by Diana Norman
‘Only the free grace of God can save us without the help of good works, for by the sin of Adam all are under sin and would be damned if it were not for the free and gracious sufferings of Jesus Christ. All by prayer can obtain this free grace. But, though good works alone cannot save us, we may assure ourselves that without good works we have not the necessary faith, for good works are the evidence of our faith.’
Next to her, Philippa’s little hands were squeezed tight in imitation of the Hedley children, John and Polly, as were theirs in imitation of their parents. Makepeace looked along the kneeling row to the profiles of Andra and Jamie Hedley, so similar in outline—does mining demand a broken nose?—so different in expression: Jamie’s amiable, lacking the ferocious intelligence of his older brother; Andra’s grim but momentarily at peace.
That’s what he wants from my coal mine, she decided. It’s his good work. Well, Lord, let it be that. But let it be my salvation and all; unless Philip Dapifer’s score is settled there’ll be no peace for me.
After the service there was chatter and exchange of news by people who met rarely. Makepeace was introduced to friends of the Hedleys as ‘Mrs Burke, the new missus at Raby’ and courteously greeted, but without excitement. She was recognized a woman nearly as poor as themselves; besides, while there was awareness that ‘wor Andra’ was reopening the Raby pit, these smallholders and agricultural workers from inland had no interest in mining operations.
Andra went off to the village to see if he could recruit corve-draggers from among its fishwives. Makepeace and the others settled themselves on a strip of blond sand to eat their provisions, paddle and build sandcastles with the children. Now that she had leisure, Makepeace tried to make friends with Ginny Hedley. The woman wasn’t actually hostile but Makepeace had hoped for more fellow-feeling from a mother with children of Philippa’s age. There was a reserve, sometimes amounting to covert scorn, which suggested that, like her brother-in-law, she regarded Makepeace as an escaped member of the ruling class come down in the world to exploit and then desert them.
‘What’s Ginny short for?’ Makepeace asked.
‘Ginny.’
I’ll show her.
Further along the beach a group of village women sat apart by upturned boats, their wide-winged caps clustered in disapproval of those with leisure. Makepeace and Philippa walked along to them and stood watching knobbled hands thread mussels on catch lines ready for the men to take to sea next day. Each line had at least five hundred hooks, each hook two mussels. ‘How long’s that take?’ Makepeace asked one of them.
The woman didn’t answer. Lord, these people . . . but in this case it was probably not so much rudeness as incomprehension; they weren’t speaking the same English. And, Lord, this was poverty: the woman looked sixty years old but had a child at her breast as she worked.
Makepeace produced a ha’penny from her pocket and pointed at an upturned rowing boat . . .
The sea trip was a success as far as the children and Jamie Hedley were concerned. ‘This is grand. Where’d tha learn to row, pet?’
‘Ran a waterfront inn. Kept lobster-pots.’
Ginny showed no sign of being impressed; maybe ownership of an inn was the equivalent of an earldom to someone living in a but ’n’ ben.
To hell with her, Makepeace thought. It was balm to be on the water again, a user rather than an onlooker; she hadn’t realized how much she’d missed the sea. Oh God, to return to the days when worry had centred on catching enough lobsters . . .
After a while her muscles began to protest. She handed over the oars to Tantaquidgeon and concentrated on helping the children dangle the hook, line and mussel that her ha’penny had also bought for each of them.
Polly caught a dab, John a flounder. Even Ginny began enjoying herself and waved at friends on the sands to point up the fact that only her family was privileged enough to be at sea that afternoon.
They arrived back to return the boat to its owners, sunburnt, fishy and happy. Hedley was waiting for them on the beach.
‘She’s a good waterfront lass,’ Jamie told him. ‘Owned an inn wi’ lobsters. Rows like a bloody mermaid.’
Hedley looked at Makepeace as she tucked her untidy hair back into her cap. ‘Ay, a woman of surprises,’ he said.
