by Janeen Brian
Nervously, I picked up a rock, stared, turned it over and whispered to Gilbert, “Alvins? Medium stuff?”
“Prill. In that box.”
After a while, I managed to speed up a little. But I was nowhere near as fast as the other boys at the table. Some of them had been there months and even years. I guessed they all hoped to become miners.
“Who tossed this lot in?” Captain Trelawney had ambled up and grabbed some ore from the prill box. “Who was the last to put in?”
The boys glanced at each other.
“Not me,” crowed Bert, “I’m over the other side.”
“You’ll be out the window if you think smart remarks like that are helpful,” said the captain. “Guess it must the new boy then.” With that, the captain pushed a piece of ore up close to my face. “Attle, Pollock,” he said. “Take a close look. Don’t make the mistake again. Prill is prill. Attle is for shoring up the worked sections of the mine. Or it’s dumped. Got that?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Sorry.” I was dismayed that I’d got it wrong.
Gilbert cast me a sideways look. “You’ll get used to it,” he said, “but there’s no red ticks for good work either.”
I ignored his grin and turned my attention to the lumps of ore that tumbled continually onto the table.
There was no sun to heat the cold building and, as the morning went on, several boys draped large hessian bags over their shoulders to keep warm.
At break time, all the kids raced downstairs to play leapfrog or jump over tin drums or bits of machinery.
“Come on, Gilbert,” called Bert, holding up a long pole. “Hold the other end for us.”
“Nah,” cried Gilbert. “Get someone else.”
I was puzzled. What did the boys want with a long pole? A few minutes later, I watched as the kids took it in turns to walk under the pole, leaning further backwards the more it was lowered. The first boy to fall over backwards then had to hold one end of the pole. It looked good fun, but my head was swimming and I didn’t feel hungry.
“Do you want some?” I offered Gilbert half my pasty.
“If you don’t want it.”
After a while, I got used to spotting the copper and though it was hard to swallow and talk in the noisy, gritty room, I felt as if at least I wasn’t making any mistakes. We had another break, but then the hours started to drag.
At last, it was knock-off time.
As I clambered down the long set of steps of the picky-shed, I felt as if my bones and body had been squeezed through Mrs Ellery’s wooden-roller laundry mangle. Yet I’d been sitting, just as I used to at school.
School.
It seemed a world away, but I’d only left there that morning.
Gilbert and I picked up a few pebbles, he with his right hand, me with my left, and had competitions to see who could throw the furthest, the highest, or hit targets.
We didn’t talk much about the day at the picky-shed. There wasn’t much to say really.
“What do you reckon about going down the shaft we found?” he said.
“Shouldn’t you be getting home?” It was a weak excuse on my part, but Gilbert wasn’t concerned.
“We’re working now, Jack,” he said. “We should grab fun while we can. We gotta work Saturday mornings now too, remember.”
I hadn’t remembered.
“So when do we get to do the billycart?”
“Like I said, after work. Come on, let’s go.”
“Maybe another time, Gilbert.” I knew that Mam would have expected me home after school time, as normal. I didn’t know how I’d dodge her dark looks as it was. Besides, I was sore and tired.
I had heaps of excuses. But what would I say next time Gilbert suggested we climb down the shaft?
Chapter 12
It wasn’t much fun going home. Mam was friendly enough, but when she asked about school, I had to tell her that I’d left after giving Miss Goldsworthy the note. And I’d gone to the mines.
“You’ve started then,” she said in a quiet voice and sat down.
“It’s all right, Mam. It’s really good. I sat next to Gilbert. And I filled lots of buckets of ore.”
At last she looked up at me and met my gaze.
“I don’t know what to say, me handsome. Truly, I don’t.” She rose and took a pie from the oven.
“Where’s Dorrie?” It was something to say.
“On her bed. I need you to go to Mrs Ellery’s and get some herbal tonic. Tell her your sister has a cold.”
I agreed gladly. It meant I could get out of the house and maybe Mam might be cheerier when I got back.
