Black Sheep – Susan Hill

An achingly sad novel, Black Sheep portrays a community trapped by conventions, class and inequality.

It’s a novella with a simple story. Set it seems in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, the Howkers are family in a small, tight-knit mining town, Mount of Zeal.

The men in this town are miners, the women support them. It’s a limited life: hard, dangerous and dirty for the men, monotonous and thankless for the women.

The two kids in the family are the centre of the novel. Ted and Rose want something a little different; not radically so, but a freer job for Ted, and a less miserable life for Rose.

Ted wanders one day, aged 14, to the hills and meets a farmer who offers him work; Ted adores the freedom of the hills and the open air, and chooses farm work over mining – a decision met with anger and despair by his parents, brothers and neighbours.

Rose dates and marries Charlie, the son of a manager at the mine, but it’s a mean and miserable marriage, Charlie is a sometimes violent dictator in their home and she longs to dance, eventually flirting and dancing with a miner called Lem, a small act that results in disgrace, the end of her marriage and being dismissed from her job and returning to live with her family and serving her father and brothers.

It looks like this situation will continue until there’s a horrific explosion in the mine, and three of the Howkers are killed – the father and two older brothers. An awful accident that sees Ted choose to return home, give up his dreams of a different life and submit to a life as a miner, going down in the lift shaft each day and hating every moment of it.

Until, that is, he overhears Lem talking derogatorily about his sister Rose. Ted strikes out at him, just once, but through sheer bad luck the man dies. Quickly arrested and tried, it ends tragically for Ted, Rose and all.

My god, Black Sheep is such a sad, sad story. Despite it’s brevity and the inevitably simplistic picture of the characters it can draw in so few pages, the power of this story is in its portrayal of people thoroughly trapped.

The small mining town in which they live is described as like an ampitheatre, with rows of houses built around the mine in the centre. The houses are small, hemmed in together; Mount of Zeal is a physically constrainted and claustrophobic place.

Even more constraining are the expectations and conventions. It’s assumed that the men will work in the pit. It’s what everyone does, and when Ted chooses the job on the farm above Mount of Zeal it’s an outrage, a disgrace even. His parents can’t understand it. After the explosion, Ted chooses to work in the mine, as if there’s no other possible option once the accident has happened. We don’t know why; perhaps the pay is higher than the farm work; perhaps he wants to be with and support his Mum and sister; there’s never any question about this, it’s as if the brief period on the farm was his rebellion but he returns to what’s expected in the end. And there’s never a question about whether, given so much of the Howker family was killed in the mine, whether a different career for Ted would be safer, which it course it would.

Tied to these conventions around work are those surrounding the women of the story. There’s Evie (Rose’s Mum) who, like her Mum before her, spends her life serving the men in the house – feeding them, cleaning them, making sure they are ready to go into the mine the following day. And of course there’s Rose, who has been led to believe her only option is to get married and do the same. When she does, ‘marrying upwards’ with the son of a mine manager, and it turns out to be a miserable and coercive relationship, and she seeks some little enjoyment in life, in the tight conventions of this town, it makes her a public disgrace.

And underpinning it all is the constraints of class, which determines all of the characters’ lives, from birth to death. The expectation of such horrific and dangerous work, the grind of getting by, of watching your money, the sparse and luxury-less existence the whole community of Mount of Zeal leads, the unjust sentencing of Ted at the end of the novel.. None of these things would have been the case if it were a middle or upper class community. Their lives are shaped thoroughly by the class inequalities in which they are forced to live.