Chapter 13
Lew Sylvester’s brother Warren had picked up a copy of the Sheffield Telegraph at the dog track on Saturday, and had seen an advertisement in it for miners to fill the vacated positions at Grangely Main. There were similar adverts, too, he’d heard, in newspapers in Birmingham, Newcastle and Liverpool. Only a matter of days now before the striking miners slunk back to work, Warren had said. He had no sympathy for them, not an ounce. The miners should put up and shut up or get on and do something else for a living. That was his view. Warren had no time for self-pitying whingers.
Lew was full of this news as he walked along the dark streets with Arthur and Amos, but disappointingly Arthur would only nod, as if it was only to be expected, and Amos walked ahead so he didn’t have to listen. And then, when they got to the colliery, it turned out not to be news at all – the talk in the time office and the lamp room was of nothing else.
‘Waste o’ bloody time,’ said Alf Shipley, who had no faith in the power of the working man to improve his lot. ‘All them weeks, kiddies starvin’, folk dyin’, an’ all for nowt.’
‘They should stick it out,’ said Amos. ‘If blacklegs take those jobs, there’ll be riots on t’streets.’
‘Oh aye, an’ what good’ll that do anybody?’ said Sidney Cutts.
‘Keeps it in t’newspapers,’ Amos said. ‘Makes folk realise we can’t be subdued by capitalist tyrants.’
‘Keep thi revolutionary claptrap to thissen,’ said Alf. ‘Tha’ll ’ave us all out o’ work wi’ that kind o’ talk.’
‘Death or victory,’ said Amos loudly, punching the air. He grinned broadly.
‘Bloody ’ell, Amos, I didn’t know tha could smile,’ said Sidney. He handed Amos his brass checks.
‘Puts Yorkshire miners centre stage,’ said Amos, ignoring Sidney and continuing with his theme. ‘Right under Balfour’s nose.’
Lew said, ‘Aye, an’ right up it an’ all,’ and was pleased to earn a brief laugh from Arthur who stood by him in the line.
‘Fact is,’ said Arthur, ‘Balfour’s never ’eard o’ Grangely an’ never will. Nowt to do wi’ ’im.’
Amos shook his head. ‘Balfour best sit up an’ listen then,’ he said. ‘The workin’ man will ’ave ’is day.’
Arthur, displeased with this casually seditious talk, walked to the bank ahead of Amos and Lew, exchanged a friendly nod with the banksman who took his check, and stepped on to the cage. He was the last man on, and it plunged downwards almost immediately. At the bottom of the shaft he set off alone to the Parkgate seam where he was to spend his shift. It was only a mile from the shaft bottom but it was a devil of a place to work, hot and dry and dirty. The water carriers – young lads hauling tanks of water on wheels – went back time and again to fill the dudleys of any miner working there.
There was no need to stoop in the main roadway through the mine, the roof being several inches higher than a man’s head and wide enough for tubs and ponies to pass each other with room to spare. Arthur strode along, content to be alone. Amos and Lew would join him soon enough. He thought about Eve; he knew that what Samuel Farrimond had asked of them was harder for her than for him. Arthur was underground as often as he was at home anyway. The house in Beaumont Lane was Eve’s domain, and almost sacred to her. Arthur understood this, and it was because he understood that he had spoken as he had; Eve would not have been able to utter the words, yet Arthur knew that, at the same time, she would never forgive herself for failing to make the offer. So he had spoken for her and offered their home as a refuge for strangers, and foreign ones at that. He hoped her kiss earlier that morning had meant she forgave him.
He turned into another tunnel, hotter now, and lower. Arthur had to move more cautiously and he stripped off his jacket and shirt. He passed two men, Fred Greaves and Frank Ogden, youngsters not long graduated from the screens and sent by the deputy with replacements for two of the wooden props that supported the roof; they had twisted under the weight of the tons of rock and shale they held at bay. It was a common enough sight, these bowed and buckling posts, and it was a full-time job to keep up with the maintenance. Arthur knew the two lads – there was no one at New Mill he couldn’t name – and they exchanged brief nods as he passed.
