I should be able to type faster than that but of course I also have to think of something to write about. And I also don’t realy like typing on a flat keyboard because as I think I already explained somewhere I’m used to a sit up and beg manual machine and I could probably type just as fast on that and be less uncomfortable. I’ve got myself a cushion to boost my seat because the table’s higher than my chair. I also switched on a the little air bower heater because it’s old in here and our proper heating isn’t due to come on for a few hours yet. Hence I’m rather hunched over trying to stay warm while I’m typing and it isn’t doing me any good st all. In fact I hurt rather badly. If my health and safety manager at work saw this she’d have a fit!
I’m also coming down with a cold I think. I had a sore throat during the week and I’ve coughed and sneezed a few times and this morning my nose is starting to run. (The only part of me that ever does!) I blame the children’s swimming lessons that go on at the smae time as i ever go swimming these days. Change of routine means I’ve had to change my swim time and so the little darlings are in the other side of the pool while I’m swimming and they’re wiping their snotty little hands all over the changing room where I have to get undressed and shower. Not good. But this isn’t supposed to be a rant. This is supposed to be a memoir about my writing life. So here we go.
Moving on from the trip down the mine we were also taken around Tinsley Wire Works, also near Rotherham, I think. It was a huge factory place with a lot of hot things that scared the living daylights out of me. Frankly, I suspect if I’d had to choose between the steelworks and the pit I might actually have chosen the pit. Fortunately I didn’t have to. My overwhelming memory of the wire works was that everything was very big and very hot. White hot in fact, and if anything had splashed or spilled on me I would have died quickly in agonising pain.
There were also huge hammers that crashed down onto the semi molten metal to begin the shaping. |if you imagine they were trying to make a massive block of steel into a very long, very fine wire, you can see how much pounding and rolling and general brute force was needed to make it happen. Of course they had to make the steel first and they put lots of stuff into a furnace to create it. I know there was iron in there because that’s how you make steel. and there’s carbon too. I know that much from chemistry and my archaeology degree. Not sure what else went into the mix though. I suppose they told us, but I was too busy being scared to remember. So they mixed everything up in their huge furnaces and when it had boiled for long enough they poured it out into blocks.
I an vaguely remember something from my early childhood about pig iron. It’s called tat because they used to think the iron ingots looked like piglets feeding from a mother sow. It’s to do with how it’s poured. Into one long channel with side channels so that eventually you get a shape like a huge capital E with extra arms.
So that’s sort of what they did. They tipped the molten steel into the ‘pigs’ and left it to cool. There were sparks. Lots of sparks. I remember them, like massive fireworks going off very close to us. I hated that bit. It was noisy too. Like rockets and Roman candles. I’ve never liked fireworks that much. Huge, public display ones a long way off are fine. I can appreciate the colours and the light and the fountains, but I’ve never enjoyed back garden ones that I had to stand within a few feet of and watch them thrown fire into the air. And please don’t ever hand me a sparkler. Those bits might not have enough latent heat to burn you because of their size, but it sure feels tome like I’m being attacked by something tiny that’s armed with sewing pins!
So you can imagine my terror at standing within a few feet of a massive vat of melted steel being poured into a hole in the ground, throwing off presumably large sparks that were all a dull red. Not white hot any more – but dull red was enough to hurt, I’m sure.
and that was just the start. After they made the pigs they had to bash them out into longer, thinner shapes. They were kind of square in cross section and they started by hitting them under the drop hammers. Each one had to be pounded along its length and then turned through 90 degrees and thumped again to turn it into a longer, narrower pig. and this went on until they were small enough to fit between the rollers.
Once they were narrow enough they were run through a series of rollers that got tighter and tighter until the slightly longer and slightly narrower block of steel became a much longer (by a couple of miles) and very very much narrower wire. And at the far end of the factory were huge winding machines that were gathering up the finished product and twisting it onto drums so it could be transported.
The whole place was large, loud, hot and, as far as I was concerned, very frightening. It all seemed to be happening without warning too. At least in teh mine we were told what would happen where, and more importantly, when. In teh steel works it seemed like huge, unpredictable monsters had been let loose and some of them even breathed fire!
I wasn’t popular in a later discussion when we were asked to talk about our impressions of the places we’d been. I said I found the steel works much more frightening than the pit and I think I would prefer to be a miner, if I had to be either. Many of my colleagues were from mining families and a few had even lost people in various disasters over teh years. Grandfathers, uncles, even dads had perished. Or most of the locals knew someone who knew someone, in that tight community kind of way.
Whatever, the places were both well outside my experience and not something I ever wanted to try again. I’ve been down fake mines and heritage mines since then, always on railways for some reason. Perhaps the old cage idea is too dangerous to turn into a museum – because that ‘s what all British mines are these days, either closed or museums. I’ve seen the sanitised versions that never seem to manage to portray reality. They concentrate on the sense of pride and the skill that was needed. They don’t talk about the dirt and teh cold and the damp and teh coughing diseases. They show the intricate coal carvings that some of the miners did. You can even buy souvenir coal ornaments to put over your convenient, clean and safe gas fire mantelpiece. Heck, I’ve got one! It’s a dragon.
But you don’t get the sense of ground in dirt. About however much you scrub in the pithead showers you’re never going to get the coal dust out of your wrinkles and your private places. About the colour of your snot from breathing the dust, and how miners developed a taste for snuff because it was the only way to get the filthy dirt out of your nostrils. And how miners’ handkerchiefs were always brown, to cover up the stains of the coal dust and the snuff.
They talk about the unions and the union bosses who fought to keep the mines open and a fair wage for the workforce, and how eventually the spirit was broken by a Tory prime minister determined not to let the workers win.
I wonder if others who go down those show mines feel the same way I do. I wonder how many of them look up and think, how thick is the rock over my head and just how much of me would be left if it suddenly collapsed? Not to mention how long it would take them to dig through it and perform a rescue if I did survive a rock fall. And I wonder how those men who used to work the pits ever managed to forget the crushing weight of that roof above them.
Let’s just say that I’m pleased I didn’t ever have to do either of those jobs. and in the end I didn’t have to talk to miners or steelmen as part of my job. I left the Sheffield area when I became a journalist and had to deal with farmers and others involved in a rural economy.
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