Manvers Main Colliery, 1948
One morning in June 1948, Harry is out in one of the underground districts of the Silkstone seam at Manvers Main, wiring up explosive shots to blast away rock for the advancing roadway. Labouring in dim, shadowy electric light, and stripped topless because of the heat, he and his small group of men can hear as they work the dense, crumpling sounds of explosions and rock falls from other shot-firing in different parts of the mine. The first time Harry heard the noise he was a teenager, and thought it meant the pit was collapsing and he was about to be buried alive.
Talking about the women in the clubs, who is on the fiddle, the glass-backed devils on this shift, Harry waits for his mate to bore holes into the wet rock with a heavy, shoulder-mounted drill.
‘Did tha do Mother Riley a’ Sat’d’y then, Juggler?’
‘Aye.’ Juggler is serious and shy sometimes when asked directly about his act.
‘Did tha drink that half-pint of beer?’
‘I’m not telling thee how I do it, so don’t bother asking.’ This is how everyone begins trying to get it out of him.
‘We shall be finding out one of these days. We allus find out, don’t we lads?’
‘I’ll find thee out if tha don’t get yon holes cleaned out. Shut thy rattle and get some work done.’
Harry checks for gas with his safety lamp, then takes greenish-brown sticks of explosive from a box and pushes them into one of the holes. Then he adds a detonator with a long lead and uses a rod to push that and the explosive to the bottom of the hole, leaving the lead hanging out. When he has filled all the holes like this, he connects the leads in a circuit and, with the nonchalant attention to detail of someone dealing with danger that they can control, connects that circuit to a roll of electric cable. He takes the men down the roadway to set them as sentries, checks again for gas, and connects the electrical cable to an exploder. From somewhere in the pit comes the muffled crump of other shot-firing, and the roof and floor shake around him.
‘Firing!’
Harry crouches down in a hollow in the tunnel wall, winds the exploder’s handle until its green light illuminates, and pushes down the plunger.
*
While Harry is waiting for electricity to pass through the cable to the explosives, Winnie is at home, perhaps at that moment serving Alf Hollingworth his breakfast at the table in the sitting room. She has not begun her affair with Alf flippantly. She has been married almost twenty years, but feels haunted by her father’s prediction that she would struggle to find happiness with Harry. She had wanted not only to love her husband but also to nurture him, and even if he couldn’t love her the same way she would have liked to feel that she was helping him. At this time, however, she feels ignored and taken for granted. And then into her home, via the brother she so loves, had come a man who talked to her and flattered her. Though he is so much younger than her – thirteen years – the attraction is founded less on lust than on a sort of romantic compassion. The gypsy girl understands and says she is right to feel as she does. This is a romance such as you might find in the cinema, or in books.
*
‘Misfire,’ says Harry. ‘Damn it.’ He winds the detonator and pulls up the handle for a second try. Nothing. Must be a wire broken somewhere.
As he calls ‘misfire’ the sentries’ bodies relax. Harry delicately uncouples the wires from the detonator so that the explosives cannot go off. He walks through the darkness, his helmet light dancing a white dot on the tunnel sides, feeling the cable for damage as he goes. Sweat with its fine suspension of dust drips into his eyes. From somewhere in the pit come more muffled booms and the noise of machinery. He reaches the blast face, and begins checking the leads in the circuit.
There is a bright white light, then nothing. He awakes to feel a hard surface behind his head. It is the floor, rattling with men’s boots running, getting louder. Dust swirls. Raising his hand to his head he feels hot wetness.
‘Juggler!’
The explosives have detonated. The men’s voices sound distant behind the high-pitched hum in his ears. His skin burns, his torso, head and arms hurt and, worse than anything else, his face feels as if it has thousands of hot needles sticking into it. The men gather around him, frightened, their lamps shining on him.
‘Clean my face,’ he tells his mate. ‘Get it out of my face, whatever you can.’
The blast has driven stars of rock and coal into his pale face and body. The men clean him with water from their Dudleys, carry him on a stretcher to the pit bottom and take him to the surface in the cage. Bright sunlight on the scurry from shaft side to first-aid room; a black police car and an ambulance waiting. All around and above are gigantic, smoking pipes, headgears, elevated cableways carrying muck to the muckstacks, and piles of timber and steel girders. There are coal preparation plants, coke ovens, railway sidings, science labs and office blocks, and, amid all this, run the small, insignificant black figures carrying Harry Hollingworth on a stretcher. The pit doctor calmly tidies him up, and then he is loaded into an ambulance and sped away to the Montagu Hospital for treatment.
There is an inquiry into every serious accident at a colliery, but the management at Manvers will never establish what detonated Harry’s explosives. Perhaps he had not pulled the wires far enough from the detonator and they had sprung back and touched. More likely, Harry will think, someone didn’t realise he had gone to check the circuit and reconnected the wires, but would not admit it to the investigators. With no conclusive proof discovered, Harry Hollingworth’s injuries enter history as a mystery, a riddle or, in official language, ‘Cause Unknown’.
*
Winnie knows there has been an accident as soon as she sees the policeman talking to Alf at the front door. You don’t consciously expect your husband to be hurt in the pit, but as soon as it happens you realise how often you’ve imagined it. Her actions feel automatic. Once the policeman has explained what’s happened, and that Mr Hollingworth is satisfactory but in hospital, she takes off her pinny and combs her hair, and Alf takes the keys from the sideboard drawer and drives her to the hospital in the Daimler.
Some miners take pride in their blue coal scars, but not Juggler Hollingworth. In several sessions over two days and nights, nurses, many of them the daughters of miners themselves, work at his face with a scrubbing brush and use long steel tweezers to pick out coal from his bloody face, arms and torso. He clamps shut his remaining teeth and screws up his eyes, and between the pickings and the brushings, nurses re-bandage and patch him, and take him out to smoke cigarettes. At the end, when they have taken all but the smallest blue grains from his face, his upper body is pocked with small raw, bloody holes and cuts, and his face is scabby, bruised and pitted. In the soft white skin of his inner arms there are small blue and black constellations where the presence of blood vessels has made it impossible to tweeze out the coal. Years from now these arms will be playthings to his grandchildren who will clamour for a look (‘Show us t’ coal in your arms, Grandad!’) when they visit. Now, though, when his own children come to see him they look afraid. Roy is discomfited and quiet, and Pauline cries.
The nurses clear Harry’s face so that it heals intact. There are just a few scattered, pinprick pieces left and one small midnight-blue smudge in his hairline. At the end, as the last nurse leans over to bandage him, she pauses and says, ‘I have to ask you this, Mr Hollingworth.’
He looks up.
‘Are you the one who does that trick with that half-pint of beer?’
‘Yes, I am,’ he says. ‘But I’m not telling thee how I do it.’