Appraising the village women who reported for work next day, Makepeace saw that the fishing trade used all its able-bodied, male and female. The women gathered here at the pit head were the leftovers: the too-old, the too-young, the weak in head and body. Only two or three looked capable and these, she guessed, were either widowed or unmarried and had to rely on charity because they had no man with a boat to provide for them.
To her surprise, Ginny Hedley was among them. ‘Left the bairns with Betty,’ she said, shortly.
Makepeace had hoped for ten workers at least. Hedley had lain rails for the wagons along two tunnels. She’d reckoned two women at each site of the fall to load the stone cleared by the men, two others per tunnel taking the loaded wagons to the shaft and two more at the shaft attaching the wagons to the chains that would raise them to the surface.
The men had already gone down. Despite her protests, Hedley had hired six skilled miners, not just to help him and Jamie dig but for their expertise in shoring up tunnels. ‘I’m not having her fall in again, pet.’
Winnowing out the obviously unfit and sending them away, Makepeace was left with Ginny and four others—and one of those only because the girl had pleaded. ‘Ah’m stronger’n Ah look, missus, and missus, me mam’s sick, please, missus.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Hildy, missus.’
‘How old are you, Hildy?’
‘Twelve, missus.’
Ten, more like, and thin as a taper. ‘I suppose you’ll have to do.’ Makepeace felt disgust at herself; the weight of each full wagon these women would be pulling was a chaldron, the coal measure equivalent to almost a ton.
But what else was there to do? As it was, those pulling the wagons would also have to help fill them, which would slow the work. As it was . . .
‘God dammit, I’ll have to come with you.’ She rolled up her sleeves and saw that Ginny was smirking. The cow doesn’t think I can do it. She clapped one of the hard leather caps Hedley had provided onto her head and stepped out of her top skirt; the petticoat underneath was not only thick, it was luckily, her oldest. She got into the corve that would take them down the shaft. ‘This way, ladies, if you please.’
Grumbling all the while at their whole makeshift operation—‘Ah shudder for what they’d think of us at a proper pit.’—Hedley had trained Tantaquidgeon to use the windlass. The women dropped at a speed that left the stomach behind, only to have it jerked violently back into place as the ratchet pulled them up a foot above the tunnel floor.
They got used to work underground, though for the first week Makepeace seriously thought death would be the happier option. It was hot, limestone dust choked nostrils and throat and mixed with sweat to plaster men and women so that they looked like statues on the move. A filled wagon was so heavy it was immovable until the women learned the trick of making the sharp pull in unison that would set it sliding over the rails. Once under way, it could not be allowed to stop or it would slide back down the gradual incline, taking its pullers with it.
The harness the women wore chafed their shoulders and the strap between their legs bunched their skirts so that the folds of calico rubbed their skin raw. Makepeace said, ‘To hell with it,’ and got Betty to buy her a pair of boy’s second-hand breeches from a pedlar, though the other women refused to countenance anything so disgraceful and kept to their petticoats.
At first their backs ached, not just from pulling but from the effort of being permanently bent under low roofs. Thirst was terrible and they took to bringing down with them a forty-eight-pint cask of water that they’d empty by the end of the day. They were in the mine by five in the morning and finished at four in the afternoon when the men did, rising up into day
light, grey and blinking.
Betty learned, as miners’ wives had to do, to have the meal waiting on the table because if it was in any way delayed Makepeace fell asleep in her chair. After two days of this, Betty said: ‘Give it up, chil’.’
Makepeace looked up, said, ‘No,’ and fell asleep again.
There were two Makepeaces, one above ground and another in the pit. In the sunshine, she steeled herself for the next descent into self-imposed slavery with the knowledge that she was approaching coal, therefore wealth, therefore the eventual destruction of Catty. That it was worth it.
Below ground, her desires narrowed down to proving to Ginny, a tireless worker, that she was as good as she was and to finishing the shift without falling down.
