behind them. But even with the ventilation, he was starting to find it harder to breathe – the air was thick with dust and the stale sulphurous smell of the black powder used to blast the coal from the seam. Low stalls led off passages from the main tunnel in which Adam caught glimpses of miners working. They were down on their knees, stripped to the waist like him, and their torsos, black with coal dust and sweat, gleamed in the light from their lamps. On all sides there was a constant noise of hammering and hewing and breaking.
Adam felt his senses being overwhelmed as if by a raging tide. He wanted to scream out loud, but he doubted his father would have heard as he had hurried on ahead, looking for Edgar. All the time the tunnel was narrowing and the roof was getting lower. It was supported on timber props now, which left it sagging in places.
And then, just as Adam felt he had come to the limits of his endurance, just as he had decided to tell his father that he could go no further, Daniel stopped, standing at the entrance to a stall from which Adam could hear familiar voices coming.
Looking over his father’s shoulder, Adam could see Edgar and his older son, Thomas, lying on their sides working at the face. Edgar was using a mandrel, a straight-bladed pick, to hack the coal from the seam and Thomas was shovelling it back into a waiting tub. Their lamps and most of their clothes were hanging from nails hammered into the wall and they both were naked apart from their underwear, boots and padded caps. Adam felt embarrassed, out of place. He wished he hadn’t come and hung back behind his father, hoping that Edgar would not see him, which at first he didn’t.
‘Welcome, cousin, to my ’umble abode,’ said Edgar, doffing his cap and laughing at his affectation of a city voice. ‘What brings thee down ’ere out o’ the sunshine?’
‘To show his white-fingered son ’ow the other ’alf lives,’ said a caustic voice behind Adam, who turned round and came face to face with a thick-set, bald-headed man about his own height. He seemed to be about the same age as Edgar and like him was stripped to his underwear with his face and skin blackened with coal, but his outlandish appearance clearly had no effect on his confidence. The dirt was a badge of honour, an outward manifestation of his class credentials.
Because Whalen Dawes was a fanatic. Adam could tell that straightaway; it was clear to see in the hard chiselled set of his chin and in his unforgiving flinty grey eyes – different coloured eyes from his son, who was standing behind his father, watching with that same look of dry amusement that Adam had seen on his face before. After he had delivered the coal tubs, he must have ridden the pony straight back from the maingate to wherever his father worked in time to tell him about the visitors and give him the opportunity to intercept them.
Now Adam truly regretted asking his father to show him the mine. He’d hoped that the experience would bring him closer to the miners, help him to understand them better, but instead it was just going to make them see him as even more of an uppity outsider.
‘Is this true, Daniel? Is that why you’re here?’ asked Edgar, who had now come forward and caught sight of Adam.
‘No, of course it isn’t,’ said Daniel. ‘Adam wanted to know what the mine was like, which is natural – he lives here after all, and so I agreed to show him.’
‘Agreed to show ’im cos you want to scare ’im, make sure ’e don’t end up down ’ere, cos you thinks ’e’s too good for the likes of us,’ said Whalen, pressing his advantage.
‘No, that’s not true,’ said Daniel angrily. But Adam knew that Rawdon’s father was right – his father had been trying to scare him. He’d asked the ostler where Edgar worked but he hadn’t needed to because he already knew. And he’d taken him to the Oakwell seam because it was the narrowest, lowest part of the mine, the place most likely to trigger his claustrophobia.
It made Adam angry to have been manipulated, and angry too that he had allowed it to happen. But there was nothing he could do. His father’s plan had fully succeeded: panic was welling up inside him like a flooded dam about to burst its banks.
For a moment everyone was silent. It was as if they were all waiting on Edgar as he opened up his flask and took a long slow drink of the sweet milky tea that all the miners took with them into the pit.
‘I don’t know,’ said Edgar pensively. ‘Whalen likes nowt more’n to make trouble, I knows that …’
‘I tells the truth,’ said Whalen vehemently. ‘If that makes trouble, then I makes no apology for it.’
But Edgar held up his hand, insisting on finishing his thought. ‘As I says, I knows that. But that don’t mean what ’e says ain’t true, and I have to say, Daniel, that I doubt thee sometimes. I wish I didn’t but I do.’
There was an uneasy silence, broken when a pair of rats scurried across the floor of the tunnel, causing Adam to jump instinctively out of the way. Rawdon laughed. ‘You’ll ’ave to get used to them if you’re goin’ to be makin’ a habit of comin’ down ’ere,’ he said. ‘We likes the rats, don’t we, Dad – when they scurry about it gives us fair warnin’ that the roof might be about to cave.’
Whalen looked at his son and then over at Adam, seeing how he was swaying on his feet. Just a little push would send him over.
‘You’re right, Rawdon,’ he said. ‘Same as the timber props – we prefers ’em to the steel ones cos you can hear ’em creak and whine afore they go.’
Adam didn’t know if he could hear creaking or whining. But he could feel the millions of tons of earth and rock over his head bearing down on him, ready to bury him alive. It was intolerable, insupportable, more than he could stand. The tidal wave of his panic burst out, swamping his consciousness, and he fell to the ground in a dead faint.
On an afternoon in the late summer Adam went for a walk with Ernest, who had the day off from the screens. Coming out of the house, turning away from the mine and into the light of the rising sun, they raced each other up the hill to the oak tree on the ridge. Adam was far ahead by the time they reached the top. He was a natural athlete and his growing prowess at football had helped him win friends in the town, even though there were still some who continued to give him the cold shoulder. Rawdon was their leader and he never tired of telling anyone who would listen how Adam had gone down the mine to ‘see ’ow the other ’alf live’ and had had to be hauled out unconscious in an empty coal tub.
The shame of his misadventure gnawed at Adam far more than he was willing to admit. It wasn’t just the humiliation – his struggles with adversity had given him a strong sense of his own worth and he was never going to be fatally undermined by jibes thrown at him in the street. It was his verdict on himself that made him suffer. He had set himself a challenge when he went down the mine and he had fallen short. And it was hard to look a miner in the eye when he knew and they knew that he could not last a single morning in the subterranean darkness where they laboured all their lives.
Adam wasn’t used to failure. His instinct was always to try and try again until he had overcome the hurdle that had first defeated him, but this time there was no opportunity for redemption. He wouldn’t be allowed back in the mine even if he asked to go. Not after what had happened. And so every day he was left to gaze over at the giant headstocks with their great spinning wheels and feel their reproach. Except that today they were standing motionless and from their vantage point at the crest of the hill Adam and Ernest could see lines of dejected men trooping home from the pit. They had been let off early
