by Sam Angus
After a while he said, his face ashen, ‘There’s no hope, no hope for any of ’em, miss . . .’
Chapter Forty-Seven
Wooden beams and archways, snapped or twisted out of shape, appeared and disappeared in the swinging arc of Wolfie’s lamp.
‘A mile thereabouts to go. Shade the light – the further the horse can see, faster he’ll go, an’ if he puts a hoof on the rails he’ll slip and fall and break his knees. Make ’im go careful. Swing the light up to the ceiling now for me.’
‘Collars are all right, mostly they’re high – ’e won’t have to bend . . . an’ men prefer the old beams to the new iron ones. Wood creaks, creaks an’ groans like an ol’ tree afore it collapses, them new iron ones just snap out, sudden, like bullets.’
Wolfie kept a hand on Hero’s neck, the warmth and strength of it a comfort.
‘Half a mile, near enough, to the old shaft.’ Jo said.
There was no firedamp in the tunnel, Jo had said, but the thickness of the dark was sinister and uncanny.
They moved on through it, on and on. Hero was beginning to tire perhaps, or finding the ground difficult. Beneath the palm of Wolfie’s hand, the skin of his neck was growing hot and sweaty, his occasional refusals to budge the more frequent. Wolfie whispered to him, but the skin under his hand was as tremulous as the surface of a stream.
The horse’s fear transmitted itself to Wolfie and surged like a hot current through his own veins. Suddenly Hero yanked up his head and pulled back, dragging Wolfie with him. He whinnied wildly. The shriek echoed and spiralled in the black cavern. He spun round, snatching the rope from Wolfie’s hand, metal hoofs clattering on metal rails, the bulk of him a whirling mass, sudden and terrifying. Wolfie glimpsed the rump of him, then the flanks, catching Hero’s neck now in the arc of his lamp, a feral, flaring colossus, unpredictable and terrifying in the confined darkness of the tunnel.
Wolfie’s calls to Hero, the ringing of metal hoof on metal, and the horse’s squealing whinnies all whirled and eddied in the black.
‘It’s all right, ’s’all right, Hero.’
The arc of his light found the horse and Wolfie saw the whites of Hero’s eyes, his head high, almost to the ceiling, electrified, febrile and overwrought. One foreleg pawed and struck the air.
‘Shh, it’s all right, Hero, s’all right,’ he said again, but his own voice wobbled and shook.
‘Shh, hold ’im still,’ said Jo. ‘Quiet . . . an’ listen.’
Jo took Wolfie’s lamp and walked on carefully, the beam of it swinging, disembodied and ghostlike, in the wall of dark.
‘Stay still – don’t move.’
They waited, Wolfie and Hero distant from Jo by twenty or so feet.
‘Stay still,’ Jo said again, creeping back towards Wolfie. ‘Stay where you are.’
They waited a while, together in silence, on either side of Hero.
Suddenly there were running steps, voices, two lights coming from behind them.
‘Thank God,’ Jo said. ‘Thank God . . . some of ’em’ve come this way.’
Five figures appeared, one wounded in the legs, supported on either side, all of them weak and coughing their eyes large and white in their grimy faces.
They exchanged a short, grim greeting with Jo, nodded to Wolfie and Hero.
There was a distant boom, a muffled, faraway roar.
‘Did you hear that – did you hear?’ Wolfie asked. ‘What’s happened? What’s happening?’
‘Another explosion – at the main shaft head perhaps . . .’
Jo shook his head slowly from side to side. The men were silent, heads bowed for many minutes. When one of the older men looked up, his black cheeks were streaked with tears.
After a while, Jo rubbed his eyes and looked up. ‘That’s what were bothering ’im,’ he said. ‘Horse knew it were comin’. Wait for a bit, then we’ll go on.’
An hour or so passed, then one of the older men nodded to Jo and they all went on in silence. Wolfie’s hands trembled on Hero’s neck. His legs were shaking, tripping and stumbling as he followed on behind Jo and the men. Hero was light on his hoofs, live and wary.
‘Come on, steady the horse, calm ’im, we ’ave to keep going,’ Jo called.
