Abner Fellows was born in the front bedroom of Number Eleven Hackett’s Cottages, a four-roomed house of old brickwork that stood in the middle of a row of twenty-one, set diagonally across a patch of waste land on the outskirts of Halesby. The terrace was fifty years old, and looked older, for the smoke and coal dust of the neighbouring pits had corroded the surface of the bricks, while the ‘crowning in’ of the earth’s crust above the gigantic burrowings of the Great Mawne Colliery had loosened the mortar between them and even produced a series of long cracks that clove the house-walls from top to bottom like conventional forked lightning. One of these lines of cleavage split the face of Number Eleven and ran through the middle of a plaster plaque on which the pious owner of the cottages had carved the words:—

ISAIAH HACKETT:
GLORY BE TO GOD, 1839.

This plaque, together with the metal medallion of a fire insurance corporation and two iron bosses connected with the system of stays by which Mr Hackett’s descendants had tried to save their property from collapsing, made the Fellows’s house the most decorative feature of the row, and gave Abner a feeling of enviable distinction in his childhood long before he knew what they meant.

His father, John Fellows, like the rest of the tenants, was a miner. He had chosen to live in Hackett’s Cottages because they lay nearer to the colliery than any other buildings in Halesby and were within a reasonable distance of the cross-roads where stood his favourite public-house, the Lyttleton Arms. Hackett’s Cottages, in fact, hung poised, as it were, between two magnetic poles: the pit where the money was earned and the pub where it was spent. To remain there contented would have implied a nice equilibrium, had it not been that eastward of the cross-roads and the Lyttleton Arms ran the Stourton Road, with houses on both sides of it, and amongst them the Lord Nelson, the Greyhound, and the Royal Oak. Next to the Royal Oak came the entrance of the Mawne United football ground, and since John Fellows’s passion for football was only exceeded by his devotion to ‘four-penny,’ the pull of the colliery was hopelessly overbalanced by these delights.

At the side of the Royal Oak, on Saturday afternoons, the entrance to the football ground swarmed with black coats; and the crowd of small boys, of whom Abner made one, peering through cracks in the match-board palings could see nothing but the backs of other black coats, or perhaps, above the tilted heads of the spectators, the sphere of a football leaping gaily into the dreary gray that passes for heaven in a black-country winter. It cost threepence (ladies and children half-price) to enter the football ground, and since John Fellows never wasted the price of a pint on any one but himself, Abner had to be content with an occasional sight of the football soaring above this or that quarter of the field of play and with the hoarse waves of encouragement or derision that went up from the crowd inside.

Later, in the happy days before his father’s second marriage and the second family, John Fellows used to take the boy along with him to the football field on Saturday afternoons, or rather Abner would trail behind him as far as the gate and then pass through the turnstile in front of him, wedged between his father’s trousers and those of the man in front, breathing perpetually the acrid smell of oily coal-dust which he accepted as the natural odour of humanity. Whenever he could get himself washed in time John Fellows made a point of going early to the ground so that he might place himself in his favourite position, immediately behind the nearer goal-posts, so close to the net that he could talk with George Harper, the Mawne United goalkeeper, who, before this translation, had been a collier working in the same shift as himself, or under-mine the self-possession of the visiting ‘custodian’ with jeers and abuse.

Even at these close quarters, where Abner felt the pressure of his father’s protecting legs and heard him spitting into the net over his head, there was no conversation between them. John Fellows kept his speech for his mates, for George Harper, or, on occasion, for the referee; but at half-time, when most of the players ran in to the pavilion and the ball was free, he would give Abner a poke in the back and his neighbours a wink, and the lad would slip under the wire roping and plunge into the mÊlÉe of boys who were scrambling for its possession. Once Abner had dribbled the ball away from the others and sent a shot at the goal which George Harper, who had stayed behind talking, moved mechanically to stop, and missed; a ripple of laughter had spread round the field, and when Abner ran back under the ropes with his face flaming, his father pulled him in by the ear and said with his clay pipe between his teeth: ‘Damn’ little blood-worm yo’ are! Bain’t he, George?’ And George Harper, staring down at him with his big, melancholy eyes, said, ‘Ah . . .’

Next day, as a reward for his prowess, John Fellows took Abner with him on his afternoon walk, past the cherry orchard, past the stationary cages at the pithead and the silent engine-house of the Great Mawne Colliery, down between the smoking spoil-banks to the bridge over the Stour which separates the two counties of Worcester and Stafford, in either of which the police of the other are providentially powerless. Here, on a cinder pathway shaded by the sooty chestnuts of Mawne Hall, there was racing between the limber fawn-skinned whippets that the miners fancy: timid, quivering creatures, with their slim waists bound in flannel jackets like frail women in their stays. It was thrilling to watch them slip from the leash, race with their pointed heads converging, and roll over at the finish in a cloud of cinder-dust.

