Union Belle (13 page)

And at least it had stopped his mad panic.

The pain drove everything from his mind for some minutes, but when it cleared he started to weep again with utter frustration and dismay. How the hell was he going to dig himself out with only one good arm?

Something bounced off his hat, and that gave him the impetus to shuffle slowly backwards on his knees towards the other end of the skip, holding his injured arm firmly against his chest. When he reached the space where Johnno lay, he turned around and settled himself in a sitting position with his back against the metal side of the skip, the safest place, he thought, if the roof dropped again.

He looked around for his rucksack but couldn’t see it, and felt like crying about that, too; there had been a piece of cake in his crib tin, an apple and a bottle of water. Thinking about it, he was suddenly overwhelmed by a raging thirst. But there was nothing to drink down here, except his own piss and he didn’t think he was quite that desperate yet.

He sat with his knees raised and the elbow of his broken arm cradled in his other hand. If he didn’t move, it didn’t hurt as much. He wondered whether he should take off his belt and strap the arm to his chest, but decided against it; if he had to move quickly for any reason he’d be buggered.

So he sat there, his head tilted back against the skip and his lamp illuminating the roof, staring at the rubble and coal balanced up there, waiting to crash down on him and bury him once and for all.

It was getting even warmer, and he fancied that the air in the small space was harder to breathe now, growing stale, running out. And was that methane or carbon monoxide he could smell? Couldn’t be, they were both odourless by themselves. He tried to slow his breathing, counting
ten seconds between each inhalation, but the dizziness it brought on panicked him and he reverted to breathing normally.

And all the time he was listening. For the telltale trickle that might signal another fall, but most of all for the sound of pickaxes and perhaps even muffled calls, yelling out for him to hold on, they were coming, they would be there soon. But he heard nothing, only the faint whistling of air going in and out of his own blocked nose.

The panic rushed through him again, snatching him up and dragging him along mercilessly, and he bent over, willing himself not to scream. His heart was thudding and his brain felt as though it was inflating to a size that would any second now burst his skull. A scream was clawing its way up his throat and he clamped his good hand over his mouth, stifling the sound and squashing it back down to a series of sharp whimpers. The panic, he knew, would get him before anything else did, if he couldn’t control it.

But, Christ, he was scared. He had never really been frightened of anything in his life and he’d taken pride in that, but he was shitting himself now. He was so scared he felt like vomiting. The realisation that he was capable of feeling such stark terror terrified him even more, and, under that was the niggling suspicion that he was a fool for having gone through his life ever thinking anything else. He wasn’t Tom McCabe, tough coalminer and staunch union man, he was Tom McCabe, insubstantial, frightened and ordinary.

Tom McCabe, trapped in a small, airless hole deep underground.

He dozed. He dozed, and he thought he might have dreamed.

He saw his boys when they’d been born, cuddly, milky-smelling little bundles with hair that stood straight up, and he saw them now: Neil with his bright, five-year-old face that was starting to look so much like Ellen’s, and Davey with his chubby toddler’s hands and legs, following him out the gate in the mornings clamouring to be allowed to go to work with him.

And he saw Ellen—his generous, sensible, thoughtful Ellen—standing at the kitchen sink up to her elbows in soap bubbles, tilting her cheek so he could kiss her goodbye. She’d been beautiful when they were courting. She had the sort of hair that picked up the sun and the most velvety dark-blue eyes that sparkled when she laughed, and even when she was only thinking about laughing. Her lovely firm body had given him aching balls for eighteen months until just before they were married and she’d finally let him go all the way, but the wait had been worth it. His mates had all said he was a lucky bastard, but he’d never needed to be told that.

And then the boys had come along, and he’d been so pleased and so proud he’d thought that nothing better could ever happen to him. Watching them growing up had almost made up for everything he feared he might have missed by not going off to war. And through all of it Ellen hadn’t changed; she was just as beautiful now as she had ever been.

Tom woke up with a start, his arse numb, his arm throbbing and a dragging feeling deep in his guts. He grimaced as he realised what it was—he needed a crap. It stank in here, too. Was gas seeping in, or was it him?

He heard himself giggle. Ellen hated him farting, and she hated even more his response whenever either of the boys did it. ‘Magnificent he would say, with a short but heartfelt round of applause, and the boys would titter themselves
silly. Ellen never did, though; she believed farting should be confined strictly to the outhouse or, but only if very short, outside the back door.