‘Come on, Hero, come on,’ Wolfie whispered, watching their lights, scared of being left behind, of the men going on ahead into the darkness and leaving them alone. He pulled again at Hero, but the horse was hesitating, pulling back on the rope. Wolfie breathed deep and slow to stop the pounding of his heart. The men’s lamps were growing smaller. Wolfie tugged again.
Hero pawed and snorted and pranced, striking the air with a foreleg. Wolfie’s arm quivered as he tried to pull him on.
‘Come on, Hero, it’s OK. The explosion was by the main shaft . . . a long way away.’
Again the horse demurred.
Wolfie waited. His body quaked from top to toe. He heard a faint and sinister creaking, like the creaking of a ship. He held his lamp up to the ceiling. Nothing. He took a step back, still holding the lamp to the ceiling, then another step, and another, the horse moving quietly back with him. He saw a long and vicious crack.
‘Get back!’ he yelled. ‘Get back, get back!’
Hero whinnied, a piercing scream of terror that stretched and echoed like a wild thing down the tunnel. His hoofs struck the rail, again and again, pawing and jabbing.
‘Get back!’ Wolfie was shouting. ‘Get back, get back!’
There were running footsteps, men shouting and calling to one another, Jo’s voice screaming, ‘Get back! Get back far as you can – Run!’
Hero was huge and whirling, monstrous and sudden. Wolfie tried to steady his lamp, still calling out to the men, but Hero was plunging up and down now, swinging his head from side to side, a gleaming colossus, all running sweat, eyes bulging and glinting. Suddenly Wolfie was thrown backwards, hit with force in his side by the great bulk and bone of Hero’s head, and flung to the ground.
Men were shouting and screaming and running past him. Wolfie lay, coiled in pain against the wall of the tunnel.
There was an immense boom and Wolfie wound himself tighter, buried his head in his arms, blocking out the roaring, the screaming . . .
There was another boom, more screaming, then the crash and thunder of falling stone.
Choking on the rush of vile air, his mouth gritty, eyes stinging, the air thick with dust, Wolfie was numb with terror. Ahead, somewhere in the dark, stone was sliding. He tried to stand but his legs had turned to water. Shaking violently, he groped for the fallen lamp, spitting dust and grit. Clutching it, raising it, he saw a mound of hard grey rock and debris.
Behind him there were voices, then ahead a cry – the sound of a man groaning in pain. Wolfie leaped forward, his hand shaking with such violence that the beam from the lamp jumped and swung across the darkness. There was another rumble, a further slide of stone far ahead, the dust of it clogging his eyes, his mouth, choking his throat. He spat out more grit as he turned: there in the violent shaking of his beam was the horse, large and spectral; and behind him were figures staggering and stumbling, clasping each other. Swinging his lamp the other way, Wolfie called to Jo.
Wolfie called again.
There was no answer. Wolfie stepped forward, the beam of his light useless in the thick dust. He waited, glancing towards Hero, sensing the horse’s wariness, seeing the watchful eyes, the tense ears, the blindfold gone.
‘Jo!’ Wolfie called, his mouth dry. ‘Jo!’
Hero stepped forward, nuzzled his hand, his shoulder, pushing him. Wolfie paused, then rose, steadying himself with a hand on Hero’s neck. He held out the lamp. In its beam dust swirled.
Holding a clump of the shorn mane, Wolfie moved cautiously forward. Hero moved with him, careful as a cat over the fallen stone, which littered the rails, his steps sure and true in the dark. Wolfie went on, stumbling, conscious of the horse’s alert intelligence, wary and sharp as a wild thing, conscious of his own soupy brain
. Behind them rang footsteps on the metal rail, making their own way on.
How high was the fall? Had it blocked the roadway? Jo? Wolfie stumbled into a rock, hitting the bone of his knee, the sudden agony of it doubling him up. Hero was snorting, stepping away, treading gingerly across the sharp stones to the right, live and wary. Wolfie lifted his lamp. Had the fall been only on the left side? He saw the curve of the tunnel. To the right, the wooden prop, creaking a little, was bent but holding. He swung the beam up across the curve of the roof. The centre was holding, to the left a gaping hole, a pile of stone and debris beneath the split and jagged props.
‘Jo! Jo!’
