A Horse Called Hero (22 page)

There was an immense boom and Wolfie wound himself tighter, buried his head in his arms, blocking out the roaring, the screaming . . .

There was another boom, more screaming, then the crash and thunder of falling stone.

Choking on the rush of vile air, his mouth gritty, eyes stinging, the air thick with dust, Wolfie was numb with terror. Ahead, somewhere in the dark, stone was sliding. He tried to stand but his
legs had turned to water. Shaking violently, he groped for the fallen lamp, spitting dust and grit. Clutching it, raising it, he saw a mound of hard grey rock and debris.

Behind him there were voices, then ahead a cry – the sound of a man groaning in pain. Wolfie leaped forward, his hand shaking with such violence that the beam from the lamp jumped and
swung across the darkness. There was another rumble, a further slide of stone far ahead, the dust of it clogging his eyes, his mouth, choking his throat. He spat out more grit as he turned: there
in the violent shaking of his beam was the horse, large and spectral; and behind him were figures staggering and stumbling, clasping each other. Swinging his lamp the other way, Wolfie called to
Jo.

Wolfie called again.

There was no answer. Wolfie stepped forward, the beam of his light useless in the thick dust. He waited, glancing towards Hero, sensing the horse’s wariness, seeing the watchful eyes, the
tense ears, the blindfold gone.

‘Jo!’ Wolfie called, his mouth dry. ‘Jo!’

Hero stepped forward, nuzzled his hand, his shoulder, pushing him. Wolfie paused, then rose, steadying himself with a hand on Hero’s neck. He held out the lamp. In its beam dust
swirled.

Holding a clump of the shorn mane, Wolfie moved cautiously forward. Hero moved with him, careful as a cat over the fallen stone, which littered the rails, his steps sure and true in the dark.
Wolfie went on, stumbling, conscious of the horse’s alert intelligence, wary and sharp as a wild thing, conscious of his own soupy brain. Behind them rang footsteps on the metal rail, making
their own way on.

How high was the fall? Had it blocked the roadway?
Jo?
Wolfie stumbled into a rock, hitting the bone of his knee, the sudden agony of it doubling him up. Hero was snorting, stepping
away, treading gingerly across the sharp stones to the right, live and wary. Wolfie lifted his lamp. Had the fall been only on the left side? He saw the curve of the tunnel. To the right, the
wooden prop, creaking a little, was bent but holding. He swung the beam up across the curve of the roof. The centre was holding, to the left a gaping hole, a pile of stone and debris beneath the
split and jagged props.

‘Jo! Jo!’

His voice was a desperate scream. He swung the lamp to and fro over the fallen rock.

‘Here . . . I’m here . . .’

Wolfie started forward, stumbling over the rough stone, several hundredweight of it. The lamp swung back and forth. He was scrambling round the slagheap, falling, sliding, scrabbling at it with
his bare hands.

‘Where, where . . . ?’

He stopped, horrified.

‘My chest . . .’

Wolfie knelt, wiping the debris from Jo’s face with his own filthy hands, tears streaming down his own cheeks. Jo was clear of the main landfall, lying sideways across the tunnel, a rock
pinning down his chest and one arm.

Wolfie moved tentative hands towards the sinister black mass, broad and flat bottomed. How had Jo not been crushed to death? How could he move it? Was it more dangerous to move it than not?
Wolfie lifted Jo’s free arm and placed it above his head. He called out into the blackness – ‘Help, help!’

Someone was moving through the dark to reach them.

Wolfie placed his own hands on either side of the stone, weighing the size of it. He called for help again.

A voice called back to Wolfie to ‘Wait!’ – that two of the men had lost consciousness from the after damp they’d tried to escape earlier, that they had to be carried,
that Wolfie should go ahead and get help.

Wolfie waited. For a long while he cradled Jo’s head to his chest, holding his limp, cold hand in his, his own head bowed. When Wolfie looked up, the older of the men was at his side,

‘Go on laddie. Hurry. I canna leave my boy. For the love of God, go on, get help for’s.’

Twenty hours had passed since the last explosion. The engine house was a tangle of bricks and twisted headgear. New winding apparatus and a new cage had been driven up.

