And she was like her mother. Constance nodded mentally to the thought. She knew she was. Her grandma thought she was a bairn still and too young to know her mind, but she didn’t think she’d ever been a bairn where her feeling for Matt was concerned.
Her mother would have understood. This train of thought stirred the deep and futile longing that had always been with her since a little girl. If she could have just talked to her mam once, hugged her, kissed her, she would be content. Her grandma was lovely and she loved her all the world, but her mam . . . Well, she was her mam. And the people who said you couldn’t miss what you’d never had, talked rubbish.
‘Constance?’ Mabel stopped at the end of the lane, her gloved hands reaching for the sweet face that was the image of her daughter’s. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying, hinny?’
Constance looked into her grandma’s faded blue eyes and nodded. She understood only too well. Matt could do no wrong where her grandma was concerned, and if he had chosen Tilly Johnson as his lass then she was to be welcomed with open arms. And the ironic thing was, it was because of her and the great debt her grandparents felt to Matt that this was so. When she had been saved from the fire it had also saved her grandma’s reason, that’s what her granda had told her once when it had been just the two of them. Her grandma had always had a special bond with Hannah, he had confided. It was like that sometimes with one particular child, and she had suffered greatly when Hannah had died. But there’d been her, Hannah’s baby, to care for. And the special bond had been passed down because didn’t her grandma love her more than anything or anyone? her granda had finished, patting her cheek gently. And she must always remember that. She was her grandma’s sun, moon and stars.
Bending forward impulsively, she kissed her grandmother’s lined cheek. ‘I love you, Grandma.’
Mabel flushed with pleasure but her voice was dismissive when she said, ‘Go on with you, what are you after now?’ She had never been a one for expressions of physical affection. She showed her love in keeping a clean and tidy home and providing meals that were good and plentiful as befitted a dutiful wife and mother.
Knowing this, Constance now linked her arm through her grandmother’s, her voice deliberately playful: ‘I’ll be as nice as pie to Tilly, Gran, I promise. How about that? And when she goes on about all she has to do at the post office as though the rest of us are numbskulls, I’ll listen with bated breath and hang on her every word.’
‘Oh you, our Constance!’ But Mabel was laughing, her world having been put in order again.
Constance, on the other hand, felt hers would never be right again.
Chapter 2
It was the middle of March, and the severe winter which had seen snowfalls as high as the top of hedgerows and three months of relentless blizzards showed no signs of relinquishing its grip on the frozen north. There had been flurries of snow all week and the cold was intense, the sky lying low over the rooftops and causing folk to predict at every opportunity: ‘There’s more on the way, we aren’t out of this yet. This winter’ll be remembered for many a year.’
Matt Heath echoed this sentiment but in his case it had nothing to do with the weather. As he put it to himself, Tilly was driving him fair barmy. One minute she’d be warm and eager in his arms, giving him every signal she wanted him as much as he wanted her, and the next she’d be the outraged virago or worse, in floods of tears, making him feel like an animal.
He knew what she was holding out for, of course. Marriage. She wanted a ring on her finger before she went the whole hog. She’d never actually said so, but he knew. She was a good girl, she’d told him over and over again, and good girls didn’t do ‘that’.
He shuffled forward in the line of miners in the lamp cabin, waiting to draw their lamp along with the two tokens with the lamp number on. The lamp man would hang one token up in the cabin and the other would be kept by the miner; it was the only sure means of knowing if a miner had completed his shift and was safely above ground again.
‘Cheer up, man, it might never happen.’ His brothers were standing right behind him and now George nudged him in the ribs as he spoke, while Andrew put in, ‘What’s up with you these days, anyway? You’re a right miserable so-an’-so most of the time.’
Matt shrugged. If he told them the truth he knew what their answer would be. Only last week George had asked him when he was going to pop the question, and when he’d replied that it was his business and his alone, his brother had asked him what he was waiting for.
It was a good question. What
was
he waiting for? Tilly was bonny and bright and she loved him; his family had made it clear they thought he’d done himself proud in catching a lass like Tilly. And he had. He had.
