Theirs Was The Kingdom (64 page)

“We’ll start in from the lowest level,” Bryn said, when, retching slightly, Giles staggered into a low-roofed underground chamber.

It was like yet another scene from the illustrated Dante’s
Inferno
, seen in Mr. Thompson’s library, a pall of velvet darkness shot through with indistinct points of yellowish light, where gnomelike men stumped to and fro across a maze of intersecting rails. Trolleys, pulled by ponies, rattled by and other trucks, recently emptied, were riding into one or other of the tunnels, or roads as Lovell called them, leading to the coal face.

He did not know what he had expected but it was not this, and neither was it the long, toilsome journey down a foot-wide track beside one of the railways. The darkness, a darkness you could almost grab by the handful, would have been absolute had it not been for the glimmer of Lovell’s lamp, moving ahead, or the welcome break of a dimly lit bay, scooped in the face of the road at rare intervals. Everywhere the roof was so low that Giles, despite his lack of inches, had to crouch, and it crossed his mind to wonder how his brother Hugo would have fared down here. Bryn said little, confining his occasional comments to a word or two flung over his shoulder, and Giles gathered that nobody wasted breath in conversation down here. One needed it all to adjust to the crouching stumble if one was to avoid tripping over the rails, or smashing one’s head on the revetted roof that constantly scraped the leather hat he was wearing. He had thought of himself until then as very fit and agile, but movement, and survival too he would wager, demanded a different kind of fitness to that a man acquired on the Exmoor upland. One needed to be a dwarf, a contortionist, and a tightrope walker, so that when, at a bay, Lovell stopped to permit the passage of an unseen oncomer, he gasped, “How much further to the face?”

“Two—three hundred yards. If you’re that puffed…” But he did not complete the sentence, holding up his hand and cocking an ear in the direction of the approaching footfalls.

They were hurrying. Even Giles noticed that, and when a miner came level with the bay he at once linked his expression with a subdued but definite pattern of sounds that issued from the tunnel, a sustained murmur punctuated by a series of sharp, metallic clankings, and then an agonised cry from close at hand.

Lovell said, detaining the passing miner, “A derailment? Is the road blocked?” The man, shaking himself free, replied, “Truck running free. And some of Owen Williams’s toes along with it,” and he jerked his head towards the opening.

“Bady hurt?”

The man shook his head. “They’re bringing him outbye. Stay here, whoever you wass,” and plunged onwards towards the shaft, moving very swiftly at a loping crouch that was like the passage of a hunted animal.

It struck Giles at once that Lovell did not seem so concerned as he should have been, and when he asked if this meant there had been a serious accident the manager said, unconcernedly, “Truck over a man’s foot. It happens every day. It might be trivial, or it might mean amputation when they get him to the pithead.” And then, with what Giles thought of as a tincture of malice, “There’s far worse happens down here than the loss of a couple of toes or even a foot. At least that means Williams will be kept on, and work above ground, and that doesn’t happen to most casualties. The ones that survive, that is. I’ve seen a dozen men carried out on stretchers from one shift and they were the lucky ones. Two dozen more were under a fall, or gassed and beyond human aid.”

The clank of a string of trucks approached until its rattle made speech impossible. On the first of them lay Owen Williams, a young man about Giles’s own age, or possibly a year or so older. In the light of a brace of lamps carried by the boy leading the pony, and an older miner riding the tub behind and supporting the injured man’s shoulders, Giles caught a swift glimpse of the recumbent man’s face. It was twisted with pain that the mask of coal dust could not conceal, and it seemed to Giles that he was having as much as he could do to keep from screaming. His left boot had been removed and his foot was swathed in roughly-applied bandages. Thick as they were, blood was seeping through. The mournful little procession passed in a matter of seconds, so that it was as though it had been part of a confused dream. Bryn Lovell called after the last loaded tub, “Good luck, man…” but nobody answered and he moved forward again, Giles following, sweat striking cold in his armpits and under the browband of the hard leather hat he was wearing.

It was only the first of a series of revelations, nightmarish most of them. Although here and there, particularly at the coal face, he found himself technically interested in the processes of removing coal from a seam and transferring it, via the conveyor, to the waiting tubs.

