Bred of Heaven by Jasper Rees Page B

men of the Rhondda, whether they had work or not, he was astonished not only by their mild manners and gentleness, but by the high level of education, culture and intellectual curiosity.
    And then he plunged underground. Issued with dungarees and a lamp, he stepped into a cage with a group of men for the afternoon shift and reached fifty miles an hour as they dropped half a mile into the earth. ‘It roared. It rattled. It banged. I felt that my feet had left the bottom of the cage and that my ears were being pulled upwards.’ It slowed to a halt, out he stepped and began walking for more than a mile towards the coalface. Overhead, steel girders had been wrenched out of shape by the weight of half a mile of terra firma. Underfoot, as he walked between rails, his boots kicked through fluffy powder. A voice hallooed from a great distance. Then another noise was heard, which grew and grew until ‘it was as if the miners in the front line had released some dragon that was tearing towards us in the dark’: a train of twenty-five cars laden with coal growled past, as Morton and his guide stepped into a lay-by.
    Eventually he came to the coalface, where he found not onlyminers but boys and a horse. He seemed to show more interest in the fate of the colliery horses than the boys, and indeed reported on the care they received at greater length than the business of working the seam. Nonetheless, Morton did marvel at the extraordinary skill with which the men attacked the face:
    You who know coal only as something in a homely fire-bucket can have no conception of its appearance deep down in the earth … A child would realise the peril of picking at this soft black stuff, with the hard rock above always in danger of falling and crushing you to death. The miners … knew exactly where to strike. They were as black as negroes. Their shirts, wet with sweat, clung to ebony bodies. There seemed something gallant and desperate every time a man tapped a great ledge of coal, gently felt it move until it seemed to tear like cloth, then – ‘Stand clear!’ – and down it fell in a black rush, lumps of it big enough to break your back!
    He seemed to find no means of expressing his admiration for these men other than through punctuation: he littered these paragraphs with exclamation marks as he met and talked with them of music (‘He was fond of Handel!’) and of greyhounds (‘We talked of dogs!’). The readers of the
Daily Herald
needed to be told that these miners were no worse than themselves, and possibly rather better. ‘It was like finding hell inhabited by angels,’ said Morton.
    His imagination made a link with still-fresh memories of the trenches, a coal mine’s atmospheric equivalent for camaraderie in the face of danger.
    â€˜Well, and what do you think of it?’ a miner asked him as he entered the cage to be sent back up towards green grass and soft rain.
    â€˜You are always in the firing-line.’
    â€˜We get used to it. It’s got to be done! I wish a few more people would come and see us work. Cheerio!’
    The DOSCO Mark IIB Roadheader bears down on the coalface, its ferocious cutting head a-jigger. A new upgraded DOSCO would cost in the neighbourhood of one and a half million quid, Brian tells me. This one’s forty years old. If it were a whale it would be smothered in barnacles. Under advice, I’ve got my breathing mask on.
    Visible across the vertical surface is a join between the six-foot coal seam and, above it, a mixture of sandstone and mudstone. The miners call it muck, because it’s worthless. The cutting head engages the wall of rock and begins the work of ripping it to shreds. As the arm swings left and right, up and down, the whole lot spits off in an indiscriminate mix onto the floor, where it is swept into the bowels of the machine by two huge, flat, rotating star-shaped wheels. The roar is all-engulfing. There’s no point