The Stony Path (28 page)

For a moment all Luke was aware of was that his eardrums felt like they had exploded and clouds of gritty dust were hitting his face and filling his eyes and ears. Everything was shaking and moving but the ringing in his own head was taking precedence, and it was some seconds before he realised he’d been flung to the floor, where he was sitting in total blackness, a blackness so absolute that it felt like a live entity in itself. How long he sat there he didn’t know – it could have been seconds or minutes such was his stunned state – but then outside sounds began to filter through what had become a giant waterfall roaring in his ears.

He felt himself all over, breathing out a long sigh of relief when he knew he still had two arms and two legs. Shouldn’t there have been some warning? The old miners said there was always a warning – a rush of air, the scurrying of rats,
something
– before an explosion.

‘Pete?’ Luke and the old miner had been the last two of the shift through the mother-gate – Arnold had been one of the first out of the cage and had stalked off after giving Luke a glare that told him their earlier conversation was still rankling. Luke remembered now the feeling of someone thudding down against him when he’d been knocked to the floor, and he felt about him cautiously.

When a voice at the side of him said, ‘Keep yor hands t’ yerself, lad,’ he knew Pete was all right.

‘What are we going to do?’ Luke gasped thickly.

‘Get out them as can move.’ The shuffling indicated that Pete had risen to his feet, and now Luke joined him, swaying slightly, as the older man said, ‘It’s in-bye where it’s happened, an’ them nearer the tailgate’ll have fared worse. We’d better see what’s what with our lot. Where’s t’ deputy?’

Luke felt his head cautiously. By, but he felt dizzy, and he could hardly hear a thing – had his eardrums shattered? As he groped his way in the pitch blackness, he had only gone a few steps when he tripped over what turned out to be Ernest Burns. He recognised him from the loud swearing that followed. ‘Ruddy good down here. If the firedamp don’t get you, a boot in the head’ll do the trick.’

More shuffling and groaning and muttered curses indicated that men were moving now, and Pete was encouraging those who could to get back to the roadway. The air was choking and fetid, and when Luke again stumbled over a prostrate body – which this time made no response – Pete told him to haul it back towards the roadway. ‘Aa’ll join thee in a minute, lad. All reet?’

The dust-filled air was thick and heavy as Luke, now crawling as he lugged the dead weight behind him, made for the air door. As he reached it, he thought for a moment the relief was going to make him lose consciousness. And then he was through, and the first thing that struck him was that there was light – blessed, wonderful light – from the lamp of the shift foreman, who must have run from the other section when he heard the blast. And the second reaction was to look round the men standing or sitting or, in some cases, lying in the roadway.

‘They’re all out bar Pete, Jack, Bart an’ your Arnold.’ Sam Williamson, the shift foreman, read Luke’s mind, before kneeling beside the unconscious figure of Eric Armstrong, the miner Luke had brought out with him. Then he rose, saying, ‘Get moving to the shaft, the lot of you, and those that can’t walk must be carried. I’ve notified up top and they’re sending in a rescue crew. It seems bad, but I’ve seen worse.’

The air was cleaner out in the roadway, with the air door shut against the suffocating coal dust, and Luke continued to breathe it in for a moment before he said, as the rest of the shift began to shamble off, ‘I’m going back in. Pete’s all right but he’ll need help to find the others in there.’

Sam looked at Luke. ‘Aye, well, I won’t argue with you, lad, and I’d be glad of the help. It’ll take time for the rescue crew to get here, and maybe there’s more in store. The sooner we get ’em out and up top the happier I’ll feel, and there’s still the section at the tailgate to see to. The roof’s down there, so I understand, and I reckon it’s bad.’

Luke nodded. He didn’t quite understand the desperate urgency he felt regarding Arnold – he had never liked his brother, and he knew full well Arnold didn’t like him – but nevertheless it was there. Perhaps it was as simple as blood being thicker than water. But it wasn’t just Arnold. To leave any man lying in that pitch-black hellhole was unthinkable.

