Authors: Richard Benson
Beside the beds the relatives sit, trying to think of what to say, and not breathing through their noses. Danny’s lips are charred, and his mouth is a wet pink hole in the black crust of his face, like a hole in a burned pie. He can barely speak, but sometimes he looks yearningly at Millie and as he spasms with pain, he croaks, ‘Get hold of me, Millie’ – and she has to say, ‘I can’t,’ because she knows if she holds him she will hurt him. For the hour they are allowed to remain in the ward the visitors have to take breaks outside because the smell makes them feel they will be sick.
After the visit a doctor takes Millie into a waiting room. The doctor, balding, eyes tired behind spectacles, is weary, hesitant, relying on a script in his head. ‘It’s difficult to say at this point, Mrs Lunness,’ he begins. ‘But – ’
‘Don’t flannel me, doctor,’ says Millie. ‘I can see what state he’s in. Just say it.’
The doctor nods. ‘All right. Well, with those burns, your husband is lucky to be alive. We can’t give you any guarantee, but if his body can build enough strength to begin recovering there is a good chance for him. If he stabilises here, we can move him to the Special Burns Unit at Wakefield, and then if he survives for a month, say thirty days from now, his chances of a full recovery will go up to ninety per cent.’
Danny does stabilise, and as he regains his strength he spends further visiting times telling the family what happened. Forty men on the two o’clock shift had been working on a coal face deep underground and half a mile from the pit bottom. They were making the face ready so that the next shift could cut coal from its seam. Some men repaired the tunnels, or gates, that led off at angles from the long, five-foot-high gallery with its wall of coal, while the wastemen moved the roof supports, allowing parts of the rock roof to collapse behind them. Danny was working as lineman for a team of eighteen wastemen. They were moving roof supports when Danny saw, many yards down one of the gates, a set of safety doors blow open.
There is a bright blue flash, and then a fireball of gas is rushing down the tunnel towards the men. Danny shouts, ‘Get down!’ and drops to his knees. The other men drop likewise, heads bowed tightly into their chests, hands protecting genitals. One, however, Jack’s mate Derek Smith, stands up, spooked. Danny shouts to him, but Derek, panicking, gallops down the gate, trying to outrun the flames. Before anyone can stop him the flames engulf them all. As the fireball whooshes over him, Danny can feel it rip at his clothes and burn his body, and then there is a roaring, rattling hurricane of earth and coal dust being sucked into its wake.
For a second, time slows. Danny thinks about his skin, and about Derek, and about how bad everyone’s burns will be. He has time to stand up in the thick, swirling dust, and make out the shapes of other men around him standing up and looking for the gates that lead off the face. He has time to search for the fireball, but when he spots it, it is rebounding off the brattice-cloth hurdles at the end of the face, and rushing back towards them. Derek is for a moment silhouetted prostrate on the ground. The men cannot get down again, and they take the full force front on. The blast scatters them like leaves in the wind. It blows off most of their remaining clothes, blasts their scalps from their skulls and burns lumps out of their ears and noses. As they regain consciousness their lungs feel as if the flames are in them, and because there is no oxygen in the air they are inhaling smoke, fire and coal dust. There is a strong smell of tar. The dust is so thick that you can see for only a yard or two.
Some men who are able to walk try the telephone near the face that links to the pit bottom and the surface, but it is out of order. It takes several minutes for the deputies to realise there has been an accident. Someone breaks open the boxes of morphine kept in the tunnels and dispenses it to the injured men. The colliery officials on the surface are alerted and SOS calls put out. The seam is evacuated and the remaining miners told to go home, but most stay to help find the men and get them above ground.
It takes more than an hour to take the most badly affected men off the face. Each one, burned, and dosed with morphine, has to be taken the half mile to the shaft, brought up and then carried to the ambulance room and readied for dispatch to the hospitals. The injured and dying men come up on stretchers, covered in blankets, but even the hot summer air feels cold on their burnt bodies, clumps of hair and scalp hanging down, skin and rags flapping. Some have their faces covered, but none are dead, yet.
‘We told them, Jack, didn’t we? I
told
him about that gas.’
Jack nods to Danny. He had thought the same.