He saw men stripped to the waist lying in crannies that were hardly more than eighteen inches high, clawing away at the seam with a speed and precision that he would not have thought a machine could accomplish in these cramped, claustrophobic galleries. He saw the place where the truck had left the rails and crushed Owen Williams’s foot; he saw a shift of boys, none older than Third Form boys at school, eating their “snap,” as Lovell called it, before starting another four-hour spell at the conveyor, where they were charged with the work of tipping the loaded sections of the conveyor into tubs and easing the string down an incline to an open space at the hub of the galleries. He did not speak to them. It seemed to him that it would have been patronising on his part, but he stored in his mind the deep impression they made on him, a dozen bleary-eyed imps, gossiping gaily among themselves, as though they were taking part in a parody of a junior-school tuck-shop spree.

He saw many other things that he never afterwards forgot, for the hours spent down there, beginning with that backbreaking scramble to the bay where they waited to make way for Williams, and ending with the blessed relief of smelling daylight at the top of the shaft, were etched into his memory in a way that nothing he had previously experienced could rival in terms of truth and sobriety.

He said, as they walked down the narrow-gauge tracks that led to the sidings below, “How much do those men earn, Mr. Lovell?” Lovell said, “It depends what they’re doing. A boy stableman, a few shillings. An experienced miner, about the same as one of your father’s waggoners.”

“Why do they go on doing it, generation after generation?”

“What else could they do? They have no other skills to sell and there are compensations.”

“I haven’t noticed any.”

“Ah, you would have to live here and work with them, shift for shift. Your father realised that but he’s been under fire himself.”

He stopped and seemed to consider for a moment. “See here, lad, you plagued me to show you a coal mine and I’ve done it. You seem shocked but, unless I’m mistaken, you’re still very curious. That chap Williams lives close. Suppose we go and enquire after his chances? Would that embarrass a young gentleman like you?”

“Not in the least. I should like it very much, Mr. Lovell. I came here to learn.” He may have been mistaken but it seemed to him that the grim-faced manager of the Mountain Square relented somewhat, and came some way to meet what he probably regarded as an inquisitive boy, who was proving a time-wasting nuisance. “Then we’ll go,” he said, “for I fancy I know that poor chap’s father, although the name about here is as common as Evans and Jones.”

It was one of those leaning slate-roofed hutches he had stayed in on his way from the coast, very cramped but spotlessly clean and oddly over-furnished. Owen’s father was a used-up little man, himself a surface worker with two other sons, both out working middle shift when they called. Mrs. Williams, a talkative, fresh-faced woman of about fifty, made a great fuss of Lovell, who seemed to be on familiar terms with everyone about here, and Giles wondered if this was because he had been born in the area or because local men still remembered his almost legendary feat of twenty years back, when he had hauled a pump to a flooded mine in time to save the lives of entombed miners.

The house did not strike Giles as being the centre of domestic tragedy. Indeed, the reverse seemed to be true, for Williams Senior, having told them that Owen was at the infirmary and likely to have three toes amputated, added almost gleefully that this would result in the lad getting a job on top. It struck Giles as astonishing that a family could rejoice at such a gruesome slice of luck and he asked, diffidently, “Won’t your son be lame, Mr. Williams?” Williams said cheerfully that he might but that lameness, to that extent, was preferable to an injury that would stop a man doing a full day’s work. He did not say what Giles judged to be in his mind, that a job on top meant Owen would be likely to live out his full span of life, and he thought that these men, every one of them, were like soldiers occupying an exposed redoubt, sniped at from all points of the compass and unlikely, in the very nature of things, to survive indefinitely.

Giles asked Mrs. Williams how many children she had and was told five— three boys, all down the pit, and two girls in domestic service at a big house in Breconshire, further north. “It’s not often they come home,” she said, “except Christmas and Mothering Sunday, but it’s glad I am for them for they’ve a good place up there, and plenty to eat.” She then brought him tea and a piece of home-baked cake and asked him, but not inquisitively, what he was about in the Rhondda. Luckily Lovell heard the question and answered for him. “Mr. Swann is going into his father’s business. He’s getting the hang of things in the regions before settling in London.”

