1926

I

On my first birthday Auntie Eve stuffed me in Gramma’s gladstone bag, smuggled me out the back door, stomped up the creek bed – Auntie Eve had heavy feet – and buried me under a paperbark. Then stomped home and swore blind she hadn’t seen me all day. Gramma exhumed me. April Fool, Ron. In the UK the General Strike was called in support of a million miners locked out of their pits because they wouldn’t accept wage reductions. The jellyback leaders of the Trades Union Council surrendered after nine days – nine days! - but the coalminers fought on until December, when solidarity triumphed in time for Christmas. The shame-faced pit bosses unlocked the gates, apologised profusely, said they absolutely took the miners’ point and strongly recommended the government award a huge rise in wages. Which the government was only too happy to grant. Throwing in bonus paid holiday and a generous pension scheme as a gesture of seasonal goodwill. April Fool. Gramma kept a scrapbook. A letterful of bad news arrived from Barnsley every month.

Malcolm slid through the dark, dodging table, ducking the workshirt hanging stiff and unfriendly above the fireplace. He jabbed at coal to unearth the glow, dropped the poker with a clank and dragged the kettle to the heart of the fire. The crunch of coal, the clank, the scrape of kettle in the dark, did not vary throughout the year, except when Sarah was ill and Dot, standing in, had the night before neglected to fill the kettle. At such times, rare, the tone of the scrape was different, was followed by a loud oath, the stamping of feet out the back door, the squeak of a tap, the heavy note of water entering kettle in anger, while Dot loitered nervously in bed, waiting for a better moment to emerge, which never came. Trapped warmth exaggerated the smell of cooked meat and musty bedclothes which hung in the house until the sea breeze was let in. He located the doorknob, negotiated the loose tread halfway down, unerringly.

Leaning forward to watch streaks appear in the morning sky, listening to the magpies and twittering wrens, tearing sheets of the Herald into an appropriate size, he amused himself in picturing the entire early shift in simultaneous occupation of the line of thunderpits located behind the line of houses, all listening to magpies and wrens whilst tearing sheets of the Herald. With the more squirrelish miners of The Bay tearing not merely for the moment but with a view to the future. Rip of newspaper and birdsong aside, Malcolm preferred to sit in silence, but had engaged in shouted conversation with seated neighbours when there was strife at the pit. Shouting and strained toiletting had continued for days following the Mount Mulligan explosion. The sit was colder in winter, lasting until he heard the kettle boil. He made tea by the glow of the fire. Poured in a tot of Red Mill. Dragged over the chair. Gave the fire a few more jabs. Leaned into the warmth. Sucked noisily at his brew. Thought.

Why Charlie Shipwater, a hewer, was in the haulage way at the time of his death was never established. His boots and collection of tools had passed to Malcolm. Eleven at the time, Malcolm had lain out the inheritance on his half of the bedroom floor with the formal precision of a dental assistant. Shovels, picks, mandrills, pinch bar, hatchet, borer, drills and bits, powder tin, crib tin, water bottle, boots. For the better part of six years – three months in France excepted, during which time Gramma had undertaken the task – Malcolm had cleaned the tools, oiled them against rust, rubbed dripping into the boot leather, in anticipation of progress onto the coal. His graduation to hewer came amid loudening whispers of the role’s extinction as the spectre of mechanisation stalked the pits with post-war vigour. Several early model cutters, electric chains and windy picks, were already deployed in the old section. Despite promises, men had been laid off. There had been accidents. Miners needed to hear the roof talk. Machines were noisy.

On his back in an undercut, cutting deeper with pick or hatchet, one handed, there was almost daily a moment when Malcolm became piquantly aware of the weight of the world inches above his face, and considered that it could render him as flat as a stamp before he knew it. “Bottom-holing” was deemed the most dangerous activity of all when winning coal the old way. It would be simple to kick out the timber supports, Malcolm thought. Slam. Gone. At other times he thought about the war. The government had preferred him to stay in the pit. His mother had refused to sign the papers. The women of The Bay had not distributed white feathers. To the outside world, The Bay barely existed. As long as it continued producing coal, The Bay would stay unnoticed. Coming of age, Malcolm had enlisted and sailed to Europe. He was drilling behind the lines within a day of moving up when the armistice denied him the privilege of facing the enemy.

He fished to unwind. Fishing was solitary and above ground. As a youth, he had fashioned his own rod, under the guidance of his father. He had harvested the bamboo. Formed the guides. Wound the bindings. Applied the varnish. The result was a beautiful instrument. His first savings upon entry to the pit went towards a wooden sidecast reel, an object of singular beauty in his regard. Rod and reel had endured. The Bay presented any number of good spots, hosting a variety of catch. The tidal rock platforms at either each end of the beach. Blackfish. Cod. The beach. Whiting. Bream. Flathead. The point of the loading jetty. Jewfish. Tailor. Snapper. If nothing else, leatherjacket lurking around the piles. The jetty was his favourite spot, his favourite time late saturday night. On a rising tide and no moon. No work next day, nothing overhead but stars. On a still night the noise from the pub reached the end of the jetty. Malcolm had his rum. In May, when the tailor were running, he stayed all night. When the tailor were not running, nor anything else, and not a bite was to be had, he would still, frequently, stay all night. One thousand feet out to sea, thirty feet above the high water mark, he could, he felt, cast a hook and sinker over the edge of the world. Where there be monsters. It would be easy, he imagined, for such a monster to pull a fisherman off the jetty and over the global rim. Then again, it would be just as easy to plunge off without the assistance of a monster. Despite the exaggerated height required to accommodate large coal steamers, the sea still broke over the planking in heavy weather. Locals knew the warning signs. The jetty was a long walk. Walking back it grew longer.