‘Oh, Ellen,’ he said out loud, ‘I’ll never fart again if I get out of here alive.’

His bowel cramped again, and he realised he was going to shit himself if he didn’t do something about it soon.

Moving with exaggerated care to avoid bumping his arm, he leaned his weight on his left arm, drew his legs up and pushed himself onto his knees. He was getting very stiff now, and the pain in his arm seemed to be spreading. There was an almighty great bruise coming out from his shoulder to halfway down his forearm as well.

He fumbled with the buttons on his trousers and had them halfway down to his knees before he stopped; if he was destined to die down here, then the least he could do for himself was make sure he didn’t have to share his last hours with a turd, even if it was his.

Hitching his pants back up, he shuffled on his knees as far away from the skip as he could get, which wasn’t very far at all, and began to dig a hole in the loose coal and rubbish on the ground. When he judged it to be of a satisfactory depth, he pulled his trousers down and, his good hand out for support against the rubble that made up the walls of his tomb, manoeuvred himself over it. As he crouched there, his bowels emptying, he reflected that this might be the last crap he ever had. In the confined space, the smell was terrible.

By the time he finished, he was laughing. There was no toilet paper, of course, so he yanked his pants up without wiping himself. He was still giggling as he scraped coal into the hole, covering it over completely.

Then he was crying again. He moved back to the skip and looked at his watch, seeing through the salty blur of
his tears that it was still six minutes before two. He was unbearably thirsty, his throat raw with coal dust, and suddenly very, very tired.

He knew now that he was going to die down here, so there was no point in trying to keep the panic down any longer. But when he took a deep breath and relaxed, giving it ample opportunity to rise up, nothing happened. There was no wild lurching of his stomach, no uncontrollable racing of his heart, no ear-shattering screams. Instead, he stared at the opposite wall in the flickering, dying light of his lamp for a while, then drifted off to sleep again.

This time he dreamed about Johnno. Johnno with beer running down his chin as he raced to drink his last pints before the pub shut; Johnno dragging on one of his racehorse fags and adding to the fug in the workingmen’s club room they called the Smoke Box because it had no windows; Johnno being Santa Claus at the last union Christmas party, giving out presents to all the kids and little Willie Takoko complaining that his cotton-wool beard ponged of beer; Johnno sitting up, the shattered ribs in his caved-in chest crackling, and telling him he was going to die in this shitty little coal hole if he didn’t pull his finger out and do something soon.

Tom sat up, the weight of his dreaming making his movements ponderous.

‘What?’

Johnno’s voice came again. A little clogged and muffled as though he’d just eaten several Weetbix without milk, or as if his mouth was filled with dried and flaking blood, but it was definitely his voice.

‘I said pull your finger out, Tom, or you’ll die in here. Come on, wake up.’

Feeling the bones in his own neck creaking, Tom turned his head very slowly in Johnno’s direction.

Johnno was indeed sitting up, his broken ribs protruding forward and down over his lap, as if some sort of heavy, messy weight was pushing them out.

Tom sighed. ‘I can’t, Johnno, I’m too tired.’

Johnno pointed a dirty finger at him. ‘I gave you a message for Donna.’

‘I know, but I’m fucked.’

‘Fucked, my arse,’ Johnno rasped, and something dark flew out of his mouth. ‘We’re mates and you have to give Donna my message.’

‘I’ll do what I can,’ Tom said. He sighed again and closed his eyes, but Johnno didn’t go away.

‘You’ll do better than that, Tom,’ he said, louder now. ‘You’ll hang on until they get to you.’

‘Yeah,’ Tom mumbled, wishing Johnno would lie down and go back to being dead.

‘
Wake up!
’ Johnno bellowed. There was another dry snapping sound from his chest.

In his dream, Tom jerked upright again.

Johnno glared at him. ‘If you don’t stay awake I’ll bring the roof in. I can do that, you know. I’m dead and when you’re dead you can do what you fucking well like.’

‘Oh, piss off,’ Tom said. ‘Leave me alone.’

‘Right, I’m bringing the roof in,’ Johnno said.