‘And people heard me. When I get out of here, I’m going to sue the bastards. There’s kids could’ve lost their fathers.’
Everyone around the bed is quiet, taking in the story. Danny tries to smile. ‘Never mind the kids,’ he croaks to Jack. ‘We’ll still have that barrel.’
*
Danny survives to the end of the week. The doctors judge him fit enough to move, and order his transfer to the Specialist Burns Unit at Wakefield Pinderfields Hospital. The family, with his son Brian back at home now, begins daily trips to sit with him and as they tick off the thirty days, Danny keeps going. Three weeks after the accident he is growing stronger and is thinking about his options for suing the managers. He survives the first week in the new hospital, and then the one after that. Ernie, meanwhile, is slowly recovering in hospital in Doncaster.
The inspectors go in at Barnburgh Main, and the pubs and clubs are full of rumour. Jack and Pam decide to put off the wedding until Danny recovers, and Pam holds her dad’s burned hand and tells him she won’t get married until he comes out to give her away. Jack cannot stop himself feeling guilty for not having been at work and angry at the arbitrariness of it all. One night, he meets Derek Smith’s mother in the street. Jack had been brought up with Derek on the same backings. When they were at school Jack had wanted to be a gardener and Derek had wanted to work on a farm; Derek had got a farm job, but then married and had children, and the pit paid so much better than working on the land.
‘He’s in t’ hospital at Donny,’ Mrs Smith tells Jack. ‘He’s been asking after you, love. He says he’d like to talk to you, will you go to see him and sit wi’ him one night?’
Jack says of course he will, he’ll go tomorrow night, but the next day, Thursday 4 July, a neighbour tells him that Derek has passed away in hospital. He is the first of the rescued men to die.
*
When the family goes to see Danny at the Burns Unit, the smell is still as bad but Danny can talk a little more easily. He has a healthy body, still fit from the gym, and he withstands the injuries well. He seems to grow neither weaker nor stronger, but the days pass and he is still alive at the start of the last of the four weeks. ‘It’s his strength,’ Millie and his family tell each other as they gather in the kitchen before going to Wakefield, or coming home through the light, summery night. ‘It’s all t’ training and boxing he’s done.’ ‘Tha’s going to be all right, Danny,’ Jack says, and Danny cracks a white smile in his still-reddened face.
But the following week, twenty-two days after the accident, he grows weaker, feverish and tired. After tests, the doctors tell Millie he is recovering well from the burns, but there is a complication. The dust and gas have poisonous chemicals in them and when they came into contact with his raw wounds the toxins had entered his blood. Danny has leukaemia, and the doctors can do nothing to arrest it.
When Millie arrives on 24 July, the twenty-ninth of the doctor’s thirty days, the curtains are drawn around Danny’s bed. Millie assumes his dressings are being changed, but when she tries to slip through she sees doctors and nurses around the bed, and the doctors are peering at him. A senior nurse shuffles over, takes Millie’s arm and leads her away.
There is fluid on his lungs, says the nurse, but the doctors are doing their best.
A few hours later, Danny Lunness dies.
*
Four more of the men besides Danny and Derek die from their injuries. Ernie Towning recovers in hospital, but suffers nightmares about the explosion, waking up confused to find himself on the ward. On the day he is discharged Clara and the kids go to collect him, and when young Clare sees his burned black and red face she thinks her father is a monster, and runs away from him, screaming. His flashbacks recur, and one afternoon, a week or so after returning home, he waits until Clara and the children go out, walks into the kitchen, turns on the gas oven, and puts his head inside. Clara comes back in time and wakes him, yanking him away from the oven by his belt. ‘You silly bugger,’ she yells. ‘What the bloody hell are you playing at?’
He is ashamed and silent. She upbraids him, and afterwards tells people what he has done with words repeated so often they become a catchphrase: ‘The silly bugger can’t even get that right.’ The words sound cruel, but they are only pitiless; Clara is of the old school and she knows that pity can weaken a person. Ernie slowly recovers stability, though he never goes underground again, taking a job above ground on the colliery trains. He suffers nightmares for the rest of his life.
