Crow Stone. Jenni Mills
three-quarters of a mile from the crew in the northern sector,’ says Gary. ‘And that’s as the crow flies. There’s another team building roads southwards. But it feels spooky, when you’ve spent your life in working mines and quarries. It’s so quiet. Where are my ear-protectors?’ He clamps his hands to his head in mock panic. ‘You must be used to this, though, if you’ve done a lot of work in old mines.’
I never get used to it. These places still fill me with awe and wonder. How did people–men–have the nerve to do this with no more than picks and candles to tunnel into these hidden places and risk flood, firedamp, being blown apart or buried alive? My feet slither and splash in creamy puddles. There’s water trickling down the walls in places, gleaming in the light.
‘Does anybody ever get lost?’ I ask.
‘Impossible,’ says Gary. ‘Nobody, but nobody, infringes the safety regulations. I make bloody sure of that. Everyone stays inside the roadways, even when we’re constructing a new one. You don’t f— muck around, this place is too dangerous. If Dickon here wants us to take a closer look at a particular feature, we build over to it. No short-cuts for anybody.’
The underground road takes another turn to the left, past a floor-to-ceiling dry-stone buttress built of the discards the quarrymen call gobs. I feel less tense now that I know we’re heading northwards. Every so often, another wood or metal tunnel branches off, leading to another part of the mine. We seem to have been walking for ages. The dampness of the air mists the light; bright as it is, it can’t penetrate far beyond the walkway.
Dickon starts a little whistle, an irritating tuneless hiss through his teeth, as another cathedral undercroft opens up around us, an uneven landscape piled with humps of discard stone. I glance nervously at Gary. Which of us is going to say something?
‘We’re under the main part of the village, where the shops are,’ says Gary. ‘Stop that, Dickon. The miners will go mad if they hear you. At least try to respect the superstitions. Especially here.’ He indicates a couple of the pillars, wearing white shrouds of reinforcing concrete. ‘We call this Co-op Cavern. Had a bit of a roof fall here a few months ago, nothing too serious, but it meant the poor old Co-op up above had to ask the deliverymen to park their lorries five hundred yards down the road and carry the stock in on foot until we got the pillars supported.’
‘How far’s the Co-op above our heads?’
‘About two metres, that’s all.’
‘Christ.’ How do people live with that kind of uncertainty?
‘Found anywhere to live yet?’ asks Gary.
‘Well, nowhere in Green Down,’ I say quickly. Both men laugh.
‘Trouble is, wherever you go in this area there are underground workings,’ says Dickon. I can tell he’s the sort who enjoys being the bearer of glad tidings. He blows his nose with a horrible liquid trumpeting sound. ‘Actually …’ sniff, sniff, it’s still dripping, would you believe, and he’s left a bogey on the end ‘… where you’re living, Gary, that’s got quarrying underneath. I was looking at an old survey map in the council archives last week.’
‘Well, thanks, Dick,’ says Gary. He’s striding on at a pace that suggests he’d like to leave Dickon behind. But you don’t get rid of him that easily.
‘Seriously, Gary, you should get a survey done or you might find your insurance is invalidated.’
‘It’ll be invalidated for bloody sure if I get a survey that proves I’m living on top of disaster.’
‘Sell it,’ I butt in. ‘Let some other bugger find out.’
Gary shoots me a hard look to check I’m joking.
Dickon takes me seriously. ‘That would be immoral.’
‘Listen,’ I say, as we round a corner into another set of pillared chambers, ‘sometimes it’s immoral to tell people things they don’t need to know.’
He’s still trying to work that one out when I hear muffled thuds and crashes. I look at Gary and raise my eyebrows.
‘That’s the works,’ he confirms.
We can see the occasional white flash of light ahead, at the end of a long chamber with pillars that taper like Superman’s torso. Beyond that the workings recede into darkness. I glance at the plan. We’re almost at the north-eastern extreme, under an area called Mare’s Hill.
The fizzing light of welding equipment reveals sharp fragments of activity, the creation of a new section of steel walkway. I can make out ten or so hard-hatted figures. Their high-visibility waistcoats turn them into bright silver scribbles against the darkness.
‘Most of this team are free miners from the Forest of Dean,’ says Gary. ‘Bit of rivalry between them and the Welsh miners on the other team, but they’re a great bunch. Tough as hell, good workers. It’s a hereditary thing, going back to the Middle Ages. They’re the only people allowed to dig the coal there, but I don’t think many can make a living from it now.’
I imagine them out there among the trees, dark, silent men with muscles like knotted rope, the sound of solitary picks echoing through mossy branches. Tock, tock, tock, like woodpeckers.
We’re almost at the end of the walkway now, and the miners have noticed us. One by one they put down their tools, and stand there, waiting, arms folded, in the last pool of electric light. Behind them the darkness is intense.
‘Hi, guys,’ says Gary. ‘Hi, Ted. Just showing the new engineer the workings.’
Ted, the one nearest me, is a big bloke with tattoos snaking up his corded arms. He pushes up the peak of his hard-hat to get a better look. His eyes are flinty, his mouth set like concrete.
Even Dickhead Dickon can tell something’s wrong. I can hear him shifting uneasily from foot to foot in the thunderous silence that’s fallen.
I guess no one thought to tell them that the new engineer is a woman.
It was the sound of a hammer that woke me, penetrating my sleep like someone knocking on the inside of my head. Tap tap tap. Very quiet taps. As if someone was trying not to be heard. I looked at the bedside clock, expecting to find it was the small hours of the morning, but it wasn’t yet midnight. Tap tap tap.
I knew immediately it was a hammer and not anything else because all my life I’d known the different sounds hammers could make. I could tell this was a small hammer, hitting the head of a small nail, hardly more than a pin, driving it gently into wood. The sound pattered through my bedroom window, opened wide to let in a breath of humid summer air. It came from my father’s workshop in the garage.
I pushed back the sheet and swung my feet on to the floor. An orange glow filtered through the curtains from the streetlamps on the hill above our house. Beau Bunny, the toy rabbit I’d had since I was tiny, and a committee of my old teddy bears sat on a wicker chair next to the window. Their beady eyes watched me disapprovingly. I saw myself as a ghostly white shape in the dressing-table mirror. It struck me that I often felt like a ghost in the house.
I crept out of the room and down the stairs–tap tap tap–through the narrow hallway that tonight smelled of fried fish–tap, tap tap–into the kitchen where the washing-up from supper was still piled in the sink. The back door stood open and I slipped through it. The concrete yard was gritty but blessedly cool on the soles of my bare feet. The orange streetlamp made everything unnatural, harder, lurid, shadowed, like frames in a comic strip.
The garage was set well back from the road, separate from the house, at a lower level because the street dropped away downhill. My father had made an entrance in the side, with three steps leading down into the garage. Light sliced out through the half-open door.
As