The Black Mountains by Janet Tanner Page A

for the privilege of squatting alongside the colliers, tea can between knees, munching cogknockers of bread and tossing crumbs to the mice that scuttled up from everywhere as soon as they smelled food. And who wouldn’t drag a little extra coal in their putt if it also meant a little extra pay at the end of the week? Ted soon realized how much he liked money when he discovered how the thought of it could ease the sting of a raw wound in the middle of the night.
    As for the other things he learned, some of them could still make him blush, especially when his father was in earshot. But he listened with open-mouthed interest as the older lads swopped tales of their conquests among women, and discussed the prices of the local whores, who, it seemed, demanded anything from a glass of cider to a whole week’s wages for their favours.
    He learned too to gamble, on ‘anything that moved,’ from the twist of a playing card to the speed of a cockroach, and he watched betting slips change hands well out of reach of the law. His vocabulary grew to include the sort of words he would never be able to use at the Sunday dinner table, and he tasted his first Gold Flake, walking across the pit yard after a long day’s shift.
    All this before he was fourteen years old. Fourteen.
    The thought reminded him that next month would bring his birthday. Suddenly restless, he pushed back the bed-clothes and swung his bare feet onto the rag rug.
    The trouble with his birthday was that it heralded the beginning of the winter, and the endless weeks when he saw daylight only on a Sunday. That was no fun. Just give him mornings like this one, he thought.
    Quietly he padded over to the window and pulled back the curtain to look out.
    Not a soul in the rank was stirring yet. On the opposite side of the yard, the doors of the privies and wash-houses were firmly closed, the only sound being the patient clucking of the Clements’s hens in their pen in the gardens beyond.
    Ted leaned on his elbows, letting his gaze run idly over the wash-house blocks and the bits of gardens he could see between them—small segments of rich, brown earth broken up by potato haulms, cabbages and runner beans.
    Then he stiffened suddenly, his eyes narrowing. What was that down at the end of the Durrants’ garden, moving slowly among the feathery green parsnip tops?
    A fat muddy-pink pig moved lazily and methodically through the parsnip patch.
    The Durrants’ neighbours all complained about the pig, but Martha had always overruled them. She was very partial to home-cured pork and bacon, and one pig had succeeded another in the wooden sty at the end of the garden.
    Now, the current one had got out, and was having the time of her life, turning the vegetable patch into a sea of mud.
    Unable to contain his delight, Ted snorted with laughter. There was no need to worry that the pig might get into their garden for Martha had persuaded her poor hen-pecked husband to surround their ground with chicken wire, believing her neighbours at number nine to be encroaching on her vegetable plot. Now, that was serving as a barrier to keep the pig in!
    Ted’s laughter disturbed Fred.
    â€œWhat the devil’s going on?” he muttered raising his head from the pillow, and Jack, too, opened his eyes and kept them open to see his brother hanging out of the window.
    â€œIs there a fire?” he asked eagerly.
    Ted began to laugh again.
    â€œBetter than that. Come over here, boys, and see what I can see!”
    They came, clambering over the beds and a sleepy Jim.
    â€œIt’s old Mother Durrant’s porker!” Fred said unnecessarily. “ He’s having a go at her parsnips!”
    â€œHell have the lot up in a minute,” Jack commented anxiously, and Ted laughed again.
    â€œPigs do. They’ll root up anything. Serve her right, I say, the old misery!”
    â€œDidn’t we ought to tell somebody?” Jack asked worried, but