And the Land Lay Still (56 page)

PART FOUR

Borlanslogie in the 1950s: a small, suffering town always on the verge of getting to its feet, always just about to be cowped over again. Most of the men were miners, or worked in coal-related jobs of one kind or another; the rest, a scattering, were shopkeepers, labourers, bus drivers, postmen, railwaymen, a couple of publicans. A very few worked on farms in the surrounding district. Once long ago there’d been only a village and the entire population had been colliers, a race apart from the rest of the world. Then came roads and railways and the village grew to a town. Then came war and peace and war again. Some of the social divisions frayed, but not many. The mine managers, surveyors and engineers still lived, along with the doctor and the schoolteachers, in the better houses on the outskirts of the town, away from the worst of the dirt, while the colliers and their families inhabited rows of cottages that seemed to hunch together against the weather, accident and adversity without much expectation of avoiding any of them. These rows had no names, only numbers – 1st Street, 2nd Street, 3rd Street – and only in recent years had the cottages themselves acquired numbers.

The women of Borlanslogie cooked meals for their hungry men, meals as vast as they could make them given the strictures of money, coupons and rations. They washed clothes and cleaned their houses and minded the bairns. During the war some of the women, in addition to all this, had worked in the Logie Coal Company’s engineering workshop, a huge shed where the bogies and engines and other equipment used in the pits were made and repaired. But with the war over they weren’t wanted there any more: some were as capable of working a steam hammer as any man but the men didn’t like that fact, and they pushed the women out of the workshop and back into their cottages.

Other parts of the great, grimy old palace of King Coal, however, had long been considered suitable for women to work in: the tracing room, for instance. This was where Mary Murray worked.
She’d started during the war and nobody, if she had anything to do with it, was going to force her from a job that paid a steady wage and enabled her to look to the future with some degree of hope.

She was the third of four sisters. The older two, Meg and Alice, were married to miners and were breeding the next generation, three boys and a lass for Meg and twin boys for Alice. The youngest sister, Dot, had been conscripted for munitions work in Birmingham in 1942 and had settled there. Mary’s tracing work wasn’t physically hard, but she had to concentrate. There were huge sheets showing all the underground workings, the tunnels and roads and the seams of coal, and the type of rock or clay that the coal ran through at different depths and in different sectors. Like an underground city it was, and the surveyors and architects were always adding on new levels and districts, and it was the tracers’ responsibility to update the charts and maps on to the big sheets. They had to climb up on to the tables sometimes to do the job properly, carefully copying in the new information, tracing particular sections that then needed to be enlarged on the huge photostat machine, or making copies for the engineers on the even more cumbersome copying machine. Their eyes would be streaming from the ammonia that was needed to fix the images. The amount of detail on the maps was amazing: Mary felt she knew all the workings even though she’d never been in them, she could picture the men moving around down there, ghostly, glistening with sweat. The system the miners used was called ‘stoup and room’: as they cut the coal they left pillars of it in place to hold up the roof, so she thought of the mine as a kind of Greek temple in black, rows and rows of black columns stretching away in the beam of the men’s lamps. As they worked out a particular area they’d put props in and cut out the stoups if it was safe to do so, so as not to waste any of the coal. Mary diligently marked all the stoups on the plans and diligently removed them when they were cut away. Once she suggested to her supervisor, Mr Cochrane, that he should arrange for the tracers to go down in the cage to see the pit for themselves, it would give them a better idea of what it was they were mapping. Cochrane was appalled. ‘Mary, there’s been nae women doon a Scottish pit in a hundred years. It’s no a place for a woman.’ ‘I’m no wanting tae howk the coal,’ she said, ‘I’m just wanting tae see what it looks like.’ But
Cochrane was dead set against the idea, and so were the other tracers, except for her best pal, Ina, who was game for just about anything.

