There is something soothing about a coal fire.
It isn’t just the warmth, it’s the welcoming glow
and the hypnotising darting flames.
I remember a few of us going to a friend’s house after youth
club. It was an icy night and we were all very happy to be having a supper of
tea and toast with her family in their warm, cosy living room. I was almost
falling asleep watching the fire from my slouched position on the sofa. It was
only the jovial atmosphere keeping me awake and I might have stayed, as I
sometimes did at weekends, but this was a school night and soon I would be back
out in the cold, heading home with the others. It’s funny how things stick in your mind.
My grandfather once scared me when he was lighting the fire.
I think he’s the one who showed me how to make firelighters out of newspaper.
It’s a skill I still have, but no call for it. He was trying to get the fire
going and nothing was happening, so he held a sheet of newspaper across the
fireplace. There was a tremendous roar
that frightened me and the newspaper was sucked into the hearth which had
become a furnace. I wasn’t very old, certainly pre-school age. I ran away in
tears looking for my mum or my nanna. That same grandfather, who loved me to
bits and I adored him, had a network of blue-grey lines on the backs of his
hands, like a road map. He told me it was a result of his short time as a coal
miner when he was young, before joining the army for WW1. He never returned to
the pit. He went into the licenced trade, starting a family tradition.
I was watching a
neighbour’s coal delivery the other day, fascinated to see that nothing had
changed. The wagon had stopped across our driveway, which made me look, and it
could have been nineteen-fifty-odd again. The coalman’s jacket and the way he
heaved the full sack on his back to carry it, was exactly the same as when had
coal delivered to the pubs, before central heating took over.
Welcoming in the New Year always involved a lump of coal, a
crust of bread and a shilling or a penny – whatever my father had in his
pocket. He would go out of the back door and come in the front, with the said
items to ensure heat, food and wealth for the year.
Coal mining accidents and disasters have happened world-wide.
I remember Aberfan in 1966 and being horrified at the pictures in the paper. A
coal tip created by a nearby colliery slid down a hill on to a junior school, demolishing
some of it. Many lives were lost, mostly children. The Minnie Pit Disaster in
Staffordshire happened in January, 1918. Over a hundred men and boys lost their
lives, forty of the pit lads were under sixteen. It inspired Wilfred Owen to write this poem,
Miners
There was a whispering in my hearth,
A sigh of the coal,
Grown wistful of a former earth
It might recall.
I listened for a tale of leaves
And smothered ferns,
Frond-forests, and the low sly lives
Before the fauns.
My fire might show steam-phantoms simmer
From Time's old cauldron,
Before the birds made nests in summer,
Or men had children.
But the coals were murmuring of their mine,
And moans down there
Of boys that slept wry sleep, and men
Writhing for air.
And I saw white bones in the cinder-shard,
Bones without number.
Many the muscled bodies charred,
And few remember.
I thought of all that worked dark pits
Of war, and died
Digging the rock where Death reputes
Peace lies indeed.
Comforted years will sit soft-chaired,
In rooms of amber;
The years will stretch their hands, well-cheered
By our life's ember;
The centuries will burn rich loads
With which we groaned,
Whose warmth shall lull their dreaming lids,
While songs are crooned;
But they will not dream of us poor lads,
Left in the ground.
Wilfred Owen (18/3/1893 – 4/11/1918)
Thanks for reading. Keep safe and well. Pam x
