The Colliery

A clear, white dawn breaks over the dreary town as they make their way up the dusty road.  Their trudging cadence is marked by the clink-clink of tin lunch pails and canteens slung on shoulders or carried in hand.  Up the hill they rise.  With a scuffling tread these grey men pass like ghosts through the lifeless landscape.  Purged of leaves and green a grove of trees stands long dead with crooked limbs reaching pleadingly to heaven.  All is sooted by dust from generations of toil, the work of a thousand men drilling and blasting, breaking coal from rock and sorting rock from coal.  This is the colliery.

The scarred mountain stands mournfully, draped in slag and crowned by the monstrous breaker rising like a gallows casting its pall over the sodden workers at its feet.  The contraption is built of heavy timbers, bolted and braced, made greasy by the black dust, its trestle reaches grasping arms from sky to earth clutching the hillside.  Interwoven with iron rails and steel cables, the breaker’s trestle plunges headlong into the mountain’s gaping wound and downward into the man-dug abyss where the black treasure lies.

On this hilltop, from the engine house perched atop the breaker, emanates an incessant clanging of machinery and the intermittent hiss of escaping steam.  The din is buttressed with the rumble of heavy wheels, drumming pistons and the rattle of chains.  The machines roar as onward come the men of mines.  Slouching into queue amidst smoke and steam they await the morning’s descent.  Eight men to a flat car, they sit side-by-side, butted against wooden cleats, as they ride the trestle down into the pit.   Knees drawn up to their chests, arms hugging their legs, they jostle and bump as the car rolls down the track, slowly picking up speed as it goes.

Through the gaping portal they pass from life on earth to the life below where all is black and damp.  Down they ride with eyes wide straining to adjust to the utter darkness.  They rumble along until the sudden bump of the railhead announces their arrival at the bottom of the pit.  In the deep stillness there is the sound of water trickling over rock, droplets ploinking into pools.  Soon the quiet will be shattered by the clanging of irons swung in the miners’ toil.  The darkness too is broken by splinters of light as davy lamps are lit and hung upon the miners’ caps.  

Some say a day in the pit passes like three on the ground.  The plodding work is spent with no movement of sun or shadow to mark the passage of time.  Here the hours are measured by cartfuls of coal, the minutes by lump and shovelful.  The thumping and clanking of pickaxes and sledges sound like clock chimes counting the movement of the time.  Slowly, by blow upon blow, the rock gives way to the strength of iron and the perseverance of men.