The Valley (26 page)

‘And saying thy prayers,’ calls Harry, ‘in church.’

‘Church,’ mutters Winnie. ‘I know your church. T’ church where t’ bibles have handles.’

Without the presence of Sonny, Danny and Lynda her remark could have flickered into a row. As it is, Winnie smiles and Harry just shakes his head. ‘I’m off to get some holy water,’ he says, and takes the white enamel bucket and slips out the back door.

‘Is tha coming to t’ wedding?’ Danny asks Lynda.

The wedding is between Pam Lunness – Danny and Millie’s middle daughter – and Jack Gundry, a placidly mannered teddy boy who works on the same coalface as Danny at Barnburgh Main. Millie has been in a bluster of organisation, annoying Winnie who has been trying to help only to find Millie disregarding her suggestions (‘She thinks she knows it all!’ says Winnie, feeling that Millie has never been the same since she joined the Buffs a few years ago). There is some anxiety over money because Danny recently damaged his thumb in a pit accident and has been off work for two weeks.

In the club that evening, Danny now tells Winnie, Jack has been worrying about beer for the wedding. Months ago Danny had agreed to buy a barrel for the reception, but if he doesn’t get back to work soon he won’t be able to afford one. ‘I’m going on Monday if I can, but this – ’ he holds up the still-bandaged hand – ‘i’n’t half giving me some hammer. I’m worried if I get working I’ll do my hand altogether.’ Danny’s hands have been worked hard by boxing, but it is the ability to grip that he worries about. Without that you can’t work, and can end up with a pit-top job.

‘Tha manages to hold pint glasses all right,’ says Harry, coming back into the room with the beer.

‘I want to get back and get sorted out wi’ em about t’ ventilation,’ says Danny, ignoring him. ‘I had a right ding-dong wi’ t’ under-manager and I shall kick his backside before I’ve done. There’s gas leaking through somewhere on our face. They reckon to have inspected t’ ventilation but tha can smell it sometimes.’

This dispute has been running on and off for a year. Last summer inspectors detected explosive firedamp in a hole in the roof but then, after adjusting the doors that controlled the flow of air around the mine, they said it was no longer present. Together with the union man Danny, who is the lineman on his shift, requested another check by the miners’ own panel of inspectors a few days before he hurt his thumb. They found no gas and said the ventilation was in order, and Danny, speaking on behalf of his men, had a row with both the inspectors and the undermanagers. He said the firedamp must be collecting in holes in the rock, it had to be. They said they couldn’t find it and there was nowt else they could do.

‘They need to shift t’ doors to get air going round,’ he says to Winnie. ‘I
know
there’s gas. I flaming know it.’

The heatwave lasts, and by the end of the month the River Dearne runs low in its bed and the firemen can no longer keep up. On the afternoon of Wednesday 26 June, as the valley swims in heat, Winnie retires to the cool of the sitting room to rest. The early part of Wednesday afternoons, before Lynda returns from school, is the time she takes for herself in the week to knit, sew or read. Today she gazes at a novel, but finds concentration difficult.

At just past three o’clock she hears voices in the yard that are louder and more numerous than usual, and when they persist she goes to the kitchen door. Through the gate she sees men and women hurrying up and down the backings. Comfort Eades is in the yard talking to two women from Barnsley Road. ‘Summat’s gone off at Barnburgh pit,’ she says to Winnie. ‘Accident or summat. They’ve just made an announcement at t’ pictures, and asked ’em at Highgate pit if they can send some men down to help.’

She thinks about Millie and Danny, and Clara and Ernie. Ernie, who also works on Danny’s face at Barnburgh, has just gone back to work after a stay in the caravan in Bridlington. Winnie asks Comfort to watch Lynda, then takes her bag and beetles down the hill to Bolton-upon-Dearne, the sun hot on her skin, the sound of a pit buzzer audible in the distance. As she nears Bolton, there are people on the street. Some are hastening along the footpaths towards Barnburgh Main colliery. Two police cars shoot past followed by a blue NCB ambulance with its bells ringing.

