I’m way behind with my writing this week because I’ve been
really busy at work and sometimes after you’ve spent hours editing a 14 page
document that grew to 28 pages over the space of three days you just don’t feel
like anything other than a large gin and tonic when you get home. Actually it was a grappa or three, but let’s
not quibble over alcohol.
A writer’s job is to imbibe. Bck in teh Victorian and
earlier times the best writers would all partake of various semi-poisonous
substances that inspired visions and feelings of elation. It’s not a new idea
for writers to enjoy their recreational drugs. My drug of choice happens to be
alcohol. I was a hevy smoker once upon a time and could quite easily type like
a mad thing with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of my mouth. You had to
develop a kind of squint to stop the smoke getting into the eye above the fag
end so you could always recognise other journos in the pub because they all had
a sort of lopsided expression and half closed eye.
Actually in your local pub you were almost certain to recognise
other journos because you either worked with them or they worked for a rival
publication, and you had to know who they are to see what they were up to. Chances
are you had already met them in the press gallery at the local court or bench
at the local council and you almost always ended up in the pub with them
afterwards anyway. But once in a while
you spotted someone with teh giveaway ciggy scowl who you didn’t know and you
assumed it was one of the Fleet Street hacks looking for a follow up on
something big, juicy and newsy that had happened recently.
Funny how we always referred to it as Fleet Street even
after most of the nationals moved to Wapping. The Grauniad was never at Fleet
Street anyway, and it didn’t move. Everyone else moved out East and newspapers
were never really the same again. It was a sad demise, and it’s gone even
further since the heady days of national strikes. The internet has killed local journalism
because nobody wants to wait overnight for their news any more. Where’s the
point in waiting for a piece of paper that leaves dark marks on your hands if
you can scroll through your phone in front of Strictly It Takes Two and get
everything you want to know.
You don’t get the garden parties and the 100th
birthdays any more, of course, but I never thought people actually read them
anyway. Even if I enjoyed writing about my little old guy who lived to about
106 in the end and insisted on a birthday kiss every year! Deaf as a post but
lovely and still had an eye for the ladies.
Whatever, I was in the middle of talking about Sheffield and
learning how to be a journalist before I got side tracked. I get side tracked
very easily. You might have noticed by now, but I think it’s a symptom of Nano
that every word counts, even if it’s junk and completely off topic!
I slowly got to know Sheffield after that first lonely,
cold, rainy night at teh bus station and I gradually made a few friends. We
were an odd bunch. There were only about 20 of us doing the pre-entry course
and we were tagged onto the end of a secretarial college. (Which in itself was
part of a technical college) So we weren’t exactly like the other students. We
were all under 20 at the start of the course, but I was the oldest in the group.
A couple of other had done some sort of gap year but no-one else had messed up
a totally different course and worked for a year. So I had a bit more experience
of the world than most did.
I remember one lescture where Gerry came in and said: “Right
I want you all to imagine you’ve been sent to a cocktail reception to meet a bigwig.
What are you going to order?” Most of the group looked blank but I thought for
a moment about a bar I used to work in and tentatively said: “Can I have a
Manhattan?”
“Sure you can,” came the reply. And Gerry started making mixing
motions with his hands before passing me my imaginary glass. “Do you have any
idea what’s in it?”
“Not a clue,” I said. and took an imaginary sip.
“Well don’t have too many,” he replied before going on: “Anyone
else?”
Of course some clever sausage said: “Can I just have a gin
and tonic, please?” which rather took the gilt off my gingerbread, but there
you go.
There were other topics I knew nothing about, however, and
the locals were much better prepared than I was when it came to finding out
about them. This was all taking place in 1975/6 which was a time of great
employment upheaval. There were strikes
in many places and the government was
doing its best to destroy the unions. Some of the biggest arguments were in the
mines and steelworks. And it was clear that some of my colleagues would end up working
on newspapers in the local areas that had mines and works. Those in charge of the course were determined
to give us as wide an experience of life as possible.
I can remember one of the lecturers telling us: “We don’t
want you to be faced with an angry miner who tells you that you can’t possibly
understand his plight because you don’t know what it’s like down the pit. We want you to be able to turn round and say
yes you do know because you’ve been down and crawled along the coal face. ”
So that’s what they did. They arranged for us to visit Kiveton
Park Colliery near Rotherham, where we met miners and travelled down in the
cage with them to the working galleries where we could experience the dark for
ourselves. Except it wasn’t dark. Mines are very well lit places, at least near
the entrance they are. They took us on a sort of train that carried us deeper
underground until we reached the ‘sharp end’ and they showed us quite how
narrow some channels were.
You don’t waste time digging out rock if the only bit you
want is the seam of coal running through it. So your tunnel is as tall as the
seam you’re mining. And they still did mine by hand for the smallest seams back
then. Yes, you can send a machine through, but then you waste time and effort
sorting out the black gold from the duff rock. A man – and they were always men – can choose
which bits to hew and which to leave behind.
The tunnel we crawled through was about three feet high; apparently
not one of the narrowest. We were led
through by one of the miners, who pointed out that he was going first so that
we wouldn’t be in his way if anything bad happened!. “I’ll be faster that you
in an emergency, that’s a fact, and I’m not going to get trapped down here
because you lot can’t crawl quickly!” Thanks pal!
Janet was claustrophobic and really didn’t want to do it.
She’d been incredibly brave even to get that far. It was very oppressive to
think about the tons and tons of rock above your head. But, bless her, she did
it. She asked to be at the back so she could determine how fast she moved, and
not be in anyone’s way if she panicked. And she crawled along the face. That’s
guts!
I’d already faced my own challenge in the cage on the way
down. I hate lifts, and ones you can see out of so you can watch the walls
going up past you are particularly scary to me. Not to mention that the way
they prevent everyone suffocating down there is to pull air up through a
ventilation shaft so that fresh air goes through the network way below ground.
f course all that carbon dioxide has to go somewhere and it leaves by means of a narrow channel
that comes out near the top of the lift shaft. If you breathe it at the wrong
moment you don’t get fresh air, you get stale, heavy air that’s laden with old
breaths of hard working men. You feel like you’re drowning. We had been warned
not to breathe in at that point, but of course I mistimed it and got a lung
full of nothing.
As you crawl along
the face you realise how horribly dark and restricting the place could be if
the mechanisms designed to keep you alive broke down for any reason. The
lights, for example, don’t penetrate far into a three feet high tube. You have
a light on your helmet, of course, so you’re never in the dark entirely, but
the view you get when you look up is of the backside of the person in front of
you. So you don’t look. You crawl,
facing down, watching your hands reach out one after the other and you are
deeply grateful that you don’t have to work down there. But at least you can say to a striking miner
that you do know what his work conditions are like.
Kiveton Park was also a fairly dry mine. Not all of them
were. Imagine adding an inch or two of mucky water to crawl through and you
really know that you are lucky not to have had to be a miner. And you
appreciate every piece of coal you ever burn afterwards. These days most of the coal in the UK has been
mined in Russia or similar places, by machine, and it’s not such a good quality
as the shiny black stuff that used to be hewn by hand in Britain. It’s rarely
used to heat houses directly, these days. It’s used in power stations to make
electricity. It means fewer of us have asthma and similar lung diseases, not to
mention the poor sods who wrecked their insides by digging it up for us in the
first place!
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