No Man’s Land

He shook his head hard as if to expel his thoughts and opened his eyes. His father was looking at him intently, as if he was trying to read his mind.

‘I’m sorry, Adam. I know this is hard.’ Daniel spoke slowly, leaning forward towards his son. ‘It’s hard for me too. But we’ve got no choice. London will chew us up and spit us out if we stay; it’s a cruel town and it’s hurt us enough already.’

Adam nodded, not knowing how to respond. They’d hardly talked all day – the death of Adam’s mother and the weeks in the workhouse had set Adam against his father, and he had repeatedly rebuffed Daniel’s attempts at conversation. But, in spite of himself, he had begun to sense a change in his father. Daniel seemed more thoughtful, less driven. Adam had seen how he had said nothing when they had sat watching the rich men and women coming and going at the station dressed in all their finery. In the past he wouldn’t have been able to resist a political commentary accompanied by plentiful statistics about the unfair distribution of wealth in society, but today he had seemed hardly to notice. Adam wondered what the change meant for the future.

‘What’s this place where we’re going?’ he asked, looking out into the night. Surrounded by strangers in the spartan compartment, rushing forward on the express train towards a new unknown world, he felt apprehensive and hoped for reassurance.

‘Scarsdale? It’s a small coal-mining town not far from the sea. The north is full of places just like it. Everyone works at the mine, on the surface or down below. And it’s hard work, harder than you can imagine, which makes the people hard—’ Daniel stopped in mid-sentence, smiling at his inarticulacy. ‘But not mean, not cruel – miners stick together; by and large they’re good people.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I’ve worked with them. Not in Scarsdale but further south – in Nottinghamshire where I grew up.’

‘You were a miner?’ Adam asked, sounding surprised. He couldn’t imagine his father as anything other than a builder. That’s what he’d been all Adam’s life.

‘No, the firm I was apprenticed to specialized in putting up structures round pitheads to house the heavy machinery and to support it too. It meant I was working side by side with miners all the time so I got to know their ways.’

‘And is that what you’re going to be doing now?’ asked Adam. ‘Building things for them?’

‘No, this is different – nothing to do with construction. I’m working with them – or rather for them, I suppose. I’m to be their checkweighman, which means I measure the weight of the coal in each tub they’ve mined to make sure they get paid the right amount for it.’

‘So you’re down in the mine as well, with them?’ asked Adam nervously. The thought alarmed him – it made him think of being buried, like his mother. He was brave by nature but the thought of being underground had always terrified him. He remembered the well at the back of the school in Islington that Old Beaky had told them was out of bounds. Adam had disobeyed at the first opportunity, using all his childish strength to push the thick wooden cover aside. And, if he shut his eyes, he could still relive the long wait after he threw in a stone, counting the seconds before he heard the faint splash deep down below. He’d had nightmares for weeks afterwards, dreaming of falling down into the thick darkness, his unheard cries echoing off the damp brick walls.

‘No, don’t worry. I’m up on the surface where the tubs of coal come out,’ said Daniel reassuringly. He knew all about his son’s phobia – he’d never even been able to persuade Adam to set foot in the London Underground, let alone get on one of the trains. ‘The job’s not dangerous,’ he went on, ‘but it’s important, and the money will be better than what we’re used to, which will help.’

Daniel’s words were optimistic but Adam sensed an uncertainty lurking underneath and wondered if his father was feeling ashamed that he wouldn’t be sharing the hardships of the men that he was working for. But Adam dismissed the thought: what mattered was that his father would be out of harm’s way. He’d lost his mother and he didn’t want to risk losing his father too.

‘How did you get the job?’ Adam asked. It made no sense that his father should have been able to walk into this cushy, well-paid job in this faraway place when by his own admission he’d never actually been a miner.

‘I have a cousin who recommended me. He’s a good man and he’s worked in the Scarsdale pit most of his life so he has a lot of influence with the men. And it turned out they wanted me because of what I’d done down here with the builders’ union – getting more members, getting organized. It’s the miners’ union that’ll be paying me,’ said Daniel.

‘Will you make them strike?’ asked Adam anxiously. He knew what union work meant – poverty and violence and death. Was this what lay in store for them in the north? A second dose of what they were trying to leave behind?