After turning up the collar of my jacket, I strode along the tracks that wove in and out of the cottages. In no time, I was knocking on Mrs Ellery’s front door.
The widow wore black clothes, but with her grey hair tucked under a white cap, she looked like a little magpie standing there in the doorway. And just about as bright and chirpy.
“Come in, Jack,” she said with a small bob of her head. “How can I help you?”
“It’s Dorrie,” I said. “She’s got a cold.”
“Then I have just the thing. Follow me.”
I walked into the little cottage. The kitchen was a tiny room full of odd smells, bunches of herbs and other strange dried things hanging from the whitewashed hessian ceiling. Mrs Ellery took a handful of this and a bunch of that, put it all in a twist of newspaper and handed the parcel to me.
“Your mam will know what to do. Get Dorrie to sip the mixture as often as possible. Poor little tacker.” She paused and raised one eyebrow. “I heard about the ginger biscuit and the plate.”
I nodded. “Mam was really upset.”
“You be such a grown lad now, Jack. All of twelve, I dare say.”
“Yes.”
“I remember when I rubbed brandy on your gums when you were just borned. And on Dorrie’s and Arthur’s gums too.”
I stared.
“That be a Cornish custom, Jack. To stop you from drowning.”
“Oh.” With a shock, I remembered the time when Gilbert saved me from a rip, out at Moonta Bay.
“But sadly,” Mrs Ellery went on, as she walked from the kitchen, “it don’t stop you from hanging.”
“Oh, I won’t get into trouble then!” We both laughed and I added, “I started at the mines today, Mrs Ellery.”
She stared hard at me. “Did you now? Well, maybe that be a good thing and maybe not. We’ll see, eh?”
My eyebrows drew together. What did Mrs Ellery mean? As I followed her to the front door, I noticed the number of boxes, bags and tin trunks that lay tightly packed into every bit of space available.
“Are you leaving Moonta, Mrs Ellery?”
“No, Jack. I’ll make old bones here. My niece and her two children from the Burra mines have come to stay. Until they find a place of their own, that is. It’s their luggage that you see. The grown-up son, Matthew, be a miner. They be in town now, buying this and that.”
“Oh. Goodbye, Mrs Ellery,” I said, setting off. “Thanks for this.”
I waved the newspaper twist in the air.
“Go well, Jack.”
After several days at the mines, I felt as if I’d been going to work forever. Now instead of waiting at the Tree, Gilbert and I met outside the mines, just for the fun of walking in together. At the top of the steps, if we stopped long enough, we’d look out in one direction and then another. We’d try to outdo each other as to how far we could see.
“I can see the horizon at Moonta Bay,” I said, squinting one cloudless morning.
Gilbert elbowed me out the way.
“I can see the Indian Ocean.”
“I can see a sailing ship at the Cape of Good Hope.”
“I can see the captain of the ship at the Cape of Good Hope.”
“I can see an ant on the hat of the captain of the ship at the Cape of Good Hope.”
With a snort and a chuckle, we shoved each other into the picky-shed
, ready for another day of sorting ore.
But it concerned me that neither Captain Trelawney nor Da had mentioned the visit down the mine again. Did that mean the captain didn’t think I was suitable to be a picky boy after all? Or was there another reason?
In the end I asked Da the following morning.
“I’ve been waiting for permission, lad,” he said. “But it be all right and so you can come with me tonight.”
So soon! I felt a pang of alarm.
“Can Gilbert come too?”
“It’s not a party, Jack,” Mam said, giving Dorrie a spoonful of brown herbal mixture.
Da stifled a yawn. Dorrie had woken him earlier with her coughing.
“All right,” he said wearily, “since it be John Oates’s boy. Tell him to be at the mine office at ten-thirty tonight. And no later.”
Da shuffled back to his bed, while Mam scooped up Arthur and Dorrie clung to her skirts.
When I told Gilbert he could join me down the mine that night, he punched his fist in the air. I grinned, pleased to see his eyes light up again. Mr Oates had come home from hospital. He said too many people died in there and he wasn’t going to be the next.
