“Very helpful, your young lady. Wasn’t she, sergeant?”
“I’ll say,” agreed Stubbs. I didn’t like the grin on his face either. It wasn’t a smirk, like Moxon’s, more of a leer.
“It’s Sherwood Crescent. Down the bottom of First Avenue. And don’t spare the horses.”
“Funny thing is, though,” said Moxon, “some people we talk to seem to be under the impression you have a different young lady. Someone by the name of Lisa Prior. How can that be?”
“Can’t imagine. Just drop me off at the end of the street if you like.”
“It seems to us like something that needs checking out. I don’t like inconsistencies. We haven’t asked the friendly Irish girl yet, but I dare say she’d be able to put us straight on this one. Just for verification. We like our records to be accurate.”
“I’ve had enough of this.”
“You’re quite free to go on your way, of course. Open the door for the gentleman, sergeant.”
Stubbs leaned back and opened the door. I got out. My feet woke up and began screaming.
“You’ll miss that cagoule, I’m afraid,” called Moxon. “I believe it’s starting to rain.”
I set off to walk the rest of the way to Medensworth. It was another hour before the Forest Estate came in sight, and my mind was wandering with tiredness by then.
Whenever I look at these houses, I remember what it was like round here during that 1984-85 miners’ strike. You can’t imagine it if you didn’t live through it. From the day a young Yorkshire picket called David Lee was killed in the streets of Ollerton, the death of the coal industry was sure to follow. A Greek tragedy, that’s what folk have called it who wrote books on the subject. I think they mean it was inevitable. They’re right.
There’s been a lot of stuff about the mining industry since then. Some of it is true enough, but it only tells half the story. Some pretend the closure of a colliery brings out the best in people, things like unity and comradeship. Community spirit, and all that. Oh yeah? Here in Nottinghamshire, they remember that it was those same Yorkshire pit men who tried to bully them into striking against their union’s instructions, who hurled abuse and bricks at them day after day, who smashed up their cars and their homes, terrorised their families and brought chaos to their communities. And these were men who’d belonged to the same bleedin’ union. Try telling the Notts miners all about unity and comradeship.
Even in 1997, when they closed Asfordby pit in Leicestershire, some of the men there turned down transfers to the Yorkshire area. They preferred to go on the dole, rather than work than work in an NUM pit. And that was twelve years after the strike had finished.
Or tell it to those NUM men, who stood shoulder to shoulder behind Scargill, loyal to the core, believing wholeheartedly that they were fighting to save the coal industry. Those were the blokes who watched their own mates break ranks and turn scab, working right through their strike to keep coal production going. They were the men who resisted when Margaret Thatcher turned the might of the British police against them, massed ranks of southern bobbies waving their bulging pay packets at picket lines while striking miners and their families queued at soup kitchens right through the winter. They were the same men who finally had to give in, drifting back to work, angry and defeated, until the inevitable outcome — their pits closed after all. Those lads know a thing or two about bitterness.
Almost the whole of Nottinghamshire sits on what they call the coal measures. This is a huge slab of the earth’s crust, tilted at an angle so that it comes right up to the surface near the Notts-Derbyshire border. But to get the best coal you have to deep mine. This means sinking shafts a mile down into the ground to reach the good black stuff.
There are lots of different seams of coal below Nottinghamshire. There’s High Hazles, Wingfield Flags and Brinsley Thin. Dunsil, Abdy and Sutton Marine. Combs, Mainbright and Manton Estheria. Their names are like a poem when you hear them said by a miner. But the really good stuff is called Top Hard. Its seam is thicker than the others, and the coal is better quality too. It’s the hard, dull stuff that burns for a long time, as distinct from the soft, bright coals like the Combs and Gees and High Hazles, which are flashier looking but burn quicker.
Most of the collieries round here were originally sunk to work Top Hard. You could sell the coal for more money, the pit became more viable, and the blokes’ jobs were safer. Any pit with a workable seam of it was onto a good thing. Yes, Top Hard. It would be a miner’s dream if the stuff wasn’t such a bugger to dig out. It’s killed as many men as it’s saved. But that’s life around here. You only survive if you work yourself to death. We live as if we were always in Top Hard.
From the plateau at the back of the Forest Estate you can see over the whole of North Nottinghamshire, as far as the power station cooling towers on the banks of the Trent. On good days the real forest lies below you, a dark blanket of trees across the county. It’s as if a large cloud has cast its shadow there, while the hills beyond still sit in sunlight.
From here, too, you can see more of those strangely shaped hills. Man-made, of course. Landscaped spoil heaps where coal mines used to be. During the strike, the Yorkshire pickets used to swarm over these spoil heaps to get to the pit entrances when the police blocked off the roads. They don’t need to bother now.
You can tell by the state of the spoil heap how long the pit has been shut. Some, like Shirebrook, are grim black cliffs, with deep rivulets down their sides where rain has carved out channels in the slag. But others are green, unnaturally smooth and suspiciously contoured, with sheep turned out on them to graze the stunted grass. This is where pits have been closed and landscaped over.
My mum always said that’s what they did to my dad. Closed him down and landscaped over him. He didn’t last long once they’d chucked him on the dole. He just withered away, like a bit of old root dug up from the earth and left to rot on the surface. Now he’s in the graveyard at St Asaph’s. They put him back into the same ground that he’d spent his life working in.
Of course, pitmen get redundancy money when they’re laid off. This buys them a newer car maybe, a holiday in Majorca, a few new carpets and curtains. It doesn’t buy a man what he had before — self respect. That was what my dad lost the day he walked out of the pit gates for the last time. When he washed off the coal dust that afternoon, it was like he’d washed off all the outer coating that made him a man and left some sad white, squirming thing exposed to the air. He said goodbye to his mates, and he hardly ever left the house again until the day he died. In the end, maybe the grave is the only escape from a life in Top Hard.
The old miners will tell you this sometimes. But only sometimes, and then probably at another pitman’s funeral. When you’ve been through this shit a few times, it tends to leave a scar on you that never heals and never goes away. My scar itches a lot. Sometimes, it burns.
19
“What you going to do then, Stones?”
I’d called another planning meeting, which just showed how desperate I was. After hearing about the night before, it was Slow Kid who asked the usual question. What was I going to do?
“Yeah, what you going to do?” said Metal.
“Don’t ask me,” I said.
“Who else is there to ask, Stones?”
Slow Kid looked around the room meaningfully, first at Metal, then at Doncaster Dave, who was well out of it with a bag of Cheesy Wotsits.