From Coal Dust to Stardust

As far as Kim was concerned, there was never any reason to question my heterosexuality. I remember one day we were watching some frothy American drama on TV when I nudged her and said, ‘That actor’s really good-looking, isn’t he?’

Kim made some non-committal noise and continued watching.

‘Don’t you think it’s a bit odd, babe,’ I persisted, ‘for me to think a guy is attractive?’

I was genuinely surprised she hadn’t picked up on what I had just said; deep down, perhaps I was even hoping she might guess my secret.

This time she stopped looking at the TV and turned to me, confusion etched across her face.

‘Why would that be odd, Gary?’ she asked. ‘I tell you if I think a girl’s pretty and it’s just the same thing, isn’t it?’

‘Um, yeah, I suppose,’ I said.

And that was the closest we came in our whole six-year relationship to discussing my sexuality. Even towards the end, when I was having such a struggle to maintain the façade of being straight, she never seemed to have any inkling of the fact that I was, in effect, living a lie. My effeminate side clearly hadn’t gone unnoticed by others though …

It was a Sunday morning and Kim and I had taken her Jack Russell Toby for a walk around the boating lake in Doncaster. It’s a nice little park, well maintained and popular with families, and on this particular day it was busy with parents pushing prams, young kids running around and elderly couples enjoying a post-lunch stroll in the sunshine. We were about halfway around the lake when I spotted a kid who I’d gone to school with sitting on the wall with a gang of mates.

His name was Ted Peters and he was seriously bad news. He was always being suspended and constantly having run-ins with the police; everyone was scared of him – even the teachers. He even looked like trouble: well over six foot and built like a brick shithouse with close-cropped black hair and a jagged scar right down the side of his face. At school I’d always given him a wide berth and he’d pretty much ignored me in return; even so, when I spotted him in the distance on this particular day alarm bells started ringing and I immediately said to Kim we should take a different path.

‘Don’t be silly, babe,’ she scoffed. ‘He won’t even remember who you are.’

I figured she was right; after all I hadn’t seen him for a few years. But as we walked towards him it became clear that he certainly had remembered me – and the uneasy truce we’d had at school clearly no longer held.

‘Oi, poofter!’ Ted shouted, nudging his mates, and then deliberately mispronouncing my name. ‘Cockerel, you fucking nancy boy! Cock-a-doodle-doo!’

His mates started laughing and crowing along with him as he jumped off the wall and sauntered towards us.

I was instantly on my guard, but was reassured by the fact that it was broad daylight and there were so many people around us. I grabbed Kim’s hand and started to walk away, but his mates cut us off and surrounded us.

‘Who’s your slag then, Cockerel?’ Ted nodded at Kim. ‘Alright darlin’, what you doing hanging around with this poof? You should get yourself a real man.’

He grabbed his crotch and his mates laughed and taunted. Then suddenly Ted made a lunge at Kim.

‘What the hell are you doing? Pack it in!’ I screeched, trying to push him off her. That was obviously what he had been waiting for and Ted immediately launched himself at me, punching and kicking me to the ground. Kim was hysterical, sobbing and screaming, while Toby (whose lead I had dropped in the scuffle) was jumping around, yapping frantically.

On a relaxed Sunday afternoon you’d think that all the shouting and barking – not to mention a girl screaming for help at the top of her voice – would have attracted a bit of attention, but it was as if we were completely invisible. Perhaps people were scared for their own safety, but it was only when all the boys grabbed me off the floor and threw me into the lake that a couple of men finally stepped in and Ted and his gang sauntered off, laughing and jeering as they went. It was probably just a bit of fun to him, but I have no doubt that if it had been dark Kim could have been raped and … well, God knows what would have happened to me.

* * *

By the time I had finished my first year at college – one down, one to go – Kim’s modelling career was taking off. She was heading down to London every few weeks for castings and had started to make a few model friends, including a pretty Geordie brunette called Jayne Middlemass who was already becoming known as a Page 3 girl and later, as Jayne Middlemiss, made a name for herself on TV.

