At the Coalface: The memoir of a pit nurse. Veronica Clark

and he understands. Now it’s your turn,’ he said, giving me a gentle nudge towards the back door.

      As soon as I walked into the house, Peter stood up. He came over, took me in his arms and gave me a hug and a kiss. As he pulled away I gazed into his face – he looked broken. I felt a pang of guilt because I knew I’d done it to him. But I’d been so unhappy, and sometimes desperate situations call for desperate measures. We sat and talked all afternoon. We spoke about our situation in London, living above my mother and the general interference from both sides.

      ‘Your mother is as bad as mine,’ I eventually sighed. ‘Neither of them wants us to be together.’

      Peter agreed.

      ‘So I can’t go back there,’ I insisted.

      Peter nodded. ‘I know. I’ve been speaking to your dad. He says you’ve lived in my world long enough so it’s time I came to live in yours, here in Yorkshire.’

      I smiled to myself. Good old Dad.

      ‘He even said he’d get me a job,’ Peter continued, breaking my thoughts. ‘Reckons he could fix me up with something at the pit.’

      ‘Oh, Peter, that’s brilliant!’

      And it was, because it meant Peter and I could be together and far away from our two meddling mothers. The decision had been made; Peter would leave London and move to Doncaster.

      ‘I’ve missed you so much,’ I wept.

      ‘Me too,’ he said, wrapping his arms around me. ‘Your mother has been such a cow to me. It’s been horrible without you, Joan. I just want to make you happy – I want us both to be happy.’

      We spoke long into the afternoon and then he told me something quite unexpected.

      ‘You do know your mother came to Doncaster looking for you after you’d left London, don’t you?’

      I was astounded.

      ‘Yes,’ he continued, ‘she scoured all the hospitals in the area but no one had a record of a Joan Hart, so in the end she came back to London.’

      Somehow, the fact that both Mum and Peter had come looking for me filled me with hope. I thought no one would have even noticed that I’d gone, but I’d been wrong.

      ‘I love you with all my heart,’ I said, taking his hand in mine.

      ‘Me too, Joan, me too.’

      Dad was relieved when we told him we’d made up. But first, Peter had to return down south to serve his notice. In a way it made things easier because it gave me time to find us a suitable house to live in.

      ‘I think I can help you there,’ Harry, my step-brother, said.

      Harry was Polly’s eldest son. He was a successful businessman who owned four busy shops, so he mixed in high circles. One of his acquaintances was a flying officer in the RAF who owned a house he was looking to rent out in a place called Balby, situated on the outskirts of Doncaster. The house, on Stanley Street, sounded charming by description, but if I’d imagined a palatial home then I was sorely mistaken. The two up, two down was a complete tip! To make matters worse, the walls rattled every time a train went past on the main line, which ran along the bottom of the garden right beside the outside loo! Still, with little else available, we took it – beggars can’t be choosers. Thankfully, Tony and Ann offered to help clean it.

      ‘Don’t worry, Joan. We’ll soon have it sorted!’ Ann said breezily, rolling up her sleeves. I admired her optimism.

      There were so many empty beer bottles stashed under the sink and in various hidey-holes around the house that, by the time we’d collected and returned them all to the off-licence – or beer-off, as we called it – we’d earned ourselves £5! The previous tenant, it seemed, had been partial to a drink or three. The house was freezing cold, but thankfully it had a fireplace in the living room, which doubled up as the dining room. Ann would cart huge carrier bags of coal over to me from home, travelling all the way on the bus from Woodlands, because Dad got it for free. It was a good 8 miles away, so her arms always felt a little longer by the time she arrived. I couldn’t have cleaned it without her and Tony because it was the dirtiest place I’d ever seen – even Elsie would have flinched. We discovered some strange things, but the strangest and most interesting find came right at the end, when we tackled the basement.

      ‘Here, look what I’ve found,’ Tony called as I squinted in the dim light. I could just make him out – he was holding something in the air, high up above his head. He started clacking them with his fingers. At first I thought they were a pair of castanets, but as Ann and I got closer we realised it was a pair of false teeth! Ann screamed the house down, but I fell about laughing and so did Tony. It was nice to laugh; otherwise I think I might have cried. Still, we did what we could with the rest of the house. Ann and I bought metres of red gingham checked material from Doncaster market so that we could make curtains. We hung them up in the kitchen window, and strung them on a piece of elastic in a ‘skirt’ around the bottom of the big white butler’s sink.

      Peter visited whenever he could to help out, but without a car he had to catch the train. It was such a long journey that half the weekend was taken up by travel alone. Peter also needed to find himself a job. True to his word, Dad had heard of a position at Brodsworth Colliery. He put Peter’s name forward and helped set him on his way.

      ‘It’s hard graft, mind you,’ he said, sizing Peter up. I could tell he was wondering if my southern husband was up to the job.

      Peter took it, but four weeks later Dad’s north–south prejudice was confirmed when Peter was laid off sick with a sprained back. He was a highly skilled plumber, so he wasn’t used to digging or hard labour to earn a living.

      With a house to move into, I gave my notice at the nursing home and secured a better position as Deputy Matron at a day nursery that cared for babies and children aged from a few months old up to two years. The nursery was different to others in the area in that it was used by a lot of one-parent families, which was something I identified with. The matron was an unmarried mother with a little boy who attended the same nursery. I admired her because this was a time when many mothers were so shamed by having a baby out of wedlock that they’d simply abandon them or give them up for adoption, but not this lady. She was incredible, and I had nothing but the utmost respect for how she loved and cared for her little boy.

      The working hours were almost as gruelling as the nursing home. When I arrived at 6 a.m., I’d find half a dozen prams already lined up and waiting outside the main door. The parents would’ve gone, usually straight off to work. There was no worry or concern back then that someone might steal a baby, because everyone did the same thing. Mind you, it was also a blissful time when you could leave your front door unlocked without fear of being burgled or murdered in your bed. If I was shocked by the babies being left in the morning, then I was even more surprised when the same parents forgot to pick them up at night. More often than not there was usually a mix-up or breakdown in communication. One parent would presume a friend or relative was picking the child up and vice versa. A lot of the parents were bus drivers or conductors working long shifts, so I’d have to ring Doncaster police station to get them to trace the missing mum or dad.

      ‘Hello, its Elmfield nursery. I’m afraid we’ve got another no-show,’ I told the officer on the other end of the phone.

      ‘Another one?’ he gasped. ‘How on earth can you forget to pick up your child?’ The line went silent for a moment and I visualised the officer shaking his head in despair. ‘Don’t worry; someone will be along shortly.’

      Whenever I had a situation like that, Peter would sit and wait with me until the police officer arrived. The officer would try to track down the parent, who always had a valid excuse, but they’d still be given a police caution.

      I loved working with the children, and I often imagined myself as a mother with a brood of my own. All the same, it was nice to hand them back at the end of the day and switch off. I’d worked at the nursery for almost a year when Dad called to see me.