I am sick to death I ever came to this place, Gillon thought.
20
Several months before Christmas, when the price of coal traditionally began to rise, the price of coal began to drop. No one knew why.
“It’s nothing to worry about,” Walter Bone told them. “I’m not defending the Company, I’m stating fact. It used to go that way all the time—the teeter-totter, we’ve seen it all before.”
But this time it didn’t come up. The first snow flurries in late October and early November came and the price of coal kept falling.
“When the price goes down far enough, the sales begin to go up. People who don’t even need it buy it because the price is so low. It means less gold for the masters and more work for the men.”
But no one bought and no one knew why. Mr. Brothcock went down to Edinburgh to find the reason why and no one knew. It was the same all over West Fife. Coal was falling into the sea off St. Andrew’s wharf.
It was ironic, Gillon thought, just when the Pitmungo Coal and Iron was mining more good coal than ever before, it was selling less.
“It makes one almost believe in God,” Gillon said, “in a sense of justice.”
“Whatever it is, it serves the bastards right,” Jem said.
“It may serve them right,” Andrew said, “but we’re the ones who are going to hurt.”
The winter came on hard. The winds from the north as steady and cold as ever, the High Moor bleak, clouds dark, houses wind-whipped and chill, snows deep. Every hard storm was warming for the Pitmungo miners.
“Now the bastards have to buy,” the men would say, and wait.
“I have no brief for the Company, as you know,” Mr. Bone said, “but there is a balance to things. No one still has last year’s coal and there is cheap coal available. People either buy it or they freeze. I’m talking God’s sense and order now. If there is coal in the ground and people need coal, God will see to it that men will mine it.”
When no one bought it, Lord Fyffe finally went down to Cowdenbeath and go the Flying Scotsman at Edinburgh and went to London to find the reason why. The men felt better then. Old Fyffe would find out.
“He may be a bastard, and he is one, but he’s a smart old bastard, man.”
He found out nothing.
When he came back he told Mr. Brothcock to cut back on production until the laggard buyers began to buy, and then he cut the price of his coal two pennies the ton just to get the buyers to come through the door.
* * *
When a coal company lowers its prices there are several things it can do. It can increase efficiency to bring out more coal at the same cost. It can invest money in new equipment to mine more coal at the same cost. It can cut the profit it takes from its coal. Or it can cut the money it pays its miners to mine the coal. The easiest of these is the last. Sometime in November the men began being paid two pennies less for each ton of coal they mined.
“Think of it this way,” Mr. Brothcock shouted to them from the tipple, when he announced the new pay scale. “Business is sick but the Company must go on or we are nothing. The Company has given us work, now we must give back our due. Think of it this way. If a man is sick, well, that is sad but we all go on. But if the Company is sick, then we all are sick. If the Company goes hungry, then we all go hungry. If the Company dies … well, I would rather not go into that.”
He let that soak in, while the wind whistled through their wet work clothes.
“The Company has stood by you, now this is your chance to stick by your Company. Lord Fyffe expects every man to do his duty. Thank you. Good luck. God bless.”
A few of the very old miners said, “Amen.”
“And what about Lord Fyffe? Did they cut his pay packet, too?” a young voice shouted.
“Get that man’s name,” Mr. Brothcock said.
* * *
Two pennies a ton. It wasn’t much when you got down to it. A few pints less here and there, no beef in the beef broth, no jelly with the scones, no butter with the tatties, just shift things around a bit.
But it was much in the Cameron house; the cut would go deeper, because nothing must be allowed to touch the flow of siller to the kist. The Cameron Pot came first, the Camerons’ welfare second, and the stomach third, and almost everything else was out. Because now there was not only the obligation to the kist; there were the quarterly payments to Mr. Ogilvie to be met.
Sixteen pennies a day—and the loss would be more than that, Maggie knew—meant four fewer pounds of bread on the table. If they cut the children workers, the putters and fillers and pithead girls like Emily, which Maggie knew they would do, the real loss of income would be, at the least, close to eighteen pence a day, nine shillings a week, four hundred and sixty-eight shillings a year if they worked steadily.
Over twenty pounds a year.
None of them had seen it that way, but there it was for them, the breaking point, the safety margin that made it possible for them to live on Tosh-Mungo Terrace, the margin that made the difference between being a Doonie and an Uppie, the difference between getting out of Pitmungo and being buried there in the coal for eternity. They went back to tatties and dab at the stool and then to tatties and point, a trick Maggie had learned from her parents in hard times. Bowls of spuds were placed in the middle of the table next to a piece of meat or fish. With each bite of the potato you looked at the meat and it was amazing, just as her father had told her, how after a time you came to believe you ate the meat along with the potatoes. So despite the cuts, the kist was served. And despite the cuts, the quarterly option payment was sent down to Cowdenbeath to Mr. Ogilvie. He never knew what denial and what privation, what hunger, went to him with those worn, coal-blackened pound notes. Mr. Ogilvie always had to wash his hands after getting the Cameron payment.
