by Simon Mayo
‘Your dad get off this morning?’ Jack asked.
‘Yes,’ said Itch gloomily. ‘Off at six. He was getting the first flight from Newquay. Not sure when he’ll be back – he took some leave after hearing about our fun in the greenhouse.’
‘Did you see the video of Flowerdew with sick over him?’ laughed Jack. ‘It is so cool!’
‘Yeah, Dart’s going to go crazy when she sees it.’ Itch was smiling now. ‘She’ll probably get it taken down, but it’s on twenty thousand hits or something. My favourite bit is where you can see her trying not to smile when Craig’s apologizing to Flowerdew and wiping down his suit with his hand!’
They were laughing so much Barth had started watching them in his mirror. They lowered their voices.
‘Apparently,’ whispered Jack, ‘Ian Steele now has Craig’s puking as his ring tone!’ That set them off again, and Barth turned up the radio.
They were heading south, but had to travel east and inland to pick up the road to Provincetown. It had once been a busy tin-mining community right on the coast, high above the cliffs, but now almost everything and everybody had left.
The old, unused winding tower came into view first, still an impressive thirty metres high, an iconic image of mining the world over. Not much else of the past had survived. A few houses were lived in and loved; most were dilapidated or derelict. Two of the miners’ cottages had been turned into an art and craft exhibition, and a third told the story of mining in the area. New buildings had been built around the edges of the site, with all the accommodation set back from the cliffs. In contrast, the old mine works stretched to the very edge.
Barth drove the cousins straight to the office, which was another converted miner’s house, the one nearest the works. It was slate grey like all the others, but had been given a new roof and an extension at the side. A small brass plaque on the door said: SOUTH-WEST MINES. Barth parked his car next to six others, a new 5-Series BMW standing out from the pack.
‘Presumably Evert’s,’ said Jack as they got out and Barth took them into the house/office.
They were shown where to sit and wait for Evert. It had once been the hallway and kitchen area but now housed two sofas, a long, low table, a coffee machine and a series of framed photos on the wall. Most were old black and whites, with miners posing without smiling – as everyone seemed to do back then. Maybe they didn’t have much to smile about, thought Itch. The last three photos, by contrast, were in colour and featured a beaming Bob Evert in every one: Bob Evert shaking hands with the mayor; Bob Evert underground with a large, bright yellow digger; and Bob Evert looking thoughtful while studying maps.
‘Don’t tell me,’ said Jack. ‘My guess is that’s Bob Evert.’
‘Yup, that’s him,’ said Itch, and they sat and waited for his arrival.
‘Do we come in with Barth every day?’ said Jack. ‘Couldn’t we get the bus?’
‘I was thinking that too. But wouldn’t it take for ever?’
‘About that, yes,’ said Jack.
Somewhere in the house a door opened, and the booming tones of Bob Evert filtered through.
‘Here he comes,’ said Itch. ‘And I think he always talks that loudly.’ They listened as the voice got closer and louder.
Evert strode in, finishing a call and putting his BlackBerry away. ‘Itch! Hello! Welcome to South-West Mines! And who is your friend?’
‘This is Jack Lofte, my cousin.’
‘Another Lofte! Very good news! You are both welcome, of course. Let me quickly show you round before it gets busy.’
He led them out towards the mine works. There was a stiff breeze blowing off the Atlantic and it lifted Bob Evert’s carefully positioned flap of hair away from his head so that it was at right angles to his scalp. He took a SW MINES baseball cap out of his pocket and put it on, pushing his hair underneath.
‘The last tin mine in Provincetown closed in 1950 – it was the end of an industry that stretched back hundreds of years. But in 1981 the council asked me to look into opening it up again as a tourist attraction. I took it on and realized I could go one better than that. I could open it to the public and keep it ticking over as a going concern, so that if the price of tin rose enough, we could resume mining in Provincetown.’ He beamed.
He took them through some of the old mine works. Crumbling, fenced-off chimneys stood alongside rusting shaft-drilling equipment. They came to the entrance to the new workings – smaller modern buildings of blue corrugated metal housing the lift to take tourists and, if needed, miners down into the ground.
