Too Cold For Snow

The men hooted and hollered, cheered fit to burst. There was a cascade of chopsticks, thrown in the air in appreciation.
    Later on the Madagascar, a fug of flatulence settled like a sea mist throughout the levels. Prisoners patted their expanded stomachs. Boss hogs were sending leftovers to the nonces, yes, sending cold noodles to the child molesters, with bits of razor blade hidden in the mix. This was prison at the end of the day, and they were all at sea.

The Pit
     
     
    Workers at Wales’ last remaining deep pit, Tower Colliery near Hirwaun, had to abandon work yesterday when human remains were found in a recently excavated drift. Two bones, believed to be a femur and part of a collarbone, were taken away by police and are being examined at the Forensics Department in Bridgend.
    Broadcast on BBC’s Good Morning Wales, 6.9.07
     
    The tunnels are long and preternaturally dark. Down there naked eyes are useless. In such recesses, where there isn’t so much as a hint or a glint of light, the ears are forced to compensate, so the sound of a scurrying rat seems swollen to twice its size, the rustle of hairs on its rancid pelt like brushfire. This is the darkest labyrinth, the passageways connected in ways that no one remembers nowadays, now that the mine entrances are padlocked. After what happened down there.
    There’s a myth among miners that a robin sighted underground is a portent of death. A shot lighter was reported to have seen no fewer than four robins in a shaft at Caled Number Four.
    Known by some as the ‘deadliest colliery in Christendom’, Caled Number Four, near the village of Maerdy was opened in 1873. It was one of the biggest employers in the industry as a whole. Three thousand and three men sweated and coughed there. Miners were like ants burrowing into Allt Y Fedwen following an incline called the Trimsaran Sink. The secondhand winding gear above ground was arthritic: when the big wheel turned it made the sound of a badger being flayed.
    First timers, twelve or thirteen year olds on their virgin shift, would double-take when they saw the shot lighter who was blind and had to be shown where to place his fuses and how to light them. The man also had the shakes. But despite the creakingness of the machinery and the oddity of some of the senior men, Caled Number Four had rich seams of luscious coal, producing masses of hard nuggets that were long-burning and sought after by the Royal Navy for their Ironsides. But there was always something curious about the workings. Lit by candles, in defiance of marsh gas, surveyors who measured the growing tunnels could never quite make their sums add up. There always seemed to be more space than accounted for by their instruments. Roofways looked twenty feet bigger than the actual measurements. There were caverns that might have belonged to a forgotten race, halls of long lost kings, troglodyte rulers of the darkness under the land.
    Davy Jones was a miner in Caled Number Four, though everyone called him Cross Eyes. When he was born they said that storm clouds had galloped down from the hills and lightning had struck the tree outside his mother’s room. He was a lonely child because other children were merciless and the only friend he had was a girl who ran on sticks because of polio. She was called Catherine and kissed him once, full on the lips before apologising and saying she had the mumps. His parents were of that hard generation that never gave him love, so he grew up a stunted flower.
    But he did get married, to a scrawny thing called Anne he met after chapel on the Monkey Walk: she loved him like life itself. They had a child though neither could work out exactly how that had come about. They rented a tiny terraced cottage above the canal with money he borrowed at a high rate of interest from his dad and bought two fine chairs so they could sit of an evening and discuss the previous Sunday’s sermon. Davy might have said he was happy then. His wife’s porcelain skin in the flickering light. The metronome ticking and tocking of his grandmother’s grandfather clock. New potatoes from the garden where he’d planted autumn’s peelings and seen them send up vernal shoots. But it was a brief happiness. The work at the mine dried up just before the General Strike and because he was proud and stubborn like his parents, Davy couldn’t ask them for help when the money dwindled. He watched his wife turn skeletal and his baby run out of life. First the