Читать книгу From Coal Dust to Stardust - Gary Cockerill - Страница 8

‘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.

EXCELLENT RATES OF PAY

I was 18 and in desperate need of money. When I had graduated from art college a few months previously I had assumed I would walk straight into a design job in Sheffield or Doncaster, but despite what the tutors had promised us the opportunities just weren’t there. I knew that my only hope of success was to go to London, that magical place where the streets – if not quite paved with gold – were at least paved with advertising agencies and trendy design studios where an ambitious graduate might make their fortune.

Kim had by now secured a modelling agent in London, so we had decided to move down South and get a place together. Besides, Armthorpe no longer held any appeal for me. Most of my friends seemed content to remain in the village forever with their apprenticeships and girlfriends, their lives comfortably mapped out, but in my mind I was destined for bigger and better things.

I’ve got to get out or I’ll be stuck here forever, I would panic as I sat through another night down the pub with people with whom I increasingly felt I had nothing in common. But to start a new life in London required serious funds, which is why, when I spotted the newspaper advert, I shrugged off a lifetime’s prejudice and dialled the number without a second thought.

I didn’t tell my parents I was going for a job at the colliery. There was no point; I knew what their reaction would be. Kim wasn’t keen either, but she understood we needed to get some money together in order to start our lives together in London. Which is why I found myself here, within the gates of Markham Main for the first time, sitting nervously in front of the colliery’s three wise men.

‘I don’t come from a mining background and I haven’t had any experience of this sort of work,’ I told the panel of flat caps. ‘But I want to put 100 per cent into this. I’m a hard worker and a quick learner, and I’m really interested in a career in, um, coal.’

‘Well, Gary, you’re a bit … over-qualified for this job,’ said one of the men, glancing over my cv. ‘But you’ve got a good attitude and seem like the sort of lad who’d do well here at Markham. You’ll start the training next week. Well done, lad.’

On the walk back home, I thought about bottling it. Now I’d actually been offered the job all my old fears bubbled back up to the surface: I was convinced I would die or be hideously maimed in a tragic accident – at the very least end up with permanently blackened fingernails. But by the time I arrived back at my front door I had made up my mind to accept; if I’m honest, there had never really been any doubt that I would after they’d told me the dizzying figures I could earn by clocking up double shifts and over-time. For five hundred quid a week Mum and Dad would understand. Eventually.

* * *

There was no sign of the dawn when I got on my bike just before 5 a.m. and pedalled furiously through the freezing winter darkness towards the colliery for my first day down the mine. I was carrying a flask of strong tea and the sandwiches my mum had left out for me the night before. She might not be happy about her son’s new career (in fact that would be a considerable understatement) but after a screaming argument she and Dad had at least grudgingly understood my reasons for taking the job.

I’d already sat through four weeks of classroom-based training to prepare me and my fellow recruits for pit life. There were a few lads who, like me, saw this as an opportunity to earn a fast buck then move on to bigger and better things, but the rest of them were from mining families and landing a job at the colliery was the pinnacle of their ambition. I just couldn’t relate to their mentality: go underground, do the job, get pissed – that was all they seemed to want out of life.

I thought they were thick and lazy, and I’m quite sure they hated me in return. They certainly thought I was a snob and picked up on the fact that I was a bit more sensitive and softly spoken, as I got called a ‘fucking poof’ on more than one occasion. Some of them had been to school with me and knew all about my dancing and singing career as a kid, so they had plenty of ammunition. They’d even take the piss out of my sandwiches, because Mum would put a bit of salad in with the filling instead of their bog-standard plain cheese spread or fish paste. But I really couldn’t give a toss. I was impatient to start raking it in as quickly as possible so I could escape this hellhole.

I passed through the colliery gates, locked up my bike and reluctantly joined the mass of men clocking in for shifts, our breath showing like puffs of steam in the icy morning air. Then it was straight over to the changing rooms where I jostled through the throng of bodies towards my locker, avoiding eye contact as much as possible. I remember the smell of that room to this day – damp, dirty, earthy. It was the smell of the mine.