‘No, I hope it won’t come to that,’ said Daniel, choosing his words carefully. ‘I do want to help, to make things better. But I hope I can achieve that by negotiating with the owner. I hope he’ll listen to reason. I learnt from what happened with your mother, Adam. It changed me, you know, just like it’s changed you.’

Later, much later, they had to change trains. Crossing a footbridge in the rain, they looked across a moonlit landscape of warehouses and factories to where the funnels and chimneys of a blast furnace were throwing columns of white fire and belching orange smoke up into the night sky.

Adam stopped, awestruck. He had never seen anything like it.

‘The jaws of hell,’ said Daniel, clapping his son on the shoulder. ‘And inside it’s hotter than hell; hot enough to make iron into steel, which is what the British Empire is built on. And the fires never stop. They can’t because the demand never does. And the fires need coal, mountains of coal. Which is where we come in,’ he added with a smile.

They got to Scarsdale on the dawn train. And at first, as they approached, Adam could see nothing of the mine. Instead the view from the window was a vision of loveliness. Still-water lakes and green fields carpeted with the first wild flowers of spring, divided one from another by silvery white dry-stone walls; woods of beech and oak and quick-flowing streams, and up on the crest of a hill a picturesque village of thatched cottages surrounding the weathered tower of a mediaeval church. But the railway didn’t go that way, curving round instead into the valley behind where all at once the landscape was utterly transformed. Down below in the valley bottom the mine was marked out by a line of wooden towers and tall red-brick chimneys standing across from a huge man-made heap of slate-grey waste, and stretching up from it on all sides row upon row of squat grey houses, monotonous and monochrome, straddled the hillsides like an encamped army of insects. The change in the view shocked Adam. It was jarring – almost violent – to go from beauty to ugliness in a moment; from a world unchanged in centuries to this industrial outcrop of the new century, with both existing side by side in a bizarre juxtaposition.

As they got closer, Adam could see that the houses were built almost back to back along long narrow streets which all led down like the irregular hands of a giant clock towards the mine at the centre, surmounted by the high towers that dominated the landscape. They had huge wheels at their apex and Adam could see that one set was turning as they approached. The spokes of each one rotated in opposite directions and the sense of power they conveyed reminded Adam of the beast-like locomotive at the front of the train that had made such an impression on him at the station in London.

‘What are they? What do they do?’ Adam asked his father, pointing towards the towers.

‘They’re the headstocks – winding gear like I used to work on. The wheels draw the steel cables that raise and lower the cages up and down the mine shafts,’ said Daniel admiringly, looking at the structures with a craftsman’s eye, taking pleasure in their design.

‘How deep are they?’ asked Adam.

‘Different depths: I’ve heard the deepest is over five hundred feet,’ said Daniel.

Adam shivered. Again he remembered the well in the school yard, the coin falling and the splash far away down below. He’d been terrified but fascinated too, going back again and again for weeks afterwards, drawn to the well like a magnet, although he’d never removed the cover after that first time.

‘Don’t think about the shafts,’ said Daniel, sensing his son’s anxiety. ‘I told you I’m going to be working at the pithead, not down below.’

‘What about me?’ asked Adam.

‘You?’ said Daniel, sounding shocked. ‘I’d never let you work in a mine. You’re my flesh and blood, all I’ve got left, and I’m going to look after you, keep you safe. You believe me, don’t you?’ he asked, looking hard at his son.

Adam nodded, grateful for the reassurance, although he wondered at his father’s willingness to come to this place and represent the men when he was obviously so appalled at the idea of sending his own son underground to work with them.

‘You’re going to school,’ Daniel went on. ‘It’s all arranged. You’re a bright kid, brighter than I ever was, and you deserve a better life than I’ve had, one where you can use your talents and get on in the world. And that’s what your mother would have wanted as well. I’m sure of that. Now come on,’ he added as the train came to a halt. ‘This is where we get off.’

They had pulled into a small station halfway down the valley. From the platform Adam could see the railway line split in two with one set of tracks heading away over the far hill into the invisible land beyond and another continuing down to the pithead below where it wound around among the mismatched assortment of grey brick buildings surrounding the headstocks.