Clara has already left. Her neighbour, standing in the street, tells Winnie there has been an accident underground at Barnburgh. ‘No one knows how many of them were in it,’ she says, ‘it’s awful for them who’ve got somebody at work.’

Every miner’s wife and mother lives with feelings of anxiety and foreboding that are quieted by routine. You know what time he usually gets back from his shift and you notice the first minute gap opened up by the long hand when he is late. Some women worry more than others, but they all wonder as they wait. There are always the little injuries to remind you: him coming home with a cut on his head; his vertebrae badly rubbed and scabbed; him having to go to hospital for a few stitches. When he is in an accident you are shocked, but the accident feels less like a random event than a buried fear breaking out from the earth. And you know people who have been killed or hurt, so it is nothing new, just your turn. Most mining families believe strongly in fate.

‘It is frightening, love,’ says Winnie. ‘Let’s hope Ernie’s alright.’

‘My husband’s on earlies, thank God,’ says the woman.

‘My brother-in-law’s been off for two weeks, and he was on about going back. He’ll be glad he didn’t now. I’ll walk round to see them.’

At about the same time, Jack Gundry is sitting on a windowsill in the house in Bolton-upon-Dearne that will be his and Pam’s new lodgings once they are married. He is decorating, seated with his legs inside the room and his body out, so he can paint the wooden frames white. The sun is drying the paint quickly, and warming his back and the pale skin of his neck. A transistor radio plays in the room, and over its chatter he hears the pit buzzer and wonders what’s going off. As he is wondering here comes Reg Smith, a mate who works on the pit top, hurrying down the street, and calling up to Jack with an odd tone in his voice.

‘Ayup Jack –’

‘Ayup Reg.’ On seeing Reg, Jack feels guilty because he has taken the day off pretending to be ill. ‘I’m on t’ painting and decorating today. I’ve got to get this done before we get married, like.’

Reg’s expression changes as he realises Jack hasn’t heard. ‘Thy face has just gone up, tha knows –’

Jack drops the brush; it bounces off the pavement leaving a splatter of white on the dirt. Then he is rushing down the stairs and out onto the street towards Danny and Millie’s house. Had Danny been at work today? He had said he would go back this week, but he hadn’t been there yesterday, so probably not. Best to make sure though.

He runs past women clustered at front doors, their kids around their feet frightened and fascinated. Men pass by him heading the other way, towards the pit. A memory comes to him from a shift last week – him saying to his mate Derek Smith that the pit’s ventilation engineers had the airflow wrong, that the way they had set their system of doors and curtains in the faces, gates and roadways could allow gas to accumulate. Derek had said Jack was fussing and Jack had left it at that, but now the face had gone up. If there had been an explosion, gas would almost certainly have been the cause.

*

Hall Broome Gardens, Number 7: Millie is at the garden gate with two neighbours. Jack’s chest is rising and falling heavily.

‘Ayup, Jack,’ she says.

‘Where is he?’

‘He’s at t’ pit, love. He said he were going back to get that barrel.’

Jack stands silent and feels as if he could just float up into the air.

‘I know there’s been an accident,’ she says, ‘but we don’t know what’s going off yet, do you know what it is?’

‘I’m not sure yet.’

‘Has anybody said owt to you?’

‘No,’ he lies. He doesn’t want to worry her.

More neighbours come out into the street to ask if anyone has any news and some of them set off for the pit, but Millie stays, not wanting to tempt fate. Jack stays with her. He has lost track of how long he has been there when he sees a policeman approaching, checking the house numbers as he walks up the street towards them.

The pit buzzer continues to wail across the valley and in the villages men rush into the clubs to alert the drinkers. Cinema managers order projectionists to halt the matinee reels and announce the accident to audiences, who then pile out into the sunshine to seek news, or head off to offer assistance. Along the roads and on the footpaths and in the summer-deep green lanes, hundreds of miners hurry towards Barnburgh pit top, and through the streets race clanging ambulances, roaring police cars, and tyre-squealing black cars of managers and officials, more and more and more of them and then gradually fewer and fewer until the ambulances begin to pass the other way. Soon the ambulances are shuttling back and forth between the pit and the hospitals at Doncaster, Mexborough and Rotherham, and all across the valley the people gathered on streets or in house doorways are sharing scraps of knowledge and rumour. 
It’s in t’ Newhill seam. It were a big explosion, must’ve been gas .
.
. There’s above two dozen men been hurt they reckon, and there’s ambulances coming from all over. They’ve started bringing ’em out and they’ve took a lot to t’ Montagu. A lot of ’em’s been burned bad .
.
.

