From Coal Dust to Stardust

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You could be trudging for miles, often in complete darkness as the lights frequently failed – and at the furthest point from the lift shaft was the blistering-hot black heart of the mine, the coalface.

* * *

Life down the mine was one of extremes. You were either working in the freezing cold, or – depending on how near to the core you were – unbearable heat. It must have been 100 degrees at the coalface. The machinery used for cutting away at the rock got so hot that you constantly had to pour water on it to cool it down, one of my jobs as it turned out. Similarly, it was either completely silent or so deafening that despite wearing ear protectors you’d still have tinnitus by the time you got up next morning.

As I was one of the brighter of the new recruits – and possibly because I was built more for tap-dancing than rock-smashing – I was assigned a job that relied on brains rather than brawn. My responsibility was safety: making sure machinery was running smoothly and official procedures were correctly followed in whichever area I was assigned to that day. Sort of like the swotty school prefect who checks all the students’ ties are done up and shouts at them for running in the corridors, except I was having to boss around men twice my age and size. Unsurprisingly, this role did little to improve my reputation with the other miners, especially as most of the time they paid next to no attention to the rulebook.

‘Er, sorry, but you really should be wearing your helmet in this area,’ I would mutter to some huge hulk of a man.

‘Why don’t you just fuck off, Cockerill?’

‘Um, right. Okay.’

The men tended to do exactly what they wanted, which is probably why there were so many accidents. What with the very real threat of fire, explosion, poisonous gas leaks, suffocation, roof collapse and the terrifying machinery – including an enormous corkscrew-like drill that could shear off layers of rock to reach the seam of coal as effortlessly as slicing through a joint of ham – a mine is hardly the safest working environment at the best of times. There were enough ways to die down there without some wanker lighting up a cigarette or forgetting to apply a safety brake. It didn’t take me long to realise why the pay was so good on this job: that 500 quid I was pocketing at the end of each week was actually danger money.

One day I was working by the side of the tracks that carried the carts of coal up from the depths of the mine. Each of these wagons was the size of a small car and, filled to overflowing with its black cargo, unimaginably heavy. Suddenly there was a yell and a clatter and I turned, terrified, to see one of these monster trolleys careering out of control down the slope towards where I was standing. I threw myself out of the way, ending up with only a gash across my forehead and a few bruises. The lad I was working with wasn’t so lucky – poor kid was stretchered out with a shattered leg, sobbing and screaming for his mum.

During my seven months at Markham Main a bloke had his arm severed in an accident and another, tragically, was decapitated when he became entangled in machinery at the coalface. I wasn’t there when he was killed and I barely knew the guy, but I remember standing by the side of the street with the rest of the village as the funeral procession went past, an entourage of dozens of black-clad mourners following a magnificent horsedrawn coffin, barely visible for all the wreaths.

Death was a fact of life down the mine. The older miners would take great pleasure freaking us out with tales of ghosts haunting the tunnels and distant caverns of Markham Main. You’d be on your own, dozing off in the gloom, when someone would creep up on you – just to get a laugh by scaring the shit out of you. I began to dread the mine’s dark corners as much as its more obvious dangers. Honest to God, every single day I went down there thinking that I wasn’t going to come back up again. The only thing that made me stick it out was the money and the thought that with every day I was a little bit nearer to London and a glittering future.

Almost as bad as the fear, however, was the boredom. The way that some of the men dealt with the tedium of long days stuck underground was by having a wank with one of the stash of well-thumbed girlie mags you’d find in the systems booths. My sexuality was all over the place at the time and it didn’t even cross my mind to involve myself in anything like that. But, as it turned out, one of my colleagues had other ideas …

One of the unwritten rules of colliery life was that all the men showered together at the end of a shift. It was all part of the blokeish camaraderie – washing each other’s backs, slapping each other with wet towels, bonding over banter about birds and football. Like a sports locker room, I suppose, but cruder, grimier and more threatening. As you can imagine, I was way, way out my comfort zone. When I got home I always got straight in the bath to wash off the filth of that grim communal shower room.

One evening I was doing my usual thing of soaping up and getting out as quickly as possible when I noticed that one of the men was smiling at me. Chris Johnson. What the hell did he want? I had few friends in here – and Chris Johnson definitely wasn’t one of them. Hard as nails and built like Mike Tyson, everyone in the village knew you didn’t mess with him.

‘It’s Gary, isn’t it?’ he smiled, sauntering through the wet bodies to where I stood. He must have been in his mid-thirties, and with his black hair and pale blue eyes he looked a bit like an ugly, pumped-up Oliver Reed. ‘You alright, lad?’

I might have imagined it, but it seemed that the men who had been showering near me moved a little further away.

‘Fine, thanks.’ I tried to keep my eyes fixed on the grimy water swirling down the drain.

‘How was your day?’ Chris was steadily soaping himself as he talked. I couldn’t help but notice he had the biggest dick I had ever seen. Massive it was, halfway down his leg. I was too terrified to speak.

‘You know, Gary, I’ve been keeping an eye on you down the mine,’ he said. ‘I know it can be bloody hard when you’re new. I remember what it was like when I started – scared shitless I was!’