Although I had a student grant to help support me through college it barely kept me in pencils, so I got a Saturday job at a hairdresser in a nearby village. The clientele was wall-to-wall Coronation Street grannies and I spent my whole time doing shampoos and sets, but the pay wasn’t bad and I enjoyed hanging out with the salon’s owner, a gay guy called Jason who was best friends with a hugely fat older woman he called Boobs. She was your classic fag hag, always dressed in some outrageous too-tight outfit with everything spilling out. ‘Alright, love?’ Boobs would greet me in her raspy 60-a-day drawl.

The salon work helped out with living expenses, but when the summer holidays came round I was desperately in need of funds. Scouring the local papers for work, I spotted an advert that immediately caught my attention: ‘Have you got star quality? Do you love working with people? If that sounds like you, you could be a Red Coat! Butlins Skegness is looking for bright young people to join our award-winning team.’

Well, it seemed like the perfect job for me. Not only did I have all those years of showbiz experience under my belt, I was a huge fan of Hi-de-Hi, the long-running BBC sitcom about a fictional holiday camp. What with the kitsch seaside setting, Ruth Madoc running around in her little white shorts, the beauty pageants and the ballroom dancing, it actually all looked quite glamorous to me.

I was interviewed by one of the camp managers who made working there sound like a trip to Disneyland. Perhaps I should have realised something was up – it was almost as if he was trying to convince me to take the job, rather than the other way round. But I was seduced by the prospect of returning to my showbiz roots, the camaraderie of camp life and the possibility of getting a tan while I worked, and I leapt at the job when he offered it to me, also persuading Kim – who was temping in an office to supplement her modelling income – to quit her office job and come along to live the Red Coat dream with me.

We arrived at the camp on a typical English seaside summer day – grey clouds and drizzle, which would in fact linger for most of our stay. We were shown to our digs. You know that advert where a flat looks like it has been burgled, but in actual fact it’s just a complete tip? Well, that should give you some idea as to the state of our chalet.

I stared in horror as I noticed a cockroach scuttle beneath the wardrobe, praying that Kim wouldn’t notice (she didn’t, although she certainly didn’t miss the rest of his mates who turned up later that night to join the party). The room stank of stale cigarette smoke and rotting food; after a few days we actually found a long-forgotten burger mouldering under the bed. The carpets, presumably once light brown, were now patterned with an incredible variety of stains and dried-up spillages which felt crusty underfoot – if you were stupid enough to take off your shoes, that is. And as for the bed – well, the wafer-thin mattress was bad enough, but the bedding clearly hadn’t been washed since last season’s inmates had escaped. Once I discovered the communal laundry I realised why: the washing machines were so filthy that anything that went inside would come out with a whole new set of stains. Bearing all this in mind, I don’t think I really need to spell out to you what the communal toilets were like.

Desperate not to linger in our chalet on that first day, we went off in search of the staff canteen. I still remember the smell of those huge industrial kitchens and the vats of grey slop bubbling away like some primeval swamp. That night dinner was sausage and chips, but the chips were still frozen in the middle and the sausages were made out of all the unmentionable bits that were left over after all the edible parts of the animal had been removed. You couldn’t even get a drink to ease the ordeal of mealtimes, as the camp’s staff members weren’t allowed to drink alcohol onsite.

We later discovered that everyone got round this rule by having secret parties in each other’s chalets with smuggled-in booze and, as most of the employees were single and bored out of their minds, these illicit gatherings usually turned into orgies. During our short stint at the camp there was an outbreak of crabs because of the feverish partner swapping that went on.

‘Gary, we’re leaving,’ sobbed Kim at the end of that first night. ‘I don’t want to stay here another day. This is awful.’

‘Come on, babe, let’s give it a bit more time,’ I begged. I was as horrified as she was, but I was desperate for the money. ‘I promise I’ll talk to them about the chalet. We’ve committed ourselves now, and I’m sure things will get better once we start our Red Coat training. Okay?’

But at the next morning’s ‘welcome’ meeting for us new recruits there was another shock in store. Any hopes I’d had of revisiting my past glories on stage vanished as quickly as a glimpse of Skegness sunshine when we were told that we would have to earn the right to become Red Coats by working in other positions in the camp first. Forget judging the knobbly-knees contest or teaching tap-dancing, we were going to be waiters. And far from a jaunty scarlet jacket and crisp white trousers with matching shoes, my new uniform consisted of a short-sleeve shirt, too-short black trousers and a name-badge that (thanks to some administrative cock-up) read ‘Hello, I’m Barry!’