It was the mountain of coal outside Lord Fyffe No. 1 that finally forced the first major break. When the top of the coal bing reached the foot of Tosh-Mungo Terrace, they began letting miners go, the old miners first, no matter how long their service or how loyal they had been. After them went the known heavy drinkers, the ones who from time to time on Monday mornings, when a storm was hammering the side of their homes, discovered they were sick and couldn’t make it to the pit. After them went the malcontents and complainers, who were not among the most productive miners. Rob Roy was one of them. But although the Camerons were on the “victimization” list, they also were among the best miners in Pitmungo. The efficiency program would begin with men. Fewer men would produce the same amount of coal, or even more, than the larger number of miners had before them.
The days of the squeeze began. Sometime in November, the men were ordered to load their coal tubs to the hilt, up to the top of the sideboards, to the point of overflowing. When the tubs arrived at the weigh station a heavy iron rod was swept across the top of the tub and all the coal that fell down, all the coal that had been piled up above the sideboards, was to belong to the Coal and Iron Company. It was, Mr. Brothcock said, a voluntary gift from the men to the master. None of the survivors said a word. They filled their tubs to the brim and made their daily gifts. They called it “Lord Fyffe’s hump.”
After the “hump” came “Lord Fyffe’s clock.” A new cut in the payment for coal was required, Brothcock announced, to keep the Company healthy, but so no man’s take-home pay would be cut, the Company had—generously, he said; those were the superintendent’s words—agreed to extend the hours of the shift from ten hours a day to twelve. On the way out of the pit in the evening, in the dark—it was entirely voluntary—those men who wanted to could stop on the way home and help, for an hour or so, to move the coal they had mined that day a little further up the bing or to load it in the last of the available coal hutches. It was heartwarming, Mr. Brothcock was able to report, how many of the men, tired as they were, volunteered for work on the bing.
Every one of them, in fact.
Which must have been gratifying to the people in Brumbie Hall, Mr. Selki
rk said. All those barrels of ale being paid for at last. It was a gratifying example of how the classes could work together when they had respect for one another. It was enough, Mr. Selkirk said, to make you want to cry.
* * *
Gillon was the first in the family to show the effects of the work and the diet. They were making their own soap again, as they had years before, to save a few pennies. It was not very good soap but it was strong and it worked and it was cheap. They made it a hundred pounds at a time, six pounds of potash and a quarter of a pound of resin bought at the Pluck Me, and four pounds of lard bought from one of the nearby pig farms. They stirred it all together and let the mess react on itself for five or six days and then the mixture was poured into a ten-gallon cask of warm water and stirred twice a day. It was brutal work, the stirring, but after only ten days of it you had a hundred pounds of soap. The trouble with the soap was that it tended to stick and when Gillon stood up in his tub after work one day, the soap clinging to his bones gave him the look of a Halloween skeleton. He was afraid to look down at himself.
“Christ almighty, look at me,” he said. “I can’t go on this way. They’re killing me.”
“Och, hard-time ribs,” Maggie said. “You’re getting old; you can’t expect to go along like the lads.”
Getting old! It wasn’t that. It was the diet: porridge and water, potatoes and salt, thin tea with no sugar; who could expect a man to work thirteen hours a day on that and look sonsie? But even granting that, when Gillon looked in the glass after the tub, he saw how deeply his eyes had sunk into the hollows of his cheeks and how the muscles in his neck were standing out like rawhide. He looked, he thought, sixty-five years old, and here he was only one or two over forty, he wasn’t exactly sure how many.
That was the terrible irony about it; the harder he worked the closer it brought him to collapse or some form of starvation.
“You’re a Highland man and a Highland man always goes on,” Maggie said.
Gillon was no longer sure. He wasn’t sure he might not end up like the men Henry Selkirk had described, the ones who put down their picks for a wee rest and never got up again, dead from hunger while at work.
That was the thing that hurt most of all if there was any justice left anywhere in the world. To work all week long, six long days a week, and at the end of it to be hungrier than at the start of the week, to be flirting with the outer edge of starvation.
But there was nothing they could do about it then; there was no way to stop the onward rush of the work, because the winter was settling in and Mr. Brothcock had them where he wanted them. His theory of commerce and labor relations was simplicity itself; it was embroidered on a sampler over his roll-top desk in the pay office.
A man must eat, musn’t he not?
And a man’s children must eat, musn’t they didn’t?
He had them where he wanted them. Others must have read what Gillon saw in his own face. On Saturday night, when the men crawled up out of the pit to be paid, Mr. Brothcock laid Gillon off.
21
Gillon lay in bed and watched the others dress for work. It was getting to them, too, he could see. There was no zest to their movements, everything they did was designed to save energy. He thought it would be good to lie in bed and watch the others go off to work but it wasn’t any good. He got up and had breakfast with the boys.
“You should have stayed in bed, Daddie,” Sam said; “there’s no point in getting up.”
“There’s no point in lying there either.”
That was it, he thought, the thing that frightened him. There was no point.
As for food, there was oatmeal, at least, good and hot, with water and a pish of sugar.
“Can you spare that?” Sam said. “Can you really?”
“No,” his mother said.