He chatted away for a bit, telling me about his wife and kids, asking about my girlfriend, and I started to relax a little. He did seem genuinely friendly, and God knows I could do with having the colliery’s resident hard man on my side.

And then it happened.

‘Can you wash my back?’ he asked casually, turning round. I quickly rubbed the greying bar of soap over his vast shoulders to get the worst of the soot off.

‘Thanks, lad. Your turn now.’

I knew something was wrong almost immediately. Rather than the usual perfunctory scrub, Chris was moving his hands over me with slow, tender strokes, caressing my shoulders and exploring my chest almost like a lover. Exactly like a lover, I realised in horror as his hand moved lower down my back towards my bum. Then suddenly his fingers were everywhere. Touching, grabbing, probing … Horrified, I wriggled out of his clutching paws.

‘Thanks!’ I spluttered. ‘Got to go now!’

‘Bye then, Gary,’ he said calmly, an amused glint in his eye. ‘See you next week.’

It wasn’t a question.

From then on, Chris cornered me in the showers every time we were working the same shift. I’d try my best to avoid him, but several times I couldn’t. It fell into the same pattern: we’d chat pleasantly, he’d offer to wash my back and then try to grope me. I was completely freaked out, but too scared of the guy to tell him to stop – besides, I very much doubted that anyone in those showers would come to my rescue if things turned nasty. Thankfully I never had to find out, as a few weeks later I gratefully clocked out of my last shift at Markham Main.

Although I had only been at the colliery for a few months, I was a completely different creature from the pink-cheeked boy of before. To put it bluntly, I was a complete wreck. Working underground for seven-day weeks, sometimes pulling double shifts (there was no such thing as the Working Time Directive in those days) had left me deathly pale, painfully thin and completely exhausted.

I had a constant hacking cough – and every time I coughed would bring up the most evil-looking green muck you can imagine – and convinced myself that I was going to die of Black Lung, the chronic disease that tragically killed so many miners. Every night when I got home I’d scour my hands until they bled to get the coaldust out from the dozens of little nicks and cuts and from under my nails. That time I fell and gashed my forehead I was so paranoid that I’d be left with what was known as a ‘black man pinch’ – a scar that was permanently blackened from trapped coaldust – that I scrubbed at the raw, bloody wound with a toothbrush for two agonising days to get the soot out.

But the biggest problem was with those boots. All that trudging for miles across rocky, uneven surfaces in ill-fitting footwear left me with the worst blisters you can imagine. I would gingerly take off my socks at night and my entire heel would be a puffy mass of agonising pink and white. Desperate to ease the pain, I would grit my teeth and pop the blisters with a needle – but of course I was always at the doctor’s with infections and blood poisoning.

I admit I had started out at Markham Main a cocky little sod, convinced I was better than the other blokes, but after seven months down the mine I was left with quite a different attitude. As much as I hated every moment of the job and dreaded the miners’ welfare evenings where I’d have to force down a pint and try to join in the banter feeling desperately out of place, the close-knit community of a mining village finally made sense to me. I had learnt how to be a team player.

The miners’ strike had left some families in the village on the verge of starvation, but all their neighbours would rally round, bring them food, help them through the hard times. I now had a genuine respect for these men who every day risked their lives to do a job that had been lined up for them since birth. While I was floating around with my head in the clouds, they knuckled down and unquestioning did what was expected of them, despite the horror stories that they had no doubt been hearing about the mines from their fathers and grandfathers since birth.

And today, when I go back to Armthorpe, I see how these same men have completely rebuilt their lives since the pits closed, retraining as plumbers or builders, keeping their families together while the world they had always known fell apart.

With the few thousand we had saved up – together with a bit of money donated by our parents – Kim and I could finally realise our dream of moving to London. We found a little studio above a bathroom showroom in Ealing, a suburb of West London. The flat was tiny, barely 15 ft square, with a mini toilet in a cupboard (over which hung a shower attachment) and the constant drone of traffic thanks to the M4 Hammersmith flyover which was just outside the window, but it was clean and cheap – and, most importantly, it was all ours.

Dad hired a mini-van and drove us down along with Mum, my sister Lynne and Kim’s mum, who cried all the way about her baby leaving home. We had a suitcase each and a few bits our mums had bought us – some bedding, sugar, tea and a pint of milk – but that was it.

That first night, after we’d waved a final goodbye to our parents, we celebrated with cheap fizzy wine (out of mugs as we didn’t have any glasses) and burger and chips from our local greasy spoon, a place which would become our main source of nutrition as we didn’t have a kitchen and besides, neither of us could cook. That night we stayed up talking into the early hours, a combination of nerves, excitement and the M4 traffic keeping us from sleep. While we were both terrified at being on our own in a strange city, we were incredibly excited about the future. Kim obviously had work lined up and I had already gone through the London phone directories and made a list of advertising agencies, design studios, printers – anyone who might take on an enthusiastic art college graduate with Honours. I was giddy with optimism. It felt like our lives were about to begin.