I tried to calm my ever-increasing nerves by focusing on the process of getting myself dressed in my kit: first the thermal pants, vest and leggings, a rough cotton shirt that felt like it was made from hessian then a one- or two-piece overall over the top. Big socks and those hard, heavy boots. And finally a big navy overcoat, the Armthorpe logo proudly stitched on the breast, and a white helmet with a torch. Nothing fitted me properly. I was a skinny thing when I was younger – tall, but with hardly any meat on me. I wasn’t bred to be a miner like most of them down there.

My heavy boots rubbed and the helmet dug into my scalp as I followed the army of navy-coated clones trudging across the yard to a low concrete bunker. This nondescript building held the lift that would plunge us over a mile and a half down into the blackness. One of the foremen counted us as we filed past him so they’d know how many of us went in and (I realised with a stab of fear) how many of us came back out again.

You’re going to die in there! screamed my inner drama queen, always alert to potential disaster. But it was too late to turn and run, as I was carried along by the tide of bodies into the bunker, through the double set of metal lift gates and into the mouth of hell. The lift was only a couple of metres square, but there must have been about thirty men crammed into the tiny space. A packed Tube at rush hour has absolutely nothing on a colliery lift. Bloody sardines, we were, squeezed so tight that it was impossible to take a deep breath -which was probably lucky what with the reek of farts and stale beer fumes. When every last millimetre of space was filled the heavy gates were shut with a deafening clank, a siren sounded, lights flashed and then – terror. Sheer bloody terror as we fell at unimaginable speeds down, down into the bowels of the earth …

After what seemed like a few seconds the brakes kicked in with a squealing, shuddering shriek and the lift lurched to a stop, my stomach arriving a moment or two behind it. Before I had time to recover, the doors slid open and a blast of icy cold air rushed into the stuffy lift as I was carried out by the crowd into … God knows where.

Once my eyes had adjusted to the unexpected brightness, I could see I was I was standing in a vast underground cavern lit by huge florescent lights. Coughs, occasional shouts of laughter and the constant drip-drip-drip of water echoed around the cavernous, freezing space. Under my boots the floor was slushy and damp, like it was covered with melting black ice. From here, tunnels radiated in every direction – some like subterranean super-highways supported by soaring steel arches, others (I would discover to my horror) so tiny you’d be forced to get down on your hands and knees and crawl over the icy gravel.

You could be trudging for miles, often in complete darkness as the lights frequently failed – and at the furthest point from the lift shaft was the blistering-hot black heart of the mine, the coalface.

* * *

Life down the mine was one of extremes. You were either working in the freezing cold, or – depending on how near to the core you were – unbearable heat. It must have been 100 degrees at the coalface. The machinery used for cutting away at the rock got so hot that you constantly had to pour water on it to cool it down, one of my jobs as it turned out. Similarly, it was either completely silent or so deafening that despite wearing ear protectors you’d still have tinnitus by the time you got up next morning.

As I was one of the brighter of the new recruits – and possibly because I was built more for tap-dancing than rock-smashing – I was assigned a job that relied on brains rather than brawn. My responsibility was safety: making sure machinery was running smoothly and official procedures were correctly followed in whichever area I was assigned to that day. Sort of like the swotty school prefect who checks all the students’ ties are done up and shouts at them for running in the corridors, except I was having to boss around men twice my age and size. Unsurprisingly, this role did little to improve my reputation with the other miners, especially as most of the time they paid next to no attention to the rulebook.

‘Er, sorry, but you really should be wearing your helmet in this area,’ I would mutter to some huge hulk of a man.

‘Why don’t you just fuck off, Cockerill?’

‘Um, right. Okay.’

The men tended to do exactly what they wanted, which is probably why there were so many accidents. What with the very real threat of fire, explosion, poisonous gas leaks, suffocation, roof collapse and the terrifying machinery – including an enormous corkscrew-like drill that could shear off layers of rock to reach the seam of coal as effortlessly as slicing through a joint of ham – a mine is hardly the safest working environment at the best of times. There were enough ways to die down there without some wanker lighting up a cigarette or forgetting to apply a safety brake. It didn’t take me long to realise why the pay was so good on this job: that 500 quid I was pocketing at the end of each week was actually danger money.

