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There is widespread moral outrage about the new style and mood among young women: the dance moves, the make-up, the music, the cheap fashions, the exposed arms and legs. Walter fears that such behaviour will lead Winnie into the arms of one of the new breed of young men whose politics are revolutionary and whose dress and demeanour imitate the heroes in films.
    One night in 1925, when Winnie is fifteen, her father sees her talking to a young man at Goldthorpe’s fish and chip shop. When she gets back to the house later, Walter instructs her to go to her bedroom and undress to her underwear.
    If Walter’s eldest had been a boy, the boy might have turned on him and stopped it, but Winnie is a girl, and this is how it works for girls. You get punished if the men decide you have erred, and if you complain you get punished again, only harder. Not bearing the discipline is a greater crime than the crime itself.
    Dress, underskirt, corset fastened at front with bobble and hook. As she stands there and hears his steps on the narrow wooden stairs, she works out how this was her fault. He is a good man, fighting to cope with what has happened to him in the war. If he is a good man, and he has been so disgusted with her, then what is she? She stops thinking and just decides she will not cry. She won’t let him see that the beating works and won’t upset him by weeping tears that will induce the self-pity of a thwarted man. It is defiance, not only of his power, but also of what he is when he is like this.
    ‘Tha can take that off.’ Walter, face full of contempt, looks at her corset. She turns from him and unhooks it, exposing her bare back, mottled pale as pearls. She hears the pop and loose jingle of the belt buckle as he loosens it. The slither of the belt through the loops.
    ‘Bend over.’ The tone is the one he uses when dismissing a lie, or sending out a disgraced dog. ‘Tha’s acting like a whore, Winnie. Tha’ll stay away from them lads.’
    The gypsy girl is with her, beside her, and telling her she will be all right.
    He uses the buckle end on her, which tells her he is at his angriest. The beating lasts until he is exhausted. She feels rising weals. She tells herself not to cry. She loves him, and because she loves him does not want him to see her weeping. She has learnt to hold it in.
    ‘He could never make me cry,’ she will tell her daughters, and then her granddaughter, many years from now. ‘However hard he hit me, I wouldn’t.’

4 The Worms of the Earth
    Goldthorpe, 1926
    A year later, in June 1926, Winnie Parkin is working with her father among the dry soil and thirsty vegetables of his allotment on the edge of the village. It is her half-day and she has come to help him and keep him company. He is always calmer out here – when he is well enough to come – moving in his own time, his sick back slowly rising and falling and rising again among the canes and the plant tops. Alone with him here, Winnie feels safe. She fetches water for him and pulls up knotgrass and nettles. She learns to plant out beetroot, beans and leeks, and she keeps tidy the tiny, dilapidated cabin he has assembled from old doors and salvaged planks. And when they stand to rest and sip water from Walter’s pit bottle, she talks to him about his childhood on the farms, and about Shirebrook, and the miners whose struggle has come to seem to her as permanent a part of life as the weather.
    This June, though, Walter is locked out with the rest of the British miners following the coal owners’ reduction of their wages. The dispute had been building for years. The coal markets were down and the mine owners wished to retain their profits; the miners, however, were already on such reduced wages that they felt they might as well try to force the owners to back down. The government tried to head off the conflict in 1925 by commissioning another report and paying a nine-month subsidy to make up the wages. Throughout the months leading up to