by Ruth Sutton
John climbed up onto the fence to see over their heads. ‘Violet!’ he called. ‘Vi McSherry!’ There was disturbance in the crowd to his right, and he saw hands raised.
‘John,’ came Violet’s voice, echoing across the silent road. ‘Our Tom’s down there.’
He clambered down, and pushed through the crowd that parted for him like waves cleaved by a prow. She was in front of him now, one arm stretched towards him, one hand at her mouth. He took her arm and led her unprotesting, quiet, along the road to where there was space to sit together on a low wall.
‘There’s nothing we can do here,’ he said. ‘The rescue teams are going in. They’ll be down there for hours, digging their way out under the sea. You know long those tunnels are. It doesn’t look good, Vi. But if Tom’s there, the men will find him. If he’s alive, he’ll need you.’
‘I’m all ’e’s got, John. Just another year or two, he said, then ’e’d pack it in. That’s what ’e said, if it didn’t get ’im first.’
‘I know, Vi,’ said John, as she leaned against him. ‘Come on, I’ll leave the bike here and we’ll walk up. Do us both good. Get up on the hill away from this dust. Breathe free.’
‘I’ll do the ’ouse,’ said Violet. ‘Has to be clean when ’e comes ’ome.’
All over the town, wives, mothers, sisters went home to clean their houses and wash their bedding, making ready for the return of men who were already dead.
Few people slept well in Whitehaven that Friday night. Underground, shifts of miners and rescue teams from pits all over Cumberland were joined before nightfall by men from Durham and Northumberland. More men were on their way from the Lancashire coalfield, and Scotland. They worked till they were almost too exhausted to get back to the surface, and staggered off to eat and snatch some sleep before going down again.
At the McSherry house, only Judith slept with the innocence of childhood, wrapped in her mother’s wakeful arms. Violet fussed and fretted, dusting, polishing, ironing. ‘Leave ’er,’ said Frank to John. ‘It’s what she ’as to do.’
For most of the short August night Frank and John sat together in the front room, looking out at the mindless ocean, aware of the men, dead and alive, in the tunnels that stretched out for a mile and more under the sea.
‘Fucking coal, and fucking owners,’ said Frank bitterly, whisky in his hand. ‘Killed thousands of good men in this town. Coal’s down there but it’s too ’ard to reach, John. Can’t ventilate well enough.’ He jerked his hand towards the window. ‘Gas just builds up, then a stray spark – And for what? These pits are doomed, won’t last much longer.’
‘Then what happens?’ said John, thinking about Whitehaven without the pits. ‘What’ll folk do for work?’
‘God knows,’ said Frank. ‘Young ’uns are getting out already if they can, pits on t’other side of Canada. Or down south, Yorkshire way, but they’ve their own men to think of.’
‘Courtaulds are starting aren’t they, down at Drigg?’
‘What kind of job’s that?’ said Frank, sucking the last drop out of his glass. ‘Fit for lasses, not real jobs.’
Just an hour or two into the cloudless day, John left the house and walked first down to the Haig, and then on to the William. They’d asked for help managing the influx of men and equipment as the rescue teams arrived, and Arthur Curran sent his best man down to help. ‘Stay as long as ye can,’ he said to John. ‘They need you down there more than we do.’
They were expecting him, and John began to sort out the chaos in the pit office. He talked briefly to a young miner who’d volunteered to go down at midnight to take plans of the pit to the rescue teams who were trying to find their way through the maze of tunnels to the site of the explosion.
‘It were ’ot as ’ell down there,’ said the lad. ‘Smoke and gas and rockfalls everywhere.’
Just after seven in the morning, the first body was brought to the surface. Rescue teams, filthy and exhausted, bared their heads and stood in silence in the bright early morning sunlight. Throughout the morning a steady procession of bodies continued and all hope slowly faded that anyone would be found alive.
Ministers and priests from all the churches, the Salvation Army too, moved among the crowd at the gate, helping pitiful family groups through to identify bodies. Grieving was quiet; few tears were shed in the glare of the sun.
Violet, Frank and Maggie went through the motions of life, waiting for the knock on the door, and the summons to the pit to identify what might remain of Tom Pickthall. Some of the bodies were burned or scarred, others were unmarked, as if in sleep.
