Barnburgh, 1957
June 1957. Harold Macmillan newly Prime Minister, Elvis Presley newly King. The British military is testing nuclear bombs in the Pacific, and the Paymaster General has ended the petrol rationing introduced during the Suez Crisis. ERNIE is picking the first Premium Bond winners, and Diana Dors is divorcing her manager. The kids at the dances are wearing winged spectacles and A-line dresses, bobby socks, beetlecrushers and Tony Curtis hair.
There is a heatwave across England and in the sweltering, smokey Dearne Valley the mothers are stripped to their corsets to do the housework and waiting to slap the wet heads of sons who have been swimming illegally in the brickyard ponds. Under the cloudless mid-blue skies the girls tan in the parks, and the farmland toasts, the soil dusty and the grass so tindery that the firemen are stretched by the blazes lit by sparks from trains. Through the hot nights, men and women congregate in the yards of Highgate Club and the Halfway Hotel. In the backings the summer carousers shout and sing into the small, happy hours.
Half-past ten on a Saturday night and there is singing outside the back door of 34 Highgate Lane. The singing is always outside the back doors because the front doors have the steep steps that are troublesome to a man at half past ten on a Saturday night. ‘Gentleman songsters off on a spree, damned from here to eternity . . .’
Three men, drunk on beer, are serenading Winnie, and Lynda, who has woken up and come downstairs to have hot milk by the fire. Winnie is sighing and is about to get up from the fireside as Harry, Sonny Parkin and Danny Lunness stagger in through the door, laughing.
‘My sweet!’ says Harry to Winnie, who wrestles off his hug, pulls down the front of the kitchen cabinet and saws thick, irregular slices off a bread loaf to make dripping sandwiches. With clumsy grace he plants a kiss on Lynda’s head, then goes back into the kitchen as Danny comes into the living room. Lynda is delighted to see her uncle, especially late at night with this secret pass to the shadow world of the grown-ups. Danny takes half a crown from his pocket and pushes it into her hand and makes a joke about drinking hot milk: that’s what he’s been having tonight as well, he says.
‘And saying thy prayers,’ calls Harry, ‘in church.’
‘Church,’ mutters Winnie. ‘I know your church. T’ church where t’ bibles have handles.’
Without the presence of Sonny, Danny and Lynda her remark could have flickered into a row. As it is, Winnie smiles and Harry just shakes his head. ‘I’m off to get some holy water,’ he says, and takes the white enamel bucket and slips out the back door.
‘Is tha coming to t’ wedding?’ Danny asks Lynda.
The wedding is between Pam Lunness – Danny and Millie’s middle daughter – and Jack Gundry, a placidly mannered teddy boy who works on the same coalface as Danny at Barnburgh Main. Millie has been in a bluster of organisation, annoying Winnie who has been trying to help only to find Millie disregarding her suggestions (‘She thinks she knows it all!’ says Winnie, feeling that Millie has never been the same since she joined the Buffs a few years ago). There is some anxiety over money because Danny recently damaged his thumb in a pit accident and has been off work for two weeks.
In the club that evening, Danny now tells Winnie, Jack has been worrying about beer for the wedding. Months ago Danny had agreed to buy a barrel for the reception, but if he doesn’t get back to work soon he won’t be able to afford one. ‘I’m going on Monday if I can, but this – ’ he holds up the still-bandaged hand – ‘i’n’t half giving me some hammer. I’m worried if I get working I’ll do my hand altogether.’ Danny’s hands have been worked hard by boxing, but it is the ability to grip that he worries about. Without that you can’t work, and can end up with a pit-top job.
‘Tha manages to hold pint glasses all right,’ says Harry, coming back into the room with the beer.
‘I want to get back and get sorted out wi’ em about t’ ventilation,’ says Danny, ignoring him. ‘I had a right ding-dong wi’ t’ under-manager and I shall kick his backside before I’ve done. There’s gas leaking through somewhere on our face. They reckon to have inspected t’ ventilation but tha can smell it sometimes.’