And so Kim and I spent the three weeks we lasted at the camp shuttling between the kitchens and cavernous dining room to serve up deep-fried nuggets and over-boiled vegetables to the largely disgruntled clientele. After a few weeks of drudgery, and desperate to salvage something from the whole disastrous episode, I took the manager to one side after our breakfast shift.

‘Hi, Clive!’ I said, dazzling him with my best toothy showbiz smile. ‘I didn’t want to make a big deal about this, but I should probably tell you that I used to be a professional performer.’

The manager seemed engrossed in the paperwork on the clipboard he was carrying, so I pressed on.

‘I appeared in a nationwide theatre tour with Lionel Blair and was in musicals like Carousel and Jesus Christ Superstar, I continued brightly, exuding what I hoped was Red-Coat-like bubbliness and positivity. ‘I’m a really strong singer and I can tap-dance and do a bit of ballroom as well! So basically, given the chance, I think I’d make a great Red Coat and be a real asset to your team.’

Clive finally looked up from his clipboard, scratched his crotch and squinted at my name-badge.

‘Barry,’ he said slowly, with the look of a man who’d endured a lifetime of economy sausages, stained carpets and broken dreams. ‘I really don’t give a shit.’

FOUR Hell on Earth

‘So, lad, why d’you want to be a miner?’

The three colliery bosses – proper salt-of-the-earth Yorkshire men, with flat caps and flatter vowels – were looking at me expectantly from behind the trestle table that dominated the cramped office where the interviews were being held. Even in the dingy light of the room I could see the coaldust trapped under the men’s fingernails and their leathery, calloused hands. Miners’ hands.

I had queued up all morning with dozens of other local lads for my chance to be here, but now that I finally had my moment in the spotlight my mind had gone blank. Exactly why did I want to join the workforce at Markham Main, Armthorpe’s colliery?

I’d never had a problem with interviews – years of waltzing through stage school auditions had left me confident to the point of cockiness – but today was different. Today, I was going for a job that I urgently needed, but was absolutely dreading getting.

* * *

Growing up, the view from my bedroom window was dominated by the hulking, coal-black silhouette of Markham Main. To my overactive young imagination, the distant outline of the colliery buildings was a vision of hell, with the mine’s vast wheel and clanking conveyor belt rearing up out of the slagheap like some nightmarish fairground ride. The pit was only a mile from my home, but it might as well have been in a different hemisphere. Although the colliery was the reason for my hometown’s existence and the main source of income and community for the majority of its residents – including most of my school friends’ families – as far as I was concerned it had absolutely nothing to do with me. There were few mining families living in the smart new estate where we had our semi-detached bungalow, and my parents had drilled into me from a young age that I should never even think about joining the local industry.

‘No son of mine is ever going to put his life at risk working down the mines,’ Dad would lecture, stony-faced – and that was absolutely fine by me. I’d go round to friends’ houses for tea and stare with barely concealed horror at their fathers’ ruined hands and coal-blackened faces. And although I would see the miners trudging past my school every day in their luminous safety vests, helmets and hobnail boots, always covered in a blanket of coaldust, they might as well have been aliens for all the relevance I thought they had to my existence.

It wasn’t just the thought of working in such dark and dangerous conditions that seemed so strange and scary to me, it was the whole lifestyle that came with the job. After a day down the pit I’d see my friends’ dads head off down the pub or the miners’ welfare club for pints of beer and games of darts and snooker and banter about birds and football, and I would silently vow to myself, not me. Not ever.

* * *

I had spotted the advert in the Doncaster Free Press when I was doing my weekly trawl of the job section.

WANTED – A NEW GENERATION OF MINERS FOR MARKHAM MAIN COLLIERY, ARMTHORPE

It was the early Eighties, Arthur Scargill was raising hell and there was a drive to revitalise the colliery, a last-ditch attempt to save the local industry by injecting a burst of youthful energy. But it was the last line of the advert that jumped off the page and grabbed my attention.

