The Black Mountains (17 page)

The boys teased Jim, of course, but he seemed not to mind. Married life was suiting him, and he looked so well that Fred thought that if he could find the right girl he might follow his example.

Ted, however, did not envy him at all. At seventeen, he liked girls well enough, but only as a passing fancy. There were too many other things to interest him.

He had always had a good voice, and when Stanley Bristow from the livery stables invited him to join his concert party, he soon discovered he enjoyed entertaining, too. The concert party was fun—besides singing some solos, he was expected to join with the rest of the company for comic and musical sketches, and the rehearsals and the shows themselves added spice to the long winter evenings.

Then, in the summer, there were the horses. It had only taken one visit to Bath Races with his mates to get him hooked. There was something electric about the atmosphere. He placed a bet or two himself, and was lucky enough to win a few shillings, but it wasn't the money that attracted him. It was the way the adrenaline flowed as the horses galloped past the rails, the feeling of being perched on the very edge of a precipice with the difference between winning and losing finely balanced, the sensation of leaving the real world behind for an hour or two.

So entranced was he, Ted made it his business to get to know Joe Olivers, the local bookmaker, and when his regular ‘runner' was laid up with a broken leg, Ted was employed to carry the bets, which he collected from the other men in the George and the Miners Arms. It was against the law, of course, but Ted didn't let that worry him. It wasn't as if he was doing anything really wrong. Slipping the bets out under the very nose of the local bobby was all part of the fun, and when he took them up Westbury Hill to Joe's house, he always had the excuse of taking Nipper for a walk if anyone asked him awkward questions.

But these things were all welcome distractions from the pit, and the carting which he had grown to hate. How he had ever found it satisfying, he could not imagine. He had now had four years of crawling on his hands and knees with the putt of coal attached to his waist, and he was bored and frustrated. Sometimes he thought of looking for a different job, but thinking was as far as it went. He wasn't trained for anything, and the few jobs in Hillsbridge he might have had a chance of getting were just as boring as carting, and some of them less well-paid. He could go to South Wales, he supposed, as some of the older lads had done. The seams there were thicker, so that a man could walk upright instead of crawling on all fours, and the money that could be made was much better than here in the Somerset coal-field. But moving to South Wales would mean leaving home and Charlotte's cooking, and Ted didn't bother to give it much serious consideration.

Most other men, after all, continued working in the pits week after week, year after year, his father included. It was not so much what you did to earn a living that mattered; how you spent your free time was far more important, and the two were hardly connected.

At least, so Ted thought, until in October of 1913, something happened to change his mind.

It was a wet and wild Friday afternoon. Above ground, the weather had turned cold so suddenly that the leaves had fallen from the trees with almost indecent haste, covering the lanes and pathways with a carpet of dull brown, but in the warren of black passages beneath Hillsbridge, it was as muggy as ever, and Ted was feeling wretched.

He was suffering from a heavy cold, partly caused by the change of temperature when the cage emerged from the bowels of the earth into the chill October air, and partly by the succession of late nights he'd had lately. His eyes were streaming, so was his nose, and he'd had no appetite at all for his cogknocker—the huge hunk of bread and cheese Charlotte had packed for him. Most of that he'd thrown to the mice. But he'd drunk every drop of his cold tea, and his throat still felt like a piece of sandpaper.

As the day wore on, he grew steadily worse, and each putt of coal felt like a ton weight as he dragged it on hands and knees along the narrow way towards the topple—the steep incline that led from the seam to the road below. Here it was his job to walk down the incline, fetch a tub, and bring it back to the top. Then, when he had filled it with two or three putts of coal, he had to take it back down the incline again, using an iron sprag between the spokes of the wheel as a brake.