“Do you know what I’d like, right now? Three big thick blubbering slabs of bacon on my plate. That would see me through the morn,” Sam said. “Not too well done, you see. A lot of fat oozing and drooling on the plate.”
“Aye, with bread to slop it up,” Emily said. She was a thin little girl with a mine rat’s appetite. After an afternoon working around the pit, she could come home and eat a pound of bread.
“Do you know what I would like right now?” Jemmie said. No one bothered to ask. They all knew.
“Be on a boat to America; that’s what I’d like.”
Silence. They wouldn’t encourage him.
“You wouldn’t see an American miner hoping to have three slabs of bacon on his plate. He’d have six for breakfast and six for his piece in the pit.”
“Is there any more oatmeal?” Sam said. “Just a smick.”
“None. The trouble with you is you gobble your food. You want to smushle it, nurse it along a bit, make it go further.”
“It is, I am here to say,” Sam said, getting up from the table, “a very sad day for Scotland when a working lad can’t get a second bowl of oatmeal.”
“I suppose you saw the pitprops they brought in Saturday morning?” Andrew said.
“No,” Gillon answered.
“Pine. All green pine. Pine to save a penny.”
“That’s no good. They won’t last a year,” his father said. “There must be a safety law about that.”
Andrew shook his head. He knew the book; he knew the laws.
“No law. Only the coal master’s good faith.”
“Oh, aye, that’s good. That’s very good. It isn’t his head the goddamn roof is going to fall on,” Sam said.
“Language,” his mother warned. They were getting out of hand in the hard times; their language was falling apart; they were losing their style and becoming Pitmungo. She saw it in herself.
“The theory being that he is no more interested in seeing his mine cave in than the miner is,” Andrew said.
“It’s a very nice theory, especially when you’re not under the roof.”
“Mr. Brothcock says they’ll replace them with ash when the coal begins to sell again,” Andrew said.
“Yes. I will believe that exactly at the moment I see the new props come in and the old props go out,” Sam said. “As of that moment I will become a true believer.” He turned to his mother. “I will even begin to believe in God, how does that strike you?”
“If we live that long,” Ian said.
“Aye, of course. In the faint chance we live that long.”
There were doors closing on the lane and hobnails scraping against cobblestones.
“Let’s go,” Sam said. “Let’s go the now. Mr. Brothcock does not choose to wait.”
“Mr. Brothcock is in bed.”
“Fool. You think he’d miss the looks on the faces of the men seeing the pine props being carried in? Worth an admission price.”
They strapped on their pit gear, and without saying goodbye to their father, most likely forgetting that he wouldn’t be coming with them this day, his having gone with them every day of their working lives, they jostled their black way through the door and out into the lane heading down for Colliers Walk and the Lord Fyffe No. 1 pit on the moor. Gillon could not remember feeling so alone.
“Where are you going?” Maggie said.
“I don’t know.”
“I thought you would stay here and fix some things around the house.”
“No.”
He wouldn’t descend to that. Not yet, not the way the old men did, daundering around the house, trying to make someone believe they were needed.
“The least you can do then is go up the slag pile and cull out some small coal for us.”
She was in the doorway with a creel in her hand.
“No.”
He felt good saying no to her. Picking coals off the slag pile alongside the old rheumatic women with the out-of-work alcoholic husbands. He hadn’t come to that yet.
He went down the lane in the direction the boys had gone, the only way he could think of going, the way he had gone almost every morning, six days a week, fifty-two we
eks a year, for more years than he could quickly add up. He never tried to count them. Someone was cooking an egg in butter, and the smell of it made his stomach turn over with the richness of it. He was hungry, he realized, deeply hungry, bone-marrow hungry, but when he had been working he wouldn’t allow himself to feel it. Now, with nothing to do, the hunger was out in the open, naked and unashamed. If he knew the person cooking the egg he would ask them for a minch of it, he thought, and knew he was lying. It hadn’t come down to that, either.
There were other men his age in the doorways, sitting in the sun out of the wind. He didn’t want to join them but he felt a little less alone. All in the same stall together. He was, after all, the last of the men his age to be laid off. That said something. Some of the men he passed and nodded to had been out of work for weeks now, some for months. They lived on church shillings and they didn’t starve because they barely moved and they slept hunger away.
There was a strange smell to the town that he couldn’t place. He wondered if he only smelled it now because he wasn’t dressed in his pit duds, with the breath of the mine all through them.
He went down the Walk and through the gate that led to the mine’s work area. There they were, as Andrew said, the new pitprops, white and clean and smelling green in the morning. Pine. Unmistakably pine. He lifted one of the props. The wood was still wet, resin running sticky from the knots, and it was light. On the cold dry days, when the barometer was high and the atmosphere sat heavily on the surface, you would be certain to hear them groaning and even breaking under the pressure. A splinter from one of them might pierce you like a wooden lance. He sensed someone standing behind him.
“Pine.” It was Mr. Brothcock.
“Aye.”
“Good, sturdy Scotch pine.”
He wanted to say something to the superintendent, something subtle but pointed; nothing came to him. It had to be correctly said because he had no right to get the boys in trouble.
The Camerons Page 28