Three muffled thuds came one after the other, then an abrupt trickle of coal followed by the clatter of something bigger coming down. Tom woke up. The skip shuddered against his back, and he ducked his head under his good arm to shield himself.

There was a loud scraping noise and the skip moved again, then someone was shining a light in his face.

Tom raised his hand against the harsh glare.

It was Sean McGinty.

1951

T
om got to his feet again, positioned another piece of wood on the chopping block and spat on his hands.

He had given Johnno’s message to Donna, and she’d cried so hard he hadn’t known where to look. Ellen had said she was crying from gratitude, that he’d delivered the one final message from her husband she’d most wanted to hear, but it hadn’t made Tom feel any better. Not at the time, anyway. Johnno’s funeral had been huge, and the local mines had closed for the day to allow the miners to attend. Two weeks after he was buried, Donna Batten packed up her kids and moved to Te Awamutu to live with her parents, saying she would miss everyone in Pukemiro, but would never be coming back if it meant she could stop her sons from ever going to work on the coal.

Tom had had an almighty headache from the lack of oxygen for a couple of days after they’d dug him out, and a line of black stitches down his temple, and he’d been on the funds for six weeks until his arm mended, but he’d gone back to work after that. He didn’t tell any of the other jokers, though, about how he’d almost turned and run that first day he went back into the main tunnel, how he’d had to force himself to put one foot in front of the other until he’d made himself go right down to the coal face. The section where he and Johnno had been working had been closed off because it was too unstable, so he was spared having to go back there. But there was plenty more coal, and he’d
been partnered with Frank Paget and had been working beside him ever since.

His fear in those first few weeks had been immense, and he’d told no one about it, except Ellen. She’d understood, or seemed to anyway, and had held him night after night in bed, stroking his back and his face and his arms, talking quietly and calmly until his fear started to ebb away, until he was finally able to go underground without his hands shaking as though he was an old man and his throat so dry he had to sip water almost constantly. She hadn’t told anyone else, and she’d promised him she never would—not Milly, not Gloria (thank Christ) and not even Alf. And he loved her even more, for letting him keep his dignity.

Eventually his fear had subsided to not much more than a dull niggle, although it left him with a much greater respect for being underground, and a heightened awareness of his own safety and that of others. The experience had knocked the cockiness out of him but it had also made him a better miner, and subsequently a bloody determined union delegate. The nightmares still plagued him from time to time, especially when he was unsettled, but only he and Ellen knew about those.

He was unsettled now, although a lot calmer than he had been; when he’d first heard that the opencasters had voted to go back to work, he’d been absolutely ropable. His heart thudded even now when he thought about it. Pack of scabbing bastards, even the blokes he’d counted as his mates. They hadn’t actually gone back yet, but when they did, there’d be trouble.

He picked up his axe, swung it viciously and missed his piece of wood completely as someone yelled out to him.

It was Pat, trotting around the side of the house, looking as if he’d just sprinted all the way up Joseph Street. He bent over with his hands on his knees.

‘What’s happened?’ Tom said, tensing.

‘The opencasters—the cunts are going back tomorrow!’

‘Back to work?’

‘No, back to the bloody pub.’ Pat straightened up, his face like thunder. ‘Of course back to work!’

Tom put his axe down. ‘Who said?’

‘Lorna Anscombe was visiting in town this morning and Andy Sceats’ mother was there…’

‘Andy Sceats out at Kimihia opencast?’

Pat nodded. ‘…and she told Lorna that Andy and the rest of them are going back tomorrow. There’s bloody cops all over town, too. I’ve called a meeting at Bob Amon’s place in an hour. We’ve got to stop them.’

Tom nodded. ‘I’ll let Bert and Frank know. What about the others?’

‘I’ll see them on my way home.’ Pat checked his watch. ‘An hour, all right? Four o’clock.’

Tom reached for the shirt he’d draped over the hedge. There were seven surface mines in the Waikato, producing nearly half the district’s coal, and the opencasters’ return to work could bring the underground miners down in a matter of weeks.

‘We’ll be there.’

It was decided that they’d go out first thing the next morning to confront the delegates at each of the opencast mines, to try to talk them out of starting work. Tom and Pat were allocated Phil Burns, the union president out at Kimihia.