John worked in the office all day, logging the arrival of the teams, finding food and places for them to get some rest. He took control of the flow of money, too, as people in the town and beyond responded to tragedy in the only way they could, with help for bereaved families.
By mid-afternoon he was unbearably tired, and wondering how much longer he could stay awake. There was a noise in the yard outside, not the usual noise of shuffling feet and murmurs of wives and mothers facing the unthinkable. This was a different noise, excited, breathless. He ran outside.
‘They’re alive,’ someone was shouting, ‘just walked out, four of ’em! Coming up!’
Outside the gates, the news flashed round the crowd, and every wife, every mother, hoped against hope that it was him, their man, who might walk out. They clamoured against the gates, calling, crying, praying. John ran to see the men arrive. They leaned on their rescuers, blinking in the light. John searched their faces, and found one he knew.
‘Tom,’ he cried, ‘Tom!’
CHAPTER 28
‘THE AIR KIND OF FLUTTERED,’ said Tom. He was sitting up in freshly laundered bedsheets upstairs in the West Row house, a bottle of stout in his hand. All the family and Robbie from next door were crowded into the small room. Gulls wheeled and screamed outside. Robbie’s mam was at the pit, identifying the burned and broken body of her husband.
‘Sounded like a wall collapsed somewhere. I thought my eardrums ’ad burst, it were that loud. There were twelve of us to start with, and we’d one oil lamp. Air were terrible thick, and it were red ’ot. We took us coats off. Some of ’em went off one way but Jack said nay, we’re going to face it, come along the face like. We started to crawl. Couldn’t breathe, they pulled me through. I ’ad to lie to get me breath and let me heart slow down, then we carried on.’
‘What about the others?’ asked Violet. ‘Where did they go?’
‘They went off, don’t know where. I called the last of ’em to come wi’ us, but ’e didn’t. Don’t know why. We didn’t see ’em again. They didn’t come up. When we got out, up th’ospital like, we asked where they were but … it were bad down there. Smoke. ’Ard to breathe.’
‘Did ye ’ave water?’ said Maggie.
‘Aye, two bottles or so. We knew they’d be coming to find us. Jack said, God is good, we will get out.’
‘Amen,’ said Violet from the doorway.
‘We just followed t’face, for hours, felt like. Dinna know ’ow long. Twice we tried to get o’er a rockfall, then the lamp went out. We were stuck. Bert said, if we go back, we go under, so we tore our shirts and wet the pieces and tied them round us faces and went again, and found the air crossing. We saw a body under rocks, and took the lamp. We smelt fresh air and followed it. We knew we’d get out. Bert said it were better than winning Irish Sweep.
‘We kept on climbing over falls. Heard knocking on a plate and knocked back but they couldn’t ’ear. But we knew we were close. I pushed Jimmy up the top of the last one, and then we saw men, down t’road. And they saw us. We were shouting and carrying on. We were th’only ones they found. How long were we down there?’
‘Twenty hours, Tom,’ called Frank from the bottom of the stairs, where he sat in his chair listening to the story. ‘Twenty bloody hours, we thought you were dead.’
‘We never thought we were gone,’ said Tom. ‘All that time, we just kept going, kept each
other going, thinking about which way to go, using all those years to figure it out. We knew we couldn’t just rush to nearest way out. God knows where t’others went. Poor buggers. How many all told?’
‘Hundred and more,’ said Maggie. ‘All with wives and mothers and kids.’
‘And sisters,’ said Violet. ‘God protects …’
‘Nay, Mam,’ said Maggie. ‘God doesn’t. No one does, not down there. You’ll not go back, Uncle Tom, tell us you won’t go back.’
‘Job’s a job,’ said Tom. He was quiet for a moment, taking a sup from the bottle in his hand.
‘Why me?’ he said. ‘What did I do, to be spared?’
* * *
Rumours had spread all over town about more men being alive, but the rescue teams knew there was no chance. They were all exhausted and had been stood down to rest before they started to recover the bodies.
