Do the Birds Still Sing in Hell? Read Free

Joseph Horace Greasley was always known as Horace; his mum had seen to that from quite an early age. No way were people going to call him Joe like his father. She couldn’t comprehend why anybody would want to shorten people’s names.
    Horace enjoyed the backbreaking manual ploughing of the fields, sowing the seeds and generally keeping the place ticking over so the whole family could reap the rewards of the 30 or so acres left to them by their grandfather many years before. Home was number 101 at the end of a row of miners’ cottages in Pretoria Road, Ibstock.
    Horace, his twin brother Harold, older sister Daisy, young sister Sybil and baby Derick were luckier than most pre-second world war families at the time. Although rationing was yet to be introduced, times were still hard and even though Horace’s father was employed full time at the local pit, money was tight, to say the least. No matter. Horace and his father would see that the family was well looked after.
    Joseph Greasley senior was a miner, a hardworking coalface worker who would get out of bed at 3.30 each morning to milk his cows before completing a ten-hour shift at the nearby Bagworth Colliery. As he set off for work a few hours later he would give young Horace a shake and though extremely tired and bleary-eyed, Horace would continue to pick up the chores where his father had left off. The animals trusted him; he was comfortable in their company, they in his. He was their regular feed master, the person who cleaned their beds and tended to their injuries, and they seemed to sense it. They were his animals; he was the luckiest boy in the school. Including the chickens and the ponies he had nearly 50 pets. The pigs were his favourite – so ugly, so dirty. Life had dealt them a raw deal but they were his favourites, no doubt about that.
    John Forster who lived at number 49 on the same street had once boasted in class that he had seven pets: three goldfish, a dog, two cats and a mouse. Pah! Horace had put him in his place when he’d begun reeling off the names of the Welsh ponies, the cows, pigs and even the hens. Twenty-two hens at the last count and each one had a name.
    Only they weren’t pets, Horace knew that, not really. Each November would end in an accepted sadness when his father killed a pig to supplement the family’s diet. The meat took them right through to Christmas and sometimes beyond. Horace understood, at least he did when he enjoyed theregular weekend bacon sandwich or a ham joint on a Sunday afternoon complete with roasted potatoes from the fields and quite often an egg or two collected that morning.
    It was the food chain, the law of the jungle, survival of the fittest. Man needed meat and it just so happened the Greasley family had plenty of it walking around their fields. Horace would sit for hours after the pig kill (not through choice, but because it was kind of expected), rubbing salt into the meat to cure it. Hour after hour his father would come into the big open scullery where young Horace sat working on the body of his dead friend. His father would look at the meat, press into the flesh, occasionally take a slice off and after tasting it would announce, ‘More salt!’
    Horace’s shoulders would drop, his fingers already red raw, swollen and stinging, but not once did he argue or complain. The pig that only a few days earlier had a name would be unceremoniously turned so that its arse pointed into the air, and another pound of salt would be expended into the body.
    When the salting was complete his father would come into the scullery with a large boning knife and expertly take the pig apart. The hams would be removed and stored in a cool pantry just off the hallway and the sides of bacon would be hung up the flight of stairs that led to the family’s bedrooms on the first floor. It was a strange sight but that was the best place in the house to hang them, his father had often argued with his mother. It gets the through