They arrived at the mine office at twenty to eight. Hardly anyone was in sight but it was clear that preparations were under way for resuming work. They spotted Phil Burns walking away from the office and nabbed him as
he hurried over to one of the trucks waiting idle near the lip of the pit.

‘Phil? Excuse me,’ Pat called, ‘can we have a word?’

Tom knew he was doing his best to be polite, because they’d agreed at yesterday’s meeting that nothing would be gained by being aggressive, but it was clear that Pat was finding it bloody difficult.

Phil Burns stopped. His hands were jammed in his jacket pockets and Tom could see by the hunch of his shoulders he’d been expecting this, but was perhaps hoping he might have got away with it. He turned slowly around.

‘Look, Phil,’ Pat said, moving closer, ‘why don’t we sit down over a cuppa and talk about this, eh?’

Phil’s face was pale and his eyes had dark bags under them, as if he hadn’t had much sleep in the last few days.

‘I don’t want a cuppa, Pat, and I don’t want to talk,’ he said. ‘We’ve made our decision.’

Tom said, ‘Just a couple of minutes, Phil, what harm can it do?’

‘Bloody plenty,’ Phil said.

Pat shrugged. ‘We’ll talk out here then,’ he said, ferreting in his pocket for his smokes.

He offered the tin of rollies to Phil, who shook his head. Pat shrugged, handed one to Tom and lit one himself.

‘We hear you’re starting back today.’

‘That’s right,’ Phil said.

Tom said, ‘Have you thought about what that will mean, Phil?’

Phil took a step to the left. ‘Of course we have—it means we’ll be able to feed our kids again and pay the bloody rent.’

‘That’s right,’ Pat said, smoke curling out of his mouth as he spoke. ‘It also means you’ll be scabbing, every bloody one of you.’

Phil stared at him.

‘And that means,’ Pat went on, his voice hard now, ‘that you’ll never work in this fucking town again.’

‘Steady on,’ Tom murmured. There was no point in winding Phil Burns up more than was necessary; he knew full well what scabbing would mean.

Pat changed tack. ‘You look like you need a decent night’s kip. Conscience bothering you? Up a bit late last night, were you?’

‘No.’

‘That’s not what we heard, Phil,’ Tom said. ‘We heard you had the cops at your place half the night.’

And so Phil had, according to the gossip.

‘Have a nice chat, did you?’ Pat asked.

Phil didn’t reply. Instead, he turned and made a dash for the office and was up the steps and inside before Pat and Tom realised what he was doing. He shut the door behind him and Tom thought he might have locked it. They moved closer and watched him through the window, standing at the desk now and talking to someone on the telephone.

‘Who do you think he’s ringing?’

Tom said, ‘One guess.’

Pat snorted. ‘If it’s only bloody old Sid Ballantyne it’ll be a slap on the hand and a “Now then, lads”, and when he’s buggered off we’ll just come back and have another go.’

Inside the office Phil hung up the phone and came to the window. He opened it a fraction and announced, ‘I’ve rung the police, they’ll be here in a minute. I’d piss off if I were you.’

Pat raised his hands in bemusement. ‘We aren’t breaking any laws.’

‘You’re both trespassing.’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ Pat said. He parked his backside on the office steps and got his cigarette tin out again. ‘We’re not
going anywhere, Phil, until you’ve come to your senses.’

By this time a small crowd had gathered. Tom could see the faces of men he knew well, men he liked and had shared beers with in the pub and the workingmen’s club. This morning, though, they wouldn’t, or couldn’t, look him in the eye.

Phil hung out of the window again and waved the crowd away. ‘Go on, you lot, start work, show’s over.’

As the men began to disperse, Pat leapt to his feet. ‘The show is
not
over!’ he barked. ‘You’ll regret this! You’ll be branded as scabs for the rest of your lives, and then how will you feed your kids and pay your bills, eh, tell me that?’

Heads down, the men kept walking, but Pat and Tom didn’t see them—they were too busy eyeing the three black Plymouth sedans driving at speed through the mine gates.

The front car stopped some yards from the office, and Sid Ballantyne, Huntly’s sociable and generally lenient police sergeant of some years, got out. Pat relaxed visibly and took several steps towards him.

But before he could say anything, another policeman, his helmet under his arm, unfolded himself from the passenger seat, and three more climbed out of the back. Then the other two cars emptied. In all there were fourteen cops: Pat and Tom were outnumbered and they knew it.

