Chapter One – A Woman With No Shame

There were some thoroughly unpleasant characters living around Hexthorpe in the late 1950s, but few had managed to establish quite the reputation that belonged to a young woman everybody knew as Coal Shovel. She was twenty-two years old, lived with her mother in one of the old terraced houses and had acquired a name for herself that was whispered in the shops, discussed over garden fences and occasionally mentioned in the public houses whenever somebody wanted to describe a woman who had absolutely no regard for other people's feelings or reputations.

Nobody seemed entirely certain who had first given her the nickname. Some maintained it referred to the shape of her face, while others suggested it was a reference to her remarkable ability to shovel trouble into any situation she happened to encounter. Whatever its origins, the name suited her, and she had long since stopped taking offence when people used it. In fact, she rather enjoyed being notorious, particularly when she could see that her presence made respectable neighbours uncomfortable.

Coal Shovel was a shameless hussy by local standards, and she seemed determined to make sure everybody knew it. She had a loud voice, a coarse vocabulary and a habit of laughing at precisely the wrong moment. Her clothes were generally untidy, her hair rarely looked as though it had encountered a comb that morning, and she could turn an ordinary conversation about the weather into an argument about somebody's private affairs. She had little interest in keeping a job, despite being perfectly capable of finding one, and seemed to regard the working women of Hexthorpe as rather foolish for spending their days scrubbing floors, preparing meals and keeping their families respectable.

Her mother had tried everything to improve her, including pleading, threatening and occasionally refusing to speak to her for days at a time. None of it made much difference. Coal Shovel would disappear for hours, return at an inconvenient time, eat whatever happened to be available and then complain that the house was miserable. Her mother, who had worked hard all her life, was thoroughly ashamed of the attention her daughter attracted, although by then she had become accustomed to hearing neighbours discussing her latest escapade.

The railway works and factories provided employment for many of the men in the district, and the women were generally kept busy managing households on wages that rarely seemed sufficient. There were children to feed, coal to buy, washing to do and endless bills to meet. Most people understood that life was difficult and that nobody had much money to waste. Coal Shovel, however, had developed a particular interest in people who did have money, especially men who were lonely, comfortably settled and sufficiently foolish to believe that a pretty word or a little feminine attention meant something more than it actually did.

She was particularly fond of the public houses around the neighbourhood, where she could find men prepared to buy her a drink and listen to her complaints about her miserable home life. She had learned that a sympathetic expression, a little laughter and the suggestion that she was misunderstood could work wonders. She rarely paid for anything if somebody else was willing to put their hand in their pocket, and she had become remarkably skilled at making men believe that their generosity was appreciated far more than it really was.

It was during one of these evenings that she first took a serious interest in a man called Albert Hargreaves.