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the report’s publication and the end of the subsidy, Arthur ‘A. J.’ Cook, the miners’ leader, had toured the coalfields with his rallying cry: ‘Not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day.’ The local newspapers carried weekly reports about the situation, and the miners’ newspapers were full of stories about the dispute. In the chapels, the preachers delivered solemn sermons likening the miners to the Children of Israel in bondage and the coal owners to the Babylonians and Egyptians.
    The subsidy ran out at the end of April and the miners, refusing to accept pay cuts and longer hours, found themselves locked out by the owners. On May Day, the chief executives of all the TUC unions voted to strike in support of the miners, and to defend their own wages, starting at midnight on the third. The general strike lasted nine days but by June the miners had been left out on their own.
    From the allotment, Winnie and Walter watch men searching Hickleton colliery’s spoil heap for discarded coal while Walter tells Winnie stories about the lockout. The hero is always Arthur Cook, the villains Winston Churchill and Churchill’s supposed friend, Nancy Astor. Churchill is Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Conservative government and keen to confront the miners. They have disliked him since 1910 when, as Home Secretary, he sent in troops to reinforce the police when miners went on strike in the Rhondda. There had been trouble and miners hurt, and the two sides had blamed each other ever since. ‘You know what he said to Arthur Cook, Winnie?’ says Walter. ‘When Arthur said, “We’ll let grass grow on those pulley wheels before we submit to tyranny”? He said: “And I’ll make you eat it.” Eat grass!’
    Winnie looks at the grass and weeds around her and wonders what it would be like to eat, and how you would cook it. If the strike goes on, is this what they’ll have for dinner?
    ‘He reckons he’ll drive t’ miners back down their holes like rats. I’d give him rats! Like his fancy piece Lady Astor . . .’
    ‘Her that called miners the worms of the earth?’ says Winnie.
    ‘That’s what she said in’t it! “The worms of the earth, toiling underground.”’
    Winnie shakes her head and trembles, the anger felt on her family’s behalf more potent than any she would feel on her own. The stories are not in the national newspapers, but then they wouldn’t be, would they? Officially recorded or not, they dramatise what the miners know to be true, and for Winnie they become History. It is the line about worms, the one supposedly uttered by a woman, that she will remember and pass down to her children and her grandchildren. Her father, who saved his commanding officer in the war, who was a healer, who did his best, though he could be cruel, dismissed as a scrap of blindness in the soil by a wealthy woman with a name like a perfume.
    *
    As they walk back through Goldthorpe, across King Street and Queen Street on to the High Street, men cluster on corners and police are in the side streets waiting to raid the slag heaps for scavengers. Some young men are in holiday spirit, idling and bantering, swimming in the brickworks ponds, playing football with their shirts and vests off, skins black from rubbed-in coal. There are men playing trumpets, and in a field on Barnburgh Lane, others organise pit-pony races, the animals having been brought up above ground while the pits stand idle.
    It is the older men who worry most, dependent with their wives and families on the soup kitchens, the Distress Committee, and whatever they can steal or glean from the land. There are children with holes in their clothes, holes in their boots and, sometimes, with no boots at all, which makes Winnie glad the Parkins have only two little ’uns in Sonny and Olive. Their family is relatively comfortable with Winnie and Millie now both working and able to give their mam money. They have even managed to share some of their food with