No Man’s Land. Simon Tolkien
He had to see who or what was making the noise above. He was halfway up when it stopped and the stairs began to give way beneath him. The nightmare memory of falling in the pit cage flashed across his mind and he reached out and grabbed the newel post at the top of the stairs and pulled himself up to safety just as the staircase collapsed behind him and the house seemed to tremble on its foundations.
He was in a square room, standing across from a small sash window that had long ago lost all its glass. Below the sill an emaciated black-and-white cat was standing, precariously keeping its balance on a rocking chair that was rocking violently to and fro again, responding to the shaking of the house. The animal was clearly enraged – its fur was standing on end, its back was arched and an angry snarl had exposed its teeth. Adam just had time to take a step back and put his hands up to protect his face before it sprang at him through the air, scratching his arms before it leapt down through the hole in the corner where the staircase had been and disappeared.
Adam looked down and inspected the damage: livid lacerations along the backs of both forearms that were starting to bleed. He took off his shirt and used the sleeves to staunch the blood. He felt faint and sat down on the cherry-wood chair, keeping his feet on the floor to stop it rocking. He could see it was handmade, each arm and leg lovingly carved and crafted to enable it to stand the test of time. The miner who had lived here had made it, Adam guessed, for his wife perhaps to sit at the window and look out at the sun rising over the hills.
He closed his eyes for a moment, imagining the past, and was startled by Ernest shouting his name from down below.
‘I’m all right,’ he said, getting up and leaning out of the window. ‘I’ll come down in a minute.’
‘How? You’ve broken the staircase, you idiot. I told you to be careful,’ said Ernest, laughing. ‘Wait there and I’ll find something for you to jump down on to.’
Adam turned to go back and sit in the chair but jumped, knocking it over, when a mouse scuttled under his feet, looking back at him for a moment before it vanished into a hole in the wainscot. And down next to the opening, he saw a toy train half hidden by some rags. He bent down and picked it up. It was made out of the same shining cherry wood as the rocking chair with each detail beautifully executed down to the wheels that slowly turned as he rolled it to and fro along a floor plank.
The chair for the wife and a toy for their child: Adam could see them in his mind’s eye, looking out of the window at just this time of day, waiting for the miner to return home, putting their trust in a future which was about to be snatched away from them. Just like his own mother had in London. And thinking of her again, he suddenly saw her bedroom in the house in Islington as clearly as if he had been transported back in time and was standing on the half-landing looking in. There was the little desk in the corner where she did her accounts, there the cross on the mildew-stained wall, and there the empty bed covered with the cheap eiderdown to which she would never return. She had hoped and dreamed too, unaware of what lay in store for her just around the corner.
‘Come on,’ shouted Ernest, his voice breaking in harshly on Adam’s reverie. ‘Time to jump!’
Adam looked down and saw that Ernest had dragged an old mattress below the window.
‘Better land on your feet,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t want to put my face in this fleabag.’
Adam tried to lift the sash but it came away in his hands and so he knocked away the rest of the frame and laughed when he hit the ground amid an explosion of dust and feathers. He was young and the strong blood pumping through his veins wouldn’t let him stay melancholy for very long.
They had been at Scarsdale for almost a year and Adam had his own life now. He rose early to take the bus into Gratton and worked hard at his books all day and in the evening too, when he laboured over Latin and Greek translations, straining his eyes to read by the light of the dim oil lamp while Ernest snored in his bed on the other side of the room. Adam loved the ancient world. He’d first heard many of the stories from his mother. She’d begin by reading from books but would then put them down and carry on the narrative herself in her own words. She had a gift for painting word pictures and he could remember how as a child he’d seen in his mind’s eye Odysseus and his comrades waiting nervously inside the wooden horse as the unsuspecting Trojans dragged it inside the gates of their city or Caesar stabbed to death on the ides of March. Listening to her, the heroes and villains of the past became more real than the people in his own life; and now, reading the ancient books, Adam felt the same thrill again.
He liked the school and he enjoyed being the headmaster’s prize pupil. But in the house at the end of Station Street he was less happy. The atmosphere remained strained and he could see how his father was being eaten up with stress and anxiety. Daniel’s proud receipt of the glowing reports that his son brought back from school seemed to be the only times when Adam saw his father happy. Otherwise he was a shadow of the man he’d been in London and it was hard for Adam to recognize him as the same happy-go-lucky person who had challenged the gypsy champion to a boxing match in the market square and come away with ten shillings jingling in his coat pocket.
It was Daniel’s isolated position as negotiator between the union and the owners that was the source of the trouble. As he had promised Adam he would do in the train coming north, he had tried to negotiate solutions to disputes rather than use them as an excuse for escalating conflict. And in the process he had developed a good relationship with Sir John Scarsdale and the managers, but mutual respect had not brought with it significant concessions. The essence of the problem was that Scarsdale was an old pit. In its day it had filled the coffers of Sir John’s father and financed handsome improvements at Scarsdale Hall, including the renovation of the agricultural cottages that Ernest had pointed out to Adam on their walk. But since the turn of the century productivity had steadily fallen. In response the miners had dug deeper and the narrow Oakwell seam had recently yielded good coal, but the greater depth brought more risks and the need for increased expenditure on safety.
Sometimes there were ad hoc union meetings on Friday evenings at Edgar’s house after the week’s money had been divvied up among the butty teams, and, from his bedroom up above, Adam would hear voices rising in anger and accusation. It was usually Whalen Dawes who took the lead. He had a way with words and knew how to play on his audience’s fears, turning Daniel’s long hours closeted with Sir John and the managers against him.
‘You’re cosyin’ up with ’em,’ he’d say, taunting his enemy. ‘That’s what you’re doin’. Scarsdale gives thee a nice glass o’ wine from one o’ his deecanters an’ calls thee a gen’l’man an’ soon you’re eatin’ out o’ ’is ’and like a pussycat, while the likes o’ us are left to suffer, ’ackin out ’is coal in the dusty black darkness, earnin’ next to nowt.’
Daniel would deny the accusation but his words sounded empty and hollow when he had so little to show for his efforts. And when he was absent, Whalen would go further. ‘’E’s not one o’ us; ’e’s a southerner an’ ’e doesna think like we do,’ he would say, watching Edgar all the time out of the corner of his eye to gauge his reaction while the other miners muttered amongst themselves. He was itching to have Daniel removed as checkweighman so that he could be appointed in his place and take control of the local union, but he could not move without Edgar’s support and he wasn’t sure of that yet.
He decided instead to act when the chance came to take on Sir John himself. The deaths of two Scarsdale miners gave him the opportunity. For whatever reason there had been a recent dramatic increase in the number of firedamp explosions in the mine. The cause was in dispute: the management blamed it on the growing depth of the seams being mined, but the men said that the deputies were not taking enough precautions to measure methane levels before work began each day.
This latest disaster had been particularly bad as the exploding gas ignited the coal dust on the walls of the main tunnel in the Hillsborough district, causing a flash fire which trapped a collier and his filler