ninety-seven. Every time she closed her eyes lately, the dark shape of the strange man in a black hat was there, burned onto her retina as he walked up the sunlit driveway. She drummed her fingers lightly on the contents page. Here was her chance to find out more about him; to add colour and detail to the silhouette that made her skin shrink; maybe even to glimpse the reason for what her mother had done that day. Laurel had been frightened before, when she’d searched for Henry Jenkins on the Net, but this—this rather insignificant book—didn’t scare her in the same way. The information contained within it had been published for a long time (since 1963, she saw when she checked the copyright page), which meant—allowing for natural attrition—there were likely to be very few copies in existence, most of them lost in dim less-travelled places. This particular copy had been hidden for decades amongst miles and miles of other forgotten books; if Laurel found something inside she didn’t like, she could just close the cover again and send it back. Never speak of it again. She hesitated, but only briefly, before steeling herself. Fingers tingling, she opened quickly to the ‘Prologue’. With a deep breath of strange and sudden excitement, she began to read about the stranger on the driveway.
When Henry Ronald Jenkins was six years old, he saw a man beaten to within an inch of his life by policemen on the High Street of his Yorkshire village. The man, it was whispered amongst the gathering villagers, was a resident of nearby Denaby—a ‘hell upon earth’, situated in the valley of the Crags and considered by many to be the ‘worst village in England’. It was an incident the young Jenkins was never to forget, and in his debut novel, Mercy of the Black Diamonds, published in 1928, he gave life to one of interwar British fiction’s most remarkable characters, a man of alarming truth and dignity, whose plight generated enormous sympathy from readers and critics alike.
In the opening chapter of Black Diamonds, police in steel-capped boots set upon the ill-fated protagonist, Benny Baker, an illiterate but hard-working man whose personal heart-breaks have led him to agitate for social change and ultimately which result in his untimely death. Jenkins spoke of the real-life event and its profound influence on his work ‘and on my soul’, in a 1935 radio interview with the BBC: ‘I realised that day as I watched a man reduced to nothing by uniformed officers, that there are weak and there are powerful people in our society and that goodness is not a factor in determining into which camp one falls.’ It was a theme that was to find expression in many of Henry Jenkins’s future novels. Mercy of the Black Diamonds was declared ‘a masterpiece’ and on the strength of its early reviews became a publishing sensation. His earliest works, in particular, were lauded for their verisimilitude and the unflinching portraits they observed of working-class life, including uncompromising depictions of poverty and physical violence.
Jenkins himself was brought up in a working-class family. His father was a low-level overseer at the Fitzwilliams’ Collieries; a stern man who drank too much—‘but only on Saturdays’—and who ran his family ‘like we were subordinates in the pits.’ Jenkins was alone amongst his six brothers in leaving behind the village and the expectations of his birth. Of his parents, Jenkins said: ‘My mother was a beautiful woman, but she was vain, too, and disappointed by her lot; she had no real or focused idea as to how her situation might be improved and her frustrations made her bitter. She goaded my father, badgering him constantly about whatever it was that came first to mind; he was a man of great physical strength, but too weak in other ways to be married to a woman like her. Ours was not a happy household.’ When asked by the BBC interviewer whether his parents’ lives had provided him with material for his novels, Jenkins laughed slightly and then added: ‘More than that, they gave me a firm example of the life I wished more than anything to escape.’
And escape it he did. From such humble beginnings, Jenkins, by virtue of his precocious intelligence and tenacity, managed to pull himself out of the pits and take the literary world by storm. When asked by The Times about his tremendous rise, Jenkins credited a teacher at his village school, Herbert Taylor, for recognising