A pair of bodies came up in the cage, the arm of one wound around the other. Tear stains streaked the coal dust of their cheeks. Other bodies, already up, lay in carts, scorched, all clothing
burned away, hands lifted to their faces, now forever, some had almost no aspect of humanity left. Later, all of them were covered in straw and carried away, by horse and cart, followed on foot by
silent mourners.

‘Wolfie, Wolfie,’ Dodo whispered to herself, over and over, hallucinating with exhaustion and cold.

A team went down to examine the shaft and pit.

Two hours later they returned to the surface. The main road had been impassable, the West Return impassable, the whole area quivering and quaking. No one in-bye could’ve survived they
said. The Area General Manager arrived and issued an instruction to make a road through the fall, to work with the utmost speed and explore the airway from the Seven Quarter Second South District.
This passage might connect with the East District return drift where it crossed the Seven Quarter Seam.

Two rescue workers were brought up on stretchers, their companions reporting that props and doors had been blown out, but that this passage could be travelled.

Later still, another report came that the East District return drift had been reached, but that they could go no further without rescue apparatus, as the air crossing was damaged.

Dodo listened, numb and uncomprehending, one of the hundreds still waiting there.

The manager called for twenty volunteers. A hundred or more men stepped forward. Those who stepped forward were asked to dig graves.

Hettie brought Dodo a blanket, a fresh cup of tea.

Ryland knelt, and took Dodo’s hands.

‘They were together – your brother an’ my Jo – they were . . . they – they ’aven’t . . . they were working on a different face. The fire crossed trunk
road and that road crosses all t’other in-by faces that are being worked an’ all the roadways . . . all on ’em, ’cept the old closed road – that one’s sealed
off.’ He looked up at Dodo. ‘My father died down there . . . ’e used to work that road—’

Ryland broke off, seeing men arrive at the surface, pouring out, all shouting.

‘Smoke coming out o’ brickwork . . . Doors to t’airlock blown out . . . Separation doors burning . . . Too hot to breathe . . . The dust chokes you.’

Two men were carried out of the cage unconscious. When they came to, they vomited.

In pitch dark Hero and Wolfie picked their way between the metal tracks. Most of the lamps had been lost in the rubble. Wolfie had left his, the only lamp remaining, to the two
men who stayed with the wounded. Old Walter Hobbs, the oldest of them all, was unconscious, all of them coughing and choking on the gas that was in their lungs, burns on their hands and
clothing.

Trusting Hero to lead him, Wolfie followed at his side, terror at every step, his throat parched, barely daring to breathe for fear of gas, for fear the air itself was poisoned, the roof about
to fall.

How far it was, Wolfie barely knew. ‘
A cord
,’ they’d said, there’d be a cord. But the shaft had not been used in so long, and how could they know if the cord
would still be there?

‘Go on,’ they’d told him. ‘Go on and get help. Pull the cord at the bottom of the shaft.’

Wolfie felt the gentle ticking of Hero’s pulse, the solid warmth of him, and he could hear the dripping of the walls. He had no other senses – he’d only his fingers and his
ears, only touch and hearing.

‘
Courage is when you have no choice
,’ Pa had once said to Wolfie. He’d said that he wasn’t brave, just that there was no other option. At Moreuil Wood
there’d been nowhere else to go but into the enemy fire. Wolfie had never thought about those words of Pa’s until now.

We have no choice, thought Wolfie now. This is our only hope. Eighty fathoms or more beneath the surface, in a tunnel prone to collapse, we must find our way in the dark to a shaft that may or
may not be working.

‘
Courage is nothing more, Wolfie, than when you can’t not do something, when you’ve no choice
.’

That was what Pa had said, when Wolfie had been sitting on his knee, by the fire, the medal in his hand.

Wolfie fumbled onward through the dark.

By late afternoon the following day, all hope was abandoned. Men were sent down once again, but only to recover bodies. Hour after hour, more deaths were known for certain,
more women led into outbuildings to identify them.

The vigil had lasted three days and ended for all in heartbreak. The silent crowd on the pit banks and in the colliery yard watched and waited.

Processions wound through the town, a Davy lamp on each head, the haunting sound of ‘Gresford’, the miners’ hymn, drifting upward.

Wolfie lay curled like a small child, tight against the curved wall of the old shaft head, face to the dirt. Hunger and fear clawed at him like nails. Fearing to breathe,
fearing to give in again to sleep, Wolfie clutched his arms around his chest, fearing the clotted blackness, the ghosts that must haunt such a place, fearing the men to whom he’d given false
hope, the men who could walk no further, whom he’d left, promising help.