In September the coroner records that Danny was ‘by misadventure burned on 26 June 1957, underground in the North West 1 District of the Newhill seam in Barnburgh Main colliery, Barnburgh, in the West Riding of the County of York when involved in an explosion of fire-damp’. Danny’s full name does not appear on the lists of British mining fatalities because someone at the NCB or the hospital mistakenly listed him as ‘David’. Nor does his version of the accident appear in the official NCB report, which records that it was caused by a spark from an electrical cable with worn armour coating being carried for yards on air currents until it came to a pocket of gas.
The family bury Danny in Goldthorpe churchyard. At the funeral, the church and the cemetery are packed with men and women in mourning black, families of miners, boxers and neighbours. The women wipe their eyes with small flowered handkerchiefs and the men clasp their red, nicked, blue-scarred hands in front of themselves and look down. Union representatives carry the red and gold union banner.
Perhaps the younger Millie, the Millie who married her young boxer and who could match Harry Hollingworth for lip, would have made a fuss and had the name on the memorial corrected. But Danny’s passing seems to reduce her to a pale, smokey ember. Within the year she uses her compensation payment to buy a sweet shop near the cinema in Goldthorpe to give herself an income, but it is as if something in her is broken. She finds she cannot sing any more and retires from public performances. Before the end of the decade the family will acknowledge that her incomplete recovery has become a permanent decline in her health.
*
Pam and Jack marry in a subdued ceremony at the end of August. Pam wears grey rather than white, and she walks down the aisle alone, refusing to be given away by anyone else. The men on the Newhill seam are given leave to stay off work for a day or two, but when Jack goes back to work, his undermanager makes him go to the scene of the accident to salvage the equipment. Jack asks if he could work somewhere else, since that was where his father-in-law and his best friend received their fatal injuries. ‘No chance,’ says the undermanager, ‘and if you don’t like it, you can get off down the road.’
At Highgate Lane, Danny is remembered alongside Walter as a hero and martyr to life’s random unfairness; a smashing fella whose smashingness is somehow intensified in the memory by the unpleasantness of his death. The family being what it is, he doesn’t fully leave them for a while anyway. One day, a few weeks after Danny’s funeral, Winnie is alone in the house, cleaning, when she hears a man’s voice in the room. She lays down her duster on the sideboard and turns to see Danny standing in front of the fireplace. ‘Ayup, Danny love,’ she says. ‘How are you going on? Have you been to see your Millie?’
‘Aye,’ he tells her. ‘I’ve just been down to see her, to see if she’s all right.’
And then in the silent house he lingers, as he will linger for many years in the Hollingworth memory, looking bemused, as quick and flickery as flames in a fire, and as if he might at any moment burst joyfully into song.
Thurnscoe, 1958
In the autumn of 1957 Margaret falls pregnant again. When she tells Roy he is sanguine and caring, saying it's a good job, they ought to be having a brother or sister for little Gary, their son. Roy does not stay out late for a while and the family has one of its periods of contented calm. Margaret has the flat how she likes it, Gary is walking and beginning to talk, and Roy is earning good money at Hatfield colliery. He still talks about himself as an Army man, even though he was discharged from the Emergency Reserve the previous December. The Army had recognised his qualities, he feels: in his discharge papers he had been described as âa sober, honest and trustworthy man .
.
. who can be given a reasonable amount of responsibility, and who is prepared to work hard'.
And now, in his civilian career, he does work hard, clocking up the overtime on the earthmovers, and arguing with his dad about the strain when they go out drinking. Harry and his pals annoy Roy with their insistence that the young men complaining these days should have tried the pits under the old gaffers, on their bellies with picks and shovels. They'd not be able to stand it now, they say, they're different, a weaker kind of men. Roy is bored by this competitive suffering, and by the petty materialism that goes with it. His dad's expensive shirts and gold-plated tie-clips are ridiculous to him because, after all, âthey're only in bloody Thurnscoe'. Vexed by it all he goes home and tells Margaret: No, he's not paying for new stuff, what did it matter if it was new or not? It's all show for the neighbours, and he hates it. âI'm telling you,' he says, âif there was a place where everyone had no possessions, and walked around naked, I'd go to live there.' Margaret tells him to stop talking daft.