The Quality of Mercy - By Barry Unsworth Page 0,65

just the right moment, providing grounds for curiosity and an honorable reason for abandoning the game.

The two made their way to the lane that ran past the front of the cottages. There they found the older miners sitting together in the yard of the alehouse—it had been agreed that this break from custom warranted a jar or two. It made no difference whether or not they had the money to pay; many of the men were in permanent debt to the landlord and had their wages docked every week, on pain of being barred from the tavern if they defaulted. The yard was bordered by a low wall, and the two boys sat with their backs against this, invisible from the yard but still within earshot.

“They will have to get the firemen in,” the overman, whose name was Campbell, said. “I cannot say I envy the lads that job.”

There were six firemen employed in the colliery, all of them below the age of thirty. The one on duty in the section of the mine where firedamp was found would soak his clothes in water and crawl along the workway with a lighted candle attached to a long pole held out before him until he arrived at the concentration of gas. When the explosion came he would fling himself facedown against the ground. Fortune assisting, he would escape the rush of flame that shot along the roof over his head. For this he received a daily wage of five shillings, which put him among the highest-paid workers, not only in the colliery but in the country as a whole.

“Aye,” said another man, “the money is good, but naybody would do it with a family to think of. The wife would never know if tha’d come back with a whole skin.”

“It is all a question of weighing things up.” Arbiter Hill was one of those who had come out of the pit, and he was at his usual game of clarifying the issues and trying to control everybody. “On the one hand we have a desire for betterment of the finances, on the other hand we have the risk of serious hurt by fire, a risk accepted freely by agreement with the manage. That is the issue lying before us. Now lads, box on.”

Bordon, always irritated by Hill’s habit of laying down the law and telling other people the way they should think about things, said, “We can all see why they do it, there is nay mystery in that. Does tha think them fellers sit around and balance it all out? So long as we have nay light to work by but a bare flame, lads will gan on gettin’ the skin burned off their backs.”

“It is a matter of luck,” Campbell said. “Do you mind when them six men went down to repair a wall that was fallen in? About eight years now, one of them shafts with a long workway, longer than is usual nowadays.”

“Aye, sinkin’ a new shaft is cheaper than roofin’ a long gallery, so they say in the manage,” another man said.

“Well, this one ran underground for a good three hundred yards, mebbe more, an’ they had built the wall to go from the shaft bottom nearly as far as the end, rig ht down the middle, to shift the air down one side and back down the other. No one had been working the coal there for six months or so, an’ the firedamp had gathered, unbeknown to anyone. They sent these six fellers down to put the wall right, and they hadn’t been at it long before the candle flames exploded the gas an’ there was a great flow of fire from where they were working, back down the tunnel toward the shaft bottom. They started crawling on hands and knees, hoping the fire would pass over them, but they never got back, they were frazzled one after the other as the fire caught up with them, burned to a cinder in no time, all except one, name of Harry Matthews. They had to fetch him up, he had lost his senses an’ that was the saving of him, he fell flat on the ground and the greater part of the fire went over him. He was badly scorched, but they got him out alive. That’s what I mean, see, it is a matter of luck.”

“What became of Matthews?”

“He never went back down. He was scarred by the fire, but that wasn’t the reason.