A Writer's Notebook (83 page)

The foreman. A merry soul, with a loud voice and a sort of fat Flemish joviality. He loves his comforts, his coffee and rum and his glass of wine. His wife is a large stout woman with untidy greying hair, a red face and a cheerful expression. She enjoys her food and for Christmas they had a real blowout. She tells you how much the chicken cost and goes over the meal with gusto. They sat talking, listening to the radio and singing till four in the morning.

They have two sons. They didn't want the elder to become a miner and so made him a carpenter, but during his first week he had his right hand cut off by a circular saw, and now (a spectacled youth) he has some job in the mine. The younger son went down the mine without more ado.

Boys used to start at twelve, but now not till they are fourteen, and they work eight hours a day in three shifts at sorting out the stone from the coal. It is passed along on a moving pan and a little group of them side by side hurry to pick out the chips as the pan goes by. They look odd with tight-fitting caps on their heads and their blue overalls, their faces as black as their clothes, and the whites of their eyes shining.

A man hasn't the knowledge to become a skilled miner till he is thirty, and by forty-five he has lost the best of his strength, so that he has to do lighter work, for which he gets
less money. At fifty-five he gets his pension, three thousand francs for himself and the same for his wife, but seldom lives to enjoy it for more than a year or two. He speaks of dying between fifty-five and sixty quite calmly, as something that is in the natural order of things.

He gets his house at a nominal rent of eight to ten francs a month and four hundred kilos of coal a month. He works five days a week for sixty francs a day and a supplement of twenty-five per cent, but if he is asked to work overtime and refuses he loses his supplement.

Medical attention is free, but he complains that the doctors neglect him; if they are busy they don't come till the day after they are called, and medical supplies are inadequate.

The miners are friendly, kindly, helpful people. They know that their work depends on the work of others and so a natural good fellowship exists between them. Some of them live an hour or more away from the mine and come in on their bikes. They are attached to their ugly little village and even if they can get a house near the mine won't leave it.

Besides the skilled miners who get out the coal, make the passages and do the tunnelling, there are the unskilled workmen who look after the electricity, drive the trucks that bring the coal from where it has been loaded to the lifts, and push the loaded trucks into the lift. The truck has to be uncoupled, pushed by hand along the curved rail and got into the lift. A man will push twelve hundred trucks into the lift in the course of a shift. It is hard work and he is paid twenty francs a day. Before the last strike he was only paid fourteen.

The lift is very shaky. It travels at a great rate, rattling fearfully, up and down. When it reaches the bottom the empty truck has to be pushed out again.

Chez Angélique
. A smallish square room with a bar at the back of it and a lot of bottles on shelves. There are two or three square tables with a bench against the wall and chairs in front, and in the middle of the room a round table. Several miners are sitting at it and with them a heavily-built soldier in uniform on leave. One man is doing tricks with a piece of wool, a childish trick which thrills them, and they buy rounds of drinks on it. They are all friendly and cordial. At another table four men are playing cards. They talk little, mostly about the work and the price of things.

The family lives in a room behind the bar. There is a sick Pole in bed and half a dozen people are crowded round him. The air is foul.

The Poles look very different from the French. They have square heads and thick-set bodies and even through the black of the coal their skins seem white. They are on good terms with the French, but keep a good deal to themselves. They eat very sparingly, more so than the French, and put by money to send home to buy a farm with. They drink chiefly on public holidays and at marriages, when they have a great party and spend all they have. Then they economise for months to make up. They speak French haltingly, with a marked accent.

A bath is a serious business. The water is heated in the copper used for the household washing and in this the miner takes his bath. Young miners proud to show that they go down the mine walk about unwashed. When they are single they take a room, or a bed in a room, in a widow's house or in someone's who hasn't a large family. They go into Lens to go to the brothel, either by motor-bus or on their bike.

The tunnels are a little higher than an ordinary man's height. They are very long, lit coldly by naked bulbs, and a
bitter wind blows down them. It is strange to walk along them and meet never a soul. They turn and twist, and one leads out of another, and you wonder how anyone can find his way; but the foreman told me he could do so blindfold.

It is wonderfully mysterious when you come suddenly upon a little group at work. You creep through a hole in the wall of the tunnel and scramble or crawl along a narrow passage, sometimes on all fours, till you come to where they are continuing the tunnel or actually mining the coal. The drill is so heavy that it needs two men to lift it and the din it makes is infernal.

The light is dim, and the miners, stripped to the waist, with caps on to protect their heads, look hardly human.

Half-way through the day's shift they get half an hour off for lunch. They sit down on the coal dust and eat the food they have brought with them in a canister, a great lump of bread, buttered or with a stick of sausage inside it, and drink weak coffee out of a metal bottle.