Adventures in Two Worlds

by A. J. Cronin

  We reached the colliery yard, crossed a network of rail tracks glistening under flares, and went into the first-aid room, where, in silence, Jones handed me a battered surgical bag. Then, turning, he conducted me to the shaft head where, beneath the winding gear, the iron cage stood waiting for us. We entered. As the gates clanged, he gave a signal; then before I could draw a breath, the cage dropped like a plummet, with sickening velocity, nine hundred feet into the depths of the earth.

  At the bottom we drew up with a jerk. Leaving the cage, we emerged into a sort of vaulted cave, roughhewn and dripping with water, from which there gave off a series of tunnels. Along one of these tunnels my companion led the way.

  Never before had I been down a mine. Indeed, except in the remote distance, I had never seen a colliery and knew no more of the mining industry than the lump of coal which, without a thought as to how it had been won, I placed upon the fire. Now, however, as I toiled after Jones, who had set a fast pace, along this low, dark, dripping tunnel, bent double to avoid bumping my head – and even so I had twice already almost decapitated myself on rocky projections from the roof – I began to realise something of the rigours of a miner’s life.

  Every few minutes Jones drew me aside into little safety niches while, with a rumble and a roar, a train of metal tubs conducted by men stripped naked to the waist thundered past, missing us, it seemed, by inches.

  ‘Aren’t we nearly there?’ I asked, as we reached a steeper incline.

  ‘Nay, mon,’ he answered. ‘T’face is two miles from the shaft. Takes us forty minutes to reach it.’

  Nine hundred feet beneath the surface of the earth, in a tiny burrow two miles from the sole exit to free air – a horrible claustrophobia attacked me, a constriction of my throat and chest. I had to fight to keep my head. Though I flattered myself on my physical fitness, now I was gasping for breath and sweating profusely in the humid, dust-charged air. Ignoring my half-hearted protests, Jones relieved me of the heavy bag as, turning off the main level, we entered a branch tunnel cut from solid rock, not more than three feet high, indeed of such restricted dimensions that we had to crawl forward on our hands and knees. The bed of this jagged conduit was awash with running water – Tregenny, I afterwards learned, was a ‘wet pit’ – so that in my inexpert progress I was soon wet to the waist. My God, I thought to myself, this is where men work, toil for long eight-hour shifts, hacking and hewing the coal from the narrow and difficult seams, day after day, through boyhood, manhood, the prime of life, yes, even to old age – a lifetime spent in this troglodyte existence, and all this for a wage which barely keeps body and soul together.

  Presently, we arrived at the coal face and here, succoured by the under-manager and three of his mates, lay my patient, flat on his back, pinned by a heap of debris. When he had briefly greeted me, the under-manager spoke to me, aside, in a low voice. They had been shot-firing to bring out the coal and through a fault in the stratum the blast had undercut, bringing down masses of broken stone and leaving a great insecure ledge overhanging the cavity beneath. Not only was the injured man caught in the fall, but at any moment the entire roof, a hundred tons of solid rock, might cave in.

  Although the under-manager’s voice was steady, it held an unmistakable urgency. With a hurried glance at that hanging tombstone overhead, I crept up to the trapped miner. His left leg, mutilated and useless, was hopelessly gone – as though pulped by some gigantic press – and so irretrievably wedged that he could not be moved an inch. Only one course was open: an immediate amputation below the knee.

  The thought appalled me. The baleful prediction of my student days had come to pass, and I knew by this time only too well my lack of skill as a surgeon, or at least my limitations in that bold and delicate art, which demands a special co-ordination of mind, heart, and hand it has never been my good fortune to possess. But now, fearful though I might be, there was no drawing back. I opened the first-aid bag, slit away the tattered clothing with a pair of curved scissors, and bared the mangled limb. I saturated the mask with ether. My patient was still conscious.

  ‘I’ll get you out of this,’ I whispered, with a confidence I did not feel. ‘ Just breathe in and forget about everything.’

