I was up on the local escarpment the other day, looking down over the valley, where the river Calder meanders across it`s clay bedded floodplain.

A few hundred yards further, along the ridge, gapes the wide West facing mouth of Crigglestone tunnel - walled off at one end these last 40yrs or so and now the preserve of bats. Designed to take the West wind into it`s extra wide mouth and self clean, to purge the smoke from those chugging little steam engines that ran, over the path of the current M1, into the valley to the East of the ridge.

Or so I was told by the hard men of the local colliery - those fifty or so years ago. Those hard men, now in the hard ground of Crigglestone cemetery in which I am standing.

A sort of fitting tribute I guess - to the Gentlemen who bent double down Crigglestone Colliery "shifted ten tons of coal lad" as my almost 65 yr old coal miner, grandfather, once told me, on my asking as to his usual day.

I was up there early and for the first time in years - noticing as I did our school friends grave - there since we were aged 15yrs. "Hard ground" the grave digger said on my asking and I noticed the unexpected heap of broken sandstone - no `soil` there at all. Machinery being used to chisel out the tomb.

Something fitting there perhaps - for these hard men, to be encased in hard rock, bones and traces of coal dust from their lungs forming a sort of `mini strata` in their graves - a microcosm of the larger coal seams in which they once toiled.

The local doctor is in there too - not from these parts, but embedded with his patients - commitment beyond the end.

You can still imagine the life we once had, in earlier years, down in the valley. The worrying about trivia - though perceived as such now, through the gross distortion of the decades gone.

There was a stream half a mile away where a small goldfish enjoyed a few weeks of natural life. We saw it swimming with vigour and purpose - always in the same few yards of the little narrow stream. Of course a kid in the family had blabbed about it`s release from their goldfish bowl and shortly after we saw it - it was gone - no doubt to another bowl or perhaps worse.

Fifty years later it`s a memory - I can still see in the minds eye - that flash of gold amongst the green water plants.

Wonder where it`s mortal remains are? Perhaps a trace of fish bone at the bottom of a tip - or perhaps it`s been rotted in a garden, assimilated by a plant and travelled the world as gas.

Funny how it`s fighting spirit lives on in the minds eye though - that flash of gold amidst the black, coal dust streaked nostrils of those hard men - spitting coal flegm and taking the un- coughable coal back into the hard ground in which they once toiled.

oilrag

Edited by oilrag on 19/07/2010 at 19:02