Gary Cockerill - From Coal Dust to Stardust

I stared in horror as I noticed a cockroach scuttle beneath the wardrobe, praying that Kim wouldn’t notice (she didn’t, although she certainly didn’t miss the rest of his mates who turned up later that night to join the party). The room stank of stale cigarette smoke and rotting food; after a few days we actually found a long-forgotten burger mouldering under the bed. The carpets, presumably once light brown, were now patterned with an incredible variety of stains and dried-up spillages which felt crusty underfoot – if you were stupid enough to take off your shoes, that is. And as for the bed – well, the wafer-thin mattress was bad enough, but the bedding clearly hadn’t been washed since last season’s inmates had escaped. Once I discovered the communal laundry I realised why: the washing machines were so filthy that anything that went inside would come out with a whole new set of stains. Bearing all this in mind, I don’t think I really need to spell out to you what the communal toilets were like.

Desperate not to linger in our chalet on that first day, we went off in search of the staff canteen. I still remember the smell of those huge industrial kitchens and the vats of grey slop bubbling away like some primeval swamp. That night dinner was sausage and chips, but the chips were still frozen in the middle and the sausages were made out of all the unmentionable bits that were left over after all the edible parts of the animal had been removed. You couldn’t even get a drink to ease the ordeal of mealtimes, as the camp’s staff members weren’t allowed to drink alcohol onsite.

We later discovered that everyone got round this rule by having secret parties in each other’s chalets with smuggled-in booze and, as most of the employees were single and bored out of their minds, these illicit gatherings usually turned into orgies. During our short stint at the camp there was an outbreak of crabs because of the feverish partner swapping that went on.

‘Gary, we’re leaving,’ sobbed Kim at the end of that first night. ‘I don’t want to stay here another day. This is awful.’

‘Come on, babe, let’s give it a bit more time,’ I begged. I was as horrified as she was, but I was desperate for the money. ‘I promise I’ll talk to them about the chalet. We’ve committed ourselves now, and I’m sure things will get better once we start our Red Coat training. Okay?’

But at the next morning’s ‘welcome’ meeting for us new recruits there was another shock in store. Any hopes I’d had of revisiting my past glories on stage vanished as quickly as a glimpse of Skegness sunshine when we were told that we would have to earn the right to become Red Coats by working in other positions in the camp first. Forget judging the knobbly-knees contest or teaching tap-dancing, we were going to be waiters. And far from a jaunty scarlet jacket and crisp white trousers with matching shoes, my new uniform consisted of a short-sleeve shirt, too-short black trousers and a name-badge that (thanks to some administrative cock-up) read ‘Hello, I’m Barry!’

And so Kim and I spent the three weeks we lasted at the camp shuttling between the kitchens and cavernous dining room to serve up deep-fried nuggets and over-boiled vegetables to the largely disgruntled clientele. After a few weeks of drudgery, and desperate to salvage something from the whole disastrous episode, I took the manager to one side after our breakfast shift.

‘Hi, Clive!’ I said, dazzling him with my best toothy showbiz smile. ‘I didn’t want to make a big deal about this, but I should probably tell you that I used to be a professional performer.’

The manager seemed engrossed in the paperwork on the clipboard he was carrying, so I pressed on.

‘I appeared in a nationwide theatre tour with Lionel Blair and was in musicals like Carousel and Jesus Christ Superstar , I continued brightly, exuding what I hoped was Red-Coat-like bubbliness and positivity. ‘I’m a really strong singer and I can tap-dance and do a bit of ballroom as well! So basically, given the chance, I think I’d make a great Red Coat and be a real asset to your team.’

Clive finally looked up from his clipboard, scratched his crotch and squinted at my name-badge.

‘Barry,’ he said slowly, with the look of a man who’d endured a lifetime of economy sausages, stained carpets and broken dreams. ‘I really don’t give a shit.’

‘So, lad, why d’you want to be a miner?’

The three colliery bosses – proper salt-of-the-earth Yorkshire men, with flat caps and flatter vowels – were looking at me expectantly from behind the trestle table that dominated the cramped office where the interviews were being held. Even in the dingy light of the room I could see the coaldust trapped under the men’s fingernails and their leathery, calloused hands. Miners’ hands.

I had queued up all morning with dozens of other local lads for my chance to be here, but now that I finally had my moment in the spotlight my mind had gone blank. Exactly why did I want to join the workforce at Markham Main, Armthorpe’s colliery?

I’d never had a problem with interviews – years of waltzing through stage school auditions had left me confident to the point of cockiness – but today was different. Today, I was going for a job that I urgently needed, but was absolutely dreading getting.

* * *

Growing up, the view from my bedroom window was dominated by the hulking, coal-black silhouette of Markham Main. To my overactive young imagination, the distant outline of the colliery buildings was a vision of hell, with the mine’s vast wheel and clanking conveyor belt rearing up out of the slagheap like some nightmarish fairground ride. The pit was only a mile from my home, but it might as well have been in a different hemisphere. Although the colliery was the reason for my hometown’s existence and the main source of income and community for the majority of its residents – including most of my school friends’ families – as far as I was concerned it had absolutely nothing to do with me. There were few mining families living in the smart new estate where we had our semi-detached bungalow, and my parents had drilled into me from a young age that I should never even think about joining the local industry.

‘No son of mine is ever going to put his life at risk working down the mines,’ Dad would lecture, stony-faced – and that was absolutely fine by me. I’d go round to friends’ houses for tea and stare with barely concealed horror at their fathers’ ruined hands and coal-blackened faces. And although I would see the miners trudging past my school every day in their luminous safety vests, helmets and hobnail boots, always covered in a blanket of coaldust, they might as well have been aliens for all the relevance I thought they had to my existence.

It wasn’t just the thought of working in such dark and dangerous conditions that seemed so strange and scary to me, it was the whole lifestyle that came with the job. After a day down the pit I’d see my friends’ dads head off down the pub or the miners’ welfare club for pints of beer and games of darts and snooker and banter about birds and football, and I would silently vow to myself, not me. Not ever.

* * *

I had spotted the advert in the Doncaster Free Press when I was doing my weekly trawl of the job section.

WANTED – A NEW GENERATION OF MINERS FOR MARKHAM MAIN COLLIERY, ARMTHORPE

It was the early Eighties, Arthur Scargill was raising hell and there was a drive to revitalise the colliery, a last-ditch attempt to save the local industry by injecting a burst of youthful energy. But it was the last line of the advert that jumped off the page and grabbed my attention.