‘We don’t produce a lot of tin, but enough to be able to say that South-West Mines have brought mining back to Cornwall!’ Evert got a small lump of rock out of his pocket and handed it to Itch. ‘One of the first bits of ore that we mined here. Dug it myself too!’
Itch held it up to catch the light. It was a piece of shiny dark granite, with a few lines of a lighter substance flecked down one side.
‘Cornish tin, that is! Doesn’t it make you proud?’ Evert took the ore back and pocketed it. ‘We produce just enough for tourists to buy in our shop, but if we needed to we could increase production within a month. We need to keep everything ready to go so you’ll see a lot of maintenance folk around this week: they’re making sure everything is safe.’
‘Do you get any help from the students at West Ridge School of Mining?’ said Itch. The nearby college had an international reputation in mining, geology and environmental science; it seemed obvious for their students to work with South-West Mines. Mr Watkins was always enthusing about the college, and Itch thought there was going to be a school trip there.
‘Ah, yes …’ said Evert, pausing only slightly. ‘Not really. We haven’t seen any of them for a while now.’ He turned to look at the cousins. ‘And you know what? That’s fine with me! Don’t need them! We are fine on our own, thank you very much!’ He smiled at them. ‘Now, let’s introduce you to Mrs Lee and she can sort you out.’
Mrs Lee, it turned out, was in charge of the shop and exhibition. She was a large lady with greying hair tied back with a black ribbon. She was wearing a green SW MINES sweatshirt which, Itch and Jack agreed, was a cruel punishment to inflict on her. It really didn’t fit any part of her upper body, which seemed to be fighting to escape. As Evert came in, she stood up.
‘Don’t get up, Enid! Good morning to you! This is Itchingham and Jack Lofte – they are doing a bit of work experience with us this week. I think some uniform might be in order …’ He made a show of winking at Mrs Lee and left.
She called the cousins over to a drawer behind her desk and offered them a cap and a sweatshirt each. ‘You’ll like these, I think.’ She spoke with a strong Cornish accent. ‘Just the one colour and just the one size. See what you think.’ Itch and Jack exchanged glances and removed their sweatshirts. They pulled on their new ones and Mrs Lee put baseball hats on their heads. ‘Lovely. Quite lovely,’ she declared.
‘You never told me we were going to end up looking like we work in Burger King,’ whispered Jack. ‘I hope no one we know comes here this week!’
They spent the morning taking money at the till or welcoming visitors at the museum. A slow but steady stream of interested grown-ups and bored children wandered through. If anyone had questions, they were to be referred to the guide, who was called Alice and turned out to be Bob Evert’s daughter. Years ago, according to Mrs Lee, they had employed former miners to do the tour.
‘They were lovely men,’ she said. ‘They’d worked here for years. But they were let go; none of them have been near the place for years. Shame, really. I imagine—’ Mrs Lee broke off and looked around in case she was being overheard. ‘I imagine Alice is cheaper. Nice girl, though,’ she added in case she sounded too disloyal.
Alice turned out to be in her early twenties and made the South-West Mines uniform about as glamorous as it could get by customizing it with bangles, designer jeans and UGG boots. ‘Traditional mining gear!’ said Itch.
> Tours left whenever there were a dozen visitors ready to go, and that happened three times that morning. Itch and Jack were offered a twenty-minute break at midday and took their sandwiches outside. They walked to the edge of the mining works, just a few metres from the cliff face, and sat on some loose rocks.
‘Odd place,’ said Jack.
‘Odd people,’ said Itch.
‘Mainly, I sold postcards,’ said Jack. ‘And the Americans bought all the toffee.’
‘The Japanese seemed most interested in the Cornish tin pixies,’ said Itch.
‘Classy,’ said Jack. ‘I saw those. Looked like trolls. But at least they’re made from tin. So it’s slightly Cornish.’
‘Except they turned out to be made out of recycled aluminium from Indonesia. I checked.’
They both laughed at that.
