No Man’s Land. Simon Tolkien

took four steps back and braced himself, trying to concentrate on the ball and not look at Rawdon, who was staring at him from the goalmouth. He’d decided to go to the left. He didn’t know why but he was certain of his decision, and yet the knowledge didn’t stop his heart thumping in his chest. It felt like a hammer beat, but there was no time left to calm down. It was just a kick, he told himself as he got ready to run; just one stupid kick, and yet in that instant he wanted it to succeed more than he could ever remember wanting anything. Perhaps he wanted it too much, which was why he half slipped as he went forward, scuffing the shot so that it lost most of its power as it travelled towards the middle of the goal. It should have been easy to save but Rawdon had read Adam’s intentions too well. He dived hard to his right and watched helplessly as the ball rolled past his feet into the net.

      Adam’s team cheered. They’d won the match and it didn’t matter if the new boy had got lucky. He’d played well and he’d made the chance for himself. They laughed, clapping him on the back as they walked off, and even some of the other team’s players joined in. But Rawdon stood watching him with a look of concentrated hostility. He waited, leaning against a goalpost, until they were alone, facing each other.

      ‘It don’t matter what ’appened,’ he said, looking Adam in the eye. ‘It don’t matter how many goals you score. You don’t belong here wi’ us. An’ you niver will.’

      He didn’t wait for a response but walked quickly away, limping slightly as he went.

      ‘What happened to Rawdon?’ Adam asked Ernest as they began the walk home. ‘Luke said he used to score goals so why’s he the goalkeeper now?’

      ‘He hurt his leg down the mine,’ said Ernest. ‘The pony he was driving got scared of something and bolted. And then pulled up short and kicked back – britching, we call it. Rawdon caught his leg in the limmers—’

      ‘Limmers? What are they?’ asked Adam, interrupting.

      ‘The shafts they put on the pony’s harness to link him up to the tubs. You don’t know anything, do you?’ said Ernest, smiling. ‘Any road, Rawdon broke his leg in three places. He must’ve been in agony – he was white as a sheet when they brought him out but he didn’t cry out at all. Rawdon’s always been a brave lad, I’ll say that for him. And then the hospital didn’t do a good job with the operation, or at least that’s what Rawdon’s father Whelan said, although I reckon he was just after trying to duck out of the responsibility. He should have been watching out for his boy. Rawdon was only thirteen when it happened and maybe he wasn’t ready for the tubs, although I suppose you’ve got to start somewhere. Except maybe with him it would have been different.’

      ‘What do you mean?’ asked Adam, not understanding.

      ‘Because of the football. Rawdon was really good, better than you can imagine. He could go round you before you knew what had happened, like he was picking your pocket,’ said Ernest, smiling at the memory. ‘And a lot of us thought he’d end up playing for one of the clubs, earning proper money, having a life that the likes of me can only dream about. But the mine’s got a way of claiming you back when you’re thinking of escaping it, and it’s got Rawdon for life now, whether he likes it or not.’

      ‘I suppose it would’ve been different if he’d stayed at school,’ said Adam. ‘Then he wouldn’t have got injured.’

      ‘I suppose,’ said Ernest. ‘But it’s not the way here. I got good marks at school and my mother would have liked me to go on, but my dad wouldn’t hear of it. Bought me a pair of moleskin trousers and a cloth cap for my fourteenth birthday and took me up to the manager’s office to sign on the next day. And that was that.’

      ‘And you work while I sit in school,’ said Adam. ‘But it’s not easy to be different, you know, Ernest. You don’t belong anywhere. People resent you.’

      ‘Like Rawdon?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Well, you shouldn’t worry about him. He resents everyone. Play football like you did today and you’ll be all right,’ said Ernest, clapping Adam on the back.

      But Adam did worry. Not just about Rawdon but about who he was, where he was going. He was an outsider, living in a town that he was striving to escape, learning Latin and Greek at the board school so he could move away and better himself, while everyone else in Scarsdale had their gaze fixed forever inwards, their lives dominated by the mine. It was like a magnet drawing men and boys down deeper and deeper into its black passages, while the women and girls slaved away in their mean box-like little houses to service their needs. Adam saw how Annie, Edgar’s wife, toiled ceaselessly, washing clothes, baking bread, cooking meals, maintaining everything in a constant state of readiness for her menfolk, who often returned home at different hours of the day or night as their shift times changed from week to week. Sometimes she didn’t go to bed at all but just dozed on a chair in front of the fire ready to jump up and wait on them when they came in. And perhaps the constant activity was a good thing, keeping her distracted from the gnawing fear that one day Edgar or Thomas or Ernest wouldn’t come home at all, falling victim instead to one of the terrible underground accidents that seemed to happen almost every week.

      The mine was cruel and the mine was king. And yet Adam had never once been inside it. He knew that he was frightened of it – terrified even. It was the embodiment of his worst childhood nightmares when he’d dreamed over and over again of being stuck fast in a narrow space in the pitch-black darkness unable to move, buried alive without hope of rescue. And yet he hated the fear too. Adam was brave by nature and his secret shamed him, becoming a challenge that he had to overcome. If he gave into it he wouldn’t be able to hold up his head in front of the boys his age who worked down the mine every day. He needed to understand their experience; he needed to know what he was working so hard to try to get away from.

      He waited a few days, screwing up his courage, and then asked his father to show him the mine. He had been anticipating opposition but instead Daniel seemed pleased by the request – once he had got over his initial surprise at being asked; he knew full well his son’s fear of going underground.

      ‘Come to the pithead tomorrow morning and I’ll show you round,’ he said. ‘There’s a lot to learn and it won’t hurt you to miss one day of school.’

       Chapter Five

      At first Adam was alone as he walked down the street from Edgar’s house, but by the time he reached the station he had become part of a crowd of miners all heading the same way towards the valley bottom with their snap tins and drinking flasks dangling from their hands. The rising sun was shining on their backs and they seemed happy and carefree: laughing, smoking, jostling each other – a sea of cloth caps moving towards the headstocks whose wheels were running fast now, hauling the cages up and down the shafts. The men’s mood increased Adam’s sense of isolation – none of them could imagine the dread he was feeling in the pit of his stomach. He had to force himself to go on, placing one foot in front of the other.

      Further down the road, they started to meet miners coming the other way, returning home from the night shift. They were black with coal, blinking bleary eyes in the sunlight as they shuffled wearily along. And now the road became a path, winding its way through a grey barren waste ground littered with the detritus of the mine – discarded feed sacks for the ponies, broken coal tubs and timber props, pieces of rusting machinery whose purpose Adam couldn’t determine. Railway lines snaked here and there with the main line running on towards the screens area where Ernest worked.

      Adam could see him with a group of other boys and men, standing on either side of a wide belt of moving coal, their hands in a constant flurry of motion as they pulled out stones and rubbish and threw them aside, although not fast enough to satisfy a corpulent red-faced man in a low round-crowned black hat who was standing on a gantry above the screens, shouting at the workers below, berating them for being too slow or too careless with a stream of profanity that never seemed