Alligator Playground Read Online Free PDF Page B

through to Tom. She strode to the stone-walled fields, and remembered running across them as a kid. Now she wore trousers, and laughed at the fact that she was too tall to graze her crotch anymore.
    On the second day in the terraced house the silence was even thicker than the walls she had clambered over, and an effort was needed to stand up and go outside. But after the midday dinner of overcooked lamb, potatoes and cabbage, her father took his jacket from the back of the door and said: ‘Come on, Angie, let’s walk down the road to the pit. The men have been laid off, and the women have set up a protest camp outside gates. You’ll need a scarf and hat, though.’
    Maintenance men kept the mine humming so that seams wouldn’t collapse or water pour in. Pits were closing all over the coalfield, he said, but the miners wanted jobs not redundancy money. ‘The government’s playing arsy-versy one minute, and changing its tactics the next, just to unnerve everybody. They treat people like bloody schoolkids.’
    Three women were warming themselves at a coalfired brazier, all dressed in various styles of anoraks, rainbow scarves and woolly hats. One young woman sat on a plank between two barrels, helping a young boy to drink out of a titty-bottle filled with warm tea.
    An elderly grey-haired woman in a duffel coat, tall and thin, came out of the headquarters caravan. ‘Up from London, are yer?’ she said, when Fred had introduced Angela. ‘My name’s Enid. You don’t talk like us anymore.’
    ‘I can’t help that, can I?’ The woman had spoken with humour perhaps, but Angela had never liked that kind because whoever used it only wanted to put one over on you. She regretted her sharp tone, and even having opened her mouth.
    ‘Well, here we are,’ Enid went on, ‘doing the only thing we can to mek the buggers see sense. I’m not sure how far we’ll get, though. They’re doing their best to shift us. Last week they set the bulldozers on us, but the drivers refused to do it, bless ’em. The media and TV was here, and the powers that be didn’t like that, so they ’ad to call ’em off.’
    A young woman came out of the caravan with mugs of coffee and gave one to Angela. ‘We was at school together, don’t you remember?’ The wind blew the flaps of her headscarf this way and that. ‘We was in Miss Griffin’s class.’
    She said yes, now I do, and knew she would have been here as well if she had stayed and married a man whose only hope of work was down the pit – being bossed about by this woman who had set herself up as their leader.
    ‘The men are used to the work, and get good money,’ Enid said. ‘It’s the only job they can do, and there’s no other. If many more pits close it’ll be a disaster. Even now, all these villages are dying, and the crime rate’s soared. At one time you could go out without locking your door. We used to police the place ourselves, you might say, but nowadays the young lads break in and tek everything. It goes on all the time.’
    ‘Enid’s one o’ the best,’ her father whispered. ‘None better. The salt o’ the earth.’ Such phrases suggested matiness, and bigotry, yet she listened, asking the right questions, with words and gestures natural to her. Still feeling a fraud, yet knowing they had more of a case than anybody else, she signed the petition, and gave a tenner for the fighting fund.
    Enid told her father he had a lovely daughter, and there were tears of pride in his eyes. He held her hand affectionately by the back door, but let it fall as they went in, for fear her mother would see.
    On the third day she said she had to go home and look after Tom, and was as happy to get away as the first time, unable to smile till reaching Doncaster and heading south. To have stayed longer might have turned her back into someone she had always had a horror of being, only feeling what she assumed to be her real self when a tea tray was brought to her table at the hotel in