‘On thi own?’ said Frank, watching him go.
Arthur said, ‘Sykes and Sylvester an’ all,’ but he spoke tersely and didn’t stop walking or look back, because nobody ever worked alone and Frank Ogden should know that.
Arthur was stripped to his shorts by the time Lew and Amos arrived at the coalface; the temperature in this section of the pit was pushing 90 degrees. Lew, crouching in the confined space, took a deep drink from his dudley then began to strip too. Arthur was already lying on his side finding if not exactly a comfortable position then one which was at least tolerable while the work was done. Amos made no move to join him. He waited, stock still, with his head slightly cocked.
Arthur looked at him. ‘When you’re ready,’ he said, drily.
‘Summat’s amiss,’ said Amos.
Immediately, Arthur pushed himself away from the floor and up on to his knees; he’d noticed nothing awry himself, but Amos was almost as experienced in this pit as he was, and many a man had been saved before now by gut instinct. Lew sniffed the air; it was hot and full of dust, but it didn’t carry the foul stink of gas. Arthur checked his lamp for any change to the flame; it burned bright and was yellow, not blue, and he looked at Amos questioningly.
‘What’s up?’ he said.
‘Summat’s shiftin’,’ said Amos, and he began to shuffle back down the tunnel, away from the coalface. Arthur and Lew exchanged a look and, without saying a word, agreed to follow him. Lew left just ahead of Arthur, who stayed a fraction longer, listening, before picking up his lamp. The merest scrap of shale, no bigger than a flake of snow, fell from the ceiling on to his bare shoulder. More followed, soft and sinister. Bent almost double, moving as quickly as he could in the confined space, Arthur set off out. Lew was just in front, Amos had moved out of sight. He’d be heading all the way back to the main roadway; if something was happening, that’s where they needed to be. It was a nuisance, creeping away from the face in this way when it was likely they’d be back before long, but there was not a shred of doubt in Arthur’s mind that it had to be done. The wooden props lining the tunnel creaked from the strain of supporting the earth. They did this every day, Arthur told himself. It meant nothing. Nevertheless he tried to step up his pace, but he’d caught up with Lew now, and the taller man moved more slowly underground, always had.
They shuffled on and were making good progress, were so nearly out. Just a few yards more and they’d be in the roadway, where Amos waited. And then, with heart-wrenching certainty, Arthur knew that it was all over. In a few, short, terrible seconds, the creaking became a splintering and the splintering became a demonic creak and grind, more final than anything he had ever heard before, and the noise was ahead of them, not behind. Amos, still unseen, shouted, ‘It’s comin’ dahn!’ and Lew turned in panic to see where Arthur was, wasting precious moments to twist himself round in the confined space. There was Arthur, almost on top of him, and their eyes locked for the briefest moment before Arthur gave Lew a powerful shove with his shoulder, propelling the younger man further down the tunnel as one of the props, then another, snapped like matchsticks under the impossible weight, and the roof of the tunnel pressed down with all the might of the earth above it. The rockfall was loud and swift and brutal; it filled the tunnel with dust and noise so that nothing was visible and even the sound of Lew screaming was lost in the din. Then, with obscene suddenness, it was finished. Lew was pulled away, dragged backwards by unseen hands as the last rocks settled into place and a silence descended, more terrifying by far than the noise.
Lew, half-crazed by the trauma, struck up a low, animal moan like an injured bull. Amos left Lew with the men who’d run to his aid and shuffled forwards, as hesitant and vulnerable in the thick dust as a blind man. Gr
oping with his hands, he found the edge of the fall and, stooping, felt along its fringes for any sign of Arthur. He could see, at this close range, the extent of it, floor to roof, and nothing to show that Arthur was there, though still a chance, thought Amos, that his friend could be safe on the other side of it. Standing again, leaning in to the wall of rock, he began to pull at the rocks nearest the tunnel roof, loosening them, letting them slide. Behind him, Lew’s wailing had finally ceased – or, at least, ceased to be audible – as he was helped further along the roadway to the pit bottom. Fred Greaves, plucky for a youngster, had stumbled towards Amos, coughing and choking on the dust, to join him in his task. Together, wordlessly, they clawed at the rock; if a space could be made at the top of the fall, perhaps Arthur’s voice might be heard. Perhaps if they worked hard enough, there might be space for a man to crawl to safety.
