Simon Tolkien - No Man’s Land

There was an uneasy silence, broken when a pair of rats scurried across the floor of the tunnel, causing Adam to jump instinctively out of the way. Rawdon laughed. ‘You’ll ’ave to get used to them if you’re goin’ to be makin’ a habit of comin’ down ’ere,’ he said. ‘We likes the rats, don’t we, Dad – when they scurry about it gives us fair warnin’ that the roof might be about to cave.’

Whalen looked at his son and then over at Adam, seeing how he was swaying on his feet. Just a little push would send him over.

‘You’re right, Rawdon,’ he said. ‘Same as the timber props – we prefers ’em to the steel ones cos you can hear ’em creak and whine afore they go.’

Adam didn’t know if he could hear creaking or whining. But he could feel the millions of tons of earth and rock over his head bearing down on him, ready to bury him alive. It was intolerable, insupportable, more than he could stand. The tidal wave of his panic burst out, swamping his consciousness, and he fell to the ground in a dead faint.

On an afternoon in the late summer Adam went for a walk with Ernest, who had the day off from the screens. Coming out of the house, turning away from the mine and into the light of the rising sun, they raced each other up the hill to the oak tree on the ridge. Adam was far ahead by the time they reached the top. He was a natural athlete and his growing prowess at football had helped him win friends in the town, even though there were still some who continued to give him the cold shoulder. Rawdon was their leader and he never tired of telling anyone who would listen how Adam had gone down the mine to ‘see ’ow the other ’alf live’ and had had to be hauled out unconscious in an empty coal tub.

The shame of his misadventure gnawed at Adam far more than he was willing to admit. It wasn’t just the humiliation – his struggles with adversity had given him a strong sense of his own worth and he was never going to be fatally undermined by jibes thrown at him in the street. It was his verdict on himself that made him suffer. He had set himself a challenge when he went down the mine and he had fallen short. And it was hard to look a miner in the eye when he knew and they knew that he could not last a single morning in the subterranean darkness where they laboured all their lives.

Adam wasn’t used to failure. His instinct was always to try and try again until he had overcome the hurdle that had first defeated him, but this time there was no opportunity for redemption. He wouldn’t be allowed back in the mine even if he asked to go. Not after what had happened. And so every day he was left to gaze over at the giant headstocks with their great spinning wheels and feel their reproach. Except that today they were standing motionless and from their vantage point at the crest of the hill Adam and Ernest could see lines of dejected men trooping home from the pit. They had been let off early for the third time that week. There was less demand for coal in the summer and so there would be less in the men’s pay packets come Friday night.

‘It’s hard on my mother, hard on all the women,’ said Ernest, leaning back against the tree trunk with a sigh. ‘It’s the old story: prices go up and wages go down. And when the women complain the men slink off out the back door to drown their troubles at the King’s Head where they’ve got a nice fire and a smiling barmaid, and then there’s no money left to pay the bills.’

‘It was like that in London too,’ said Adam. ‘Except that it was the other way round: the building trade was slack in the winter and picked up in the summer.’

‘Well, the answer’s the minimum wage,’ said Ernest. ‘Everybody knows that. But the owners won’t pay it so something’ll have to give.’

‘There’ll be a strike – is that what you mean?’ asked Adam. Just saying the word made him nervous, bringing back those terrible last days in London and his mother’s untimely, unnecessary death.

‘Yes, I expect so. My dad wants to do something, I know that.’

‘And mine doesn’t?’ asked Adam.

‘I don’t know. My brother says he’s trying to negotiate but there’s a feeling that that’s not going anywhere, that the owners are just playing him along.’

‘Taking him for a fool?’

‘I didn’t say that,’ said Ernest sharply. ‘Look, I don’t know much more than you do. My dad doesn’t say much and a lot of what I hear at the pithead is just rumour – men complaining, letting off steam.’

Adam nodded, but he knew himself that all was not well between his father and Edgar. Ernest’s father had gone out of his way to be kind to Adam after the debacle in the mine, telling him that a lot of ‘first-timers’ found it hard to cope with the bad air and the noise in the deeper seams, but, as far as Adam was aware, there had been no rapprochement between the two cousins. They seemed ill at ease in each other’s company and the atmosphere in the house was strained as a result. Adam remembered the rebuke that Edgar had administered to his father before he fainted away, and he wondered how much longer he and his father would be welcome under Edgar’s roof.

But the ill feeling had certainly not affected his friendship with Ernest. As the months had gone by, he had grown to trust and admire his second cousin. He liked Ernest’s lack of prejudice – the way he insisted on making up his own mind about issues even if the majority disagreed with him, and the way he never complained about his lot; this quality seemed even more impressive to Adam after he had seen at first hand the awful driving monotony involved in working on the pithead screens. If Ernest had a fault it was a lack of ambition. His world was what it was and he had no hope of changing it. He was stoic without being cynical, and his loyalty was absolute.

‘Come on,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘We’re not here to talk about the mine, not on my day off. There’s somewhere I want to show you.’

They followed the path over the ridge and were suddenly in a new world. The mine and the grey monochrome houses of the town disappeared as if by magic, replaced in an instant by a pastoral landscape of woods and fields and streams unchanged in centuries. There was the sound of birdsong in the air and a red kite circled slowly overhead, allowing the fluctuating eddies of the faint breeze to direct its flight.

After a mile or so Ernest stopped, pointing down to his left where they could see over a long grey brick wall to where the pale stucco exterior of a substantial country house glittered in the golden light of the afternoon against a background of thick-leaved elms and, closer in, rows of tall cypress trees, pointing like long dark green fingers up towards the sun. Between the two wings, the Palladian façade with elegant sash windows rising symmetrically on either side of the entrance portico was half reflected in the still surface of a lake, which abutted a wide manicured lawn that descended on a gentle slope from the quadrangular courtyard and ornamental stone terrace at the front of the house. Two regal swans were floating on the water, preening their long white necks.

‘Scarsdale Hall,’ said Ernest, theatrically waving his hand. ‘Home of Sir John, who pays me a pittance for cleaning his coal.’

‘I’ve seen him,’ said Adam. ‘He comes to church sometimes with his wife wrapped up in furs and a son who doesn’t like me.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he doesn’t think I’ve got the right to look at the parson’s daughter.’

‘Miriam – she’s pretty, isn’t she?’

‘Yes. How do you know? I thought your family never went near a church.’

‘We go there for funerals. Everyone does, whether they believe in it or not. A miner who’s got blown to bits in a firedamp explosion deserves a good send-off; and it makes the family feel we care, which is what matters. The parson understands that – I’ll say that for him. And Miriam looks beautiful in a black dress,’ said Ernest with a grin.