There’d been no cord.

When he woke again he heard the eerie dripping of the walls and a strange new rasping sound. His clothes were wet, his tongue clumsy and dry, his limbs shaking. He stretched a
hand through into the darkness. His fingers found something . . . Hero, Hero’s leg. Wolfie ran his hands up, struggled to his feet and stood, clutching at him, trembling over the warmth of
him, clinging to the comfort of a living, breathing being. Standing, leaning his own head against Hero’s neck, he listened to his breathing, to the jaws, grinding and chomping.

Wolfie started, then ran his hand down the head over the loose muzzle. He started again, searching with his fingers from the muzzle and found only the rough surface of the wood . . . the gnawing
. . . Hero was gnawing the wooden posts. Wolfie ran his hand over the grain of it, stretched out, backwards to the wall, ran both palms over the stone of it, felt its dripping wetness.

He heard a tongue rasp against stone and he whirled round. The horse’s head lowered and snuffled the boy’s hand, placid and curious.

‘Oh God . . . Oh God.’ Wolfie’s tongue was dry and thick, ‘How long’ve we been here?’ he wondered. He cried softly into Hero’s neck. ‘I promised
– I promised green grass and mist and stars and trees to rub against and stars . . .’

Hero lifted his head, and he laid it over the boy’s shoulder and let it rest there.

‘
There’s nothing on earth like the moment a horse rests his head on your shoulder
.’

Fresh tears streamed down Wolfie’s cheeks. The deepness of the gesture, the trust in it, felt, to Wolfie, like the twisting of a blade in a open wound . . .

He shook himself free and ran a trembling, feverish hand over the rough wall, following the curve of it, reaching blindly out in the thick blackness, both arms outstretched, searching, tripping
and stumbling like a madman through the dark.

The colliery yard was still thick with silent figures. All listened, heads bowed, as the Secretary of the Mine read a list of the missing and the lost: name after name, three
men to one family, four to another. Not a man, not a street, in the town was untouched, in every house a son or brother, a father or an uncle lost.

A long silence followed.

In that silence a bell rang out.

Again and again it rang, frantic and feverish. Sudden, spurting hope electrified the faces of the crowd. It started forward. Ahead of them all, Ryland was running up the hill shouting,
‘The old shaft – Number One shaft!’

Men ran after him, the foreman dropping his paper, running too, shouting for a cage, for machinery, for temporary headgear. Dodo was running, racing with the crowd, joining the flood that poured
from the main shaft to the next brow, trying to find Ryland.

On the lip of the old shaft, men were calling down, their faces wild with hope, torches flashing into the darkness below.

‘Send me down!’ Dodo cried. ‘I must go down.’

Someone was pulling her back and saying, ‘There’s no way to get down.’

She broke free. ‘Send me
down
!’ she screamed.

The foreman called for quiet, for silence, for everyone to keep calm. They waited, breath held, listening, but their silence was met only by the silence of the grave.

‘Send down a bottle – any bottle . . . brandy . . .’

Machinery was being hauled up the banks. A hundred, desperate hands were rigging up a makeshift headgear. A brandy bottle was passed from hand to hand.

Ryland tied the bottle to a rope and lowered it.

On and on, he fed the rope, five hundred foot or so, into the greedy, unfathomable dark. Then he waited.

‘Pull it, man, pull it!’ people begged him after a while.

Ryland waited a little, then began to pull. Five slow minutes passed. Men’s, women’s, children’s faces were lit with hope. Still Ryland was hauling up the rope. As the end of
it neared the surface, one by one they stepped back, shaking their heads.

Ryland fell to his knees, bowed his head and pulled, hand over hand, just for the sake of it, knowing there was nothing there.

‘There’s nothing – nothing . . .’ he croaked.

‘Keep going, man, keep pulling!’ the crowd shouted.

Ryland pulled, mechanically, like a dead man, the last twenty feet of rope to the surface.

Dodo saw, illuminated by a hundred torches, a plume of silver tail hair, knotted in the end of the rope, like a sheaf of moonlit wheat. She leaped forward, grasping the rope, clasping it,
holding it to the light, raising it to her mouth, to her cheeks.