“I can’t wait until tonight,” Gilbert said as I picked up a handful of ore.
“What’s up tonight?” Bert first eyed me and then Gilbert.
“We’re going ghost hunting,” said Gilbert, casually. “Wanna come?”
For a second, Bert’s face paled, then he scoffed. “Nah. Who’d wanna do that? That’s for little kids.”
Gilbert shrugged. “Oh, well. If we find any ghosts, we’ll send them around to your house.”
Bert’s eyes widened, but he kept any further comments to himself.
Soon afterwards, I found a few bits of a skull mixed up in the ore. A couple of small pieces fitted neatly together.
“What do you reckon, Gilbert?” I said. “Animal?”
“Could be,” he replied. A second later, he added. “Or human.”
We all went quiet after that.
I began to think about my other brother and sisters. They’d died from a terrible sickness. Mam said it was typhoid or the black measles. Hundreds of people all round Moonta died at that time. Some people said it was because the rainwater soaked into the water tanks built near dunnies. And then the dunny stuff turned the water rotten. But no one really knew.
My brother and sisters were buried in the Moonta cemetery. There were lots of other kids who’d died from typhoid too. So many long rows with mounds of graves. Mam called them “little hills of heartbreak”.
I put the bits of skull bone into my pocket to take home. But when I went to put them in my treasure tin beneath the bed, I noticed my schoolbooks had been shifted. I opened the first one, my English exercise book and gaped.
Someone had been writing in it. Copying words and sentences below the lines. It had to be Dorrie. How dare she! I flicked over a couple more pages. The same thing. At the back of the book was a piece of paper, with more words and sentences.
“Dorrie!” I shouted. She was nowhere to be found. Just like her to hide when trouble was about. I strode back into the room, tidied my books and tin and thought about the night to come.
Chapter 13
“Get up now, lad! And don’t wake your sister.”
I woke from a deep sleep and sat bolt upright. As I bumped Da’s lantern, shadows leaped about the room, far sharper than my woolly thoughts.
It was a starry night. The cold had a sting in its tail and I breathed out clouds of white. Yawning, I hurried along in the outskirts of Da’s lantern light.
Gilbert arrived with his lantern soon after.
“Evening, Gilbert,” said Da.
I was proud of the way my father said that to my mate. It was as if he too admired Gilbert for making it there on his own and on time.
Da spoke briefly to someone in the mine office and then we all walked to a change room full of clothing and equipment. In no time, Gilbert and I looked like our fathers in skullcaps, miners’ helmets with candles and thick pairs of boots.
Raising our eyebrows in anticipation, we lifted our heavy picks.
“Come on, lads,” said Da. “To the skip.”
I knew about that. It was called a gig too and was the metal cage that rose up and down in the mine. Some skips carried the miners. Others raised ore from underground.
“In you go, boys,” said Da. I held my breath, drew my pick and crib-bag in close and stepped into the shaky contraption.
“Both your sons, Thomas?” said another miner, already inside and waiting.
“No, this here be my son, Jack, and the other is Gilbert, John Oates’s boy. They come to see the mine.”
“What level?”
“A hundred and twenty fathoms,” Da answered.
A few more miners squeezed in and murmured greetings. Next came a series of tapping noises. My eyes widened. One miner lit the candle on his helmet and must’ve noticed my horror-stricken face.
“It be to let the operator know to lower the skip,” he explained in a gravelly voice. The gate was shut, the skip shuddered and then it dropped. My stomach dropped too. But as we kept descending, it rose like a trapped bird and beat about in my chest.
Several miners began to sing hymns. Instead of the sound being soothing, it added to my terror. I felt as if I was being sucked into a dark hell, as fearsome as the open mouth of an underground monster.
With no warning, the skip began to slow and then stopped with a sudden, bone-shaking clank. My breathing quickened as I tried to escape from it as fast as possible. But I’d stepped into a deep, gloomy cave.