  When he was under the influence of the anaesthetic I propped the bottle against his side, tightened the tourniquet, pulled on a pair of rubber gloves, picked up the knife, and in a strained silence, having swabbed the knee with iodine, made the first incision.

  There was no time for finicking – it was neck or nothing. Lying flat on my stomach under that low and pendant roof of rock, I worked like one possessed, shaping wire flaps, methodically clipping on the artery forceps one after another, cutting down to the bone. Then I reached for the saw. But as I did so there was a cracking sound, a fragment of stone detached itself from the roof and fell upon the container of ether, smashing the glass to fragments, flooding every drop of anaesthetic upon the ground.

  I swore despairingly. But it was impossible to stop. At frantic speed I went through the bone, and began the ligatures. The under-manager, with his eye on the cracking roof, kept urging me to greater haste. I slipped in two drainage tubes, made good the last internal sutures, and started, with deep stitches, to sew up the skin flaps. As I threaded my needle for the last time I suddenly looked round and caught the injured man’s dilated eye fixed strainingly upon me.

  ‘Ye’ve made a fine job of it, Doctor, bach,’ he whispered from between his clenched teeth, ‘though I only saw you do the hint end of it.’

  He had been out of the anaesthetic, and watching me, for a full five minutes.

  As they pulled him clear of the undercut and laid him on the stretcher his eyes were still fastened upon me. He tried to speak again. Instead, he fainted. And, indeed, I almost gave way also, for no sooner had we started back on our slow and painful passage to the shaft, than fifty paces back of us, with a final rending crepitation, the entire rock ceiling fell in.

  We reached the surface at two in the morning, and to me, at least, the stars had never seemed brighter. There was no ambulance. We carried our patient on the stretcher to his home, and there, aided by the district nurse, I worked over him until he had begun to recover from the worst symptoms of shock. Dawn was breaking when I finally reached our lodging. Heavens, I thought dizzily, as I let myself in, what a way for any man to spend the first night of his honeymoon!

  Chapter Sixteen

  First impressions of a place often prove misleading – but in this instance they showed a melancholy accuracy. No mining town can ever be a thing of beauty, and Tregenny was certainly, in the local idiom, a ‘ rough shop’. The community’s existence was centred in the mine, and as the little Tregenny Coal Company, though highly rated for integrity and fair dealing, was not a rich concern, operating at a disadvantage in wet, narrow seams where the coal was of indifferent quality and difficult to ‘ win’, and as, moreover, the mining industry in general had, at this period, lapsed into a slump, it was inevitable that the local conditions should be bad, with a complete absence of those amenities which one normally expects in a civilised country.

  In the town itself there was neither hospital nor X-ray apparatus.

  The company did its best by providing a doctor for the miners and their families, but, inevitably, the standard of men attracted to such an appointment was variable. Thus in recent years Tregenny had seen an irregular coming and going of raw youngsters fresh from college, older practitioners unaware of what they had ‘let themselves in for’, licensed apothecaries with quasi-medical degrees, and, worst of all, a draggled succession of ‘dead beats’, doctors who had failed elsewhere, fallen into disrepute, or even been struck off the register for professional misconduct Such unfortunates usually try to hide and eke out a living in some forgotten corner of the world. Our predecessor, poor fellow, was a habitual drunkard who was removed finally to Cardiff Infirmary in a state of alcoholic coma.

  Small wonder, then, that our arrival caused no commotion, that our welco
me was both chill and apathetic. Yet beneath their dark and upright dignity, the people were, at heart, warm and kindly. The Welsh are capable of generous impulses, and once their distrust of strangers is overcome, they can be intensely hospitable. My conduct of that first case – for which, forced upon me as it was, I actually deserved no credit – had created a favourable impression, and, while still gazing at me askance, people began to wonder, hopefully, if they had ‘got a half-decent chap’ at last. The manager, Dai Lewis, called at our lodging and went out of his way to be civil and obliging. He sent us, with his compliments, a load of firewood and coal from the pit-head so that we should at least be warm. And Mrs Morgan, our landlady, unbent so far as to hang clean curtains in our sitting-room and even promised to teach my wife how to bake a batch of that noted Welsh delicacy – raisin griddlecakes. This short, dark-visaged woman had lost her husband in a pit disaster some years before, and now harboured within her bosom deep strains of melancholy – a reserve quite different from that of Dr Cameron’s Janet, whose silences had an ironic quality and who, beneath her firmness, seemed always to be struggling against laughter.