It was a tortuous exercise and a dangerous one, though the carting boys took it cheerfully for granted, and Ted was no different. Like them, he accepted the fact that the tub would run away each time the sprag was removed unless he did something to stop it, and the obvious way to do that was to hook the crook that was fastened around his waist into an eye on the tub, to enable him to use the weight of his own body to hold on to it. The fact that the tub weighed five hundred weight or so when it was full did not worry him unduly, and he had become adept at running the tubs down the incline in a series of stops and starts, releasing the sprag, letting the tub run down a few feet, and driving the sprag back into the wheel before it gained too much speed.

So good at it was he that he did not stop to wonder what would happen if the sprag missed the wheel for some reason. It didn't do to worry about things like that.

That afternoon, however, Ted was tempted to take the tub down with two putts of coal in it instead of three. Twice as he was pushing the tub up the incline he had to stop to blow his nose into the soaking rag he had tucked into the waistband of his trousers, standing with his back against the tub to stop it from running away, and it all seemed too much effort. But coal left at the top would mean an extra journey, and be didn't care for the thought of that either. So into the tub went the usual three loads, and Ted hooked himself to it and released the sprag.

At first it seemed like an ordinary run. Down the incline he inched, with the tarred rope biting into the flesh around his waist each time he released the sprag and took the strain for a second or two. A couple of stumbling steps, braced against the weight of the tub, a quick lunge forward, and the relief as the sprag bit into the wheel and held. Pull it out, be hauled a step, push it in, stop. Pull it out, be hauled a step, push it in, stop. It was a relentless, beating rhythm, and it came to him as automatically as breathing.

But today something went wrong.

A third of the way down the incline, with the wheel free and the tub straining at the rope, he drove the sprag back and waited for the jerk and the skid that should follow. But it never came. Perhaps because of his feverishness, he had missed the all important gap in the wheel. The sprag struck a spoke, and was catapulted out again. The wheels took another turn, gathering speed already, and Ted, still attached to the tub by the rope around his waist, was jerked roughly forward.

For a split second in time, he wondered stupidly what had happened. Then, as the tub surged forward, he knew. He dug his heels into the rough, dust-covered floor and pressed his hands against the topple walls, bracing himself until he thought his spine would snap. But his feet slithered over the stony incline, and the skin hung in ribbons on the palms of his hands. On the steep gradient it was hopeless. The tub gathered momentum, the rope jerked painfully around his waist, and he lost his footing and fell face down on the track. Faster and faster the tub rolled on, dragging him behind it. His eyes and nose were full of coal-dust.

Oddly, in spite of the rough ground, he felt no pain. Reality no longer existed, and he was only aware of a strong feeling of indignation.

“I'm going to die, and I'm not ready,” he thought. “I'm too young.”

The black walls of the topple rushed past him and Ted had the vague yet unmistakable impression of being pulled through a dark tunnel at great speed. Then there was a crash so loud that it reverberated through his body, and he felt himself being thrown up like a rag doll by the rope around his waist. For a moment it felt as if the world were turning over, then, with the clarity that comes when the happenings of a split second seem stretched into eternity, he believed he was flying. The roof of the passage skimmed past. He felt it brush his leg, a kiss of searing pain. The earth rushed up to meet him, and in the blackness he was surprised to see his mother's face, clear, radiant, and oddly untroubled. His body thudded down on dust-covered rock, knocking the breath from his lungs. He was aware of nothing but a bright light coming closer and closer until it enveloped him in its intensity and the world about him was still.

They told him afterwards that less than a minute had passed between the sprag missing the wheel and the tub becoming derailed at the foot of the topple, catapulting him in a full arc so that he landed on a heap of coal in front of it. But to Ted it seemed as if he had lived his life and gone beyond in those moments. He regained consciousness as the cage jolted him to the surface, but his first impression was not of pain or discomfort or the streaming walls of the shaft, but rather of coming back, somewhat unwillingly, from a great distance.

The grey October light filtered into the cage and with it the chill, damp air. Someone threw a coat across him. And the pain began, like the first waves of a rising tide that lapped at him gently but remorselessly, with the promise of the swirling flood to follow. He gritted his teeth against the searing agony of flesh scraped raw, and nothing seemed important beyond living through the next moment—and the next.