“Ah, London,” Mrs. Williams said, as though Lovell had mentioned Pekin, “that’s a racketty ole place, I’m told. I’ve never been, and not likely to go, although Trevor Jones’s boy down the street has gone to work there. Got a job as a clerk in a warehouse, he has. That’s what comes of attending to his lessons at the new school. Owen and Huw would have likely gone there if it had been open in time, but it wasn’t, so they have to make do with evening class when they’re on day shift.” She addressed Lovell, directly, “It’s making good progress they are, Mr. Lovell, or so the minister tells Gwyn.” She turned to Giles again, smiling. “You’ll have forgotten your schooldays by now, Mr. Swann.”

It occurred to Giles then, more forcibly even than when he was clawing his way along those black galleries, that the contrast between sections of the British was so great that they might be inhabiting different planets. He was eighteen, and less than a month ago he had been a schoolboy. Those children he had seen eating their snap were six years his junior and had probably been at work for a year.

Lovell said, rising, “I’ll look in next time I’m round, Williams, to enquire after Owen. He’s a good strapping lad, and I’ve no doubt he’ll be at work again in a month.”

“I hope so indeed,” Williams said, gravely, “for he’s getting top rate and Mam’ll miss the money.”

Giles said, as soon as they were clear of the house, “Won’t Owen get compensation for an injury like that?” Lovell said that the miners did operate some sort of mutual provident scheme that would possibly yield a temporary sickness benefit of three or four shillings a week, but there was no official provision for injuries.

“But that’s monstrous! Can’t the employers work out some kind of scheme for contingencies of this sort?” Lovell stopped and looked at him quizzically. “The owners? About here? Good God, no lad. That wouldn’t occur to the best of them. A man is no good to them lying on his back, is he?” He smiled then, a wry and wintry smile, that seemed to hurt a little. “You’re a budding radical, I perceive. I can see you and John Catesby getting along if you get so far as the Polygon. But let me give you a grain of comfort, concerning our business at least. Your father has the right ideas about the relationship between capital and labour. He’s a good gaffer as I said, even though he’s a hard man in some ways, or hard to those who don’t attend to their business to his satisfaction. Catesby’s ways and his ways are different, however. Catesby has been trying to turn the world upside down ever since I’ve known him, and can’t understand why me and the other regional gaffers won’t help him.”

“Why won’t you? You have to admit that life bears pretty heavily on people like the Williamses. I’ve seen very little so far but what I have makes me wonder if a thumping good revolution isn’t needed here, as it was in France in 1789.”

“Ah, that’s for the young to dream about,” Lovell said, tolerantly. “Dreamed something like it myself when I was your age, but I’ve learned since. By reading and by observation. I believe in slow pressures, applied through Parliamentary processes, of the kind Gladstone applied in the early seventies. Change things too quickly and what happens? You invite reaction, of the kind that spread clear across Europe in ’forty-eight. A few months of freedom and then
snap
, the collar’s notched a hole tighter. The art of government isn’t to be found in a revolutionary tract but stodgier reading. It’s a slow, toilsome process, take it from me. One Ewart Gladstone is worth twenty Dantons and any amount of Wat Tylers.”

It was in Giles’s mind to admit that he had heard Gladstone, and been spellbound by him, but he said, instead, “I’m greatly obliged to you wasting a whole day on me, Mr. Lovell. I’ll write and tell my father how kind and helpful you were and that you may have thought me a great nuisance but didn’t show it.”

“Aye, I did think that, up to the moment you agreed to pay a call on the Williams, but I don’t think it now. I’m thinking something different and I’ll tell you what it is. I’d be right content to work under a young gaffer like you, if your father ever took it into his head to retire. Years at a gentlemen’s school hasn’t spoiled you the way it does most young men o’ good family. You could think like one of us when you’ve seen more and read more and had time to digest it. If ever you’re this way again, I’d take it kindly if you called in at Abergavenny and met my missis an’ boys. Will you do that?”