As they ate their lunch, they watched the Atlantic rolling in to smash itself against the foot of the rocks far below. This was one of the stretches of coastline with no beach, the high and low tides marked by a rising and falling sea level. They fed the remaining bread, cheese-and-onion crisps and Twix crumbs to the seagulls and walked back in the direction of the shop. Jack pointed at another series of buildings beyond the mining works, which they hadn’t noticed before. Surrounded by equipment and outhouses, it had its own road and car park, and they wandered over to take a closer look. It was similar to the new mineshaft building they had seen earlier – a grey cabin twenty metres above the ground, surrounded by steel frames, with a conveyer angling down into a corrugated iron shed. The car park was empty apart from the Mercedes they had arrived in – Jolyon Barth’s. As they approached, the driver’s door opened and Barth got out. They hadn’t noticed he was inside.
‘Can I help you guys?’ he said, walking over.
‘We were just looking around. We hadn’t noticed this bit before,’ said Itch.
‘Well, it’s kind of out of bounds really. It’s just for maintenance.’ Barth sounded tetchy. ‘We need to keep the mine at operational levels of performance at all times, and this is where the teams go in. That’s all you need to know. Now I expect Mrs Lee needs you – off you go.’
Itch and Jack turned round and headed back. Itch looked over his shoulder and saw Barth standing and watching them leave.
‘Think we were being warned off there, Jack. He didn’t sound quite so friendly as this morning.’
‘And he wasn’t exactly fun to be with then, either. We should definitely explore the option of getting here by bus.’
‘Agreed,’ said Itch as they re-entered the world of Mrs Lee and mining toffee.
The highlight of their week came after a conversation with UGG-booted Alice, the tour guide. Itch and Jack both wanted to go down the mine and asked her how that could be arranged. It turned out that only Mr Evert or Mr Barth could arrange it, and she would see what she could do. Then, late on the Thursday, just as they were preparing to pack up for the day, Evert put his head round the door.
‘Shaft entrance lift in ten minutes – leave your phones.’
Jolyon Barth was standing at the entrance to the lift shaft when the cousins arrived with Evert. Barth handed them jackets and scratched white helmets. Next came heavy battery packs which strapped around their waists, each with a cable that looped over the shoulder to a powerful electric lamp. Barth pulled open the grille for them to enter the lift and they stooped as Evert, behind them, bellowed, ‘Welcome to my world!’
They shuffled forward into the ‘cage’, as everyone called it. There was room for six, according to the sign, but four was quite a squeeze. Barth closed the outer and inner grille doors and pressed one of the many buttons on a brass-coloured panel. With a lurch, the lift shuddered and then suddenly dropped as the cousins gasped and reached for the sides. The men laughed as the lift slowed to a more leisurely rate of descent.
‘It’s tradition!’ yelled Evert. ‘All first-timers get that! You won’t forget your first trip in a hurry!’ He and Barth looked thoroughly pleased with themselves; both Loftes looked distinctly green.
‘Right. On with the tour. It’s forty metres down and it’ll take about a minute to get there,’ said Evert. ‘We’ll need to fix the lighting, but you should get a pretty good idea of life underground.’
Unlike an ordinary lift, you could see through the grille door and watch the different levels of rock they were descending through. This was Barth’s cue to speak.
‘Once we are through the layers of topsoil and building foundations, it’s pretty much granite all the way. It’s straight granite at first with nothing else to see, but now’ – he pointed to some vertical brown stripes appearing in the black stone – ‘you can see the tin veins or lodes appearing.’ They trundled their way down further, watching the changing colours and hues in the rock face. Over the din they heard running water, and then saw gleaming wet rock shining back at them.
‘What happened here during the earthquake in December?’ asked Itch. ‘Presumably no one was down here at the time? That would have been scary.’
‘We had to shut for forty-eight hours to check that everything was safe, of course,’ said Evert, ‘but no, there was no one down here at four a.m. The safety and maintenance teams spent a long time studying all the cracks and fissures but they gave us the OK eventually.’ He had started to frown now, and fell silent till the lift stopped with a clatter. His face brightened. ‘Right, here we are! Not exactly a journey to the centre of the Earth, but as close as you’re getting!’
Jolyon Barth pulled open the lift doors. Itch and Jack were pleased that they had jackets on as the temperature had dropped noticeably. Their four lamps bobbed and shook as they ducked out of the lift, sending wild, dancing spotlights into the dark. Barth walked into the gloom and turned on some strip lighting. It revealed entrances to two large tunnels with metal tracks on the ground and a tangle of wires running the length of the low ceiling. Barth, stooping slightly, led the way down the left-hand tunnel, passing a series of alcoves and dark side passages.