His voice was a desperate scream. He swung the lamp to and fro over the fallen rock.
‘Here . . . I’m here . . .’
Wolfie started forward, stumbling over the rough stone, several hundredweight of it. The lamp swung back and forth. He was scrambling round the slagheap, falling, sliding, scrabbling at it with his bare hands.
‘Where, where . . . ?’
He stopped, horrified.
‘My chest . . .’
Wolfie knelt, wiping the debris from Jo’s face with his own filthy hands, tears streaming down his own cheeks. Jo was clear of the main landfall, lying sideways across the tunnel, a rock pinning down his chest and one arm.
Wolfie moved tentative hands towards the sinister black mass, broad and flat bottomed. How had Jo not been crushed to death? How could he move it? Was it more dangerous to move it than not? Wolfie lifted Jo’s free arm and placed it above his head. He called out into the blackness – ‘Help, help!’
Someone was moving through the dark to reach them.
Wolfie placed his own hands on either side of the stone, weighing the size of it. He called for help again.
A voice called back to Wolfie to ‘Wait!’ – that two of the men had lost consciousness from the after damp they’d tried to escape earlier, that they had to be carried, that Wolfie should go ahead and get help.
Wolfie waited. For a long while he cradled Jo’s head to his chest, holding his limp, cold hand in his, his own head bowed. When Wolfie looked up, the older of the men was at his side,
‘Go on laddie. Hurry. I canna leave my boy. For the love of God, go on, get help for’s.’
Chapter Forty-Eight
Twenty hours had passed since the last explosion. The engine house was a tangle of bricks and twisted headgear. New winding apparatus and a new cage had been driven up.
A pair of bodies came up in the cage, the arm of one wound around the other. Tear stains streaked the coal dust of their cheeks. Other bodies, already up, lay in carts, scorched, all clothing burned away, hands lifted to their faces, now forever, some had almost no aspect of humanity left. Later, all of them were covered in straw and carried away, by horse and cart, followed on foot by silent mourners.
‘Wolfie, Wolfie,’ Dodo whispered to herself, over and over, hallucinating with exhaustion and cold.
A team went down to examine the shaft and pit.
Two hours later they returned to the surface. The main road had been impassable, the West Return impassable, the whole area quivering and quaking. No one in-bye could’ve survived they said. The Area General Manager arrived and issued an instruction to make a road through the fall, to work with the utmost speed and explore the airway from the Seven Quarter Second South District. This passage might connect with the East District return drift where it crossed the Seven Quarter Seam.
Two rescue workers were brought up on stretchers, their companions reporting that props and doors had been blown out, but that this passage could be travelled.
Later still, another report came that the East District return drift had been reached, but that they could go no further without rescue apparatus, as the air crossing was damaged.
Dodo listened, numb and uncomprehending, one of the hundreds still waiting there.
The manager called for twenty volunteers. A hundred or more men stepped forward. Those who stepped forward were asked to dig graves.
Hettie brought Dodo a blanket, a fresh cup of tea.
Ryland knelt, and took Dodo’s hands.
‘They were together – your brother an’ my Jo – they were . . . they – they ’aven’t . . . they were working on a different face. The fire crossed trunk road and that road crosses all t’other in-by faces that are being worked an’ all the roadways . . . all on ’em, ’cept the old closed road – that one’s sealed off.’ He looked up at Dodo. ‘My father died down there . . . ’e used to work that road—’
Ryland broke off, seeing men arrive at the surface, pouring out, all shouting.
‘Smoke coming out o’ brickwork . . . Doors to t’airlock blown out . . . Separation doors burning . . . Too hot to breathe . . . The dust chokes you.’
Two men were carried out of the cage unconscious. When they came to, they vomited.
Chapter Forty-Nine
In pitch dark Hero and Wolfie picked their way between the metal tracks. Most of the lamps had been lost in the rubble. Wolfie had left his, the only lamp remaining, to the two men who stayed with the wounded. Old Walter Hobbs, the oldest of them all, was unconscious, all of them coughing and choking on the gas that was in their lungs, burns on their hands and clothing.
Trusting Hero to lead him, Wolfie followed at his side, terror at every step, his throat parched, barely daring to breathe for fear of gas, for fear the air itself was poisoned, the roof about to fall.