There was something else. Midway through the day, diggers and pullers gathered at the bottom of the shaft for ‘snapture’, to chew on some bread and drink more water. A month ago, if she’d been asked why a son would follow father and grandfather down the pit to its inevitable and terrible risks instead of acting like a sensible man and taking to highway robbery, she would not have known the answer. Now, listening to them, she saw Andra, Jamie and the others as men in a skilled and invaluable job, inspired to an almost fanatical loyalty to one another by their shared danger underground and the incomprehension they faced above it.
Met in the street, the men Hedley had hired were not worth a second glance; scarred and rough, they were creatures to hurry past. Wullie Fergusson, the oldest, looked a nightmare in sunlight; he was bald and misshapen, his enormous trunk tapered into thin legs so bandy from childhood rickets that a pig could have run between them. He’d been Hedley’s first mentor in the mining trade and Andra introduced him to Makepeace with pride as ‘my marra’, the accolade pitmen accorded to those with whom they worked side by side. When she tried talking to him, he proved inarticulate to the point of rudeness. She was astounded to learn from Hedley that the man was a Methodist lay preacher.
But in the dark, during those candlelit breaks in labour, he became a giant of knowledge, advising and warning in his singsong dialect, telling tales of disaster and heroism much as his Viking ancestors had recounted the great Norse sagas.
‘Where does he preach?’ Makepeace asked Hedley.
‘In the pits.’
She thought: We’re different people when we’re under the earth.
The fellow-feeling spread to the women. To the outside world they were sluts working in degradation and too-intimate a relationship with men, but they were proud of what they did. It became a matter of honour, and not just for the farthing they earned by every load they carried, to work faster—and a matter of shame to show weakness. The donkey had to carry little Hildy back to her village at the end of the day, the other women holding onto her so that she didn’t fall off from fatigue, but she was at the pit head every morning ready to begin again.
It was a democratic darkness; what was important was trusting one’s marra to literally pull her weight, not to let the wagon slide back, to ensure it was properly loaded and chained so that it didn’t spill its contents on its way up the shaft. Ginny and Makepeace staggered home together too tired to talk but knowing that if they did it would be as equals. Now they spoke the same language—a different one from anyone else—calling light ‘lowe’ (pronounced ‘now’), the men wielding the picks ‘hewers’, and themselves not loaders and pullers but ‘fillers and putters’; the work-face was ‘in-bye’, to move in the direction of the shaft was to go ‘out-bye’.
The mine had its own beauty provided by the human body at work. In the barely tolerable heat, men had stripped off their flannel shirts by the end of the day and light flickered on muscles constantly moving, on the silhouette of a face, on a pose all the more vital because it was held for less than a second.
It was always noisy from the hit-hit of the picks, trundling wagons, shouts of conversation or instruction. When the silence came, it was eerie. Makepeace and Hildy at the shaft became aware of a loss of sound that left the pit to the quiet beating of the pump and trickling water. ‘What’s happened?’
Voices echoed along the tunnel and came nearer, Ginny and her marra were pushing an empty wagon, behind them were the other women and men.
‘What’s happened?’
‘We’re through, pet. Andra’s sent us back.’
‘Through?’ So there was an end to the endless. She was Sisyphus being told by a forgiving god that the stone could stay at the top of the hill. She took a candle from its holder on one of the wagons. ‘Let me see.’
Ginny tried to stop her as she pushed past. ‘Andra says stay here.’
‘To hell with that. I want to see the coal.’ She hurried along to the right-hand tunnel and walked down it. The props on either side of it were like an avenue in a regulated forest. There was nobody at the face, she was looking at a wall. ‘Mr Hedley?’ Then she saw that she was in a cross-piece like the head of a hammer; the men had dug a narrow passage across both tunnels at right-angles.
‘Hedley.’ She turned left, into the bigger arm of the cross-piece.
His voice said: ‘Howay, she’s not right propped yet.’
Damned if she howayed; it was her coal. ‘Where is it?’