On that Sunday the police of Staffordshire were quiescent. George Harper was there, his massive thighs bulging striped cashmere trousers. There was joking between George and Abner’s father about the goal that the boy had kicked. John Fellows won five shillings on a dog called Daisy, and Abner trailed home behind him at six o’clock, when the steam in the engine-house was beginning to hiss from its exhaust in preparation for Monday’s work. John Fellows retired to the Lyttleton Arms with his five shillings and spent a dozen more, while Abner went home, too tired to play and clammed for his tea. It surprised him to find number eleven locked up, though he ought to have remembered that before they went out dog-racing his father had left the key with Mrs Moseley, who did the housework, and cooked their dinner; but when he walked round to Mrs Moseley’s he found that she had gone to church and forgotten to take the key out of her pocket. He tramped back home again and fell asleep on the doorstep.

In later years, when the conflict with his father began, he always remembered these untroubled days with regrets: the Saturday football matches; the Sunday whippet-racing and terrier-fighting, together with certain afternoon walks along the tow-path of the canal, where the bodies of puppies that were old enough to be taxed floated into beds of loose-strife and willow-weed, and jack-bannocks hung swimming in shoals through the yellow water. In all these memories John Fellows was a benignant figure; and this one would hardly have guessed, for John Fellows was not prepossessing. He was a short man with a low-set head and an immense shoulder-girdle. His eyes were small and lost in deep orbits, so that when his face was ingrained with carbon the white of the sclerotics was intensified in a way that made them seem grudging and malignant. Walking home in his pit clothes, bow-legged and with the dazed and hampered gait which is the mark of men who labour underground, he always looked as if he had been drinking. Generally he had been drinking, but at his soberest he was an ugly customer, and the blue enamelled tin pot in which he carried his tea struck one as a dangerous weapon.

Poverty their household never knew. John Fellows could reckon on picking up his three pounds a week, and spent every penny of it. There was always meat in the house, and Mrs Moseley knew better than to serve him with food that was not freshly cooked. In his way he was an epicure. Although the Lyttleton Arms was the nearest public-house, Abner would often be sent out with a jug to fetch his father’s supper beer from the Greyhound, or even from the Royal Oak, next the football ground, where they kept Astill’s Guaranteed Old Stingo. John Fellows had no use for bottled beer. Bottled belly-ache, he called it. He rarely smoked a pipe, for lights were forbidden in the pit, and the habit of chewing plug-tobacco had made him prefer his nicotine neat.

He was shaved once a week, on Saturday nights, and upon this function depended another of Abner’s special joys: the privilege of going with him to the barber’s shop, a low, boarded room heated by gas-jets and the breath of expectant, expectorant men. Here, wedged upon a bench at his father’s side, he would read the comic papers that Mr Evans provided for his customers. Some were printed on pink paper and some on green; and while Abner absorbed the adventures of two alliterative tramps, he would hear the sing-song of Mr Evans, a Welshman from some remote Radnorshire village, as he talked to the victim of his razor and the other waiting customers. Mr Evans was a great authority on local football, and subscribed to a news-agency that sent him a sheet of half-time and final scores long before the evening edition of the North Bromwich Argus arrived. His knowledge of football politics and personalities was all the more remarkable because Saturday was his busiest day, and for that reason he could never see a game of football played. Abner envied him this abstract knowledge of the game; but more than Mr Evans he envied a small boy with pink face and plastered hair who, wearing a long white jacket, lathered the customers’ chins, and when Mr Evans had scraped them, sprayed their faces with bay-rum. At last, with dramatic suddenness, this entertainment was withdrawn. John Fellows developed a rash on his chin which Mr Ingleby, the chemist, declared to be barber’s itch, and Mr Evans became the object of his most particular hatred.‘That bloody Welshman!’ said John Fellows. ‘I reckon shaving’s a dirty business.’

And so he grew a beard . . . but he wouldn’t let that Evans trim it, not he!

All Abner’s early pleasures were in some way or other related to his father. It was natural that John Fellows should take a pride in his only child. He didn’t talk to him much—a man who chews tobacco has better work for his jaws than talking—but he was sometimes amused by his company and proud of his sturdiness and capacity for mischief. He rejoiced that his son was a ‘bloodworm’ much in the same way as his mates rejoiced that their terriers were good fighters. He liked him to be hard, and boasted that Abner could take the strap (as he called it) without yelling. Indeed there was something to boast about in this, for the miner chastened his son with a brown leather belt which, as the buckle witnessed, had once belonged to a member of the South Staffordshire Regiment. This belt, he sometimes affirmed, had been all round the world before it came into his possession; but Abner was too well acquainted with its other qualities to pursue the history of this.

In spite of his weekly lickings Abner’s life was generally happy. He had no cares for the future. He knew that when his schooling was over he would be sent to work at the pit. He wouldn’t be sorry for that, for it seemed to him quite natural to work underground, to earn big money and spend it freely. When that day came he felt that he and his father would be able to drink together on equal terms. By the time that he was fourteen he was already taller than John Fellows, and meant to grow a lot taller still. He was going to be strong and to learn boxing: perhaps, in a few years’ time, he would be able to strip and fight in one of the boxing-booths at the wakes: perhaps, in stripes of chocolate and yellow, he might even play football for Mawne United and talk like a brother with the great George Harper.

