The pits are gone now, for the most part. The pit heaps, which in my childhood resembled black mountains, are flattened, are fields. Only the villages remain with their long narrow streets. Many chapels are empty with weeds growing up around the doors for they have long been closed. Some have been sold and converted into houses, others are used for car repair workshops or warehouses. Some of those still open are desperate for money and congregations.
I live in a little pit town very close to where I was born. At least I think of it like that. When I moved here three years ago there was open-cast mining just beyond my house but no pits, though at one time there were three in the small area around my house. Some things haven’t changed. There are allotments here and pigeon crees. Sometimes when I walk my spaniel in the afternoons by the river I can see the pigeons flying round and round their crees, their wings silver in the sunshine against the blue sky. People keep greyhounds and join bands, and there are the pubs and workingmen’s clubs. During the early autumn there are leek shows where proud gardeners show off shiny bright vegetables. Each year in the newspapers there are stories of leek slashing, of secret recipes for watering, to make the leeks exactly the right size for the shows, and during September broth and leek puddings are made.
The town of which I write still exists. It’s a pretty town too, over on the Durham coast, pretty with the kind of emptiness which many of the Durham villages have, a neatness where nothing is disturbed: no pit dirt, no pitmen, no raised voices of a Saturday night, no chapel of a Sunday, no work, no growth. It had three pits in 1880 and three chapels and a church. It had sprung up like a weed from the first few houses until it became a harbour for the export of coal from inland pits, and then one at a time over a period of twenty years the three pits were sunk, houses were built, the trade of the port increased and all the needs of a growing town were met by shopkeepers, tradesmen, anchor manufacturers, brass founders and finishers, iron founders, engineers, even a bottle works. There were three ship-building yards with sail makers, ships chandlers, block and master makers, eight coal fitters. There were fourteen inns and public houses, three breweries. And there were the miners living in houses swiftly built by the mine owners.
Away from the houses there are cliffs to the north and to the south, in places seventy feet high. At intervals there are pleasant sloping grassy banks. A few miles to the north is Sunderland.
Come back with me to the days when the coal industry in Durham was at its height, when the towns which now have boarded up shops and empty streets were busy communities, when the streets of the seaside towns echoed with voices from other countries, to a certain summer afternoon when the shadows were long on the beach and the tide washed the sand just as it had done all that time before and has each day since.