One day I was working by the side of the tracks that carried the carts of coal up from the depths of the mine. Each of these wagons was the size of a small car and, filled to overflowing with its black cargo, unimaginably heavy. Suddenly there was a yell and a clatter and I turned, terrified, to see one of these monster trolleys careering out of control down the slope towards where I was standing. I threw myself out of the way, ending up with only a gash across my forehead and a few bruises. The lad I was working with wasn’t so lucky – poor kid was stretchered out with a shattered leg, sobbing and screaming for his mum.

During my seven months at Markham Main a bloke had his arm severed in an accident and another, tragically, was decapitated when he became entangled in machinery at the coalface. I wasn’t there when he was killed and I barely knew the guy, but I remember standing by the side of the street with the rest of the village as the funeral procession went past, an entourage of dozens of black-clad mourners following a magnificent horsedrawn coffin, barely visible for all the wreaths.

Death was a fact of life down the mine. The older miners would take great pleasure freaking us out with tales of ghosts haunting the tunnels and distant caverns of Markham Main. You’d be on your own, dozing off in the gloom, when someone would creep up on you – just to get a laugh by scaring the shit out of you. I began to dread the mine’s dark corners as much as its more obvious dangers. Honest to God, every single day I went down there thinking that I wasn’t going to come back up again. The only thing that made me stick it out was the money and the thought that with every day I was a little bit nearer to London and a glittering future.

Almost as bad as the fear, however, was the boredom. The way that some of the men dealt with the tedium of long days stuck underground was by having a wank with one of the stash of well-thumbed girlie mags you’d find in the systems booths. My sexuality was all over the place at the time and it didn’t even cross my mind to involve myself in anything like that. But, as it turned out, one of my colleagues had other ideas …

One of the unwritten rules of colliery life was that all the men showered together at the end of a shift. It was all part of the blokeish camaraderie – washing each other’s backs, slapping each other with wet towels, bonding over banter about birds and football. Like a sports locker room, I suppose, but cruder, grimier and more threatening. As you can imagine, I was way, way out my comfort zone. When I got home I always got straight in the bath to wash off the filth of that grim communal shower room.

One evening I was doing my usual thing of soaping up and getting out as quickly as possible when I noticed that one of the men was smiling at me. Chris Johnson. What the hell did he want? I had few friends in here – and Chris Johnson definitely wasn’t one of them. Hard as nails and built like Mike Tyson, everyone in the village knew you didn’t mess with him.

‘It’s Gary, isn’t it?’ he smiled, sauntering through the wet bodies to where I stood. He must have been in his mid-thirties, and with his black hair and pale blue eyes he looked a bit like an ugly, pumped-up Oliver Reed. ‘You alright, lad?’

I might have imagined it, but it seemed that the men who had been showering near me moved a little further away.

‘Fine, thanks.’ I tried to keep my eyes fixed on the grimy water swirling down the drain.

‘How was your day?’ Chris was steadily soaping himself as he talked. I couldn’t help but notice he had the biggest dick I had ever seen. Massive it was, halfway down his leg. I was too terrified to speak.

‘You know, Gary, I’ve been keeping an eye on you down the mine,’ he said. ‘I know it can be bloody hard when you’re new. I remember what it was like when I started – scared shitless I was!’

He chatted away for a bit, telling me about his wife and kids, asking about my girlfriend, and I started to relax a little. He did seem genuinely friendly, and God knows I could do with having the colliery’s resident hard man on my side.

And then it happened.

‘Can you wash my back?’ he asked casually, turning round. I quickly rubbed the greying bar of soap over his vast shoulders to get the worst of the soot off.

‘Thanks, lad. Your turn now.’

I knew something was wrong almost immediately. Rather than the usual perfunctory scrub, Chris was moving his hands over me with slow, tender strokes, caressing my shoulders and exploring my chest almost like a lover. Exactly like a lover, I realised in horror as his hand moved lower down my back towards my bum. Then suddenly his fingers were everywhere. Touching, grabbing, probing … Horrified, I wriggled out of his clutching paws.

‘Thanks!’ I spluttered. ‘Got to go now!’