In this manly, indefinite future, women had no place. He had never had a sister; as far as he remembered he had never had a mother; and so he followed the example of his father whose domineering attitude towards the widow, Mrs Moseley, was beyond any doubt correct, while Mrs Moseley, who had her living to make, accepted it without protest, as a woman should do. Towards girls themselves Abner felt no positive hostility, though he passed them in the street as a well-mannered dog passes cats, with a solid appreciation of their potential evil; but for members of his own sex who dallied with emasculating tendernesses he and the boys with whom he played were full of scorn and even of active malice. The worst libel that any of his companions could suffer was a chalk inscription on his own back door of the words: ‘Tommy So-and-so goes with Cissy Something-else.’

Abner and his friends even went so far as to pester these votaries of passion in their own most sheltered haunts. Above the pithead of the Great Mawne Colliery runs a lane skirting the ancient cherry orchard of Old Mawne Hall. It is short: at the end of it the pit-mound stands up black, and over beyond the Stour valley a desert of blackness stretches westward, with smoke-stacks thronging thick as masts of shipping in a harbour. Over its hedges, in the dusk, light clouds of cherry-blossom may be seen, but even before the wind has tumbled the petals down they are blackened by smuts from the colliery chimney. This lane, indeed, was a decorous walking place where one might hear a patter of moving feet and low laughter on any evening in May; but lower down the slope, past the colliery, it turned into another, shadowed with hot-smelling elder, stunted hawthorns and oak-apple trees, which had a darker reputation. Dipping down over the hillside this lane climbs back upon itself and opens out again into the orchard road. This loop, which is called in Halesby the ‘Dark Half-hour,’ was the favourite hunting ground for Abner and his friends. Carrying the smelly dark-lanterns that are sold on Guy Fawkes’ day, they would creep as quietly as possible under the shadows of the trees, selecting at a signalled moment some unfortunate couple locked in each other’s arms whom they might shame with their lights. Often they got their heads smacked, but this only served to reinforce their opinion that lovemaking which shrank from publicity was discreditable.

One evening in summer when Abner was fourteen he took part in one of these expeditions. The day had been hot. His father had promised him that he would make him a kite in the evening. The split lath lay ready on the table with a roll of blue paper. Mrs Moseley had boiled some paste, and Abner had borrowed enough string and folded newspaper to make a tail. As the heat of the afternoon declined a gusty wind began to blow from the west, filling the street with dust and scraps of paper. At six o’clock John Fellows came back from the pit. The dust had blown into his eyes, that were never very strong. Tears and sweat together were tracking down through the grime on his cheeks. He seemed to have forgotten all about Abner’s kite.

‘What’s that?’ he cried, irritably. ‘Can’t yo’ give us a moment’s peace? Wait till I’ve swilled!’

He had his swill in the brewhouse, filling a tin bath with black soap-suds. The kite had become a grievance. ‘Nattering away . . .’ he muttered, with his head in a roller towel, ‘werriting about kites on a day that would make a pig sweat blood!’

Abner, who knew his father, got away without any further discussion, leaving Mrs Moseley to soothe him. He went out and played cricket in the sloping field above the pit where the ponies that have worked so long underground that they are blind are put out to green grass and to a white mockery that they get to know as daylight. When the boys came down to play, these shaggy creatures stood huddled in a corner and edged against one another, rubbing the coal-dust out of their matted coats. If they strayed over the field of play Abner and his friends pelted them with pieces of slag from the cinder heap behind the wickets. They also threw slag at a group of little girls who dared to look at them over the broken hedge. When the light faded so much that they could no longer see to play, and the beam-engine in the power-house ceased to grunt, the boys all lay down talking in the hedgerow, and the ponies wandered back to pull at the grass on either side of the pitch. At last Abner, who was the leader of the set, because he was the strongest, said: ‘Let’s go down the Dark Half-hour and scare some of ’em.’

On such a clammy evening there were certain to be many lovers. One of the boys produced a halfpenny packet of red Bengal-lights. Abner snatched them from him, left him crying, and with three others ran down to the mouth of the lane. In the hedge-side couples stirred uneasily. The tunnel under the elders was full of a hot odour of dust and nettles and some kind of mint. They crept forward through the darkness in Indian file. ‘Let’s try this one, kid,’ whispered a boy named Hodgetts, ‘him over there up agen’ the tree. ’Ere, where’s the bloody box?’

‘There’s somebody coming,’ whispered a woman’s voice.

They struck three lights together. The tunnel glowed like a furnace. Against the trunk of a tree a short man was leaning with a pale young woman clutched in his arms. Abner saw that it was his father. He dropped his match and ran.

The boy Hodgetts came panting behind him. He was shouting: ‘Kid . . . kid . . . did yo’ see who he were? It were your gaffer!’ Abner turned and swiped at him viciously as he ran. Joe Hodgetts crumpled up in the hedge howling. Abner went on blindly into the Cherry Orchard Road. His heart thudded in his throat like a water-hammer. He didn’t know where he was. He only knew that he was crying and that he had broken his knuckles on Joe Hodgett’s skull. He rubbed them in the black dust of the roadway, and that stopped the bleeding. But nothing, it seemed, could stop his tears.