Shouldering their bags, Daniel and Adam walked out through an empty waiting room lined with posters advertising seaside holidays in Blackpool, Scarborough, Whitley Bay and other places Adam had never heard of. The world of brightly coloured deckchairs and bathing machines, pleasure boats and parasols under a hot sun, seemed a long way removed from this bleak mining town which was to be their new home.

Outside the station they had to pause for a minute as a column of cloth-capped miners came up the street from the direction of the mine, returning home from the night shift. Their faces were smeared black with coal dust and their iron-heeled clogs clattered on the roadway as they approached, setting off sparks on the cobbles. Some of them were singing. The tune reminded Adam of a hymn that the congregation used to sing at the church in Islington when he went there with his mother but he could not recognize any of the words. They seemed to be in another language.

The last of the group had almost gone past when a tall man stopped in mid-stride and rushed over to them. He had an open tool bag in his hand, which he dropped on the ground as he put his arms around Daniel, pulling him close in a bear hug. Something tin-like inside it clanged as it hit the pavement and Adam instinctively bent down and picked it up, holding it out to the stranger.

‘So, this is thy boy, eh, Daniel?’ said the stranger, releasing Daniel and looking Adam up and down with a broad smile. ‘’E’s the livin’ image of thee, ain’t ’e? An’ good-mannered too, which I s’pose ’e gets from thee,’ he added, taking the bag. ‘Not like us miners. I’d shake thy hand, lad, but it needs washing first.’

‘Adam, this is your cousin, Edgar Tillett,’ said Daniel. ‘We’re going to be staying with him and his family until we find our feet.’

‘Find thy feet,’ repeated Edgar with a laugh. ‘Thy feet’re at the end of thy legs last time I looked so thou shouldna’ be wastin’ thy time tryin’ to find ’em. An’ you can stay wi’ us as long as you need. You know that. Blood’s thicker than water as they say, an’ they say right.’ He clapped Daniel on the shoulder and Adam sensed his father’s awkwardness in the face of his cousin’s largesse as he smiled uncertainly in response.

The other miners had gone on ahead and now they began to follow them up the hill, walking towards the rising sun. Edgar walked in the centre with Daniel and Adam on either side.

‘How was work?’ asked Daniel.

‘Tight,’ said the miner with a smile, pronouncing the word with relish as if pleased with the selection he’d made from a choice of other possible epithets. ‘That’s the word for it, I’d say. We’re workin’ a plough seam jus’ at present – that’s a narrow ’un, no more’n two feet high – and so we ’ave to be on our ’ands an’ knees most o’ the time. Hurts the back and it hurts the ’ead too if thou doesna watch thyself,’ he said with a grin, stretching his arms out wide as if to release the tension. Adam could see that he was a powerfully built man, lean and strong with muscle.

‘An’ it hurts our pockets too when the owner won’t pay us enough for all our hard work. Which is where you comes in,’ he said with a sideways look at Daniel. ‘You’ve come at the right time, Cousin, I can tell you that. I’m looking for’ards to seein’ thee gangin’ toe to toe with ol’ Sir John and the managers,’ he added with a smile.

‘Who’s Sir John?’ asked Adam, who’d been listening avidly to the conversation. The foreignness of everything in this new world had begun to excite him: the landscape, the way Edgar talked, the things he said. They made Adam want to understand, not to be left behind.

‘Sir John? Why, ’e’s the owner – o’ the mine, an’ o’ nigh ivrything ’ereabouts,’ said Edgar with an expansive sweeping gesture of his hand that seemed to encompass everything in sight. ‘’Cept me ’ouse o’ course. I owns that, lock, stock an’ barrel. I’m one of the few that do, so ’e canna evict me even if the notion takes ’im, which is nice to know.’

They had followed the road up from the station without turning right or left and now came to a halt in front of the last house in the street. Beyond, a yellow cornfield ran up the rest of the hillside to a thick-limbed oak tree standing alone like a sentinel on the sharply etched skyline. The house was the same height as its neighbours but it had been extended out at least fifteen feet to the side where a vegetable and flower garden had been planted out in tidy rows behind a picket fence.