  I was now in the thick of my practice, consulting morning and evening in the crowded surgery near the pit, until the walls sweated and the air was choked with the steam of damp bodies. Miners with beat-knee, nystagmus, chronic arthritis, sprained and lacerated limbs. Their wives too, and their children with coughs, colds, and colics – and the minor ailments of humanity. Those patients who were more seriously ill I visited in their homes – a round which usually occupied four or five hours each day. Despite handicaps and shortages, or perhaps because of them, it was worth while work. My amputation case was making an admirable recovery. Alone in the village, with no other physician for miles around, I felt a queer pride in my responsibilities, a rising exultation in the hope and promise of the future.

  In other ways, however, Tregenny was unquestionably grim. There was no social life, no means of entertainment, not even a cinema. My wife and I both loved the country and were used to long rambles together through woods, fields, and meadows. Here, however, shut up in this narrow valley, hemmed in by the smeary blackness of the wasteland, it was impossible to escape to verdant pastures. In fact, that very colour, green – nature’s own sweet tint – was something we never saw in all the monochrome of drab Tregenny. At times this sense of being buried, far down in this swart cleft of the mountains, was singularly oppressive. But we were young, healthy, and absurdly in love. We also had a sense of humour which enabled us to laugh at the deficiencies and oddities of our existence … In brief, we were happy.

  Every afternoon, when I was free, we went to the pit stables to see the old ponies. These little animals, true Welsh moorland ponies, sturdy and shaggy-maned, had, most of them, spent all their working lives in the mine, pulling the long heavy trains of tubs, loaded with coal, from the face to the shaft bottom. Years in the darkness of this underground existence – for while in use they were never brought to the surface but always stabled underground – had rendered most of these patient and willing little creatures almost completely blind. Now, infirm and aged, they were unfit for further service. But Lewis, the manager, was a humane man, who would have none of that hateful practice, existing at many mines, that crime of sending worn-out animals abroad to Belgium or Holland, there to be sold and slaughtered in the knackers’ yards. Instead, the ponies were housed and fed, let out in the yard when it was sunny, allowed to end their days in peace.

  We got to know them all – Nigger, Gingersnap, and Taffy were our special favourites. And how they loved the carrots and lump sugar which we never failed to bring them! After such a bonne bouche they would lean their old heads out of the stall and, reaching out blindly, rolling their opaque old eyes, try to lick us all over with their moist, rubbery tongues.

  Occasionally we were joined at the stables by the person who had become our most intimate friend in this carbonaceous wilderness. She was the district nurse, a middle-aged woman who became especially dear to both of us. And since her history is one which merits consideration, I might perhaps anticipate events and recount it now in its entirety.

  Olwen Davies was only twenty-five when, fresh from her hospital training course, she was appointed visiting nurse to the district of Tregenny. Her lodging, comparable to ours, was a cold and sparsely furnished room in Chapel Street, and her reception was equally chilly. Nevertheless, Olwen threw herself enthusiastically into her work, walking in all weathers over the bleak mountain trails, visiting the sick, tending the few patients who appeared at the bare, simple dispensary provided by the rural board.

  The company doctor at that time, old Dr Gallow, was slack and incompetent. He gave her no help whatsoever. In the face of continued discouragement, the young nurse had to fight down a temptation to resign.

  Towards the end of her first summer a sharp epidemic of enteric fever struck Tregenny. When Olwen went to Dr Gallow, hoping for instructions to combat and confine the epidemic, she received a surly rebuke. These outbreaks were no rarity in the village; what in heaven’s name could one do but physic the sick and endure the visitation?