They reached Pete after a short way and he was hauling Bart Hopkins, who looked to have two crushed legs, along with him. The man’s groans were blood-curdling.

‘He says Arnold an’ Jack were afront of him.’ Pete didn’t stop moving as he spoke, and Luke and Sam Williamson had to press against the walls of the tunnel as he passed. ‘Seemed to me the roof’s doon, but one of ’em was groanin’ like.’

‘The others are moving to the shaft; can you manage to take Bart?’ the foreman asked.

‘Aye.’ It was pithy, but the grit-laden air was not conducive to conversation.

They had gone some way when they found them. Arnold’s head was bleeding and he was unconscious, but the prop that had wedged itself above his head and which was taking the weight of a huge slab of stone had certainly saved his life. Jack Davison, the deputy, was quite dead, the life having been crushed out of him by the unforgiving, hard black rock he had worked for most of his forty-three years.

It was when they came to move Arnold that the two men realised one of his legs was broken, the bone sticking through his torn trouser leg and gleaming with macabre whiteness in the dark. Nevertheless, whatever other injuries he might have also sustained, they knew time was of the essence. It wasn’t unusual for one explosion to be followed by another – firedamp was the very devil – and they could do nothing for Jack; it would take machinery to lever the body free.

By the time they reached the roadway, Luke and Sam were sweating and gasping, but then they were breathing the clean flowing air again in great hungry gulps.

‘He was lucky.’ Sam Williamson nodded down at the comatose figure at their feet. ‘Give it a while and likely he’ll be as right as rain. Jack was the only breadwinner in his house, it’ll hit his missus hard.’

‘Aye.’ Luke said nothing more. They needed all their strength to make it to the shaft and the cage that would take them out of this mausoleum, but Sam’s words had kicked him in the stomach. Eva, and now Arnold. The ties holding him to this town, to the pit, were tightening like the tentacles of a giant squid which was determined to suck the life out of him. He was the only breadwinner now that his father had gone, at least until Arnold was better, and who knew how long that would take?

At a movement from Sam he turned, taking his brother’s upper body as Sam lifted Arnold’s legs, and the two coal-encrusted figures, their eyes gleaming strangely in their black faces, began to stumble along the rough roadway towards the box that would carry them upwards into the daylight.

Chapter Twelve

It was a blazing-hot day in early September, and the country had been in the grip of a heatwave for weeks, the temperature now reaching ninety-three degrees Fahrenheit in the shade.

At the beginning of August the weather had made the bank holiday one of the busiest ever, thousands of Durham’s working class escaping to the parks and beaches in horse-drawn trams and farm carts and by shanks’s pony, there to buy song sheets and listen to the bands and eat bread and fish for a penny. The farthing fairs, bathing machines, cockle wives, Punch and Judy shows and donkey rides did a roaring trade, along with the portable stage shows by pierrots and comedians, and the inevitable open-air services by the temperance sand missions – the preachers giving it hot and strong to their restless audience. Down in the capital, London’s parks had reported record business; the beautiful Australian Patsy Montague delighting more cosmopolitan crowds at the London Pavilion with her tasteful impersonation of a living marble statue.

None of this pleasure-seeking had touched the farm at all. Since the day of the funeral in April the relentless daily drudgery which made up Polly’s life had become almost mind-numbing, with little to distinguish one day from another as she laboured from sunrise to sunset. She had heard nothing from Miss Collins beyond a brief note two weeks after her departure, when the older woman had thanked Polly for her ministrations when she had been residing in the cottage. A horse-drawn flat cart had arrived at the farm the next morning, the contents of the cottage had been cleared and that had been that.

Luke had made one short visit to acquaint them with the facts of his father’s departure and the accident at the mine, emphasising that with Arnold laid up and Eva’s mental and physical health causing concern, he felt obliged to curtail his visits to the farm for the time being. Polly rightly assumed – more from what Luke didn’t say than from what he did – that conditions at home were dire, and she expressed her understanding of the position Luke now found himself in whilst adding that he would be welcome any time he could call. That had been in April, and since then Luke had written twice to say he hoped all was well at the farm and that he would try to visit eventually, but as yet he had not made an appearance. Of Michael there had been no word at all.