EXCELLENT RATES OF PAY

I was 18 and in desperate need of money. When I had graduated from art college a few months previously I had assumed I would walk straight into a design job in Sheffield or Doncaster, but despite what the tutors had promised us the opportunities just weren’t there. I knew that my only hope of success was to go to London, that magical place where the streets – if not quite paved with gold – were at least paved with advertising agencies and trendy design studios where an ambitious graduate might make their fortune.

Kim had by now secured a modelling agent in London, so we had decided to move down South and get a place together. Besides, Armthorpe no longer held any appeal for me. Most of my friends seemed content to remain in the village forever with their apprenticeships and girlfriends, their lives comfortably mapped out, but in my mind I was destined for bigger and better things.

I’ve got to get out or I’ll be stuck here forever, I would panic as I sat through another night down the pub with people with whom I increasingly felt I had nothing in common. But to start a new life in London required serious funds, which is why, when I spotted the newspaper advert, I shrugged off a lifetime’s prejudice and dialled the number without a second thought.

I didn’t tell my parents I was going for a job at the colliery. There was no point; I knew what their reaction would be. Kim wasn’t keen either, but she understood we needed to get some money together in order to start our lives together in London. Which is why I found myself here, within the gates of Markham Main for the first time, sitting nervously in front of the colliery’s three wise men.

‘I don’t come from a mining background and I haven’t had any experience of this sort of work,’ I told the panel of flat caps. ‘But I want to put 100 per cent into this. I’m a hard worker and a quick learner, and I’m really interested in a career in, um, coal.’

‘Well, Gary, you’re a bit … over-qualified for this job,’ said one of the men, glancing over my cv. ‘But you’ve got a good attitude and seem like the sort of lad who’d do well here at Markham. You’ll start the training next week. Well done, lad.’

On the walk back home, I thought about bottling it. Now I’d actually been offered the job all my old fears bubbled back up to the surface: I was convinced I would die or be hideously maimed in a tragic accident – at the very least end up with permanently blackened fingernails. But by the time I arrived back at my front door I had made up my mind to accept; if I’m honest, there had never really been any doubt that I would after they’d told me the dizzying figures I could earn by clocking up double shifts and over-time. For five hundred quid a week Mum and Dad would understand. Eventually.

* * *

There was no sign of the dawn when I got on my bike just before 5 a.m. and pedalled furiously through the freezing winter darkness towards the colliery for my first day down the mine. I was carrying a flask of strong tea and the sandwiches my mum had left out for me the night before. She might not be happy about her son’s new career (in fact that would be a considerable understatement) but after a screaming argument she and Dad had at least grudgingly understood my reasons for taking the job.

I’d already sat through four weeks of classroom-based training to prepare me and my fellow recruits for pit life. There were a few lads who, like me, saw this as an opportunity to earn a fast buck then move on to bigger and better things, but the rest of them were from mining families and landing a job at the colliery was the pinnacle of their ambition. I just couldn’t relate to their mentality: go underground, do the job, get pissed – that was all they seemed to want out of life.

I thought they were thick and lazy, and I’m quite sure they hated me in return. They certainly thought I was a snob and picked up on the fact that I was a bit more sensitive and softly spoken, as I got called a ‘fucking poof’ on more than one occasion. Some of them had been to school with me and knew all about my dancing and singing career as a kid, so they had plenty of ammunition. They’d even take the piss out of my sandwiches, because Mum would put a bit of salad in with the filling instead of their bog-standard plain cheese spread or fish paste. But I really couldn’t give a toss. I was impatient to start raking it in as quickly as possible so I could escape this hellhole.

I passed through the colliery gates, locked up my bike and reluctantly joined the mass of men clocking in for shifts, our breath showing like puffs of steam in the icy morning air. Then it was straight over to the changing rooms where I jostled through the throng of bodies towards my locker, avoiding eye contact as much as possible. I remember the smell of that room to this day – damp, dirty, earthy. It was the smell of the mine.

