Days of Darkness

I remember going down the pit

Changing into ‘pit clothes’at the pit-head baths

Sliding the lamp out from the charging rack

Handing my ‘dog-tag’ check to the onsetter

The pneumatic rush as the cage appeared

Bouncing on a limb-thick, greasy cable

The violence of its jaw-like gate opening

Inviting we, reluctant boys, to step in, trying

To keep step with its last oscillations

As we strode over the sucking gap

Between solidity and suspension

The gate sliding shut like a sentence

And then, the planet conjured from under us

(An analogy for the future of the industry)

To that free-fall plunge of Newton’s wit

I, never did though, laugh at it

But especially not, when I found out that

The same cable lifted out mine-cars, amounting

To hundreds of tons of coal and ‘muck’

Every shift of three, in twenty-four hours

This, with a system lacking the safety measures

And emergency brakes of every tall building

Elevator, ever built for everybody but miners

And definitely not, when I learned of the

Occasion the ascending cage overtook the cable

Following the winder’s over-zealous braking

Fell back, slicing through the hanging loop

Of life-line cable as if it were pasta, accelerating

Its burden, to an explosive terminus, hundreds of yards

Below, at a speed, I never did dare work out

Only coal, money and materials were lost that day

But learning of it, I lost something else, and the

Revelation that my life shared sanctity with coal

Every day, didn’t make the hoary, old joke

That NCB stood for . . . ‘No (beep) Bothered’

One bit funnier either

 

(NCB actually stood for National Coal Board . . . later changed to British Coal . . . later changed out of all recognition)

 

© Mike Laycock (Silversalt)

Done