A barely discernible figure was standing on a lump of stone with a candle held high, studying the roof.
‘Is this it?’ she asked. ‘Where is it?’
‘Look, woman.’ He was impatient, still inching the light along the roof.
She turned. Behind her was a man-sized niche for a hewer to stand in and let a wagon go by. Nothing there. She turned back. All around her was the pungent smell of coal and she couldn’t see it.
Then she did.
Straight in front was the wall of coal Hedley and his father had uncovered all those years ago. She’d missed it because it sucked in light and was only apparent in contrast to the reflective stone around it. At this point it looked as high as he’d said it was, but further on it narrowed down to a ribbon. ‘Oh God,’ she said, ‘it peters out.’
‘Bloody doesn’t.’ He was irritable and inattentive.
Of course. The word ‘seam’ was misleading, suggesting something linear; but here was a wavering layer of black jam in a cake, an enormous cake with near-endless jam; now, looking to her left, she saw it went all through the cross-piece, even on its other side at her back. ‘It’s good, is it?’
‘It’s grand if this bloody roof stays up.’ He was nervous. She was chattering with excitement and he told her to shut up.
‘What’s that?’
‘What’s what?’
She heard it, a creak like the swing of a badly hung door. Hedley got down. ‘Gi’ us your lowe.’ He took both candles and held them up so that he could see along the cross-piece. ‘Fuck.’
In the light there were downward trails of mist as dust fell from the roof further along. ‘Out, pet,’ he said, pushing her ahead. She stumbled forward, then he suddenly pulled her back—and the roof fell in.
Noise and shock took away her sense and she watched, almost like an uninvolved spectator, as thundering angular boulders filled her view, not so much falling as suddenly being there, bouncing and rolling into position. Dust hit her in a wave so that she had to close her eyes against it.
When she opened them, she was in a room of which one side was a heap of jagged rock from floor to ceiling. Detritus was filling its gaps, hissing like a viper.
Hedley’s voice, steady now, said: ‘It’s all right, pet. It’s not a bad one. Wullie’ll get us out. Won’t take long.’
She was on her knees tugging at stone, but he stopped her. ‘Don’t disturb the bugger.’ Glancing up, she saw his eyes were directed at the room’s ceiling, then they slid back to her and his teeth flashed white in the grime of his face. ‘We found her, pet. She’s here, we’ve hit gold, this is nowt but an inconvenience.’ He helped her up.
She tried to copy him. ‘You sure gold hasn’t hit us? Have we got air?’
‘Ay, there’s always air.’
He kept talking—they were rich; this fall was nothing; he explained the science of falls; made plans—as if they were in the parlour at the Factor’s House instead of a small cell made of rock and coal. ‘You’re all right, bonny lass. Wullie’ll get us out.’ He said it over and over but when she would have sat down because her legs were shaking, he made her stay standing, and every so often he looked at the roof above them. She noticed he positioned her with her back to the cavity in the wall. ‘You’re all right, bonny lass.’
She was, but only because he was with her; without him she would have been scrabbling like a rat, squeaking, pleading to get out.
They both saw the dust falling, heard the massive crack above their heads. Their eyes met.
He leaped at her and the weight of his body pushed hers into the cavity. All light went out. The fall came at them like a thousand-strong cavalry charge. She felt Hedley jerk and groan as he was slammed closer against her by rock that tumbled on and on and on, an insane living thing walling them up until it was satisfied that it had done all it could to kill them. Gradually it settled itself. There was pattering; it hadn’t finished the job, it was filling gaps, and then it was quiet.
Her back was pressed hard against rock. Hedley’s body was so tight against hers it held her suspended on tiptoe; he might have been a tree she’d got stuck to while climbing it. His arms trapped her shoulders, his cheek rasped against hers, he was panting with pain. There was only darkness. ‘All . . . right, pet.’ His breath coming and going on her skin. ‘They’ll . . . ah, fuck . . . get us out.’