‘Bye then, Gary,’ he said calmly, an amused glint in his eye. ‘See you next week.’

It wasn’t a question.

From then on, Chris cornered me in the showers every time we were working the same shift. I’d try my best to avoid him, but several times I couldn’t. It fell into the same pattern: we’d chat pleasantly, he’d offer to wash my back and then try to grope me. I was completely freaked out, but too scared of the guy to tell him to stop – besides, I very much doubted that anyone in those showers would come to my rescue if things turned nasty. Thankfully I never had to find out, as a few weeks later I gratefully clocked out of my last shift at Markham Main.

Although I had only been at the colliery for a few months, I was a completely different creature from the pink-cheeked boy of before. To put it bluntly, I was a complete wreck. Working underground for seven-day weeks, sometimes pulling double shifts (there was no such thing as the Working Time Directive in those days) had left me deathly pale, painfully thin and completely exhausted.

I had a constant hacking cough – and every time I coughed would bring up the most evil-looking green muck you can imagine – and convinced myself that I was going to die of Black Lung, the chronic disease that tragically killed so many miners. Every night when I got home I’d scour my hands until they bled to get the coaldust out from the dozens of little nicks and cuts and from under my nails. That time I fell and gashed my forehead I was so paranoid that I’d be left with what was known as a ‘black man pinch’ – a scar that was permanently blackened from trapped coaldust – that I scrubbed at the raw, bloody wound with a toothbrush for two agonising days to get the soot out.

But the biggest problem was with those boots. All that trudging for miles across rocky, uneven surfaces in ill-fitting footwear left me with the worst blisters you can imagine. I would gingerly take off my socks at night and my entire heel would be a puffy mass of agonising pink and white. Desperate to ease the pain, I would grit my teeth and pop the blisters with a needle – but of course I was always at the doctor’s with infections and blood poisoning.

I admit I had started out at Markham Main a cocky little sod, convinced I was better than the other blokes, but after seven months down the mine I was left with quite a different attitude. As much as I hated every moment of the job and dreaded the miners’ welfare evenings where I’d have to force down a pint and try to join in the banter feeling desperately out of place, the close-knit community of a mining village finally made sense to me. I had learnt how to be a team player.

The miners’ strike had left some families in the village on the verge of starvation, but all their neighbours would rally round, bring them food, help them through the hard times. I now had a genuine respect for these men who every day risked their lives to do a job that had been lined up for them since birth. While I was floating around with my head in the clouds, they knuckled down and unquestioning did what was expected of them, despite the horror stories that they had no doubt been hearing about the mines from their fathers and grandfathers since birth.

And today, when I go back to Armthorpe, I see how these same men have completely rebuilt their lives since the pits closed, retraining as plumbers or builders, keeping their families together while the world they had always known fell apart.

With the few thousand we had saved up – together with a bit of money donated by our parents – Kim and I could finally realise our dream of moving to London. We found a little studio above a bathroom showroom in Ealing, a suburb of West London. The flat was tiny, barely 15 ft square, with a mini toilet in a cupboard (over which hung a shower attachment) and the constant drone of traffic thanks to the M4 Hammersmith flyover which was just outside the window, but it was clean and cheap – and, most importantly, it was all ours.

Dad hired a mini-van and drove us down along with Mum, my sister Lynne and Kim’s mum, who cried all the way about her baby leaving home. We had a suitcase each and a few bits our mums had bought us – some bedding, sugar, tea and a pint of milk – but that was it.

That first night, after we’d waved a final goodbye to our parents, we celebrated with cheap fizzy wine (out of mugs as we didn’t have any glasses) and burger and chips from our local greasy spoon, a place which would become our main source of nutrition as we didn’t have a kitchen and besides, neither of us could cook. That night we stayed up talking into the early hours, a combination of nerves, excitement and the M4 traffic keeping us from sleep. While we were both terrified at being on our own in a strange city, we were incredibly excited about the future. Kim obviously had work lined up and I had already gone through the London phone directories and made a list of advertising agencies, design studios, printers – anyone who might take on an enthusiastic art college graduate with Honours. I was giddy with optimism. It felt like our lives were about to begin.