in the old rusting tubs that half-blind, bow-legged ponies had once pulled along the tunnels of a busy underground town. (The ponies would be tossed on top of the coal and hauled to the surface themselves when they had outlived their usefulness. Jackie had heard tales of them being shot en masse in the fields of Nettle Hill Farm after modern mining methods had made them redundant, and bulldozed into mass graves.) Strangest of all, pairs of pit boots that had once been put to warm against the kitchen fender in preparation for the beginning of a cold night shift were now home to busy lizzies and hardy annuals in a few of the Settlement gardens: it was as if the owner of the boots had been detonated out of them, like a scene in a Buster Keaton film, leaving a straggle of flowers instead of trouser tatters and trails of curling cartoon smoke.
The prettifying of industrial relics – turning miners’ helmets and steel-toe-capped boots into garden ornaments – was only a domestic version of the glut of ambitious landscaping and reclamation projects that had been instigated in the countryside around Rusty Lane in recent years. In this process, the scars of the mining past had been flooded with ponds and lakes, and planted with meadows and saplings. The slag heaps from the twin collieries had been levelled off and grassed over (and in the case of the spoil heap at the Lee, turned into a dry ski slope); the railway line the coal wagons had trundled along was now a nature trail; the headgear for the main shaft was a picnic area complete with a flushing toilet and scribbled-on, but as yet relatively unvandalized , comprehensively illustrated information panels. (Heronsand bitterns, little ringed plovers and reed warblers had come back to breed at the recently established deep sump lake.)
The countryside around Rusty Lane was blistered with man-made hills filled up with hundreds of tonnes of household rubbish and organic waste, where sheep and cattle grazed on the lower slopes. Vast tracts of disturbed land had been designated a Heritage Park. An unnerving silence lay over the area, whose new orderliness and cleanness, although representing a kind of progress, struck the people who had lived all their lives there as queer.
Before they reached the end of Half Nichol Street, Jackie called to Stella to come so he could put him on the lead. There were two horses on the scrap of spare ground at the end of the street, and the dog had yapped around worrying them in the past. Stella didn’t want to come and thought about it for a minute, but then did, with his tail down and his haunches low in submission and his belly almost scraping the ground.
The horses were piebalds, and they were tethered by heavy clinking chains, morosely cropping the thin litter-strewn grass. Rusty Lane was situated on a high ridge in sight of the coast. Sea coal from the coal seams that rose in the sea-bed was washed ashore all along the coast there and the horses were used to collect this in little carts. Blue plastic sacks lined with coal dirt had been split and opened and tied over their backs. They followed Jackie and the dogs gravely through their milky eyes and their curled pale lashes as they passed.
Jackie kept all the dogs with him as he skirted behind some modern school buildings at the edge of a playing field. He faintly heard a chord struck on a piano, then children’s voices singing, and the dogs in the nearby (canine) New Kennels baying for their morning feed; he tried to avoid starting the dogs off by not slamming his car door hard when he got home from Bobby’s in the middle of the night. Two-thirds of the way down the field, behind the metalwork room, which was emitting the smell of acoke fire and melted solder, a hole had been torn in the wire mesh fence. It would have been easier to let the dogs off here, but there was a lane on the other side of the steep embankment that cars (driven by buzzed-up, showing-off ex-pupils) sometimes came tearing
The prettifying of industrial relics – turning miners’ helmets and steel-toe-capped boots into garden ornaments – was only a domestic version of the glut of ambitious landscaping and reclamation projects that had been instigated in the countryside around Rusty Lane in recent years. In this process, the scars of the mining past had been flooded with ponds and lakes, and planted with meadows and saplings. The slag heaps from the twin collieries had been levelled off and grassed over (and in the case of the spoil heap at the Lee, turned into a dry ski slope); the railway line the coal wagons had trundled along was now a nature trail; the headgear for the main shaft was a picnic area complete with a flushing toilet and scribbled-on, but as yet relatively unvandalized , comprehensively illustrated information panels. (Heronsand bitterns, little ringed plovers and reed warblers had come back to breed at the recently established deep sump lake.)
The countryside around Rusty Lane was blistered with man-made hills filled up with hundreds of tonnes of household rubbish and organic waste, where sheep and cattle grazed on the lower slopes. Vast tracts of disturbed land had been designated a Heritage Park. An unnerving silence lay over the area, whose new orderliness and cleanness, although representing a kind of progress, struck the people who had lived all their lives there as queer.
Before they reached the end of Half Nichol Street, Jackie called to Stella to come so he could put him on the lead. There were two horses on the scrap of spare ground at the end of the street, and the dog had yapped around worrying them in the past. Stella didn’t want to come and thought about it for a minute, but then did, with his tail down and his haunches low in submission and his belly almost scraping the ground.
The horses were piebalds, and they were tethered by heavy clinking chains, morosely cropping the thin litter-strewn grass. Rusty Lane was situated on a high ridge in sight of the coast. Sea coal from the coal seams that rose in the sea-bed was washed ashore all along the coast there and the horses were used to collect this in little carts. Blue plastic sacks lined with coal dirt had been split and opened and tied over their backs. They followed Jackie and the dogs gravely through their milky eyes and their curled pale lashes as they passed.
Jackie kept all the dogs with him as he skirted behind some modern school buildings at the edge of a playing field. He faintly heard a chord struck on a piano, then children’s voices singing, and the dogs in the nearby (canine) New Kennels baying for their morning feed; he tried to avoid starting the dogs off by not slamming his car door hard when he got home from Bobby’s in the middle of the night. Two-thirds of the way down the field, behind the metalwork room, which was emitting the smell of acoke fire and melted solder, a hole had been torn in the wire mesh fence. It would have been easier to let the dogs off here, but there was a lane on the other side of the steep embankment that cars (driven by buzzed-up, showing-off ex-pupils) sometimes came tearing
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