This dispute has been running on and off for a year. Last summer inspectors detected explosive firedamp in a hole in the roof but then, after adjusting the doors that controlled the flow of air around the mine, they said it was no longer present. Together with the union man Danny, who is the lineman on his shift, requested another check by the miners’ own panel of inspectors a few days before he hurt his thumb. They found no gas and said the ventilation was in order, and Danny, speaking on behalf of his men, had a row with both the inspectors and the undermanagers. He said the firedamp must be collecting in holes in the rock, it had to be. They said they couldn’t find it and there was nowt else they could do.
‘They need to shift t’ doors to get air going round,’ he says to Winnie. ‘I know there’s gas. I flaming know it.’
The heatwave lasts, and by the end of the month the River Dearne runs low in its bed and the firemen can no longer keep up. On the afternoon of Wednesday 26 June, as the valley swims in heat, Winnie retires to the cool of the sitting room to rest. The early part of Wednesday afternoons, before Lynda returns from school, is the time she takes for herself in the week to knit, sew or read. Today she gazes at a novel, but finds concentration difficult.
At just past three o’clock she hears voices in the yard that are louder and more numerous than usual, and when they persist she goes to the kitchen door. Through the gate she sees men and women hurrying up and down the backings. Comfort Eades is in the yard talking to two women from Barnsley Road. ‘Summat’s gone off at Barnburgh pit,’ she says to Winnie. ‘Accident or summat. They’ve just made an announcement at t’ pictures, and asked ’em at Highgate pit if they can send some men down to help.’
She thinks about Millie and Danny, and Clara and Ernie. Ernie, who also works on Danny’s face at Barnburgh, has just gone back to work after a stay in the caravan in Bridlington. Winnie asks Comfort to watch Lynda, then takes her bag and beetles down the hill to Bolton-upon-Dearne, the sun hot on her skin, the sound of a pit buzzer audible in the distance. As she nears Bolton, there are people on the street. Some are hastening along the footpaths towards Barnburgh Main colliery. Two police cars shoot past followed by a blue NCB ambulance with its bells ringing.
Clara has already left. Her neighbour, standing in the street, tells Winnie there has been an accident underground at Barnburgh. ‘No one knows how many of them were in it,’ she says, ‘it’s awful for them who’ve got somebody at work.’
Every miner’s wife and mother lives with feelings of anxiety and foreboding that are quieted by routine. You know what time he usually gets back from his shift and you notice the first minute gap opened up by the long hand when he is late. Some women worry more than others, but they all wonder as they wait. There are always the little injuries to remind you: him coming home with a cut on his head; his vertebrae badly rubbed and scabbed; him having to go to hospital for a few stitches. When he is in an accident you are shocked, but the accident feels less like a random event than a buried fear breaking out from the earth. And you know people who have been killed or hurt, so it is nothing new, just your turn. Most mining families believe strongly in fate.
‘It is frightening, love,’ says Winnie. ‘Let’s hope Ernie’s alright.’
‘My husband’s on earlies, thank God,’ says the woman.
‘My brother-in-law’s been off for two weeks, and he was on about going back. He’ll be glad he didn’t now. I’ll walk round to see them.’
At about the same time, Jack Gundry is sitting on a windowsill in the house in Bolton-upon-Dearne that will be his and Pam’s new lodgings once they are married. He is decorating, seated with his legs inside the room and his body out, so he can paint the wooden frames white. The sun is drying the paint quickly, and warming his back and the pale skin of his neck. A transistor radio plays in the room, and over its chatter he hears the pit buzzer and wonders what’s going off. As he is wondering here comes Reg Smith, a mate who works on the pit top, hurrying down the street, and calling up to Jack with an odd tone in his voice.
‘Ayup Jack –’
‘Ayup Reg.’ On seeing Reg, Jack feels guilty because he has taken the day off pretending to be ill. ‘I’m on t’ painting and decorating today. I’ve got to get this done before we get married, like.’
Reg’s expression changes as he realises Jack hasn’t heard. ‘Thy face has just gone up, tha knows –’
Jack drops the brush; it bounces off the pavement leaving a splatter of white on the dirt. Then he is rushing down the stairs and out onto the street towards Danny and Millie’s house. Had Danny been at work today? He had said he would go back this week, but he hadn’t been there yesterday, so probably not. Best to make sure though.