The officer from the passenger seat called over to Phil Burns, ‘Is this them?’

Phil nodded, and Sid Ballantyne stepped back, giving Pat and Tom a look that was both resigned and regretful.

The officer wedged his helmet on his head and said, ‘If you two don’t get off this property in five minutes, I’ll arrest you for trespass and jail you. Go on, hop it.’

Pat stared at the man for a long, tense moment, then turned away.

‘Come on,’ he said to Tom, ‘there’s not much else we can do here.’ Then, to the onlookers who had gravitated back again as soon as the police cars arrived, he declared, ‘We won’t forget this, you know. Your cards are marked and we won’t forget it.’

The cop took a step closer. ‘Are you threatening these men?’

‘No, officer,’ Pat said, ‘I’m just giving them some good advice.’

And he and Tom walked out through the mine gates, unaccompanied and with their heads held high, knowing in their hearts that this particular battle of the campaign had been lost.

Over the next ten days, the mood of the community changed.

The
People’s Voice
issued a list of names of all the men who were scabbing, and more than one underground miner cut it out for future reference. The word scab was splashed across the homes of opencasters and on nearby telegraph poles, and several families reported that their vehicles had been interfered with and livestock stolen.

Dozens of extra police had been brought into Huntly and were staying at the pub, and a twenty-four-hour police guard was placed on all opencast mines and the trains that serviced them. When they weren’t doing that, the cops were patrolling the streets of Huntly day and night on foot or in their lumbering Plymouths, streets that remained lit throughout the hours of darkness. The big black cars were also seen cruising slowly around Pukemiro, and at Glen Afton and Rotowaro, all communities where known strike leaders lived. Twice now Ellen had had to pull Neil and Davey off the couch in the sitting room as they
stood waving cheekily through the window at the police car parked across the street, its occupants watching and waiting in silence. The presence of the police was oppressive, and a miasma of gloom, resentment and bitterness was beginning to settle over the district.

But there was good news, too. Miners at Kamo finally joined the strike, and on 5 April a national strike committee was formed from the rank and file of the Waikato, Taranaki and West Coast coalminers’ unions. The meeting was held in Wellington and although none of the Pukemiro union officials went, Bob Amon did and was elected onto the committee. Prendiville’s fervent efforts to get the underground miners to take part in the secret ballot had been the final insult for many, and a new committee, divorced from the national council of the UMWU and therefore Prendiville and Crook, seemed the only solution. The old UMWU was now in tatters, but it was clear that the new committee had the mandate of the majority of the underground miners. It was a relief to regional union officials especially, as they were now back in a position of control and the strike looked certain to continue. They had held on now for six weeks, and still saw no reason to return to work before the watersiders had negotiated a satisfactory outcome, and while the emergency regulations were still in force.

But life was getting more and more difficult. Money was coming from various sources, including via a very convoluted and shady trans-Tasman arrangement with sympathetic trade unions in Australia, but it wasn’t stretching far enough and most families had come to depend on the food parcels distributed every week. Ellen and Tom certainly had, in a desperate effort to conserve the little money they still possessed so they could pay their mortgage. It wasn’t enough, though, what was in the
parcels, certainly not for larger families anyway, and Ellen thanked God she had her vegetable garden. Each week they received six pounds of meat or fish, a variety of whatever vegetables came from the market, two pounds of butter, half a pound of tea, enough loaves of bread for the week and a portion of any fruit that might be available. Honey was also bought in bulk, as a substitute for sugar, which no one could get anywhere in the country because supplies had dried up as a result of the strike.

Tom had stopped complaining about getting cheese in his sandwiches as there wasn’t any now, unless Ellen got a tiny bit on credit from Fred Hollis. But the boys never stopped moaning about the monotony of the meals she served up to them, and received several clips across the ear from Tom for doing so. From time to time she felt like smacking them herself; she made a real effort to prepare appetising food with what she had, but more often than not the result was uninspiring.

One morning at the breakfast table Tom lost his temper. It wasn’t Davey’s fault—none of this was the children’s fault—but he did start it with his incessant whining. Unlike Neil, he wasn’t quite old enough to read the signs from his father that he was going too far.