagined Trevor calling him into the office and saying that he had changed his mind, that it was obviously an impossibility, that he had decided somebody else could do it and much better.

In his more optimistic moments Jack knew this wasn’t true, both Trevor and he believed that nobody else had the ability to do it but in the night, in the rain, on late Sunday afternoons on foggy October days when the light had gone he knew that it couldn’t be done or that somebody would suddenly come along and announce as good or a better idea and his work would be lost, pointless.

Now he felt nothing. He listened to the other man’s soft words while his mind stayed numb and then he went back to his office, to his for once cleared desk. Nigel, his friend and fellow designer, put his head around the door.

‘Well?’ he said impatiently.

‘The old man liked it.’

Nigel let go of his breath and came into the room.

‘You could have said,’ he objected.

‘He actually liked it, Nige.’

‘Of course he bloody liked it, it’s a work of genius.’

‘You thought he would?’ Nigel looked across the . . .