‘Nearly there!’ shouted Evert, his voice louder than ever in the enclosed shaft. They came to an opening with a high ceiling, where an imposing yellow digger was parked. Behind it loomed a black wall with great grooves cut out of it; piles of rock lay on the ground. They recognized the digger from the photographs outside the office. It was surprisingly long and flat, with huge tractor-sized tyres and a large rock bucket pointing up at the front.
‘These are the exposed lodes that we are working on – they’re the ones that will be mined when the price of tin rises,’ said Evert. ‘Climb aboard – see what it feels like!’
Itch and Jack took it in turns to sit in the digger like kids on a pier ride. They looked at the control panel. It had two joysticks set in a keyboard, and a computer screen with digital clocks and symbols. Neither of the cousins touched a thing; both felt a bit stupid.
Evert didn’t notice. He crouched down, picking up the loose rocks, sifting them through his fingers and letting them fall. ‘This is what it’s all about.’ It was the quietest he had spoken all week. ‘This could change us all, you know. There’s power in these rocks. Don’t you feel it?’
He wasn’t expecting an answer, but Itch said, ‘I do, yes. They’re beautiful.’
Jack looked at him in puzzlement. ‘Really? Are we looking at the same thing?’
‘Yup,’ said Itch. ‘Cassiterite. SnO2. Tin ore.’
Evert and Barth exchanged a look. ‘Dead right,’ said Barth, ‘and if we had more of it we’d be in business again.’
They spent a few more minutes looking around, but Evert was now standing by the lift, clearly anxious to get back to the surface. He opened the doors and the cousins joined him. Jack wondered why Barth wasn’t coming back up with them.
‘Things to check, Jack – many things to check,’ was the reply.
As they waited for their bus home, Jack put her hand in her pocket. ‘Got something for you, Itch. Here.’ Her fingers were clasped around something and Itch hel
d out his hand. Jack dropped a lump of tin ore in it. He gasped. ‘What the …? How did you …? It’s beautiful.’
‘If you say so, Itch. I was annoyed they didn’t chuck you one down there – times can’t be that hard. Evert has a Beemer and Barth has a Merc, after all. So I just, well, helped myself when they weren’t looking. Do you have tin in your collection?’
‘I do, yes, but nothing like this.’ He angled it to catch the light. It was heavy in his hand – about the size and weight of a snooker ball, but square, with jagged edges that had crystallized points. At first it had looked completely black, but brown showed clearly in the sunlight. Itch examined it minutely.
‘You like it, then?’
Itch didn’t reply; he hadn’t heard.
‘Should have kept it for your birthday,’ Jack added.
‘But it’s stolen,’ said Itch, coming out of his tin-induced trance. ‘I should give it back.’
‘You should,’ agreed Jack, ‘but my guess is you won’t. You’re in love. With a rock.’ Again, Itch didn’t reply. She continued, ‘Anyway, it’s pretty common, isn’t it? Especially in Cornwall.’
‘Tin foil isn’t tin,’ said Itch. ‘Tin cans aren’t tin. A lot of things called tin aren’t. But this most certainly is.’ He was speaking quietly, as if in church. ‘Wow. Element number fifty.’
‘Have you got fifty now?’ asked Jack.
‘No, pea-brain, it’s number fifty on the Table of Elements, in the same column as silicon, carbon and lead.’
‘Would now be a good time to remind you that I don’t really know what an element is?’
Itch gave a little sigh. ‘I can’t believe you keep saying that! It’s pure stuff, OK? It’s the most basic stuff you can get. It’s stuff that can’t be broken down, can’t be made any simpler.’
‘Like Darcy Campbell?’ said Jack.
Itch laughed. ‘Yeah, OK, exactly like Darcy Campbell!’
They sat for another thirty minutes, with Itch talking tin and Jack wondering where their bus was. They were normally on their way back by now, but the trip underground had delayed their departure by long enough to miss the 32, which took them most of the way home. The car park was almost empty now. It looked as though only Evert, Barth and a couple of others were still there.