Dimly, he was aware of voices and people scurrying to and fro. Then, as the fog that seemed to blanket his senses lifted for a second or two, he realized what they were saying. There was no cart waiting at the pithead for coal. They had nothing in which to take him home.

Above him, the great wheel turned and the cage descended once more. The rhythmic grinding sounded both loud and distant at one and the same time. Moments later a familiar voice penetrated his brain, and he opened his eyes to see his father and Fred standing beside him, their faces pale beneath the thick layer of black dust.

“What are you doing here?” Ted croaked.

Fred leaned over, sliding his arm under his neck and raising him.

“I'm going to get you home, mate.”

“There's no cart I heard them say.”

“I know. I'm going to have to carry you on my back.”

Fred stood up, flexing his knees and standing ready. James and the other men lifted Ted on to his brother's back, so that his arms were around Fred's neck and his legs about his waist. Then, with James walking beside them, they started across the colliery yard.

Down South Hill they went, through the centre of town and into Conygre Hill which led to Greenslade Terrace. Never had it seemed longer or more steep. With every step Fred took, fresh waves of pain flooded through Ted's body. Before they had passed the seat that marked the half-distance, sweat was pouring off the older boy in black rivers. But he plodded on, his breath rasping harshly while beside him James swore helplessly at his own inability to help. His back might still be strong enough, but the effort would be too much for his chest, constricted as it was by coal and stone dust. There was nothing he could do but walk beside them and watch Ted's blood mingle with Fred's sweat.

“This'll do it,” James said to Fred. “This'll start your mother off again.”

But in spite of Ted's wounds, he felt no animosity towards the pit. Accidents happened often. They were a way of life. And Ted was alive. That was all that mattered.

TED LAY on the sofa where Amy had lain, fighting the same battle that she had fought.

But as the pain and memory of the accident receded, Ted began to feel sorry for himself. His gratitude at being alive turned to resentment that the accident should have happened at all, and he was particularly angry that it should have been the result of his own carelessness.

Lying on the sofa was such a waste of time. He'd missed out on the concert party rehearsals and one concert, and lost his chance of being permanent bookie's runner for Joe Chivers.

“He's like a bear with a sore head,” Charlotte told Redvers when he came in to see him. “He'll snap your nose off as soon as look at you.”

“Is that right?” Redvers asked, poking his grinning face round the kitchen door. “Is it safe to come in?”

“Yes, come on,” Ted said. “ Come and tell me what's been going on at work, and I might even be glad I'm here.”

Redvers sat down on the settle, stretching his legs out to the fire.

“There's nothing much to tell.”

“No, I don't suppose there is,” Ted grumbled. “ That's it really, isn't it. Day after day—nothing. Just grinding on, and for what? We haven't got a chance of making colliers. There's plenty of them. It's carting boys they're short of, and that's what well still be doing in ten years' time, if you ask me.”

Redvers stretched out a lazy hand to scratch Nipper's ear.

“You're probably right. But there's nothing we can do about it.”

“We could go to Wales,” Ted said. “ There's several gone over there, and they're doing very well. They earn twice what we do. It makes you think, Redvers.”

“I s'pose it does,” Redvers said affably, and there the conversation ended. Charlotte came in with Harry, and they both sat down to look at a picture book. The two boys went off at a tangent, discussing the fortunes of Hillsbridge Town Football Team, and even touching on Evan Comer, who was now playing a wing position for them.

“After what we did to him, it's a wonder he can still play,” Ted said, smiling with satisfaction at the memory. Already he had forgotten what he had said about going to Wales. It wasn't, after all, a serious plan, just an idea that provided an escape route from the prospect of carting year after year at South Hill Pit. In reality he knew he would be returning once he was well enough.

It was one November afternoon that Ted took his first walk since the accident. He decided to call into the pit and have a chat with the lads on the screens, but not long after he had arrived he was surprised to be summoned to the manager's office, a small, spartan room in the corner of one of the smith's shops, and the domain of Herbert Gait.