His lamp had already been tested and lit when he got it and he made his way to the cage which would take him into the bowels of the earth, George and Andrew on either side of him. As soon as everyone was in, the gate was slammed shut and the cage descended at breakneck speed before slowing just before it clanged to a stop at the bottom of the shaft. Matt stepped out into the coalface along with the rest of the men. The fact that they were nearly a hundred metres under the ground he did not allow to enter his mind. It was no good dwelling on things like that.
Sacriston was near the centre of, and on the ‘exposed’ section of, the Durham coalfield, where the coal measures were not covered by younger rocks but only the sand, clay and gravel drift deposited by the retreating ice at the end of the last Ice Age. The area had five workable seams of coal, two of which were close to the surface but three much deeper, and it was one of these the brothers worked. The rows of coke ovens alongside the railway tracks to the left of the village was a reminder that much of the coal produced from the pit was converted into coke at the pithead and sent to the iron and steel furnaces of Teesside, and the bad winter had hit production. Now the railway was operating fairly normally again, overtime was being offered and Matt had taken extra shifts whenever he could. He hadn’t liked being laid off for days on end and it had brought home to him the fact that he’d got nothing saved for the future, no nest egg. He didn’t question in his mind why he was suddenly thinking this way, merely telling himself he had turned twenty-two in the New Year and it was time he stopped frittering the rest of his wage away once he’d given his board to his mam.
He was working the foreshift this week, from six o’clock in the morning until two o’clock in the afternoon, and he’d done an extra shift for the last three days which meant he didn’t get home until half-nine at night. He hadn’t seen Tilly since the weekend and today was Friday and they were supposed to be going to a barn dance in the church hall, so he was hoping to get a kip this afternoon once he’d had his dinner. He was dog tired. He stumbled as he followed George along the tunnel the miners called the ‘roadway’ which got narrower and narrower and the roof lower the further they went, and behind him Andrew said, ‘You were daft doing three extra shifts in a run, man. It’s too easy to make mistakes when you’re knackered.’
Sharply, Matt said, ‘I’m all right, you look after your own.’ He’d read the censure in his brother’s voice and knew it wasn’t merely concern for himself that had prompted the comment. Any slight lapse or negligence by one man doing his allotted task could mean he jeopardised not only his own life but that of his companions.
The area where the cage docked was well lit; now they were in pitch blackness, the kind of black that never lifted no matter how the men’s eyes got used to it. As a lad, he’d been down the pit a couple of months before he knocked his lamp over one day and put it out. As luck would have it he’d been working by himself clearing an old roof fall, which had meant he’d been plunged into immediate and total darkness, a darkness so terrifying his bowels had turned to water. Suddenly every sound was magnified, as though the roof was going to come crashing down on him, but he’d known he had to keep working; when the gaffer came at the end of the shift to inspect what he’d done, his lamp going out would be no excuse for slacking. The rats and mice and not least the ugly black-backed beetles that infested the tunnels took on a new dimension that day. He never knocked his lamp over again. Matt smiled grimly to himself.
They were walking swiftly, even though by now most of the men were doubled up as the roof was so low; no time was ever wasted getting to the work site. No one got paid for ‘travelling’ time, even if they had to walk or crawl for a couple of miles or more from the bottom of the shaft; the owners considered that was down to the miners. The men were paid only from the minute they reached their place of work and got started.
Behind him, Andrew wouldn’t let the matter drop. ‘Why are you taking extra shifts anyway? It’s not like you need the money. Live in clover, you do, with Mam only having you and Da to look after and two wages coming in for a household of three. Not like me an’ George with wives and bairns to feed. If anyone needs extra time, it’s us.’
He knew his brother was fishing about Tilly and his intentions, but he wasn’t in the mood. ‘I’m not stopping you, am I?’ he flung back over his shoulder. ‘You’ve got a mouth on you to ask, same as me if you want extra.’
‘I did. I asked yesterday morning but they’d got their quota.’
‘You should have asked earlier then.’