I tried to calm my ever-increasing nerves by focusing on the process of getting myself dressed in my kit: first the thermal pants, vest and leggings, a rough cotton shirt that felt like it was made from hessian then a one- or two-piece overall over the top. Big socks and those hard, heavy boots. And finally a big navy overcoat, the Armthorpe logo proudly stitched on the breast, and a white helmet with a torch. Nothing fitted me properly. I was a skinny thing when I was younger – tall, but with hardly any meat on me. I wasn’t bred to be a miner like most of them down there.

My heavy boots rubbed and the helmet dug into my scalp as I followed the army of navy-coated clones trudging across the yard to a low concrete bunker. This nondescript building held the lift that would plunge us over a mile and a half down into the blackness. One of the foremen counted us as we filed past him so they’d know how many of us went in and (I realised with a stab of fear) how many of us came back out again.

You’re going to die in there! screamed my inner drama queen, always alert to potential disaster. But it was too late to turn and run, as I was carried along by the tide of bodies into the bunker, through the double set of metal lift gates and into the mouth of hell. The lift was only a couple of metres square, but there must have been about thirty men crammed into the tiny space. A packed Tube at rush hour has absolutely nothing on a colliery lift. Bloody sardines, we were, squeezed so tight that it was impossible to take a deep breath -which was probably lucky what with the reek of farts and stale beer fumes. When every last millimetre of space was filled the heavy gates were shut with a deafening clank, a siren sounded, lights flashed and then – terror. Sheer bloody terror as we fell at unimaginable speeds down, down into the bowels of the earth …

After what seemed like a few seconds the brakes kicked in with a squealing, shuddering shriek and the lift lurched to a stop, my stomach arriving a moment or two behind it. Before I had time to recover, the doors slid open and a blast of icy cold air rushed into the stuffy lift as I was carried out by the crowd into … God knows where.

Once my eyes had adjusted to the unexpected brightness, I could see I was I was standing in a vast underground cavern lit by huge florescent lights. Coughs, occasional shouts of laughter and the constant drip-drip-drip of water echoed around the cavernous, freezing space. Under my boots the floor was slushy and damp, like it was covered with melting black ice. From here, tunnels radiated in every direction – some like subterranean super-highways supported by soaring steel arches, others (I would discover to my horror) so tiny you’d be forced to get down on your hands and knees and crawl over the icy gravel.

You could be trudging for miles, often in complete darkness as the lights frequently failed – and at the furthest point from the lift shaft was the blistering-hot black heart of the mine, the coalface.

* * *

Life down the mine was one of extremes. You were either working in the freezing cold, or – depending on how near to the core you were – unbearable heat. It must have been 100 degrees at the coalface. The machinery used for cutting away at the rock got so hot that you constantly had to pour water on it to cool it down, one of my jobs as it turned out. Similarly, it was either completely silent or so deafening that despite wearing ear protectors you’d still have tinnitus by the time you got up next morning.

As I was one of the brighter of the new recruits – and possibly because I was built more for tap-dancing than rock-smashing – I was assigned a job that relied on brains rather than brawn. My responsibility was safety: making sure machinery was running smoothly and official procedures were correctly followed in whichever area I was assigned to that day. Sort of like the swotty school prefect who checks all the students’ ties are done up and shouts at them for running in the corridors, except I was having to boss around men twice my age and size. Unsurprisingly, this role did little to improve my reputation with the other miners, especially as most of the time they paid next to no attention to the rulebook.

‘Er, sorry, but you really should be wearing your helmet in this area,’ I would mutter to some huge hulk of a man.

‘Why don’t you just fuck off, Cockerill?’

‘Um, right. Okay.’

The men tended to do exactly what they wanted, which is probably why there were so many accidents. What with the very real threat of fire, explosion, poisonous gas leaks, suffocation, roof collapse and the terrifying machinery – including an enormous corkscrew-like drill that could shear off layers of rock to reach the seam of coal as effortlessly as slicing through a joint of ham – a mine is hardly the safest working environment at the best of times. There were enough ways to die down there without some wanker lighting up a cigarette or forgetting to apply a safety brake. It didn’t take me long to realise why the pay was so good on this job: that 500 quid I was pocketing at the end of each week was actually danger money.