How far it was, Wolfie barely knew. ‘A cord,’ they’d said, there’d be a cord. But the shaft had not been used in so long, and how could they know if the cord would still be there?
‘Go on,’ they’d told him. ‘Go on and get help. Pull the cord at the bottom of the shaft.’
Wolfie felt the gentle ticking of Hero’s pulse, the solid warmth of him, and he could hear the dripping of the walls. He had no other senses – he’d only his fingers and his ears, only touch and hearing.
‘Courage is when you have no choice,’ Pa had once said to Wolfie. He’d said that he wasn’t brave, just that there was no other option. At Moreuil Wood there’d been nowhere else to go but into the enemy fire. Wolfie had never thought about those words of Pa’s until now.
We have no choice, thought Wolfie now. This is our only hope. Eighty fathoms or more beneath the surface, in a tunnel prone to collapse, we must find our way in the dark to a shaft that may or may not be working.
‘Courage is nothing more, Wolfie, than when you can’t not do something, when you’ve no choice.’
That was what Pa had said, when Wolfie had been sitting on his knee, by the fire, the medal in his hand.
Wolfie fumbled onward through the dark.
Chapter Fifty
By late afternoon the following day, all hope was abandoned. Men were sent down once again, but only to recover bodies. Hour after hour, more deaths were known for certain, more women led into outbuildings to identify them.
The vigil had lasted three days and ended for all in heartbreak. The silent crowd on the pit banks and in the colliery yard watched and waited.
Processions wound through the town, a Davy lamp on each head, the haunting sound of ‘Gresford’, the miners’ hymn, drifting upward.
Chapter Fifty-One
Wolfie lay curled like a small child, tight against the curved wall of the old shaft head, face to the dirt. Hunger and fear clawed at him like nails. Fearing to breathe, fearing to give in again to sleep, Wolfie clutched his arms around his chest, fearing the clotted blackness, the ghosts that must haunt such a place, fearing the men to whom he’d given false hope, the men who could walk no further, whom he’d left, promising help.
There’d been no cord.
When he woke again he heard the eerie dripping of the walls and a strange new rasping sound. His clothes were wet, his tongue clumsy and dry, his limbs shaking. He stretched a hand through into the darkness. His fingers found something . . . Hero, Hero’s leg. Wolfie ran his hands up, struggled to his feet and sto
od, clutching at him, trembling over the warmth of him, clinging to the comfort of a living, breathing being. Standing, leaning his own head against Hero’s neck, he listened to his breathing, to the jaws, grinding and chomping.
Wolfie started, then ran his hand down the head over the loose muzzle. He started again, searching with his fingers from the muzzle and found only the rough surface of the wood . . . the gnawing . . . Hero was gnawing the wooden posts. Wolfie ran his hand over the grain of it, stretched out, backwards to the wall, ran both palms over the stone of it, felt its dripping wetness.
He heard a tongue rasp against stone and he whirled round. The horse’s head lowered and snuffled the boy’s hand, placid and curious.
‘Oh God . . . Oh God.’ Wolfie’s tongue was dry and thick, ‘How long’ve we been here?’ he wondered. He cried softly into Hero’s neck. ‘I promised – I promised green grass and mist and stars and trees to rub against and stars . . .’
Hero lifted his head, and he laid it over the boy’s shoulder and let it rest there.
‘There’s nothing on earth like the moment a horse rests his head on your shoulder.’
Fresh tears streamed down Wolfie’s cheeks. The deepness of the gesture, the trust in it, felt, to Wolfie, like the twisting of a blade in a open wound . . .
He shook himself free and ran a trembling, feverish hand over the rough wall, following the curve of it, reaching blindly out in the thick blackness, both arms outstretched, searching, tripping and stumbling like a madman through the dark.
Chapter Fifty-Two
The colliery yard was still thick with silent figures. All listened, heads bowed, as the Secretary of the Mine read a list of the missing and the lost: name after name, three men to one family, four to another. Not a man, not a street, in the town was untouched, in every house a son or brother, a father or an uncle lost.
A long silence followed.
In that silence a bell rang out.