II

Only after tea and trousers did Malcolm light the kerosene lamp. He started. Ron stood in the bedroom doorway, extruding, dough-like, from a shrunken singlet, frown rippling over wildly dilated pupils.

"Where are your pants, lad?"

His offspring looked down, gave consideration to what he saw.

"How long have you been standing there? Sarah, where are his pants?"

Sarah slid through the narrow straits separating table, ricketty chairs, explosive boxes, keros tins. The lamp was her signal to prepare the crib.

“He shouldn't sleep in the same bed as his sister without pants."

"He doesn't wear pants yet. What happened to your nappy, Ron? His bottom's freezing, Malcolm.”

"He was watching me."

"Were you watching your father, Ron? Is that what you were doing? Were you watching your father - ?"

Sarah recognised the spirit of her mother, wandering.

"His bottom's freezing. How long was he standing there? Let’s get you by the fire, Ron."

Arms spread like wings, Ron pissed on the flames. The yellow arc hit with a hiss, producing steam to clear the nostrils. Malcolm snatched his boots to safety. In full flow, Ron frowned while seeming to contemplate a deep mystery sourced in his penis. Gathering him up the without plan of future action, Sarah found her child to possess a tank of profound capacity. Hobnails crunched on the gravel outside. Pissing wherever parked, Ron observed Malcolm insert himself into the stiff envelope of his shirt, then grimy sweater, like a white worm. Still pissing, airborne once more, he watched his father crack a greasy neckerchief like a short whip, to unstiffen it, before donning a dark vest and jacket, both slightly small. Still pissing, he found himself returned to the hearth, where his mother rotated him, as though fine-tuning the alignment of a statue, such that the stream no longer dampened the fire but hissed away on the fireplace wall. He studied Sarah handing Malcolm his water bottle and crib tin. Saw his father kiss his mother’s cheek, check the Red Mill in his pocket, and leave.

His stare blackened, pupils overflowing irises, in descrying the dark shape of his father meld with a passing rank of other dark shapes. Disembodied faces appeared momentarily, ruddied by the suck on a pipe or durry, to the crunch of unseen boots.

“Get back inside, Ron. Now.”

Square bum retreated on bow-legs.

The lick of the kitchen lamp spread under the brattice curtain. He discovered he could discern the lamp-glow through closed eyelids. The talent provided a subject for research while feigning sleep. The crunch on the gravel faded. At the sound of the loose stair-tread, he slipped from bedroom to verandah, clambered onto a fruit crate – pre-positioned - and chinned the rail. A swarm of tiny lights bobbed like fireflies in the distance as the workforce hustled from lamp cabin to pit, and vanished. “Down The Pit”, Dot spat, as though her brother was thick.

Eyes closed, I could see The Pit. It was darker than dark, choked with dust you could feel peppering your face. Men died in The Pit. Horses drowned in The Pit. Runaway skips tore through The Pit. The roof of The Pit spoke. When the roof said “Run for your life!”, the men ran. Dad said The Pit bored all the way through to China. You could hear ching chong voices behind the coalface. Gramma said the Barnsley pits bored right through China and kept going all the way down to Hell. Gramma had worn black since 1911 and looked like she knew. When Gramma’s mother was a girl, she was a hurrier, crawling on hands and knees, topless, dragging a coal tram on a chain between her legs. Her sister shoved the tram from behind, with her forehead, and lost the front of her hair.

“They sent little children down the pit too, until Huskar.”

Twenty five years of sunlight and sea water and detached cottages on grassy ground had wrought negligible change in Gramma Shipwater. The West Riding clung to her grimly.

Dad home in the morning meant one thing: strife at The Pit. He was never sick. Coughing and spitting didn’t count. They all coughed. They all spat. Black bullets, at the ground or a wall they didn’t like. Or sometimes, in a good mood, long black monster goolies which cartwheeled through the air in a big lazy arc, over management fences, where they wound themselves round and round the bosses’ geraniums to underline an industrial point. Dad kept a crusty rag under his pillow. They all kept crusty rags under their pillows. His cuts healed as tattoos. Black spots on his knuckles, pencil lines on his face, buttons down his back. He swore like buggery when he couldn’t go down The Pit. He needed to dig the coal to power the train to carry the coal to power the ship to carry the coal to power the train to carry the coal. Slack blew over The Bay. Raindrops stained washing. Trees wore a coat of grit. Red clay turned black. The Bay drank The Pit in its water.