Maybe Cochrane had a wee fancy for Mary, she thought he must because he was always speaking to her, distracting her from her work. It was disgusting really, he was three times her age at least, but Ina told her to play along with it and she’d get favours without having to give anything in return. Cochrane was married to an ugly old witch she saw in the town occasionally, who always looked like she’d just broken wind and didn’t like her own smell, Ina said, so the poor man was probably keen for a bit of civilised female company. And right enough, one day not long after the war was over he took the two of them aside and asked if they fancied a change of scene the next day. He and a surveyor called MacDonald were taking a company car over to Aberfoyle, where they were to survey a portion of forest that the Logie Coal Company had bought for pit props. They were to measure the area that was being bought, count the trees and mark the ones that were ready to be cut down. Aberfoyle was away to the west in an area called the Trossachs, very beautiful by all accounts, and it would mean a full day out of the office, so they both said yes at once and Cochrane’s face lit up like a wee pink pig’s at sight of a bucket of swill. And the next day a black car with leather seats and polished wood fittings took them, Cochrane, MacDonald, Ina and Mary, across the country to the wet green woods of Aberfoyle, where it poured with rain and the girls shivered and sloshed about in rubber overshoes while the men measured the forest with chains, and had Ina holding one end of a long cloth tape in a leather case while Mary wrote down the numbers they shouted out, and MacDonald daubed the letters LCC in white paint on the trunks of certain trees, and Ina swore every time the mud went over her ankles, and Mary nearly fell over giggling, and Cochrane winked at her whenever he thought nobody else was looking. And at dinner time they repaired to the Bailie Nicol Jarvie Hotel, a splendid, rich-looking place the like of which Ina and Mary had never been in before, and they all sat round a table in the lounge bar and had bowls of cock-a-leekie soup and a glass of whisky each – ‘Just tae warm ye up,’ Cochrane said, ‘and the Company can pay for it too, I think, eh, MacDonald?’ And MacDonald looked doubtful but it didn’t stop him having a dram, and in fact the
men had a second but Mary and Ina were tipsy just with the one, it being the first time either of them had ever tasted whisky. And all the way back to Borlanslogie they rolled into each other on the leather seat, and Cochrane, who was in the back with them, told them slightly risqué stories till they were in fits, more at him than at the stories, because he was a sad wee grey man and the stories were tame compared with the stories Ina could have told. But there was something kind and good about Cochrane too, Mary thought, even in his sadness, and he never laid a finger on either of them. MacDonald the surveyor was altogether grimmer and more menacing, and had maybe thought there was to be more to the day than there was, a bit of fun away from the wives; at any rate he glowered at them occasionally from the front-passenger seat, and conversed in low tones with the driver, and maybe it was because he was thwarted that he stirred up the other surveyors next day to complain about the lassies going on the expedition, saying that they had no competence or training and were trespassing on their area of expertise, and the outcome was that such a trip was never suggested again. Mary and Ina stored it up as a precious memory, though, one of the best days of their working lives.

Her wage was small but Mary saved what she could from what she didn’t hand over to her mother every week. She didn’t know what she was saving for except the future, and then she started going with Jock Imlach and she knew, and she realised too how important it was to keep her job: because Jock’s life and Jock’s earnings were erratic, and if they should stay together and get married her own wage would give her some stability. He was bold and different, Jock, which was why she fell for him in the first place, even though she was warned by her mother and all her aunts and sisters that he wasn’t steady and she’d pay for that in the long run. What she liked about him was that he’d made up his own mind what he did and didn’t want to do. He’d worked three years down the pit, aged fifteen to eighteen, during the war: it was a reserved occupation, he’d had no option, but once the war was done he chucked it in and refused to go back. It was the winter of ’45–’46: you went down in the dark, you laboured all day in the dark, you came up in the dark and you went home in the dark. ‘I’m no a bloody mole,’ Jock said. He and Mary were sitting having their Sunday tea with
his parents before stepping out for a walk and a cuddle, and Jock said he’d had enough. He didn’t want to die young, crushed or drowned or gassed underground, or still alive but coughing his guts up, ancient at fifty. ‘What makes ye think ye’re special?’ his father had demanded. ‘Ye’re just feart o hard work.’ ‘I’m no,’ Jock had said, and it was the truth, because he wasn’t afraid of it, he just didn’t like it. ‘I’m no special. I’m just sane.’ He looked at his father, and Mary could see he was thinking, I don’t want to turn into you. And after that he took whatever job came along, he’d work for farmers or builders or the council roads department, short-term labouring work with no security, rain, snow or sun it didn’t matter so long as he was up on the surface, better to be there even if he didn’t earn what he could below ground. What was the point of good money if the getting of it killed you? ‘The miner that walked in darkness has seen a great light,’ he said. ‘Dinna blaspheme,’ his mother said. ‘I’m no blaspheming,’ he said. ‘The blasphemy’s in the life the rest o them lead.’ And he quoted Joe Corrie, the Bowhill poet, who’d written some fierce stuff back in 1926, the year of the Great Strike –

And Jock gave a bitter, ironic laugh himself, and threw in a look that made Mary like him all the more although she saw trouble in it too.