  Aroused, the young nurse took up the challenge. Collecting samples of water from the various wells – one of which she felt sure must be polluted – she took them to the health offices in Cardiff. Forty-eight hours later an official telegram arrived announcing that the typhoid infection had been traced to a well at the foot of Gower Street which supplied the lower part of Tregenny. Immediately, on orders from the colliery manager, the well was sealed.

  There was something of an outcry at such ‘interference’ on the part of the young nurse; some of the chapel deacons protested that she had far exceeded her authority. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating of it. No new cases of typhoid appeared, in record time the epidemic was confined, and Olwen, going about her work, felt the tide of public esteem flow slowly but surely towards her. No longer was she greeted with dark looks and hostile silences. The people opened their doors to her, and their hearts. Presently the children on their way to school ran across the street to greet her, miners returning from the pits grinned at her, old women detained her by the fireside with a cup of tea and a new-baked cake.

  Then, at the end of that year, a great event took place: a local committee made her a present of a three-speed, all-weather bicycle. It cost the good people of the township no slight effort, for times were bad in the valley, many of the pits working half-shift, and the pennies and sixpences that made up the subscription were desperately scarce. But its worth to Olwen, freed now from the drudgery of tramping her daily ten-mile round, was inestimable.

  It was on this same machine, now far from new but still sturdy and serviceable, as she came to meet me on the amputation case, that I first saw Nurse Davies. She was a tall, solidly built woman of forty-seven then, her figure buxom, her face mature. But there was a steady frankness, an ardour in her clear grey eyes that bespoke a sincere and earnest soul. Many times when confronted by a situation beyond my experience – and, obliged as I was to undertake, on hope and a prayer, cases which would have made a Harley Street specialist blanch, this was no infrequent occurrence – I found reassurance in her presence. Perhaps it was the way she had of standing at the bedside, of handing an instrument or a dressing, of murmuring encouragement when I was obviously in doubt and of rewarding me with a quiet glance of approval for anything well done.

  Often in the midnight hours as we worked together in the cramped attic of a broken-down dwelling, fighting to save a human life, I marvelled at her fortitude and patience. At the pit head, when summoned for a surface accident, thanks to her indispensable bike she was usually there before me – calm, cheerful, and courageous. Most laudable of all was the work which she had done in opening, on her own initiative, a clinic for the children and aged people of the township, and which she held every day in a room rented, and paid for, by herself. It was this unconscious selflessness which, above all else, sounded the keynote of her characte
r. Her thoughts were of others. She was never too busy to speak an extra word of sympathy, or too tired to rise at night for an urgent call.

  She was no conventional saint. She enjoyed a cigarette with her coffee and, in later years, a glass of oatmeal stout. In a town of many chapels, she rarely went to church. Too busy, was her smiling excuse. Yet in all our association I never once heard her speak ill of anyone. She was not a clever woman, yet she possessed a priceless fund of common sense and an instinct of resourcefulness which never deserted her. Upon one unforgettable occasion, when the current failed in an isolated cottage during an emergency appendectomy and I, in the sudden blackness, stood helpless, she slipped outside, returning with a brilliant light by which the operation was successfully completed. It was her electric bicycle lamp.

  That old black bicycle, it really seemed a part of her! When our vigil in the night had ended and she had brewed me a restoring cup of hot, strong coffee, she would nod a brisk good-bye and pedal back to her lodging beside her clinic. To tease her, I pretended to believe that she was, and would be all her life, geared to those inexorable wheels.

  Often I wondered why she had never sought out a better position. The nurses with whom she had trained had all ‘got on’ – indeed, one of them had recently been appointed matron of a great new hospital in Liverpool. When I read of this in the Medical Journal, I could not help remarking:

  ‘You should have had that post. It’s just what would have suited you.’

  ‘No.’ Nurse Davies raised her eyes steadily to mine and smiled her quiet, generous smile, without a trace of jealousy or rancour. ‘I’m not much good at managing people, and a bit rusty on surgical technique. I’m much happier, and a lot more use, careering around this old place.’