He runs past women clustered at front doors, their kids around their feet frightened and fascinated. Men pass by him heading the other way, towards the pit. A memory comes to him from a shift last week – him saying to his mate Derek Smith that the pit’s ventilation engineers had the airflow wrong, that the way they had set their system of doors and curtains in the faces, gates and roadways could allow gas to accumulate. Derek had said Jack was fussing and Jack had left it at that, but now the face had gone up. If there had been an explosion, gas would almost certainly have been the cause.
*
Hall Broome Gardens, Number 7: Millie is at the garden gate with two neighbours. Jack’s chest is rising and falling heavily.
‘Ayup, Jack,’ she says.
‘Where is he?’
‘He’s at t’ pit, love. He said he were going back to get that barrel.’
Jack stands silent and feels as if he could just float up into the air.
‘I know there’s been an accident,’ she says, ‘but we don’t know what’s going off yet, do you know what it is?’
‘I’m not sure yet.’
‘Has anybody said owt to you?’
‘No,’ he lies. He doesn’t want to worry her.
More neighbours come out into the street to ask if anyone has any news and some of them set off for the pit, but Millie stays, not wanting to tempt fate. Jack stays with her. He has lost track of how long he has been there when he sees a policeman approaching, checking the house numbers as he walks up the street towards them.
The pit buzzer continues to wail across the valley and in the villages men rush into the clubs to alert the drinkers. Cinema managers order projectionists to halt the matinee reels and announce the accident to audiences, who then pile out into the sunshine to seek news, or head off to offer assistance. Along the roads and on the footpaths and in the summer-deep green lanes, hundreds of miners hurry towards Barnburgh pit top, and through the streets race clanging ambulances, roaring police cars, and tyre-squealing black cars of managers and officials, more and more and more of them and then gradually fewer and fewer until the ambulances begin to pass the other way. Soon the ambulances are shuttling back and forth between the pit and the hospitals at Doncaster, Mexborough and Rotherham, and all across the valley the people gathered on streets or in house doorways are sharing scraps of knowledge and rumour. It’s in t’ Newhill seam. It were a big explosion, must’ve been gas . . . There’s above two dozen men been hurt they reckon, and there’s ambulances coming from all over. They’ve started bringing ’em out and they’ve took a lot to t’ Montagu. A lot of ’em’s been burned bad . . .
At the gates of Barnburgh Main a crowd, mainly women and children, is looking for sons, husbands, boyfriends, brothers. They peer into the yard, asking each other what they know, watching black-faced miners in burned clothes carry men on stretchers from the shaft side to the ambulance room. One man, a fifty-one-year-old deputy with charred hands and face, busies himself ensuring that the worst hurt get seen first, and tends to the men as he passes among them. Others kneel over the injured to help them sip water from Dudleys, talking to them to keep them conscious. Doctors from Thurnscoe, Bolton and Goldthorpe arrive in their cars and go underground to treat the men who cannot be moved. The pit manager, colliery staff and NUM officials cross the yard and follow them down to inspect the accident scene. And one by one, the worst hurt are eased into ambulances and sped away. There are twenty of them in all, some so badly burned that friends who helped them on the pit top had not been able to recognise their faces.
*
‘Mrs Lunness?’ The policeman is one of several criss-crossing the village to find next of kin. In Millie’s sitting room he explains to her and Jack that Danny was caught in the explosion, but has been brought out alive and taken to the Montagu. His condition is critical and no visitors are being admitted.
Millie appears calm but numb. When Winnie arrives and makes her a cup of tea, she talks only of the children: how to tell if Barbara and Pam have found out yet, how to contact Brian in Newmarket, and Tony, who is in the Army. Five times she will have to say it: your dad is critical, love, and you need to be ready to see him.
Pam comes, and is told. When she and Jack have steadied her, Winnie goes to Clara’s house, where Clara is back preparing to go to Doncaster Royal Infirmary. Ernie has been caught in the accident and is ill, but not critical; their son Derek, who had been due to sail to Hong Kong as part of his National Service, is on his way home to see him. Clara tells Winnie the figures she has heard: four besides Ernie have been taken to Doncaster, four others are in a hospital in Rotherham, and eleven more at the Montagu. Some of them are very poorly. ‘It’s funny,’ she says. ‘You always know it could happen, and then when it does, you can’t believe it.’