At the gates of Barnburgh Main a crowd, mainly women and children, is looking for sons, husbands, boyfriends, brothers. They peer into the yard, asking each other what they know, watching black-faced miners in burned clothes carry men on stretchers from the shaft side to the ambulance room. One man, a fifty-one-year-old deputy with charred hands and face, busies himself ensuring that the worst hurt get seen first, and tends to the men as he passes among them. Others kneel over the injured to help them sip water from Dudleys, talking to them to keep them conscious. Doctors from Thurnscoe, Bolton and Goldthorpe arrive in their cars and go underground to treat the men who cannot be moved. The pit manager, colliery staff and NUM officials cross the yard and follow them down to inspect the accident scene. And one by one, the worst hurt are eased into ambulances and sped away. There are twenty of them in all, some so badly burned that friends who helped them on the pit top had not been able to recognise their faces.

*

‘Mrs Lunness?’ The policeman is one of several criss-crossing the village to find next of kin. In Millie’s sitting room he explains to her and Jack that Danny was caught in the explosion, but has been brought out alive and taken to the Montagu. His condition is critical and no visitors are being admitted.

Millie appears calm but numb. When Winnie arrives and makes her a cup of tea, she talks only of the children: how to tell if Barbara and Pam have found out yet, how to contact Brian in Newmarket, and Tony, who is in the Army. Five times she will have to say it: your dad is critical, love, and you need to be ready to see him.

Pam comes, and is told. When she and Jack have steadied her, Winnie goes to Clara’s house, where Clara is back preparing to go to Doncaster Royal Infirmary. Ernie has been caught in the accident and is ill, but not critical; their son Derek, who had been due to sail to Hong Kong as part of his National Service, is on his way home to see him. Clara tells Winnie the figures she has heard: four besides Ernie have been taken to Doncaster, four others are in a hospital in Rotherham, and eleven more at the Montagu. Some of them are very poorly. ‘It’s funny,’ she says. ‘You always know it could happen, and then when it does, you can’t believe it.’

*

The following day the men in the Montagu are allowed visits from relatives and close friends, and Harry drives Jack, Millie and Winnie to the hospital. The injured miners occupy a single ward, and in the corridor outside a loose handful of forlorn children, barred from going in because of their age, crouch on heels, clutch dolls and run Dinky cars along the floor.

Winnie and Harry go in behind Jack and Millie. Before she is even inside the ward, the strong, nauseating odour of burned hair and putrefying flesh makes Millie retch. Many years later, when the visitors tell their children and grandchildren about the accident, it is the smell they remember; for many of them, the ward and the appearance of the burned men is hazy, as if the fouled air had made them drunk. Millie has a moment of dizziness, then takes in the sight of the ward. There are five beds lined along each wall. On each bed lies a block of ice the size of a single wardrobe. On each block of ice lies a man, naked but for a towel across his abdomen. Each man’s skin is a black mass of scorched scabs, like the skin of a burned baked potato cooked in a bonfire, with a few small flashes of wet, red-raw flesh. Worst are the heads, swollen to twice their proper size, with most of their hair and facial features burned off, making it hard to distinguish one from the other.

There is silence, broken only by attempts at coughs from the older men. They cannot speak properly to call you, so all that is left is eye movement. As Jack, Harry, Winnie and Millie come into the middle of the ward, several pairs of eyes, bloodshot-white in the black heads, swivel to them. Some of the families sitting by the burned men, the Grattons and the Edwards who live close to Dan and Millie, murmur greetings. Millie gasps and reels. Winnie takes her arm. Jack thinks quickly and looks, trying not to appear obvious, at the record sheets clipped onto the iron bars at the bottom of the beds without visitors until he sees ‘D. Lunness’.