Simon Tolkien - No Man’s Land

It was much darker now than it had been back in the whitewashed stables: pitch-black outside the pools of light cast by their lamps. But the tunnel was still far less daunting than Adam had anticipated. A succession of curving steel supports holding up the roof gave him a sense of security and the generous height and width of the roadway were enough to keep his claustrophobia at bay. But it was still a ghostly place – water dripped continuously from a pipe running along the crown of the roof down into puddles on the ground in which Adam caught faint reflections of himself and his father in the lamplight.

The tunnel was empty except for two roadmen hard at work repairing the narrow railway that ran down the centre, constructed on top of wooden sleepers bolted together with fishplates. The noise of their claw hammers echoed off the walls – a clanging percussion that broke off suddenly when they got up and moved quickly to the sides of the roadway. Adam and Daniel followed suit, ducking into one of the manhole niches that were built at regular intervals along the sides of the tunnel. A pony was coming up the slope hauling a line of coal tubs each full to the brim and marked with the iron motty tags that Daniel had told his son about earlier. As it came abreast of where they were standing, Adam saw that the pony had a rider. Rawdon was lying flat on the animal’s back, his hands on its black ears, his head turned sideways in their direction. He caught Adam’s eye as he passed and smiled – a cold contemptuous smile that made Adam feel that Rawdon had seen right through him and felt the toxic fear that he was working so hard to keep under control.

‘The boy’s an idiot – that’s how he hurt himself before,’ said Daniel, looking back at the train of tubs as it rounded a corner in the tunnel, its wheels rattling on the rails. ‘His father would be furious if he knew.’

‘Will you tell him?’ asked Adam.

‘No, Whalen wouldn’t want to hear it from me,’ said Daniel, shaking his head. ‘And anyway today’s about you, not Rawdon Dawes. We don’t need to get distracted.’

‘About you’ – once again Adam wondered why his father had been so quick to grant his request to see the mine. What was it he was hoping to achieve?

He wanted to follow his father’s advice and put Rawdon’s sudden apparition out of his mind, but it was hard – the encounter seemed like an ill omen, coming so soon on the heels of his wish that their paths shouldn’t cross.

And it didn’t help his peace of mind that the ceiling was getting lower now as they went further down into the mine so that they had begun to have to bend their necks forward as they walked to avoid hitting their heads on the overhead struts. Adam wasn’t used to walking in a crouch and his back started to ache, but still his father pressed on.

And it was getting hotter too, so hot that Adam took off his shirt to better feel the soft breeze that the mine’s ventilation system was blowing down the tunnel behind them. But even with the ventilation, he was starting to find it harder to breathe – the air was thick with dust and the stale sulphurous smell of the black powder used to blast the coal from the seam. Low stalls led off passages from the main tunnel in which Adam caught glimpses of miners working. They were down on their knees, stripped to the waist like him, and their torsos, black with coal dust and sweat, gleamed in the light from their lamps. On all sides there was a constant noise of hammering and hewing and breaking.

Adam felt his senses being overwhelmed as if by a raging tide. He wanted to scream out loud, but he doubted his father would have heard as he had hurried on ahead, looking for Edgar. All the time the tunnel was narrowing and the roof was getting lower. It was supported on timber props now, which left it sagging in places.

And then, just as Adam felt he had come to the limits of his endurance, just as he had decided to tell his father that he could go no further, Daniel stopped, standing at the entrance to a stall from which Adam could hear familiar voices coming.

Looking over his father’s shoulder, Adam could see Edgar and his older son, Thomas, lying on their sides working at the face. Edgar was using a mandrel, a straight-bladed pick, to hack the coal from the seam and Thomas was shovelling it back into a waiting tub. Their lamps and most of their clothes were hanging from nails hammered into the wall and they both were naked apart from their underwear, boots and padded caps. Adam felt embarrassed, out of place. He wished he hadn’t come and hung back behind his father, hoping that Edgar would not see him, which at first he didn’t.

‘Welcome, cousin, to my ’umble abode,’ said Edgar, doffing his cap and laughing at his affectation of a city voice. ‘What brings thee down ’ere out o’ the sunshine?’

‘To show his white-fingered son ’ow the other ’alf lives,’ said a caustic voice behind Adam, who turned round and came face to face with a thick-set, bald-headed man about his own height. He seemed to be about the same age as Edgar and like him was stripped to his underwear with his face and skin blackened with coal, but his outlandish appearance clearly had no effect on his confidence. The dirt was a badge of honour, an outward manifestation of his class credentials.

Because Whalen Dawes was a fanatic. Adam could tell that straightaway; it was clear to see in the hard chiselled set of his chin and in his unforgiving flinty grey eyes – different coloured eyes from his son, who was standing behind his father, watching with that same look of dry amusement that Adam had seen on his face before. After he had delivered the coal tubs, he must have ridden the pony straight back from the maingate to wherever his father worked in time to tell him about the visitors and give him the opportunity to intercept them.

Now Adam truly regretted asking his father to show him the mine. He’d hoped that the experience would bring him closer to the miners, help him to understand them better, but instead it was just going to make them see him as even more of an uppity outsider.

‘Is this true, Daniel? Is that why you’re here?’ asked Edgar, who had now come forward and caught sight of Adam.

‘No, of course it isn’t,’ said Daniel. ‘Adam wanted to know what the mine was like, which is natural – he lives here after all, and so I agreed to show him.’

‘Agreed to show ’im cos you want to scare ’im, make sure ’e don’t end up down ’ere, cos you thinks ’e’s too good for the likes of us,’ said Whalen, pressing his advantage.

‘No, that’s not true,’ said Daniel angrily. But Adam knew that Rawdon’s father was right – his father had been trying to scare him. He’d asked the ostler where Edgar worked but he hadn’t needed to because he already knew. And he’d taken him to the Oakwell seam because it was the narrowest, lowest part of the mine, the place most likely to trigger his claustrophobia.

It made Adam angry to have been manipulated, and angry too that he had allowed it to happen. But there was nothing he could do. His father’s plan had fully succeeded: panic was welling up inside him like a flooded dam about to burst its banks.

For a moment everyone was silent. It was as if they were all waiting on Edgar as he opened up his flask and took a long slow drink of the sweet milky tea that all the miners took with them into the pit.

‘I don’t know,’ said Edgar pensively. ‘Whalen likes nowt more’n to make trouble, I knows that …’

‘I tells the truth,’ said Whalen vehemently. ‘If that makes trouble, then I makes no apology for it.’

But Edgar held up his hand, insisting on finishing his thought. ‘As I says, I knows that. But that don’t mean what ’e says ain’t true, and I have to say, Daniel, that I doubt thee sometimes. I wish I didn’t but I do.’