*
The following day the men in the Montagu are allowed visits from relatives and close friends, and Harry drives Jack, Millie and Winnie to the hospital. The injured miners occupy a single ward, and in the corridor outside a loose handful of forlorn children, barred from going in because of their age, crouch on heels, clutch dolls and run Dinky cars along the floor.
Winnie and Harry go in behind Jack and Millie. Before she is even inside the ward, the strong, nauseating odour of burned hair and putrefying flesh makes Millie retch. Many years later, when the visitors tell their children and grandchildren about the accident, it is the smell they remember; for many of them, the ward and the appearance of the burned men is hazy, as if the fouled air had made them drunk. Millie has a moment of dizziness, then takes in the sight of the ward. There are five beds lined along each wall. On each bed lies a block of ice the size of a single wardrobe. On each block of ice lies a man, naked but for a towel across his abdomen. Each man’s skin is a black mass of scorched scabs, like the skin of a burned baked potato cooked in a bonfire, with a few small flashes of wet, red-raw flesh. Worst are the heads, swollen to twice their proper size, with most of their hair and facial features burned off, making it hard to distinguish one from the other.
There is silence, broken only by attempts at coughs from the older men. They cannot speak properly to call you, so all that is left is eye movement. As Jack, Harry, Winnie and Millie come into the middle of the ward, several pairs of eyes, bloodshot-white in the black heads, swivel to them. Some of the families sitting by the burned men, the Grattons and the Edwards who live close to Dan and Millie, murmur greetings. Millie gasps and reels. Winnie takes her arm. Jack thinks quickly and looks, trying not to appear obvious, at the record sheets clipped onto the iron bars at the bottom of the beds without visitors until he sees ‘D. Lunness’.
Beside the beds the relatives sit, trying to think of what to say, and not breathing through their noses. Danny’s lips are charred, and his mouth is a wet pink hole in the black crust of his face, like a hole in a burned pie. He can barely speak, but sometimes he looks yearningly at Millie and as he spasms with pain, he croaks, ‘Get hold of me, Millie’ – and she has to say, ‘I can’t,’ because she knows if she holds him she will hurt him. For the hour they are allowed to remain in the ward the visitors have to take breaks outside because the smell makes them feel they will be sick.
After the visit a doctor takes Millie into a waiting room. The doctor, balding, eyes tired behind spectacles, is weary, hesitant, relying on a script in his head. ‘It’s difficult to say at this point, Mrs Lunness,’ he begins. ‘But – ’
‘Don’t flannel me, doctor,’ says Millie. ‘I can see what state he’s in. Just say it.’
The doctor nods. ‘All right. Well, with those burns, your husband is lucky to be alive. We can’t give you any guarantee, but if his body can build enough strength to begin recovering there is a good chance for him. If he stabilises here, we can move him to the Special Burns Unit at Wakefield, and then if he survives for a month, say thirty days from now, his chances of a full recovery will go up to ninety per cent.’
Danny does stabilise, and as he regains his strength he spends further visiting times telling the family what happened. Forty men on the two o’clock shift had been working on a coal face deep underground and half a mile from the pit bottom. They were making the face ready so that the next shift could cut coal from its seam. Some men repaired the tunnels, or gates, that led off at angles from the long, five-foot-high gallery with its wall of coal, while the wastemen moved the roof supports, allowing parts of the rock roof to collapse behind them. Danny was working as lineman for a team of eighteen wastemen. They were moving roof supports when Danny saw, many yards down one of the gates, a set of safety doors blow open.
There is a bright blue flash, and then a fireball of gas is rushing down the tunnel towards the men. Danny shouts, ‘Get down!’ and drops to his knees. The other men drop likewise, heads bowed tightly into their chests, hands protecting genitals. One, however, Jack’s mate Derek Smith, stands up, spooked. Danny shouts to him, but Derek, panicking, gallops down the gate, trying to outrun the flames. Before anyone can stop him the flames engulf them all. As the fireball whooshes over him, Danny can feel it rip at his clothes and burn his body, and then there is a roaring, rattling hurricane of earth and coal dust being sucked into its wake.