They wooed and they wed, and ordinarily that would have meant the end of her job as a tracer, but she had a nagging mistrust that Jock wouldn’t always provide, so she went to see Mr Cochrane. Now Cochrane knew she was a good worker, one of his best, competent and reliable, and he liked having her around of course, and he said, ‘Aye, Mary, we must move wi the times, I’ll no pit ye oot o a job just on account o ye being a mairrit woman.’ So she stayed on, right through till January 1947 when the coal industry was nationalised and she became an employee of the National Coal Board, and on Vesting Day there was a bonus for all the workers in the industry. Which was fine, except that Jock, who was well out of it by then, but cynical as ever, said, ‘Aye, but look how much they’re giein the
Logie Coal Company in compensation. Your wee bonus would slip through a hole in their breeks and they’d never ken it was awa.’

Well, he’d given her a Christmas bonus himself by then, and all through January, February and March of that cold, cold winter, when the best thing you could do to keep warm was go to your bed from dusk till dawn, she grew the new life in her beneath the blankets, and all through the spring she kept going to her work, saying nothing about it until it was too obvious to be denied. Then Cochrane called her in and said, ‘Aye, Mary, we’ll be letting ye go soon, I see.’ She said, ‘Aye, but I’ll want tae come back. Will ye keep a place for me?’ Cochrane gaped at her. ‘But ye’ll hae a bairn tae look efter.’ ‘The bairn’ll be looked efter,’ she said, though she’d no idea how, ‘but I’d like tae come back tae my job.’ Cochrane huffed and puffed, and said it was unthinkable, but he’d think about it, the main thing was she was to go away and have the bairn and they’d talk about it after.

So she went away and Ellen was born, a hard birth it was but it didn’t change Mary’s mind, it made her more determined than ever to go back, because she knew by then she’d have to fend for herself and the lassie, she couldn’t depend on Jock, he was good for a joke and a story but not for providing life’s essentials. Jock seemed to measure freedom by the number of miles he could put between himself and the pits; he went further and further afield for work, anything that promised good pay and plenty of overtime, although more often than not the reality didn’t live up to his expectations. He had no staying power, and was always on the lookout for something better. It was the age of the hydro schemes in the Highlands, and Jock worked on one after another of them. Postal orders came home with reasonable regularity, and sometimes they were big, but more often they looked like they represented the scrapings from his wallet on a Monday morning. He spent plenty on drink and gambling, Mary knew it. He’d always been one for the horses. It was one of the reasons he kept taking work at a distance – so she couldn’t take his wage packet off him unopened as happened in most other households. If she challenged him about it on one of his brief returns home he got angry and defensive: wasn’t a man away from his family and friends to have a few wee pleasures from time to time, and what business was it of hers how much he was
earning? ‘I’m your wife,’ she said, ‘and this is your daughter.’ ‘Aye,’ he said, ‘I ken who ye are. I’ll no see either of ye starve.’ ‘No, because ye’ll be away in Inverness or somewhere,’ she said. Then he slammed out of the house on his way to the pub. He was back later with a wee drink in him, daft for her then, and he charmed her in spite of herself, but she knew very well to put no faith in his charm.

So she spoke to Cochrane again, and asked if he’d keep her in mind for getting her job back in a year or so. She had the notion that her mother would take the bairn through the week – somebody would have to, Ellen was that inquisitive and demanding she required full-time attention – but a year seemed an age away, and she could see Cochrane calculating that she’d change her mind or fall pregnant again before she was back at his door, and he said, ‘Aye, fine, Mary, in a year,’ thinking that would be the last of it. But no, every time he saw her she’d say, ‘I’ll be back in nae time, Mr Cochrane,’ and the months went by fast enough, and in the summer she was at him again, ‘Now, Mr Cochrane, Ellen’s nearly one and my mither’s tae take her frae noo on, so I’ll just come in tae start next week, will I?’ And he hadn’t the heart or the courage to stop her, she was a good worker and he missed her spirit in the office, and another tracer was leaving anyway, they were all away to get married and have bairns, it was like a national epidemic. ‘Mary,’ he said, ‘if ye can dae the work I’ll be glad tae have ye.’