They laboured at the task for almost an hour, Fred driven by youthful inexperience, Amos driven by grief. He knew, now, that it was hopeless. Enough of the fall had been shifted out of place to see just how far back it extended. Unless Arthur had turned and run in the opposite direction – and Amos knew he hadn’t, knew he would’ve been right there with Lew – then his body had to be underneath these rocks.
He slid away from the top section of the wall, back down to the tunnel floor. The dust had finally begun to clear, and visibility was improving. Amos heard Reg Gilford, the seasoned old deputy, calling him back. There were reinforcements, said Reg, men with unsapped strength and energy. Fred, too young to pay no heed to the deputy, clambered gingerly down the irregular slope of the wall and retreated but Amos stayed put, heaving rocks from the base layer, showing no sign of flagging.
Then he saw it, revealed by the removal of a large, flat section of stone: Arthur’s hand, emerging outstretched from the debris as if straining to touch him. The palm was down, the fingers splayed, the nails rimed with black. Tears began to course silently down Amos’s cheeks at the sight.
He sat back on his heels and hung his head. Behind him, Reg Gilford had arrived to coax him away, and he saw, immediately, why Amos had ceased his efforts. Any further attempts at rescue would be fruitless. Now it was simply a matter of retrieving the body.
It could wait a minute or two though, thought Reg, hanging back respectfully from Amos, who appeared to be praying. But Amos had nothing to say to God, whose presence could never be felt at the bottom of a mine. Instead his head was full of grief, curses and impotent fury.
It took no time for the pit to rob a man of his life, thought Amos. No time at all.
Chapter 14
Monday was wash day, the one day of the week when Seth and Eliza were happy to get out of the house and off to school. Breakfast on Mondays was always rushed because by the time they got themselves up and downstairs, Eve was already busy fetching in extra water, bringing it to the boil and piling soiled linens into a great basket in the kitchen. Years ago she had got Arthur to install a barrel outside the back door to collect rainwater from the spouts; it was softer than water from the spigot in the street, and better – Eve believed – for the clothes. She guarded her rainwater jealously; it was forbidden to use it for the bath tub, and she made Seth and Eliza go back and forth to the tap with buckets when water was needed for any other purpose than the weekly wash.
In silence, the children ate bread and dripping and drank a glass of milk at the table. They watched as Eve bustled about, lifting the mats from the kitchen floor and shifting the fire irons and fender away from the rising steam. She pushed the empty dolly tub nearer to the stove and then dragged the mangle across the floor too, positioning it by the tub. Eliza, a helpful little soul, collected the empty plates and carried them to the sink where she briefly rinsed them and stacked them to dry on the ridged draining board. Ellen, far too young for school but old enough to understand that she should keep out of her mother’s way, slipped down from her chair and into the parlour, away from the commotion. Then Seth and Eliza, wrapped up warm and ready to go, came to Eve for a brief, distracted peck on the head before leaving the house to join their friends on the short walk to school.
Alone in the kitchen, Eve filled the dolly tub with boiling water and dropped in the first batch of whites: sheets, pillowslips and a few bits of the children’s underwear which looked in dire need of a hot wash. She left them there to soak and went out into the backyard to stretch out her drying line, unhooking the coil of thin rope from its place by the kitchen window and unravelling it until she reached the privy wall where there was another hook at the same height as the first. She looped the rope around it twice then walked back at a slight angle, making another line which was finally secured on to a third hook on the other side of the window to the first. She tied the loose end tight, yanking on it hard, to be sure it wouldn’t give way. It wasn’t a bad drying day, she thought. Even if the weather turned and the washing all had to come back into the house, they would still have the smell of outdoors about them. Hilly appeared; her line was already up, and she had a basketful of wet clothes resting on her hip. The two women exchanged a smile but didn’t linger to chat. No one had time for that on wash day.