‘Well, ’ere we are,’ said Edgar, pushing open the door and beckoning them to follow him inside. ‘Not exactly a stately ’ome but it’ll do. Thomas, Ernest, say ’ow d’yer do to your cousins.’ This last was addressed to two young men sitting at a deal table on the other side of the large low room into which the entrance opened directly. There was no front parlour as Adam had been used to in London or, if there had been, the partition wall had been knocked down to increase the main living space, which was centred on a big fireplace with a bread oven set in its side. The fire was banked high with red coal and Adam could feel the thick heat radiating off it from the moment he came in.

Ernest, the younger of Edgar’s two sons, came forward and shook Adam’s hand. He was a few months older than Adam and seemed open and friendly like his father. His brother Thomas stood back. He appeared reserved, nodding his head rather than shaking hands. And behind him Adam could see a woman in a white apron and cap, evidently their mother, come bustling out from another room at the back of the house.

She didn’t wait to be introduced but came straight over to Adam and kissed him on the cheek. ‘I’m Annie, Edgar’s wife,’ she said. ‘And I’m glad you’re here. Now, take your coat off and Ernest will show you your room. Edgar, you need to go in the back and wash yourself. You’re black from the pit and you’re not eating breakfast with the likes of us looking like that.’

‘Why do your parents talk different?’ Adam asked as he followed Ernest up the stairs, and then immediately regretted the question. It was rude to ask about the way people spoke. His mother had told him that.

But Ernest didn’t take offence. ‘She’s had more schooling than our dad – he went down the pit when he was nine or ten. One of the two – sometimes he says eight but that’s when he’s had a few too many to drink on a Saturday night and he’s trying to lay it on thick and make you feel sorry for him,’ he said with a laugh. ‘Schooling takes the Yorkshire out of thee, or at least that’s what they say round here. And yes, I suppose it’s done it to me too. That and my mother who’ll clip me round the ear if I talk silly, as she calls it. But I don’t know if it’ll last: I’m working at the pithead now, on the screens, and it’s hard not to talk like everyone else. We all end up down the pit sooner or later, you’ll see. And now here’s my room. And yours too – we’ll be sharing if that’s all right …’

Ernest threw open a door with a theatrical gesture and Adam found himself in a long thin room with two beds, each made up with a spotlessly white counterpane. A table with an oil lamp stood between them, facing a wide but low rectangular window with leaded panes from which he could see across to the oak tree at the top of the hill. They were clearly on the top floor of the side extension that he’d noticed earlier.

‘Better than looking out the front,’ said Ernest, following Adam’s gaze. ‘The houses here are all the same – it’s easy enough to go in the wrong one if you aren’t careful, coming home in the dark. It happens all the time. And you could end up in the wrong bed too, next to the wrong wife if you aren’t careful. And I don’t know what would happen then!’

Ernest laughed and Adam joined in, relaxing for the first time in as long as he could remember. Soon the laughter took him over and he had to sit down on the bed opposite Ernest, holding his sides. And that’s how his father found them when he came upstairs with his bag.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘You two’ll be friends, I think, and I’m glad of that.’

Part Two

THE MINE

‘Who made ten thousand people owners of the soil, and the rest of us trespassers in the land of our birth?… Where did the table of that law come from? Whose finger inscribed it?’

David Lloyd George, Speech in Newcastle, 9 October 1909

Chapter Four

January 1911

The next day, Daniel and Adam went on the bus to Gratton, the nearest town, to visit the board school. He sat in a room full of dusty books and completed an exam which he found easy – the standard here seemed lower than in London, and by the end of the day their business was done. There would be no fees to pay; all Adam had to do was buy his own textbooks and pay for the bus fares, and work hard.

‘Your boy’s got brains,’ said the headmaster, shaking Daniel’s hand. He was an earnest-looking man with intense grey eyes and an evident sense of mission. ‘He’ll go far if he stays the distance.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Daniel, looking pleased. ‘I’ll make sure he does that.’

‘What does he mean – stay the distance?’ asked Adam as they waited in the queue at the bus stop.

‘Most children leave school even if they have the chance of staying on. Times are hard and there’s pressure from their families to have the extra income, and then they want to have their own money too.’

‘Like Ernest?’ said Adam.

‘Yes. Edgar has bought his house and that means the family needs more. The rent we’re paying will help too – my cousin’s a generous man but he knows which side his bread’s buttered.’

