Houghton Main Colliery and Bolton-upon-Dearne, 1975
In the early evening of 12 June 1975, Margaret, Gary and David are watching television at home when the floor, furniture and light fitting tremble faintly for a few seconds. The tremor is not enough to chink the tea mugs on the coffee table, but it does make them look at each other in puzzlement. Three hours later the News at Ten has a report from Houghton Main about an explosion 350 yards down in the Melton Field seam. Men are missing underground, feared dead. Margaret and David ask Gary if this was what the tremor was. Maybe not, he says, it might just have been something in Hickleton’s workings. None of them wants to think the explosion is what they felt. Some of Houghton’s workings are below Thurnscoe village, so the missing men could be 350 yards below their feet.
When Gary arrives at work the next morning the pit yard is in muddy chaos: police cars, television vans and yellow mine-rescue trucks are parked up and ambulances wait near the wooden steps that lead down from the shaft side. Miners stand around in hushed groups. Coming off duty, tired rescue teams in knee pads and breathing apparatus pass fresh ones going underground to take their place. Outside the baths are gathered the families of the trapped and missing, waiting for news; a Salvation Army van serves them drinks and sandwiches. Above everyone’s heads the spoked iron winding wheels are still.
Gary goes to the safety team’s cabin. All twelve men are quietly waiting to find out if they can help. He hears a scuffle outside and looks out from the open doorway as Arthur Scargill and the government ministers Tony Benn and Eric Varley cross the pit yard to the manager’s office. They have been underground; Scargill is wearing an old 1950s metal mining helmet, a type still worn by some men like badges of individuality and long service. Reporters and television cameramen crowd around them, asking questions about the explosion and the casualties.
‘Them pillocks want chucking down t’ shaft,’ says one of the dust control men, meaning the reporters. ‘They’ve been sniffing round t’ families like bloody vultures, pretending to be all sad and sorry. They’re not so sad and sorry when we’re putting a pay claim in.’
Five men have been killed, and one badly injured. The emergency teams are still trying to recover the dead bodies in the dust and the wreckage. Kenny’s dad, one of the rescuers, is among them. ‘They keep finding pages from a Bible floating about in t’ dust,’ Kenny says. ‘One of t’ lads that’s been killed always took it down wi’ him. Didn’t do him much good, did it?’
Gary knows three of the dead men. He feels numbed by the accident and unsure of how to act among the older miners. To him the day feels so abnormal as to be unreal, but in their grim faces he can see the past lives that make it familiar. There are Ukranians and Poles working at Houghton Main, men who have concentration camp tattoos on their wrists and saw family and friends die around them in the war. When these men speak about the accident and the deaths and the families waiting for news, there is disgust in their voices, and also a sort of weariness.
The source of the explosion, everyone knows, will have been ignited gas. An inquiry will conclude that methane was most likely ignited by sparks from one of the fans used to draw air through the mine. With the pit closed and only the senior managers and rescue teams allowed in, the men are sent home, and Gary is not needed for three days. On the fourth day the ventilation officer sends him, Kenny and a deputy down to some disused workings in the Silkstone seam to take measurements and test the system of pipes that drain methane from the air. Houghton Main works nine seams, and the Silkstone, 940 yards down, is the deepest. As they wait at the shaft side for the cage, Gary is unsettled and fidgety.
‘What’s up wi’ you?’ the deputy asks disdainfully.
‘What’s up wi’ me? There’s been five men killed down there, and I knew three of ’em. I think it feels a bit macabre.’
The winding wheels above their heads begin to revolve slowly, and the cables tighten as the cage rises up the shaft.
‘Does it buggery. They’ll not hurt you now, will they?’
Gary looks away. The deputy’s scorn is mostly bravado. Pits are superstitious places and according to the men who work there, Houghton has been haunted by miners’ ghosts since it was sunk in the 1870s.
‘Maybe not, but it’s not very pleasant.’
‘Get away wi’ you. You talk like women.’
The cage comes up in front of them. When its bottom is level with the tub rails, it rattles to a halt, and the banksman yanks back its gates. The men toss their pit checks into a wooden box and step in, bowing to fit their heads under the low roof. When the banksman has secured the gates he presses a button and the cage slides down into the darkness. They drop past the lights of the Melton Field inset, and then the other seams below that: Beamshaw, Barnsley Bed, Dunsil, Fenton, Parkgate, Thorncliffe. At Thorncliffe they get out and take the manriding conveyor down into the Silkstone.
Near the pit bottom the roadway is as large as an underground railway station and illuminated by electric lights. Further along, the roofs are lower and the floors more uneven, and there are no lights, so the three men have to rely on their cap lamps. They concentrate on finding level footing and do not talk, but Gary can sense a tension in the atmosphere of the whole pit. When they pass other miners in the roadway they hardly acknowledge each other. It is as if everyone is calculating how long it will be until they finish their shift and get back to the surface.
In the disused workings, Gary can see the strain in the others’ eyes when he catches their faces in his lampbeam. The air is dank and stale-smelling, the only noises muffled and distant. Gary and Kenny take their tools from their bags as the deputy watches, and collect air samples without speaking.
