LITMIR.BIZ

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… there’s a problem with the reverse intake.’

      Mari didn’t hear Nick’s muttered words, but she saw his fist swing. The manager scuttled backwards to avoid the blow, hands to his mouth. For a moment Nick stood looking at him, his face full of disgust. Then, awkwardly, he rubbed his knuckles although they hadn’t so much as grazed Cruickshank’s face.

      ‘I’m sorry,’ he said in a low voice. ‘You’re only the manager. What can you do, except what Peris tells you? How does that make you feel, tonight?’ Without waiting to hear if Cruickshank had any more to say Nick swung away towards the pit buildings.

      Keeping to the protective shadows, Mari followed him. She felt a smothering sense of relief that the pit was closed and Nick would not be allowed to go down and be swallowed up by the fire.

      At the powerhouse door she caught up with him. She pulled at his sleeve and he turned on her, fists clenching again before he saw who it was.

      ‘Mari?’ He was frowning, blacker-faced than she had ever seen him. ‘What are you doing here?’

      ‘I wanted to be with you. To see you’re … safe.’

      ‘Don’t be a fool. Is there anyone belonging to you down this pit?’

      ‘No.’ Like Nick, all Mari’s family worked in Nantlas No. 2.

      ‘Well, then. Go home out of the way.’ Roughly he pulled her to him and kissed her, and then wrenched her round to face the gates again. Mari wanted to cling to him, dragging him back to her and away from the pit, and her fingers clutched at his Sunday coat.

      ‘Nick,’ she said desperately, knowing that it was stupid and unable to stop herself, ‘it isn’t a bad omen for us, is it, this happening today?’

      ‘An omen?’ He was crackling with anger now. ‘Don’t talk such bloody rubbish. More than an omen, isn’t it, for Gath Goch? And Dilys Wyn?’

      John Wyn was the miners’ agent for No. 1. He worked with Dicky Goch too, and his fourteen-year-old twin sons as well.

      Mari’s arms dropped to her sides. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. Numbly, she began to walk alone back towards the colliery gates.

      Nick pushed open the powerhouse doors. He blinked in the light. In the high, red-brick interior the great generators were still humming, keeping the searchlights outside uselessly burning. Polished brass winked proudly back at him. At first glance the cavernous space seemed empty, then Nick looked up to the iron gallery that ran round the walls. A group of men was huddled in front of the air gauges. Most of them were still pit-black, and half a dozen wore the cumbersome back-tanks, coiled tubes and orange webbing of rescue breathing apparatus. Through the generator hum, Nick heard their defeated silence.

      He ran to the spiral staircase and took the stairs three at a time, his boots clanging on the iron.

      ‘Nick.’ The men nodded acknowledgement to him. Among them were their own union representative, Jim Abraham, Nick’s own senior agent from No. 2 pit, and John Wyn’s No. 1 deputy. The shift manager was there too, his face and clothes grimed from his expedition down the shaft.

      ‘Bad?’ Nick asked, knowing how bad it must be for there to be this silence, this inactivity. When no one spoke he said roughly, ‘What happened, in God’s name?’

      One of the men wearing breathing apparatus came wearily forward. In a flat voice he began to tell the story. Nick recognized that it was already becoming a set piece, a tale that would have to be repeated for the Mines Inspector, the manager’s meeting, the inquest. Nick served on the Miners’ Safety Committee, and he had heard half a dozen similar recitals.

      ‘I went down with Dicky Goch today,’ the miner said. ‘Unofficial, see? It was a normal shift. I was in the last stall, the one next to Dicky, with Rhys there.’ He pointed to one of the other men, also in rescue gear. ‘They were all empty, behind us. The rest of the gang was up ahead.’ Nick nodded, understanding that the official men would have the best places. ‘At ten to six, Dicky came back and told me and Rhys to put up. We were to go back to the main shaft and call through that the rest were coming. We went. We were just passing the junction with two district when we felt the air reversing past us. It was licking the dust up behind us. We knew there was something bad wrong. We ran to the shaft bottom and called through for help. As the cage came down we heard the explosion.’

      ‘Felt it, more like,’ the other miner corrected him. ‘No noise. Just a shaking and shuddering.’

      ‘I was on my way down in the lift cage,’ the shift manager put in quickly. He was anxious to convince the men’s representatives that the right things had been done, the right procedures followed. Too eager, too anxious, Nick thought. ‘I met the two men here at the shaft bottom and they told me what had happened. I sent up for the breathing apparatus, collected the other men who had come up meanwhile, and we set off again. The air was rushing past us all the time. It’s a damp seam, the Penmor …’

      His voice trailed off uncomfortably.

      One of the other men took up the story. ‘We got within fifty yards of the junction of the main haulage road with the road down to Penmor. The fire had taken proper hold. As we stood there, watching like, a great long tongue of blue flame came licking back up towards us. Then it was sucked back again, and the air behind us with it. There was nothing to do. I’ve never seen a fire like it. Trying to fight it with what we had would have been like pissing down into hell.’

      There was another long, quiet moment. The generators hummed blindly on.

      ‘The district was checked today, was it?’ Nick asked softly.

      Jim Abraham half-raised his hand to stop him, and then wearily let it fall again. What Nick Penry wanted to know, he found out somehow. And words, whatever they were on either side, could make no difference tonight.

      The shift manager, not looking at anyone, said, ‘The report book clearly states that the fireman checked every working stall in the area this morning. There was some gas, but very little. No more than two per cent.’

      ‘And the empty stalls?’

      ‘Ah … not today, as it happens. According to the book, that is.’

      And so from somewhere, deep in the workings, an outrush of the deadly fire-damp gas had gone undiscovered. It had mixed with the airflow and a tiny spark, perhaps from a cracked safety lamp or even a piece of overheated machinery, had ignited it. And then it had exploded.

      In an even softer, and more dangerous, voice Nick said, ‘General Rules, of which even you as shift manager must be aware, state that daily checking for gas escape in every area of the mine is mandatory …’

      ‘Save it, Nick,’ someone was murmuring. ‘This isn’t the time.’

      Down in the body of the powerhouse, the door opened again. The pit manager came in. At his shoulder was a bulky, middle-aged man in evening dress.

      ‘Here’s Mr Peris, lads,’ the manager shouted up to them.

      The men crowded forward and leaned over the gallery railings. Nick felt the press of them behind him, solid but defeated. Further behind them, unwatched now, were the rows of air gauges with their nil readings. His hands gripped the cold iron. Beneath him, in Lloyd Peris’s upturned face, reddened with food and drink, he read the brazen readiness to bluster out of his responsibilities. Nick felt his throat swell and tighten with the rage inside him.

      ‘Peris? What happened to the air intake reverse?’ His shout filled the span of the arched roof and echoed back at him. ‘What happened to it, Peris?’

      There was no answer. Nick pushed through the men and clanged down the iron stairs again. Cruickshank shrank back a little, but the owner stood his ground squarely.

      ‘A little too much of the hothead, Penry,’ he said smoothly. ‘It won’t do you or your men any good. Not shouting at me, nor threatening my manager. Now, as you all know’ – he raised his voice so that the

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