“Keep still, Jack,” said Da, lighting both Gilbert’s and my candles. They barely threw enough light to show Da’s face.
“Your eyes get used to the dark,” he said.
I wasn’t so sure. Moving shadows, flickering candlelight and flames from occasional torches stuck in rock crevices made the whole scene eerie. It wasn’t the outside night darkness with twinkling stars. It was a closed-in darkness – an underground darkness.
Gilbert elbowed me. I turned and saw the same gappy-toothed grin that I’d seen in the flickering light of the Midsummer Eve bonfire. I couldn’t grin back. All I could do was nod and shuffle as close to Da as possible.
He strode past sections that were thickly timbered, like walls. And edged past great trolleys that ran along rails. My ears were being deafened by the sounds of drilling and sawing, of men swinging picks against the rock face and the rumbling of trolleys.
“Watch where you’re putting your feet,” Da warned. “There be no dunnies underground.”
Alarmed, I called loudly, “Are we nearly there?”
Da shook his head. “We be opening a new stope below.” Then he pointed to a hole and a long ladder.
The rungs were moist and greasy, and I couldn’t believe we were going further down. It was hard to breathe.
“See over there?” Da said. “Those men be shoring up the walls with timber. That keeps the earth and rock back while the new stope is blasted and mined. And those two be setting a hole ready for blasting.”
I looked to where one miner held a long metal spike to the rock. The other, with a sledgehammer, shouted, “Get nearer with your candle, Will, so I can see where I’m hittin’!”
I gasped. The first miner’s head looked too close to the spike end as it was.
Was that what Da did?
“Sometimes,” he replied, when I asked. “I sink shafts and open drives, but mostly I use a pick. And get paid for how much ore I send up. Now watch, lads. This is how you use a pick.”
He took the tool, leaned back and swung at the wall. He swung again and again with a kind of rhythm, rocking on his feet and driving the edge deeper and deeper.
“Your turn,” he said to us. “You here, Jack. You over there, Gilbert. Now bring down some ore.”
To my horror, he walked off, leaving us to it.
Gilbert and I began. For what seemed like hou
rs, we struck our picks at the wall. Each crack sent a shudder through my hands and arms, and soon my shoulders burned with the effort.
Puffing, I shouted to Gilbert, “When can we stop?”
“Dunno,” he shouted back. “I’m done in. When’s your da coming back?”
Neither of us knew the answer to either question, but I breathed a sigh of relief when Da appeared soon after. He had news.
“Lads! Captain Rodda be coming along soon to do his daily inspection. Remember he’s the captain so mind your manners. Now, let’s see how you be working.”
For another ten minutes or so, Da watched us, commenting on where best to hold the pick, or how to get more force into the swing.
“Boys,” he said and we both stopped.
I straightened my shoulders as the captain approached. He was dressed in white trousers and jacket.
After speaking briefly to Da, the captain nodded to Gilbert and me.
“You’ll each be fine miners in time,” he said in a deep rich voice. “But you might need new picks.” With a twinkle in his eye, he glanced at our miserable piles of rock.
We all enjoyed the friendly joke and I was the first to agree how little ore we’d dug compared to the real miners.
Once Captain Rodda had moved on, I leaned my pick against the wall and said, “So can we go now, Da?”
“You’ve just started, lads. Another few hours so’s you understand the work of a miner, then you can go back up to grass and get some sleep.”
My jaw dropped. Gilbert looked at me and blinked in a dazed way.
It was a lonely job. You couldn’t talk. The noise was so loud it almost stopped you thinking. But it was the dark that cowered me, like a small rabbit trapped in the fixed gaze of a fox. It pressed down on me and I struggled for air.
The dark and the fear were one and the same.
Much later, Gilbert and I dragged ourselves up the ladder and collapsed into the skip.
There was only one other miner returning to the surface.
In a weary voice, I said, “Excuse me, but why do some miners sing hymns on the way down the mine?”
The man gazed at me through bloodshot eyes. “Because we be heading the opposite way to heaven,” he said.