For a second, time slows. Danny thinks about his skin, and about Derek, and about how bad everyone’s burns will be. He has time to stand up in the thick, swirling dust, and make out the shapes of other men around him standing up and looking for the gates that lead off the face. He has time to search for the fireball, but when he spots it, it is rebounding off the brattice-cloth hurdles at the end of the face, and rushing back towards them. Derek is for a moment silhouetted prostrate on the ground. The men cannot get down again, and they take the full force front on. The blast scatters them like leaves in the wind. It blows off most of their remaining clothes, blasts their scalps from their skulls and burns lumps out of their ears and noses. As they regain consciousness their lungs feel as if the flames are in them, and because there is no oxygen in the air they are inhaling smoke, fire and coal dust. There is a strong smell of tar. The dust is so thick that you can see for only a yard or two.
Some men who are able to walk try the telephone near the face that links to the pit bottom and the surface, but it is out of order. It takes several minutes for the deputies to realise there has been an accident. Someone breaks open the boxes of morphine kept in the tunnels and dispenses it to the injured men. The colliery officials on the surface are alerted and SOS calls put out. The seam is evacuated and the remaining miners told to go home, but most stay to help find the men and get them above ground.
It takes more than an hour to take the most badly affected men off the face. Each one, burned, and dosed with morphine, has to be taken the half mile to the shaft, brought up and then carried to the ambulance room and readied for dispatch to the hospitals. The injured and dying men come up on stretchers, covered in blankets, but even the hot summer air feels cold on their burnt bodies, clumps of hair and scalp hanging down, skin and rags flapping. Some have their faces covered, but none are dead, yet.
‘We told them, Jack, didn’t we? I told him about that gas.’
Jack nods to Danny. He had thought the same.
‘And people heard me. When I get out of here, I’m going to sue the bastards. There’s kids could’ve lost their fathers.’
Everyone around the bed is quiet, taking in the story. Danny tries to smile. ‘Never mind the kids,’ he croaks to Jack. ‘We’ll still have that barrel.’
*
Danny survives to the end of the week. The doctors judge him fit enough to move, and order his transfer to the Specialist Burns Unit at Wakefield Pinderfields Hospital. The family, with his son Brian back at home now, begins daily trips to sit with him and as they tick off the thirty days, Danny keeps going. Three weeks after the accident he is growing stronger and is thinking about his options for suing the managers. He survives the first week in the new hospital, and then the one after that. Ernie, meanwhile, is slowly recovering in hospital in Doncaster.
The inspectors go in at Barnburgh Main, and the pubs and clubs are full of rumour. Jack and Pam decide to put off the wedding until Danny recovers, and Pam holds her dad’s burned hand and tells him she won’t get married until he comes out to give her away. Jack cannot stop himself feeling guilty for not having been at work and angry at the arbitrariness of it all. One night, he meets Derek Smith’s mother in the street. Jack had been brought up with Derek on the same backings. When they were at school Jack had wanted to be a gardener and Derek had wanted to work on a farm; Derek had got a farm job, but then married and had children, and the pit paid so much better than working on the land.
‘He’s in t’ hospital at Donny,’ Mrs Smith tells Jack. ‘He’s been asking after you, love. He says he’d like to talk to you, will you go to see him and sit wi’ him one night?’
Jack says of course he will, he’ll go tomorrow night, but the next day, Thursday 4 July, a neighbour tells him that Derek has passed away in hospital. He is the first of the rescued men to die.
*
When the family goes to see Danny at the Burns Unit, the smell is still as bad but Danny can talk a little more easily. He has a healthy body, still fit from the gym, and he withstands the injuries well. He seems to grow neither weaker nor stronger, but the days pass and he is still alive at the start of the last of the four weeks. ‘It’s his strength,’ Millie and his family tell each other as they gather in the kitchen before going to Wakefield, or coming home through the light, summery night. ‘It’s all t’ training and boxing he’s done.’ ‘Tha’s going to be all right, Danny,’ Jack says, and Danny cracks a white smile in his still-reddened face.
But the following week, twenty-two days after the accident, he grows weaker, feverish and tired. After tests, the doctors tell Millie he is recovering well from the burns, but there is a complication. The dust and gas have poisonous chemicals in them and when they came into contact with his raw wounds the toxins had entered his blood. Danny has leukaemia, and the doctors can do nothing to arrest it.
