His father, John Fellows, like the rest of the tenants, was a miner. He had chosen to live in Hackett’s Cottages because they lay nearer to the colliery than any other buildings in Halesby and were within a reasonable distance of the cross-roads where stood his favourite public-house, the Lyttleton Arms. Hackett’s Cottages, in fact, hung poised, as it were, between two magnetic poles: the pit where the money was earned and the pub where it was spent. To remain there contented would have implied a nice equilibrium, had it not been that eastward of the cross-roads and the Lyttleton Arms ran the Stourton Road, with houses on both sides of it, and amongst them the Lord Nelson, the Greyhound, and the Royal Oak. Next to the Royal Oak came the entrance of the Mawne United football ground, and since John Fellows’s passion for football was only exceeded by his devotion to ‘four-penny,’ the pull of the colliery was hopelessly overbalanced by these delights. At the side of the Royal Oak, on Saturday afternoons, the entrance to the football ground swarmed with black coats; and the crowd of small boys, of whom Abner made one, peering through cracks in the match-board palings could see nothing but the backs of other black coats, or perhaps, above the tilted heads of the spectators, the sphere of a football leaping gaily into the dreary gray that passes for heaven in a black-country winter. It cost threepence (ladies and children half-price) to enter the football ground, and since John Fellows never wasted the price of a pint on any one but himself, Abner had to be content with an occasional sight of the football soaring above this or that quarter of the field of play and with the hoarse waves of encouragement or derision that went up from the crowd inside. Later, in the happy days before his father’s second marriage and the second family, John Fellows used to take the boy along with him to the football field on Saturday afternoons, or rather Abner would trail behind him as far as the gate and then pass through the turnstile in front of him, wedged between his father’s trousers and those of the man in front, breathing perpetually the acrid smell of oily coal-dust which he accepted as the natural odour of humanity. Whenever he could get himself washed in time John Fellows made a point of going early to the ground so that he might place himself in his favourite position, immediately behind the nearer goal-posts, so close to the net that he could talk with George Harper, the Mawne United goalkeeper, who, before this translation, had been a collier working in the same shift as himself, or under-mine the self-possession of the visiting ‘custodian’ with jeers and abuse.