Tremors

No one in Denby Ash, neighbours, relatives, the milkman, the rent man, the local priest, the ladies on the brass cleaning rota or fellow members of the Mothers' Union would ever say that Ada Braithwaite was a woman given to hysteria, flights of fancy or deliberate attention-seeking. None of them would dare. She was, by general consent, a woman who did not make a fuss and got on with life; whatever life threw at her.

And life had, in fact, thrown quite a lot Ada's way.

At the age of fourteen she had gone from school into service at Ash Grange when it was known as 'the Big House' and its owners were, in practice if not in title, Lords of the Manor. Ada worked honestly and hard and the lords and ladies of the Big House were grateful, for this was wartime and if good domestic staff were hard to find in 1939, by 1945, under the looming shadow of a bright new socialist age, they were an endangered species. As were – although they did not yet realize it – the owners of Ash Grange themselves, whose fortunes and standing were based not on gifts of the royal prerogative, nor on rewards for victories in battle from a grateful nation, but on the ownership of land which, by geological serendipity, floated on a black sea of coal.

One morning, in her second year as a scullery maid there, the vicar of Denby Ash called at the Grange and informed Ada that her father had been killed on active service at a place called Tobruk, which was in North Africa, and if she was so inclined she could borrow an atlas from the vicarage to find where it was. The beefy, red-faced cook at the Grange, Mrs Stott, to whom Ada saw herself as understudy, put a comforting ham hock of an arm around her and told her she did not have to – a drop of hard work was what she needed to take her mind off things. She received the same advice from Mrs Stott a year later when she was informed, again by the vicar, that her mother had left the village – and Ada, her only child – to follow a Canadian corporal she had 'struck up with' who had been posted to a signals unit in Southampton. Although Ada was just as unaware of the location of Southampton as she was of Tobruk, the vicar made no offer of the loan of an atlas this time and neither did Mrs Stott offer a consoling embrace. The wartime death of a father was one thing, the desertion of a mother quite another and years later, when a letter arrived addressed to her, care of the vicarage and bearing a Canadian stamp, Ada flung it to the back of the fire without opening it.

On VE Day, Ada Lumley, as she was then, plucked up her courage, handed in her notice and left Ash Grange in search of her own brave new world. She found a job in a textile mill in Huddersfield seven miles away, and discovered a world of dance halls, picture houses, trams, charabanc trips to the Dales and even – for the first time – the coast and the delights of Hornsea and Bridlington. She also discovered young men, and eligible young men discovered her. Ada never, in her mind, set a spark but where there was a flicker of a flame, if she did not exactly fan it she certainly encouraged it to come closer, out of the draught. There was a dalliance – she would put it no higher than that – with the rather fusty, bespectacled accountant of the textile mill where she worked, a man of twenty-eight in years but fifty-eight in demeanour and attitude. Then a much more passionate, even exotically fiery, relationship with a Polish Spitfire pilot who had ended the war on the side of the victors but had found his native country still occupied.

But of all the interested young men who tempted her with port-and-lemons or half-pints of Webster's mild served in the dimpled glasses with handles which were reserved exclusively 'for ladies', the one whose cap was pitched successfully at Ada was that of Colin Braithwaite, a miner at Grange Ash, one of the three collieries which encircled the village of Denby Ash like protective, outlying forts.

And so, after five years of freedom, Ada Lumley returned to Denby Ash to become Mrs Colin Braithwaite, solemnizing the event in the village church of St James the Great under the wistful eye of the vicar who had, until that moment, been the bringer only of bad tidings.

The Braithwaites embarked on married life by moving in to Number 11 Oaker Hill, a two-up, two-down terraced council house still known locally as one of the 'pit houses' which had been built in 1906 by the colliery owners who had built Ash Grange for their own accommodation, and had been rented exclusively by miners ever since. Ada kept the house warm and clean, did the washing on Mondays, scoured the back-door steps on Wednesdays, washed the windows on Thursdays, did the baking on Tuesdays and the grocery shopping at the local Co-Op on Fridays. She made sure that Colin's snap tin and flask were full every morning before he bicycled to work at the pit at 6 a.m., and that there was hot water for a bath on his return, followed by a cooked tea on the table by 5 p.m. For his part, Colin went to work with never a day off sick, brought the coal in and laid the fires every morning, and placed his pay packet on the kitchen table every Friday. The couple visited 'the club' once a week, usually on bingo nights when women were welcomed rather than tolerated, but for Saturday night socializing they divided their custom fairly between the two public houses which bookended the village: the Sun Inn at the 'Huddersfield end' and the Green Dragon which marked the 'Barnsley end' of Denby Ash. They paid their dues into the village holiday club which allowed them an annual coach trip and a week's bed-and-breakfast in Scarborough or Bridlington, or, in an adventurous year, Morecambe.

Colin's workmates and Ada's neighbours – especially the neighbours – all expected the couple to plunge into parenthood and no one could explain (though many wondered) why it took Ada a further five years to fall pregnant with Roderick, their first and, as it turned out, only child.

A healthy son was not a blessing Colin Braithwaite was to enjoy for long, for on one fine spring morning in 1960 the vicar of Denby Ash was once more recalled to mournful and tragic duty. Ada was pegging out washing on a line...