When Millie arrives on 24 July, the twenty-ninth of the doctor’s thirty days, the curtains are drawn around Danny’s bed. Millie assumes his dressings are being changed, but when she tries to slip through she sees doctors and nurses around the bed, and the doctors are peering at him. A senior nurse shuffles over, takes Millie’s arm and leads her away.
There is fluid on his lungs, says the nurse, but the doctors are doing their best.
A few hours later, Danny Lunness dies.
*
Four more of the men besides Danny and Derek die from their injuries. Ernie Towning recovers in hospital, but suffers nightmares about the explosion, waking up confused to find himself on the ward. On the day he is discharged Clara and the kids go to collect him, and when young Clare sees his burned black and red face she thinks her father is a monster, and runs away from him, screaming. His flashbacks recur, and one afternoon, a week or so after returning home, he waits until Clara and the children go out, walks into the kitchen, turns on the gas oven, and puts his head inside. Clara comes back in time and wakes him, yanking him away from the oven by his belt. ‘You silly bugger,’ she yells. ‘What the bloody hell are you playing at?’
He is ashamed and silent. She upbraids him, and afterwards tells people what he has done with words repeated so often they become a catchphrase: ‘The silly bugger can’t even get that right.’ The words sound cruel, but they are only pitiless; Clara is of the old school and she knows that pity can weaken a person. Ernie slowly recovers stability, though he never goes underground again, taking a job above ground on the colliery trains. He suffers nightmares for the rest of his life.
In September the coroner records that Danny was ‘by misadventure burned on 26 June 1957, underground in the North West 1 District of the Newhill seam in Barnburgh Main colliery, Barnburgh, in the West Riding of the County of York when involved in an explosion of fire-damp’. Danny’s full name does not appear on the lists of British mining fatalities because someone at the NCB or the hospital mistakenly listed him as ‘David’. Nor does his version of the accident appear in the official NCB report, which records that it was caused by a spark from an electrical cable with worn armour coating being carried for yards on air currents until it came to a pocket of gas.
The family bury Danny in Goldthorpe churchyard. At the funeral, the church and the cemetery are packed with men and women in mourning black, families of miners, boxers and neighbours. The women wipe their eyes with small flowered handkerchiefs and the men clasp their red, nicked, blue-scarred hands in front of themselves and look down. Union representatives carry the red and gold union banner.
Perhaps the younger Millie, the Millie who married her young boxer and who could match Harry Hollingworth for lip, would have made a fuss and had the name on the memorial corrected. But Danny’s passing seems to reduce her to a pale, smokey ember. Within the year she uses her compensation payment to buy a sweet shop near the cinema in Goldthorpe to give herself an income, but it is as if something in her is broken. She finds she cannot sing any more and retires from public performances. Before the end of the decade the family will acknowledge that her incomplete recovery has become a permanent decline in her health.
*
Pam and Jack marry in a subdued ceremony at the end of August. Pam wears grey rather than white, and she walks down the aisle alone, refusing to be given away by anyone else. The men on the Newhill seam are given leave to stay off work for a day or two, but when Jack goes back to work, his undermanager makes him go to the scene of the accident to salvage the equipment. Jack asks if he could work somewhere else, since that was where his father-in-law and his best friend received their fatal injuries. ‘No chance,’ says the undermanager, ‘and if you don’t like it, you can get off down the road.’
At Highgate Lane, Danny is remembered alongside Walter as a hero and martyr to life’s random unfairness; a smashing fella whose smashingness is somehow intensified in the memory by the unpleasantness of his death. The family being what it is, he doesn’t fully leave them for a while anyway. One day, a few weeks after Danny’s funeral, Winnie is alone in the house, cleaning, when she hears a man’s voice in the room. She lays down her duster on the sideboard and turns to see Danny standing in front of the fireplace. ‘Ayup, Danny love,’ she says. ‘How are you going on? Have you been to see your Millie?’
‘Aye,’ he tells her. ‘I’ve just been down to see her, to see if she’s all right.’
And then in the silent house he lingers, as he will linger for many years in the Hollingworth memory, looking bemused, as quick and flickery as flames in a fire, and as if he might at any moment burst joyfully into song.