Frederick hadn’t called for a full month after the funeral, and when he had arrived one mild, sunny afternoon in late May he had offered no explanation for his absence. He had brought a pile of newspapers with him for Polly ‘to catch up with current affairs’, as he had laughingly put it, along with his copy of
Poems
by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, the book the Brontë sisters had published under their pseudonyms. Polly had thanked him for his kindness but she had felt constrained in his presence and it had showed, which had thrown all Frederick’s carefully thought-out strategy to the wind. He had delayed his visit under the old adage of ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’, and had been extremely put out to find Polly wasn’t falling in line with his plans.

He had brooded over the conundrum all the way back to Stone Farm, and had eventually decided on the policy of letting Polly stew in her own juice. The farm was failing fast and she couldn’t carry them all for ever – his time would come. He had lent all the money he intended to lend, and the slightest disaster on top of all their current debts would send the farm and its occupants into a rapid downward spiral from which there would be no escape. He would restrict his visits to the minimum and wait, that was what he would do, and when calamity hit . . .

Calamity hit in the form of the torrential rain which ended the heatwave. It was the last straw for the old farmhouse’s dilapidated, weather-beaten roof, which had been crying out for attention for years.

It was a Tuesday afternoon, but it could have been any day of the week as far as Polly was concerned. She had been labouring in the fields for the last two weeks; the corn had ripened early and needed to be harvested before the arrival of the rains – forecast by Walter every night when he looked out into the baking farmyard. The corn harvest was always a worrying affair, as the grain couldn’t be cut or otherwise handled when it was wet, and when the rains came the grain could go rotten or even start to germinate in the ear before it could be harvested. It was also a time of intense and continuous hard work, but in other years Frederick had sent his labourers to the farm to help once his own corn was safely stacked and in his barns. A couple of his men were experts at making a good corn rick with walls that leaned outwards to avoid the rain and a roof which was perfectly pitched and thatched. This year, however, the men hadn’t materialised in spite of Polly’s repeated requests for help, and although Ruth and their grandmother had spent some hours each day helping, the half-acre of corn a good man with a sickle could harvest in a day had taken three times as long, and there had been several acres to mow.

When the first drops of rain fell out of a steadily darkening sky, Polly straightened her aching back and looked about her. She had shown her sister and grandmother how to stook the sheaves in the hours they could afford in the fields, and most of the short double-rows of barley they had done so far were now in the barn. Thank goodness they hadn’t planted oats; oats would have had to be churched three times in the stook – stood for three Sundays – before they could have been brought in. But there was still more to do.

She adjusted her big straw hat wearily. The last two weeks had seen her hands and arms scratched to ribbons, her face raw with sunburn in spite of the hat and every muscle of her body screaming for relief. She had risen at half past four every morning and worked until twilight, but it had been worth it. Most of the barley was safe. In a few weeks she could harness old Bess and plough the stubble, once she had had Ruth gleaning the last of the grain. They couldn’t afford to waste a single stalk that would mean food for the chickens.

She raised her hot face to the fat raindrops, the scent of the thunderstorm beginning to permeate the cracked ground, and then, with a suddenness that quite literally took Polly’s breath away, the heavens opened and a solid sheet of water enveloped everything. She gasped, blinded and stunned for a moment by the cloudburst, and then bent to retrieve the sickle before heading in the direction of the farmhouse.

The straw hat had fallen limply about her face and she took it off, carrying it against her soaked body as she trod over baked earth which was steaming as though the fires of the underworld were trying to break through. Her long linen skirt and calico apron impeded her progress as she stumbled along, the torrent of water not letting up for a moment, but then she reached the gate and passed through into the area beyond where the pigsty was, the back of the farmhouse looming up in front of her. She skirted the side of the house, the ground awash with a stream of water, and turned into the farmyard, and just as she did so the door opened and Ruth emerged pell-mell.