When it went quiet, John picked his way through the smaller crowd at the gate, and walked round the harbour. He stopped a while to breathe the salty-sweet sea air and listen to the regular swish of tiny waves on the beach, like the last breaths of a dying man. He hoped the dead far beneath his feet had died quickly, not gasping with seared throats and lungs. He remembered coming so close to death himself, only a few miles south of where he now sat on the harbour wall, drowning in the sea with his waders full of water, and then the pneumonia, although he couldn’t recall much about that. And now fate had made another twist. He could have gone his whole life and never found a woman like Maggie. Tom had said, if you find her, don’t let her go. And Jessie? Would she marry the doctor? Had she told him the truth? Was that the end of pretence? God, he hoped so.
The bike was where he’d left it. Was it only yesterday? It seemed like a week had passed since then. The noise of the engine bounced off walls and rocks, echoed by the throb of a fishing boat that was puttering into the outer harbour with the tide. Life goes on, he thought.
He stopped off at West Row to see Tom, but he was asleep in the upstairs bedroom. Violet was out sitting with Ivy Turner at number 17, whose man would never come home. John hugged his wife without words.
Together they put Judith, exhausted by the events of the day, into the new sidecar and they drove slowly back to Sandwith. As Judith slept in her own new room, Maggie and John opened all the windows of the little house and sat together on the back doorstep, watching the last of the light fade to the north, until John was too tired to sit any longer and they climbed the narrow stairs to their bed.
* * *
All through Sunday, silent, stoic people crossed the William pit yard to the makeshift mortuary to identify those they had known and loved. Others went down into the pit themselves to bring out the bodies. On Monday, the coroner’s court began its work. There was no weeping. Men were tight-lipped and women beyond tears. The coroner heard all the evidence available at the time and then adjourned for a month. On Tuesday, the first funerals were held at churches across the town and continued with relentless regularity for two days.
It was Wednesday morning. John and Maggie went with Tom to the funeral of one of his closest friends. They’d been at school together, then down the pits as lads, and now Harry was dead. It had taken a while to identify his mangled body.
Moresby Church stood proud on the hill to the north of the town. On the beach below, the Romans had come ashore two thousand years before and built a fort on the high headland, commanding the natural harbours and estuaries to the north and south. It was on this headland that hundreds of mourners assembled. The huge church was packed, and the crowd spilled out onto the grass, standing quiet, singing the hymns whose familiar tunes reached them through the open doors. It was a high, bright, breezy day. Men sweated in their unfamiliar suits. Later, as they stood, dozens deep by the gravesides, a shower swept in from the sea. Rain fell unheeded onto heads, hair and faces, covering the tracks of tears.
They walked back into town when it was all over, leaving Tom behind to see his mates and tell his story one more time. Maggie and John walked slowly, arm in arm, through the mourning town. ‘It must have been like this in London, in the Blitz,’ he said. ‘But whole families, children, not just the men. Imagine.’
‘That was war, though,’ said Maggie. ‘This is about wages.’
‘And profit,’ said John. ‘These pits aren’t safe, love, they never were. The price of coal is too high.’
Maggie was quiet for a while. As they climbed the hill towards Kells she held his arm. ‘Before we get in,’ she said, ‘I want to talk to you, without Mam and Judith and Dad.’
He felt suddenly sick. He turned towards her, holding her face in his hand.
‘What is it? Are you ill?’
She smiled. ‘Not ill,’ she said. ‘I’m pregnant.’
He stared at her. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Certain. I thought I was, and the doctor thinks so, too. Nine weeks gone, summat like that.’
‘But when?’ he said.
‘June. D’you remember? We were at it all the time, any chance we got.’
‘I remember that cuckoo, watching us.’
‘When was that? The day Mam and Judith went to Silloth, wasn’t it? No. It was earlier than that.’
‘So when that cuckoo was watching us, the baby had already started?’
‘Aye.’
‘Oh God,’ he said, pulling her towards him. ‘A baby.’
He let her go and stepped back away from her, looking at her belly, and put his hand against it.
‘John,’ she laughed, ‘Folk ’ll see.’
‘It looks just the same,’ he said.
‘Of course it does, for now, but there’s things happening in there. It’ll show in a few weeks.’
‘A baby,’ he said again. ‘Our baby, yours and mine. When are you going to tell Judith, and your mam?’
