Yorkshire men, with flat caps and flatter vowels – were looking at me expectantly from behind the trestle table that dominated the cramped office where the interviews were being held. Even in the dingy light of the room I could see the coaldust trapped under the men’s fingernails and their leathery, calloused hands. Miners’ hands.
I had queued up all morning with dozens of other local lads for my chance to be here, but now that I finally had my moment in the spotlight my mind had gone blank. Exactly why did I want to join the workforce at Markham Main, Armthorpe’s colliery?
I’d never had a problem with interviews – years of waltzing through stage school auditions had left me confident to the point of cockiness – but today was different. Today, I was going for a job that I urgently needed, but was absolutely dreading getting.
* * *
Growing up, the view from my bedroom window was dominated by the hulking, coal-black silhouette of Markham Main. To my overactive young imagination, the distant outline of the colliery buildings was a vision of hell, with the mine’s vast wheel and clanking conveyor belt rearing up out of the slagheap like some nightmarish fairground ride. The pit was only a mile from my home, but it might as well have been in a different hemisphere. Although the colliery was the reason for my hometown’s existence and the main source of income and community for the majority of its residents – including most of my school friends’ families – as far as I was concerned it had absolutely nothing to do with me. There were few mining families living in the smart new estate where we had our semi-detached bungalow, and my parents had drilled into me from a young age that I should never even think about joining the local industry.
‘No son of mine is ever going to put his life at risk working down the mines,’ Dad would lecture, stony-faced – and that was absolutely fine by me. I’d go round to friends’ houses for tea and stare with barely concealed horror at their fathers’ ruined hands and coal-blackened faces. And although I would see the miners trudging past my school every day in their luminous safety vests, helmets and hobnail boots, always covered in a blanket of coaldust, they might as well have been aliens for all the relevance I thought they had to my existence.
It wasn’t just the thought of working in such dark and dangerous conditions that seemed so strange and scary to me, it was the whole lifestyle that came with the job. After a day down the pit I’d see my friends’ dads head off down the pub or the miners’ welfare club for pints of beer and games of darts and snooker and banter about birds and football, and I would silently vow to myself, not me. Not ever.
* * *
I had spotted the advert in the Doncaster Free Press when I was doing my weekly trawl of the job section.
WANTED – A NEW GENERATION OF MINERS FOR MARKHAM MAIN COLLIERY, ARMTHORPE
It was the early Eighties, Arthur Scargill was raising hell and there was a drive to revitalise the colliery, a last-ditch attempt to save the local industry by injecting a burst of youthful energy. But it was the last line of the advert that jumped off the page and grabbed my attention.
EXCELLENT RATES OF PAY
I was 18 and in desperate need of money. When I had graduated from art college a few months previously I had assumed I would walk straight into a design job in Sheffield or Doncaster, but despite what the tutors had promised us the opportunities just weren’t there. I knew that my only hope of success was to go to London, that magical place where the streets – if not quite paved with gold – were at least paved with advertising agencies and trendy design studios where an ambitious graduate might make their fortune.
Kim had by now secured a modelling agent in London, so we had decided to move down South and get a place together. Besides, Armthorpe no longer held any appeal for me. Most of my friends seemed content to remain in the village forever with their apprenticeships and girlfriends, their lives comfortably mapped out, but in my mind I was destined for bigger and better things.
I’ve got to get out or I’ll be stuck here forever, I would panic as I sat through another night down the pub with people with whom I increasingly felt I had nothing in common. But to start a new life in London required serious funds, which is why, when I spotted the newspaper advert, I shrugged off a lifetime’s prejudice and dialled the number without a second thought.
I didn’t tell my parents I was going for a job at the colliery. There was no point; I knew what their reaction would be. Kim wasn’t keen either, but she understood we needed to get some money together in order to start our lives together in London. Which is why I found myself here, within the gates of Markham Main for the first time, sitting nervously in front of the colliery’s three wise men.
‘I don’t come from a mining background and I haven’t had any experience of this sort of work,’ I told the panel of flat caps. ‘But I want to put 100 per cent into this. I’m a hard worker and a quick learner, and I’m really interested in a career in, um, coal.’
‘Well, Gary, you’re a bit … over-qualified for this job,’ said one of the men, glancing over my cv. ‘But you’ve got a good attitude and seem like the sort of lad who’d do well here at Markham. You’ll start the training next week. Well done, lad.’
On the walk back home, I thought about bottling it. Now I’d actually been offered the job all my old fears bubbled back up to the surface: I was convinced I would die or be hideously maimed in a tragic accident – at the very least end up with permanently blackened fingernails. But by the time I arrived back at my front door I had made up my mind to accept; if I’m honest, there had never really been any doubt that I would after they’d told me the dizzying figures I could earn by clocking up double shifts and over-time. For five hundred quid a week Mum and Dad would understand. Eventually.
* * *
There was no sign of the dawn when I got on my bike just before 5 a.m. and pedalled furiously through the freezing winter darkness towards the colliery for my first day down the mine. I was carrying a flask of strong tea and the sandwiches my mum had left out for me the night before. She might not be happy about her son’s new career (in fact that would be a considerable understatement) but after a screaming argument she and Dad had at least grudgingly understood my reasons for taking the job.
I’d already sat through four weeks of classroom-based training to prepare me and my fellow recruits for pit life. There were a few lads who, like me, saw this as an opportunity to earn a fast buck then move on to bigger and better things, but the rest of them were from mining families and landing a job at the colliery was the pinnacle of their ambition. I just couldn’t relate to their mentality: go underground, do the job, get pissed – that was all they seemed to want out of life.
I thought they were thick and lazy, and I’m quite sure they hated me in return. They certainly thought I was a snob and picked up on the fact that I was a bit more sensitive and softly spoken, as I got called a ‘fucking poof’ on more than one occasion. Some of them had been to school with me and knew all about my dancing and singing career as a kid, so they had plenty of ammunition. They’d even take the piss out of my sandwiches, because Mum would put a bit of salad in with the filling instead of their bog-standard plain cheese spread or fish paste. But I really couldn’t give a toss. I was impatient to start raking it in as quickly as possible so I could escape this hellhole.
I passed through the colliery gates, locked up my bike and reluctantly joined the mass of men clocking in for shifts, our breath showing like puffs of steam in the icy morning air. Then it was straight over to the changing rooms where I jostled through the throng of bodies towards my locker, avoiding eye contact as much as possible. I remember the smell of that room to this day – damp, dirty, earthy. It was the smell of the mine.
I tried to calm my ever-increasing nerves by focusing on the process of getting myself dressed in my kit: first the thermal pants, vest and leggings, a rough cotton shirt that felt like it was made from hessian then a one- or two-piece overall over the top. Big socks and those hard, heavy boots. And finally a big navy overcoat, the Armthorpe logo proudly stitched on the breast, and a white helmet with a torch. Nothing fitted me properly. I was a skinny thing when I was younger