had gone undiscovered. It had mixed with the airflow and a tiny spark, perhaps from a cracked safety lamp or even a piece of overheated machinery, had ignited it. And then it had exploded.
In an even softer, and more dangerous, voice Nick said, ‘General Rules, of which even you as shift manager must be aware, state that daily checking for gas escape in every area of the mine is mandatory …’
‘Save it, Nick,’ someone was murmuring. ‘This isn’t the time.’
Down in the body of the powerhouse, the door opened again. The pit manager came in. At his shoulder was a bulky, middle-aged man in evening dress.
‘Here’s Mr Peris, lads,’ the manager shouted up to them.
The men crowded forward and leaned over the gallery railings. Nick felt the press of them behind him, solid but defeated. Further behind them, unwatched now, were the rows of air gauges with their nil readings. His hands gripped the cold iron. Beneath him, in Lloyd Peris’s upturned face, reddened with food and drink, he read the brazen readiness to bluster out of his responsibilities. Nick felt his throat swell and tighten with the rage inside him.
‘Peris? What happened to the air intake reverse?’ His shout filled the span of the arched roof and echoed back at him. ‘What happened to it, Peris?’
There was no answer. Nick pushed through the men and clanged down the iron stairs again. Cruickshank shrank back a little, but the owner stood his ground squarely.
‘A little too much of the hothead, Penry,’ he said smoothly. ‘It won’t do you or your men any good. Not shouting at me, nor threatening my manager. Now, as you all know’ – he raised his voice so that the men waiting above could hear – ‘there has been a sad accident tonight. I have had a full report from Mr Cruickshank here, who has acted very properly. An unavoidable explosion was followed by an outbreak of fire, which cut off the men’s egress and prevented a rescue party from reaching them. I understand that a number of brave men, led in an exemplary manner by the shift manager, tried to get down there. Thank you for that.’ He smiled, intending a grave, consoling gesture that at the same time took in Nick’s clean face and clothes. The smile looked to Nick like the split in a pumpkin.
‘The intake?’ Nick asked him again, trying to swallow the loathing that was rising inside him as if he was about to vomit.
‘An unfortunate aspect of the accident is the failure of the reversing mechanism,’ Peris added. ‘The trapped men were subject to a negative airflow.’
The redness in front of Nick’s eyes swirled and threatened to blot everything out. He would have reached out to Peris and torn his starched shirt front, and tightened the absurd black bow around his neck until the man’s eyes popped and his tongue swelled between his lips. But Jim Abraham stepped smartly up behind him and locked his arms behind his back. Nick heard his own roaring voice filling his head, the force of it rasping at his throat.
‘They suffocated, man. Why don’t you use the proper words? Make your mouth taste nasty, do they? If the explosion didn’t get them, they suffocated to death, because your safety mechanism never worked. John Wyn told me himself. He said the installation was never completed. You didn’t want to spend the money on it, did you?’
Cut off from the normal air supply by the fire, the trapped men should have been kept alive by a simple switch which would pump in fresh air through the exhaust system. When it had failed, they had been left to die.
Nick twisted to free himself, but Jim Abraham’s grip was like iron.
‘We all know it, Peris. Every man here. It’s your negligence. You murdered forty-four men tonight. You are a common murderer.’
Even as he shouted, Nick knew that his words were a pathetically useless weapon against Lloyd Peris. The owner was already at the powerhouse door.
‘You will have a chance to present your unfounded accusations through the proper channels, Penry. Mr Cruickshank has the duty to inform the relatives of the dead men, with my deepest sympathy. He also has my orders to cap the down air supply. The pit will remain closed until the fire is out and we are sure of its safety. Good night.’
‘Your sympathy?’ Nick was shouting at the closing door, knowing that he sounded like a madman and unable to control himself. ‘Your only sympathy is with yourself because this has disturbed your bloody dinner.’
The heavy door was shut.
Jim Abraham released Nick’s arms. Briefly the older man hugged him, leaving black marks on Nick’s Sunday coat.
‘I know, lad,’ he said gently. ‘We all know. It’s like you want to kill them for it, and not even that would be enough. I was at Senghenydd, remember? Four hundred and thirty-nine men, that day.’
‘I know how many,’ Nick said bitterly. He was suddenly limp, and as defeated with the ebbing of his terrible anger as the ring of men watching him. ‘Forty-four or four hundred, it’s all the same, isn’t it? His fault, and his friends.’
Cruickshank had gone away up the gallery stairs. He had been turning heavy, polished wheels and watching the dials as the pointers flicked and sank back. Now he came to the master switch. He eased it up and the even hum of the generators faltered, dropped in pitch and died away into silence. Outside the searchlights blinked out and the pithead was lit only by the cold, feeble circles of the emergency lights.
Nick had no idea whether it was real or inside his head, but he heard the terrible low cry from the crowd at the gates. There had been no official announcement, but the news would have reached them long ago. They would all know what the sudden dark and quiet meant.
One by one, not looking at each other, the rescue party filed out of the powerhouse. They would go to the families of the dead men, and try to reassure them that they had done all they could.
Nick found himself standing alone in the shadows with the useless machinery towering around him. Wordlessly, numbed by anger that hadn’t yet given way to grief, he made a promise to the men buried in Nantlas No. 1. He promised them that he would fight the greed and callousness and cruelty that had killed them.
Nick shivered. He realized that he had no idea how long he had been standing there. Slowly, moving stiffly, he walked out of the powerhouse and across to the railings. The coal dust crunched with gritty familiarity under his feet. The crowd that had pressed against the railings was gone, taking its grief with it up to the little houses on the hillside. Nick was on his way up too when he saw that not quite everyone was gone. A little way off someone was standing staring back at the pithead. From the torn shirt showing the white glimmer of skin, Nick recognized Bryn Jones. He remembered that he had promised this morning to have a word with Dicky Goch for him. No one would have any more words for Dicky now.
Coming up beside him, Nick saw that Bryn was crying, silent involuntary tears that ran down his face and dripped on to his hopeless chest.
‘All of them, is it?’ Bryn asked.
‘Yes.’ Nick’s arm came briefly around his thin shoulders, hugging him as Jim Abraham had hugged Nick himself. ‘You didn’t get down in time, then? You were lucky today, Bryn.’
‘Call it luck, do you?’ The bitterness was not against Nick, but against all the things that they both knew.
‘Come on,’ Nick told him gently. ‘Don’t stand out in this damp air.’
They turned their backs on the darkened pit and went on up the hill together.
Biarritz, August 1924
Two days after the explosion in Nantlas No. 1, Adeline Lovell was lying on the sun terrace of the Hotel du Palais, Biarritz. There was enough of a cooling breeze to stir the flags on the tall white flagpoles guarding the sea edge of the terrace, and the strong blue light was softening to dove grey around the curve of the bay.
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