‘Not yet, not now, not with all this sadness everywhere. Can we leave it a bit, a week or two?’
* * *
It was the first Sunday in September. John saved fuel by taking the train down to Newton to see his mother. He still wasn’t sure who knew the truth about him, but he didn’t care any more. He wanted to tell her about the baby, that she was going to be a grandmother. It felt as if the baby made everything real, Jessie as his mother, him as her son.
Jessie was in the garden. Later August rain after all the warmth had caused a glut of everything and gardens hung heavy with plums, apples, beans, and tomatoes ripening in the porch at the back of the house. Maybe it was the need for another pair of hands that made her so pleased to see him.
For an hour or two they picked and harvested, until their fingers were sticky and their mouths dry. John was in no hurry to share his news. As they sat finally with cups of tea in the cool of the kitchen, she asked him about Tom, and how John was managing the relief fund that had burgeoned like the garden over the previous weeks.
‘It’s an honour to be trusted with all that money,’ she said. ‘They must think highly of you.’
He shrugged. ‘I’m an offcomer, married to a local,’ he said. They’d rather have me than someone from outside. And I’ve always been good at sums.’
‘Your dad was good with numbers,’ she said. ‘A clever man, like you.’
He thought about that for a while, the talents that get passed down through families.
‘There’s something I want to tell you,’ he said. ‘Maggie and I, we’re having a baby.’
Jessie caught her breath. ‘A baby,’ she repeated. ‘So soon.’
‘We jumped the gun a bit,’ said John, suddenly embarrassed. Jessie smiled at him. ‘Like mother, like son,’ she said.
‘You’re going to be a grandmother,’ he said.
‘I’m too young,’ Jessie protested. ‘I can’t be anyone’s granny! My granny was so old.’
‘You’ve got time to get used to it, and get the knitting out,’ he said. ‘Find the rocking chair and the shawl.’
‘A baby,’ she said again. ‘How wonderful. I’m so happy f
or you. Is Maggie pleased?’
‘Delighted,’ he said. ‘And Violet and Frank! They’ve got grandkids all over the place, but you’d think it was the first.’
‘First for me,’ said Jessie. ‘And Maggie’s well?’
‘Blooming. Nothing much showing yet. But she knows what to expect, after Judith.’
‘Things are much better, much safer, for women now,’ said Jessie. ‘When I had you …’
‘Was it bad?’ John had never really thought about it before, about the fact of Jessie giving birth.
Jessie covered her eyes. He saw the tears come.
‘I’ve tried to forget it, but now, just the past few weeks, it’s all come back to me. That awful place, the other girls, how the doctor treated us. And then they came, and just took you away.’
‘She talked about it,’ said John. ‘Enid, before she died. Did I ever tell you? She talked about that day, when they came and took me back to Barrow with them. That’s when I knew I had to find out, to know what happened.’
‘And you found me,’ she said. ‘And all these years, we’ve had to lie.’
‘We chose to lie,’ he said. ‘And now we choose to tell the truth.’
Jessie blew her nose, and smiled at him.
“I was so shocked when you told Matthew,’ she said, ‘but it had to be said. He had to know.’
‘Has he asked you to marry him?’
‘We’ve talked about it,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure I love him like I loved your father, but I’m older now. Maybe love is different. How do we ever know these things?’
‘Tom, says if you find someone, you should hang on to them. He lost his wife, and his child, both together. Did you know?’
‘No. How dreadful for him.’
‘It was a miracle that he and his mates survived,’ said John. ‘We all cried, the place was awash. And we felt guilty, Maggie and I, about being so happy when all those other people …’
They went back to the garden for a while, working together quietly in the fragrant afternoon.
CHAPTER 29
NOT LONG AFTER JOHN HAD LEFT, the telephone at Applegarth rang for a long time. When Jessie finally heard it she had to shake off her gardening shoes and run into the hall to catch whoever it was before they rang off. It was Agnes, calling from the station at Barrow to say she was on her way home. She planned to visit a friend on Abbey Road, and get the mid-afternoon train up the coast to Newton. Jessie had just got back to work in the garden, when the telephone rang again.