The dark of morning, silent still the hooter,
The town sleeps on beneath the lowering headgear.
Only a slight creak of opening doors
Allows the escape of crackling fresh hearth smoke
Drifting crisply down clog-clattered cobbles
With miners’ hushed but gently muscular voices.
As they near the pit now chattering are the voices
And one booms out, you’d swear he was the hooter
The brick-paved yard displaces homely cobbles
As men await their start beneath the headgear
Cadging half a tab for one last smoke
Before they mount the cage and close the doors.
Head lamps reveal the paddies through the air doors
And men are marshalled by the drivers voices
Tobacco chews are shared instead of smoke
Which they can’t do again until the hooter
Relieves them and uplifted by the headgear
They clatter once again across the cobbles.
The milkman rattles over lazy cobbles
And housewives rustle curtains by the doors.
The sun has risen now behind the headgear
And streets are filled with scrambling children’s voices
Whose fathers toil down deep until the hooter
Sounds the day shift’s end to streets of smoke.
And now across the valley rolls the smog smoke
Gathering as dust between the cobbles
Echoing at last to shift-end’s hooter
And soon the opening of the lift-shaft doors.
Across the yard resound the gleeful voices
And baths dissolve the dirt, beneath the headgear.
And with each dwindling year are fewer headgear
And miners jobs are blown away like smoke
And fewer, fewer, sound the laughing voices.
They found a hypodermic on the cobbles
So no child plays unless behind closed doors,
And no-one knows how to repair the hooter.
Now silenced coughing voices, gone the headgear,
And rusted is the hooter, cleared the smoke.
Deserted cobbles reflect “executive” doors.
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Stephen A. Linstead
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