‘Don’t you trust him, Dad?’ asked Adam. There was something in his father’s voice that he had picked up on – an anxiety, an uncertainty perhaps about the future. Adam couldn’t put his finger on it but he knew it was there.

‘I don’t know,’ said Daniel meditatively. ‘Edgar’s strong, and the other miners look up to him. I can tell that. And he wants to change their lives for them, just like he’s changed his own. But he doesn’t trust himself to be their leader; he thinks you need book learning for that, which is where I come in. I just hope he hasn’t misjudged me.’

It was dark when they got back to Scarsdale and rain was in the air, blown here and there by an indiscriminate wind that carried coal dust on its back up from the slag heap down below where a tangle of lights lit up the pithead. At the station Adam could see trucks on the sidings standing full of bright wet coal glistening in the moonlight, and by the doors of the miners’ houses the rainwater was washing away the early shift times written in chalk on the knock-up slates. Daniel told him that they were there for the knocker-upper, an old man who rode round the streets of the town on a bicycle in the early mornings, waking up the miners by tapping on their windows, using a long pole with wires attached.

In the house at the end of Station Street it was bath night. The galvanized iron tub that Adam had noticed hanging on a hook outside the back door when he went out to use the privy in the morning had been dragged into the living room and filled with hot water which Edgar’s wife had boiled up laboriously in the two kettles by the fire. And one by one the men of the family took turns bathing, scrubbing their pale bodies with Watson’s Matchless Cleansing Carbolic, although it was Annie’s job to wash their backs. Sitting out of the way in the corner of the room, Adam was touched to see how tenderly she ran the cloth across her husband’s shoulder blades, dabbing at the multitude of pale blue scars like tattoo marks where the coal had lodged under his skin. And then at the end Adam and Ernest carried the bath outside to pour away the inky-black water and leave it ready for the laundry work to begin the next day.

Further at the back, beyond the privy and the ash pit, a pig grunted in its makeshift sty. Perhaps it didn’t like the rain – Adam didn’t know. There had been pigs in the back gardens in London too, fattened through the year for slaughter in the autumn, but Adam had avoided them, pained by the certainty of their coming death. He felt it an ill omen that there should be another here and hoped that he and his father would have ‘found their feet’ and moved to their own house before killing time came round.

Back in the warmth of the house, Edgar, swathed in clean towels, was squatting in front of the fire, toasting brown sugar on a spoon until it turned black. Adam watched as he took a frying pan, added water and flour and mixed them with the burnt sugar for gravy. The movements of his big powerful hands were quick and fluid – hands that could make things but could unmake them too. He caught Adam’s eye and smiled.

‘Come over ’ere, lad. There’s summat I wanna show thee.’

He reached up above the mantelpiece and took down a small round tin box about two inches in diameter and six inches deep and turned it over in his fingers a moment before handing it to Adam.

‘Hang on to that and I’ll tell thee its story,’ he said. ‘Thy grand-uncle, thy father’s uncle and my father, ’e made that. Forty year ago when ’e wor workin’ in the Marley Main mine south o’ here, and the pit went up wi’ an explosion on account o’ they was usin’ matches to light their lamps – silly ignorant fools that they were – an’ one caught the firedamp that they ’ave underground. Firedamp – it’s a gas. Methane they calls it too,’ he added, catching the puzzled look on Adam’s face. ‘Any road, a lot o’ boys thy age lost their lives that day, but two ’o them survived by a miracle, trapped behind the fallen rock. An’ my dad, ’e drilled a borehole through the stone so ’e could pass this ’ere tin through to ’em with food and water for ’em to ’ave while they were diggin’ ’em out.’

‘And did they?’ asked Adam, looking down at the old tin in his hand, wondering at how Edgar had transformed it from an apparently worthless object into something so precious in just a few sentences.

‘Did they wot?’

‘Dig them out. Did they survive – the two who were trapped?’

‘One o’ ’em did, t’other didn’t. You takes your chances, but the point is that we stick together, us miners. We ’ave to,’ he added, glancing over at Daniel, who was sitting reading the newspaper at the table. And Adam sensed suddenly that Edgar had been telling the story to his father just as much as to him.