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