Digging

It was a small village, spread out up the one side of a valley away from where the narrow river weaved down along the valley bottom. The slope, on which the houses lay in rows of streets above each other, seemed quite gentle, but as they said in the village ‘everywhere is uphill from everywhere else.’

This seemed to give the people who lived in the village a kind of weariness, as thought they spent their whole lives climbing, working their way upwards. It is true that the houses higher up the hill were seen as somehow posher than those lower down, but it was a matter only of degree. Even then, though, there were some who lived higher up, the councillors, the headmaster, various tradesmen and shopkeepers, who felt they were some how above the rest of us more ordinary folk.

Down at the valley bottom, the Miners’ Welfare stood in its own grounds. A fine building that mocked the finer buildings higher up. The miners, always in their best caps and mufflers and their best suits would sit outside in its the gardens as though sunlight and summer were a rare treat for them, as though they were somehow surprised to be out in the open air.

My granddad lived a few streets away from the Miners’ Welfare in one of the small terraced houses with precarious gardens, running down the slope, all held up by retaining walls that seemed always in need of repair. My granddad would be out in that garden in all weathers, digging, as he’d spent the whole of his life before retirement, digging in the mines, but now he could dig and look around at the valley above and below him as he dug and coaxed his prize-winning vegetables out of that thick black soil. One of the last things he said to me, before he died of the mine’s disease that strangled his lungs from the inside, was ‘there is nothing like having a view, being free to look around and see what lies all around you. Remember that.’ Then he picked up his spade and began to dig again.

I did remember it - always.