They have been working for half an hour when the pit’s Tannoy communication speakers beep and an operator in the control room up on the surface makes an urgent announcement: ‘All men make their way to the pit bottom in orderly fashion. I repeat–’
They do not wait for a second warning. Gary and Kenny stuff their equipment into the bags and, with the deputy, make their way back towards the main roadway. They break into a jogging run, stepping over stray rocks and girders as nimbly as they can in pit boots. The operator makes more announcements over the Tannoy: ‘All men urgently make their way . . .’
As they draw closer to the drift tunnel that will take them back to the cage, there are men coming into the roadway from other gates and faces: haulage men, button men, face men, deputies, all running, keeping as tight and fast as they can without colliding. The warnings mean that someone has found high gas levels somewhere, possibly in their seam. Another announcement: the pace quickens and the deep, panicky grind of the boots grows louder.
‘Tha’d better keep upright, ’Olly,’ Gary hears Kenny say behind him when he stumbles. ‘If tha goes down I’m off over t’ top of thee.’
‘Thanks, comrade.’
‘Tha’s welcome, comrade.’
The men run along the roadway, splash through pooled water, bang through air doors and finally throw themselves onto the conveyor and ride upwards back to where the cage is waiting. At the pit bottom, Gary climbs off the belt. The onsetter is crashing open the cage doors and shouting at them all, come on, hurry up, shift your sorry arses. He is still shouting as Gary piles in and the cage fills up around him.
Usually the men crack jokes as they ride in the cage, but today as it rises through the dark they are silent. At the surface they step out with relief, and jog down the wooden steps into daylight.
‘I reckon tha must have a sixth sense,’ says Kenny.
‘Not really,’ says Gary. ‘It was just fear.’
‘That’s same as us all, kid.’
Same as us all. The only difference was how they dealt with it.
There is no explosion. Most men have showers and go home, a few go to a club and get drunk. By the next morning the escape already feels like something that happened a long time ago. It binds the men together with a sort of rough, unspoken intimacy. No one talks about it much.
*
A few months after the accident at Houghton, Gary’s fiancée Elaine falls pregnant. Neither she nor Gary feel ready to have children, and Elaine’s parents say she doesn’t have to marry if she doesn’t want to, but for her and Gary there is no question of not marrying. They wed on Boxing Day 1975, a Friday, at the register office in Doncaster. Kenny is Gary’s best man, Elaine’s friend Sue the maid of honour. Parents and siblings are invited but Roy, away working on the roads and living in caravans with Alwyn and Wendy, neither responds nor attends. After the ceremony Kenny drives them back to Elaine’s parents’ house in Mexborough for a buffet lunch, and then to a hotel where they have drinks under the Christmas decorations and sing along to ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ playing on the sound system.
Gary and Elaine are allocated a pit house on Bolton-upon-Dearne’s large, modern NCB estate, known in the Dearne Valley, where people like to reimagine their localities as Wild West outposts, as the Concrete Canyon. The houses are large and square, mostly semi-detached or in short terraces, rendered and painted in greys and browns, and set out on streets whose names recall places in the Empire – Vancouver Drive, Maori Avenue, Caernarvon Crescent. In the evenings and at weekends the streets are busy with young kids re-fighting the Second World War with plastic soldiers, older kids with scabby knees racing on bikes, and lads repairing jacked-up cars with Radio One playing on their stereos. To the north and east the estate joins the village; to the south and west it looks out over farmland and the smoking Manvers complex, its mighty industrial spectacle surrounded by a pastoral landscape of fields, lanes and small stands of trees.
Gary and Elaine’s semi looks out over fields. It has a large, unkempt garden and a peeling wooden fence. Inside it is unheated, its windows rattle in their frames, and there is damp on the kitchen walls and ceiling; the floors are bare boards and pock marked lino, and the whole house is infested with mice. Their families give them old furniture: Winnie and Harry bring the vinyl suite from the sitting room, and Pauline and Gordon deliver a fridge and some stair carpet in a livestock trailer. With the £40 savings they have between them, the newlyweds buy a bed in a furniture shop in Mexborough and allow themselves the luxury of a small black-and-white TV rented for 34p a week.
In the spring, Margaret White and Colin Greengrass marry at Barnsley register office. Roy is not mentioned and sends no message. When Elaine and Gary’s baby, a ten-pound boy they name Scott, arrives during a summer heatwave that scorches the grass and the fields, there is again no word from Roy.
To work closer to home, Gary transfers temporarily to Manvers Main, where the older men soon realise he is the Juggler’s grandson, and look out for him when they work together. He has a feeling of belonging somewhere and for a while, walking home along Coronation Avenue or Commonwealth Drive, he can imagine himself and Elaine being older here, with more children and a colour television and a car. When he transfers back to Houghton Main, the pit-bus ride along the four or five miles of narrow country roads seems long, particularly at dawn at the end of a night shift.
Sometimes on those pale, tired mornings he looks out of the window at the fields and worries that, at just twenty, he is too young to be a father. Afraid of his own inexperience, he would like to be able to ask his own father for advice, but there is scant chance of that. It is strength that he needs, not the Iron Man kind, but the kind that some of the older men at work have. Where did you learn that, though? In a war?
He leans his head against the glass and watches the brightening world pass by, and then he thinks of his son at home, and feels proud and almost tearful. Even if you were twenty and not strong, you could still try to be a decent, loving dad.