Back inside, Eve took the wooden dolly in two hands and plunged it into the mass of wet and steaming linen in the tub. Up and down she worked the stick, her face set in an expression of grim determination. There was nothing half-hearted about Eve’s approach to washing; she was all vigour and concentration. When she was satisfied that the clothes had taken enough of a pummelling she took up a pair of wooden tongs and began to hook out the items one by one and pass them through the mangle. It was heavy work; sheets that had dropped in so easily when dry were now made leaden with water. Eve puffed slightly as she fed them into the jaws of the mangle and turned the great iron handle. The water, slightly greyer now but still hot, ran on to a sloping wooden tray then down through a hole and back into the dolly tub. Soon she could make a start on the next batch. All being well, by the time the children came home at dinner time, the bulk of it would be done.
Eve was pegging out sheets in the backyard when she heard the sound that had the power to render her catatonic with fear. Somewhere in the town a housewife had begun to strike a poker against the grate of her fire and the sound, carrying easily through the walls of the terraced houses, had been heard and replicated by her neighbour, and hers, and again hers, until it seemed that hundreds of pokers were striking hundreds of iron grates, to relay the news more effectively than any telegraph that there had been an accident at the pit. Eve listened to the hollow, chilling sound of metal on metal and prayed with all her heart that it wasn’t at New Mill, and if it had to be New Mill, then it wasn’t Arthur. Let it be anyone else’s husband, she prayed, but let it not be my Arthur.
Eve had walked up to the pit with a growing crowd of women, but she felt alone among them and drew no comfort from their presence. On the contrary, she regarded them as rivals in their joint desire to be spared the grief and uncertainty of widowhood. There was no comfort, either, in the fact that on previous occasions Arthur had survived unscathed. New Mill was a safe pit compared to many, but Eve had made this journey twice before, her mouth as dry with fear as it was today, and had stood as close as she was able to the pit head while bodies were carried out and the dead named. That Arthur was not among them then made it more of a certainty, to Eve, that he would be this time.
She knew, the instant she arrived. There were many women there before her and their expressions of profound relief, for which at that moment Eve hated them, changed swiftly to looks of deep compassion when they saw her. So she knew from their faces that it was Arthur, though she didn’t know – at least not immediately – that it was him alone. That news was delivered to her later, as she sat motionless in the deputy’s office not drinking her hot sweet tea, waiting for Arthur’s poor, crushed remains to be brought up the shaft. She remembered, as if it were a glimpse of another person’s life, that she must have left Ellen alone in the house. The realisation didn’t alarm her; it si
mply crossed her mind, then was gone. The Earl of Netherwood came to speak to her; he always tried to attend an accident at one of his collieries, had even, on one occasion, joined the rescue effort underground. He sat by Eve for a while and spoke to her gently of his sorrow, but she didn’t meet his eyes and barely heard his words; this encounter, to her, was no honour, but merely part of the ongoing nightmare. Lord Hoyland, giving up the effort but sitting in silence with her for a while, wondered what her future held. He didn’t know Mrs Williams, had no idea what she was made of. He hoped she would find the resources – both inner and material – to stay in Netherwood. The earl was a fair man and his estate didn’t evict women for being widowed, but rent must be paid all the same.
‘Can we assist you home?’ he said now, in the hope that practical help might be more welcome than words of sympathy. ‘My driver’s outside. You’re more than welcome …’
She turned on him a gaze of such emptiness that he trailed off into silence again. Ah well, he thought. No point sitting here. So he took his leave and joined the pit managers for a debriefing; the priority now was to find unquestionable proof that the accident was unavoidable.
Eve sat on. Then Lew came to find her, one leg bandaged from the shin to the knee and blue and yellow bruising to one side of his face. He was weeping openly, like a child, though Eve was not. Arthur had saved him, he told her through great, messy sobs. Arthur had pushed him clear of the prop before it fell. He died a hero, said Lew, she could be proud of him.
Eve stared at him for a moment, then said, coldly, ‘I’ve always been proud of Arthur. He had nothin’ to prove to me.’
Lew left her alone then, and she sat in silent desolation. Boast not thyself of tomorrow, she thought, for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth.
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