‘Aye, I’d worked that out for meself.’
They scrambled on, in the funny, crab-like movement all miners looked on as natural after a few months down the pit. When he’d first come down, his back had regularly looked like a piece of meat hanging in the butcher’s shop by the end of a shift. He’d scraped the back of his head, his shoulders and spine constantly, but pain was a great teacher and now he rarely made contact with the harsh, unforgiving roof above him.
It was another minute or two before Andrew spoke, his tone as conversational as though they were discussing the weather when he said, ‘I’d bin married a year at your age and Olive was already six months gone with our Jed.’
Steady, steady.
The warning came a second after the urge to stop dead and take his brother by the throat.
But he was sick to death of being told what to do, he excused himself silently. No, not told. He could have come back with a few well-chosen words if Andrew or George or his mam and da, come to it, had voiced what they were thinking. As it was, the pressure to do what they all clearly considered right and proper and ask Tilly to marry him was worse because of its covertness.
Was it that which was stopping him? he asked himself in the next moment. He’d always been a stubborn and contrary so-and-so, he admitted it, and he didn’t make any apology for it either. His da was the same. Or was it something more? He was mad about Tilly, he couldn’t sleep nights for thinking about how she’d feel beneath him and what he wanted to do to her, but did he love her? And what was love anyway?
Andrew piped up again. ‘It’s grand holding your firstborn in your arms, man. Nothing can match it, not even the best football game in the world.’
He didn’t answer, but his brother wasn’t to be deterred.
‘It was the same when Toby was born. You look at ’em and see yourself.’
Matt snorted. ‘And that’s something to aspire to?’ he asked with heavy sarcasm. ‘Even in your case?’
‘Aye, it is.’ Andrew refused to accept the humour. ‘It’s what makes the world go round.’
He didn’t want to make the world go round. He wanted—
He didn’t know what he wanted.
Matt walked on, his eyes instinctively checking the way in front of him by the light of his lamp. Every miner looked for some unfamiliar sign that might indicate the props were going to give, or a fault in the roof – which was the only thing between them and millions of tons of rock, coal and muck – was about to crack wide open. It was part of the deputy’s duty to notice such things, of course, and that was fine and dandy, but it was every miner’s unspoken opinion that you couldn’t have too many pairs of eyes on the job.
When they reached the area they were working on they were crawling and wriggling on their stomachs like human worms, spreading out along the coalface and beginning work immediately.
Andrew had been quiet for the last ten minutes or so, but Matt supposed it was too much to hope it would last. From a bairn his brother had never been able to leave well alone. Sure enough, it wasn’t long before Andrew spoke, but this time he directed his comments over Matt’s head to George. ‘Hey, George man, how old were you when you got wed then?’
Matt answered before his other brother could speak. ‘You should know – you were his best man, weren’t you?’
Ignoring this, Andrew called, ‘Twenty-one, weren’t it, man?’
George’s answer was a grunt. He was fully aware of his brothers’ conversation and normally he would have been in there adding his two penn’orth and winding Matt up, but an abscess under one of his teeth had seen him walking the floor all night and he wasn’t in the mood for the mickey-taking, joking and cursing that went on nonstop every shift.
‘Aye, twenty-one,’ repeated Andrew. ‘Stands to reason that unless a man’s a bit . . . you know, limp-wristed . . . he’ll want to get himself a lass to go home to every night once he’s earning.’
The insinuation was too much for Matt, but the profanity he’d been about to growl at his brother was never voiced. Instead a sound like a giant beast crunching froze his limbs and filled his head in the split second before he was enveloped in dust and rock and earth, the weight of which bearing down on his chest took the breath from his body.
The consuming darkness he remembered from the time his lamp went out engulfed him, made more terrible by the fact he was buried alive, choking and suffocating under a mountain of muck. Panic-stricken, he fought to move, and as his face and shoulders struggled against the weight holding him down, he managed to free himself sufficiently to raise his upper body on his elbows, the lumps of rock and mass of gritty slack sliding off him.