in the evening and Adam and his father waited on the platform under the huge vaulted roof of the station as the day turned to dusk and everything around them dissolved into a blue and grey mist of vapour and smoke, pierced here and there by the pallid glow of the tall arc lights. Across from where they were sitting, they could see the rich coming and going through the door of the first-class restaurant: tall men in frock coats with hats and gloves escorting ladies in narrow-waisted hobble skirts who minced slowly along, their heads almost invisible under elaborate feathered hats. They reminded Adam of the flamingoes that he had seen at the zoo years before, inhabitants of an unknowable world operating on principles entirely outside his understanding.
As the departure time approached the platform filled up and Adam felt his heart beating hard. He knew Euston from days spent in the shadow of the great arch, earning coppers loading and unloading luggage for cabbies at the roadside, but he had never been on a train. He had never been outside London.
He heard the locomotive before he saw it – the scream of its whistle, the screech of engaging brakes, the hiss of steam; and then emerging out of the great pall of smoke came the black-and-red engine, a breathing, snorting mammoth of incredible power. And suddenly there was a frenzy of activity: carriage doors opening and disgorging passengers all the way down the line; porters and guards shouting, holding back the pressing crowd.
‘Come on,’ said Daniel, picking up his bag, and Adam almost lost his father in a sea of shabby jackets and cloth caps but caught sight of him at the last moment waving from the running board. He pushed forward and felt his father’s hand on his, pulling him up into the train.
Inside the compartment they found seats, perched on the ends of two wooden benches, facing each other in the flickering gaslight. Doors slammed and the shouts of the people outside were stilled by the guard’s whistle as the train spluttered back into life and began to pull away from the platform, picking up speed as it headed north, running smoothly along steel viaducts built high above the poor streets where Adam had grown up.
He closed his eyes and thought again of his mother: the leaving of London felt like a betrayal, as if he was leaving her behind too, somewhere back there in the smoky darkness, deliberately severing his last connection with her forever. He knew he was being irrational – that she was gone already – but that didn’t help with the raw tearing emptiness he felt inside whenever he forgot she was dead and then suddenly remembered. He hated that he couldn’t think of her without pain. It made him angry, and he realized that he was angry with her too – because she was supposed to explain these things to him and now she couldn’t.
He shook his head hard as if to expel his thoughts and opened his eyes. His father was looking at him intently, as if he was trying to read his mind.
‘I’m sorry, Adam. I know this is hard.’ Daniel spoke slowly, leaning forward towards his son. ‘It’s hard for me too. But we’ve got no choice. London will chew us up and spit us out if we stay; it’s a cruel town and it’s hurt us enough already.’
Adam nodded, not knowing how to respond. They’d hardly talked all day – the death of Adam’s mother and the weeks in the workhouse had set Adam against his father, and he had repeatedly rebuffed Daniel’s attempts at conversation. But, in spite of himself, he had begun to sense a change in his father. Daniel seemed more thoughtful, less driven. Adam had seen how he had said nothing when they had sat watching the rich men and women coming and going at the station dressed in all their finery. In the past he wouldn’t have been able to resist a political commentary accompanied by plentiful statistics about the unfair distribution of wealth in society, but today he had seemed hardly to notice. Adam wondered what the change meant for the future.
‘What’s this place where we’re going?’ he asked, looking out into the night. Surrounded by strangers in the spartan compartment, rushing forward on the express train towards a new unknown world, he felt apprehensive and hoped for reassurance.
‘Scarsdale? It’s a small coal-mining town not far from the sea. The north is full of places just like it. Everyone works at the mine, on the surface or down below. And it’s hard work, harder than you can imagine, which makes the people hard—’ Daniel stopped in mid-sentence, smiling at his inarticulacy. ‘But not mean, not cruel – miners stick together; by and large they’re good people.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I’ve worked with them. Not in Scarsdale but further south – in Nottinghamshire where I grew up.’
‘You were a miner?’ Adam asked, sounding surprised. He couldn’t imagine his father as anything other than a builder. That’s what he’d been all Adam’s life.
‘No, the firm I was apprenticed to specialized in putting up structures round pitheads to house the heavy machinery and to support it too. It meant I was working side by side with miners all the time so I got to know their ways.’
‘And is that what you’re going to be doing now?’ asked Adam. ‘Building things for them?’
‘No, this is different – nothing to do with construction. I’m working with them – or rather for them, I suppose. I’m to be their checkweighman, which means I measure the weight of the coal in each tub they’ve mined to make sure they get paid the right amount for it.’
‘So you’re down in the mine as well, with them?’ asked Adam nervously. The thought alarmed him – it made him think of being buried, like his mother. He was brave by nature but the thought of being underground had always terrified him. He remembered the well at the back of the school in Islington that Old Beaky had told them was out of bounds. Adam had disobeyed at the first opportunity, using all his childish strength to push the thick wooden cover aside. And, if he shut his eyes, he could still relive the long wait after he threw in a stone, counting the seconds before he heard the faint splash deep down below. He’d had nightmares for weeks afterwards, dreaming of falling down into the thick darkness, his unheard cries echoing off the damp brick walls.
‘No, don’t worry. I’m up on the surface where the tubs of coal come out,’ said Daniel reassuringly. He knew all about his son’s phobia – he’d never even been able to persuade Adam to set foot in the London Underground, let alone get on one of the trains. ‘The job’s not dangerous,’ he went on, ‘but it’s important, and the money will be better than what we’re used to, which will help.’
Daniel’s words were optimistic but Adam sensed an uncertainty lurking underneath and wondered if his father was feeling ashamed that he wouldn’t be sharing the hardships of the men that he was working for. But Adam dismissed the thought: what mattered was that his father would be out of harm’s way. He’d lost his mother and he didn’t want to risk losing his father too.
‘How did you get the job?’ Adam asked. It made no sense that his father should have been able to walk into this cushy, well-paid job in this faraway place when by his own admission he’d never actually been a miner.
‘I have a cousin who recommended me. He’s a good man and he’s worked in the Scarsdale pit most of his life so he has a lot of influence with the men. And it turned out they wanted me because of what I’d done down here with the builders’ union – getting more members, getting organized. It’s the miners’ union that’ll be paying me,’ said Daniel.
‘Will you make them strike?’ asked Adam anxiously. He knew what union work meant – poverty and violence and death. Was this what lay in store for them in the north? A second dose of what they were trying to leave behind?
‘No, I hope it won’t come to that,’ said Daniel, choosing his words carefully. ‘I do want to help, to make things better. But I hope I can achieve that by negotiating
