The Undaunted : The Miracle of the Hole-In-The-Rock Pioneers Read online

  Miners bathed each night to cleanse themselves of the coal dust. The rest of the family bathed only on Saturday night. David hated that, because they all used the same water, and he was always last. Not only was the water mostly cold by then, especially in wintertime, but it was gritty from the coal dust left by his father. In large families, the water would actually get so black that you could lose a baby in it. His mother told him that this was the origin of the old saying, “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.”

  For the families’ other personal needs, the company had built forty outhouses behind the tenements—twenty on the north, twenty on the south. Forty outhouses for almost four hundred people. And for all of this, each family was charged one-third of their monthly earnings as rent. The soot, the coal dust, the stench, and the raw sewage came at no extra charge.

  “Hurry, Mum.” David was out ahead of her, running forward, eager to be clear of Cawthorne and out into the countryside.

  She smiled. How she envied his irrepressible zest for life. “I’m coming,” she called.

  “Hurry. Barnslee be waitin’ for us.”

  Notes

  ^1. For reasons that will become apparent as the novel proceeds, I decided to have the lead characters come from a coal-mining town in Yorkshire, England. This created an immediate dilemma. How to deal with the Yorkshire accent?

  The peoples of the British Isles have an astonishing variety of accents, as my wife and I learned during our three-year stay there. Yorkshireans are not only part of that diversity but have an accent quite distinct. One day my wife and I were in the city of York, which is in the northeast of England, to do some family history research. By then, we had become pretty good at attuning our Yankee ears to local speech. But this day, when I asked for some information from one of the clerks (or clarks, as the Brits say), the woman gave me a lengthy and detailed response. And neither my wife nor I understood more than a word or two of what she said.

  Therein is the dilemma. To have at least some authenticity, I felt I had to reflect the Yorkshire accent to some degree. But if it were too authentic, I was afraid readers would find it tedious and difficult to read. Clearly, there had to be a compromise. Here, in brief, are some of the compromises I chose to make:

  —The formal thee, thou, and thy were used in Yorkshire in the 1800s. However, these were pronounced as thah, thi, and tha. These are used so frequently in conversation that they quickly became a serious distraction, so I went with the more recognizable ya and yur.

  —When a letter is dropped out of a word, it is customary for an apostrophe to be inserted in its place, as in can’t or hasn’t. But in Yorkshire, they drop letters everywhere. The initial h on most words is silent. The becomes just a t’ and is frequently tacked onto the word it modifies (for example, I’ll meet ya at t’pub). With becomes w’ and of becomes o’. Consonants at the end of words—such as in -ing words—are often dropped. The dialogue became so peppered with apostrophes that it was downright annoying. For example, here is a sentence expressed as a person from Yorkshire might say it: ’E kissed ’is wife g’bye, lef’ t’house w’ ’is bes’ mate who is o’ Barnslee Town, an’ walked t’ t’mine t’gether.”

  —Couple those two things with their unique pronunciations, and even the simplest phrase becomes a mystery. For example, “Ge’ i’ e’en,” does not easily translate into “Get it eaten.” So I often put in more recognizable spellings to make it easier for the reader.

  For these compromises, I apologize in advance to the friends and associates from Yorkshire my wife and I made while in England. I regret my inability to do justice to your rich and delightful way of speaking. My only excuse for even attempting to do so is that my great-grandfather’s ancestors came from Heptonstall in West Yorkshire, which is just twenty-five miles west of where this novel begins. So it is possible that I have a genetic bias for the “muther tunge.”

  ^2. The East End of London in the latter part of the nineteenth century had several large match factories. Here is an example of the incredibly deplorable working conditions for children and women in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. Women and girls worked six days a week, fourteen hours a day in the match factories and were paid five shillings a week.

  Though it had been banned in the United States and Sweden, Parliament refused to outlaw white phosphorus in England because it would be “a restraint of free trade.” The white phosphorus vapors caused a yellowing of the skin, hair loss, and a form of bone cancer known as “phossy-jaw.” It often led to a horribly painful death (see “Matchgirls Strike,” http://web311.pavilion.net/TUmatchgirls.htm).

  ^3. This observation was made by two missionaries from the U.S. about British taxation: “[There are] taxes of every kind, . . . for smoke must not go out of the chimney in England without a tax. Light must not come in at the windows without paying duties. . . . There are taxes for living & taxes for dying, insomuch that it is very difficult for the poor to get buried any how, & a man may emigrate to America & find a grave, for less money, than he can get a decent burial for in Old England. We scarce recollect an article without tax except cats, mice & fleas” (in Allen, Esplin, and Whittaker, Men with a Mission, 10–12).

  ^4. Yorkshire pudding is even today a staple of the British diet, especially for the Sunday meal. It is not a pudding in the American sense of the word, but an unsweetened, bowl-shaped pastry usually served with brown gravy. Tradition has it that it was first developed in Yorkshire among the very poor because it was an inexpensive way to fill children’s stomachs when meat and other staples were beyond a family’s means (see Random House Dictionary, s.v. “Yorkshire pudding”). At this time in Yorkshire, a “growler” was a small pork pie.

  ^5. Cawthorne and Barnsley are both existing towns in South Yorkshire. Barnsley is a large city, Cawthorne a village of fewer than three hundred people. Specific descriptions of Cawthorne and Pit Number Three are fictional.

  ^a. In Yorkshire, a “Tyke” is not a young child; the term is a colloquialism for a Yorkshireman.

  ^b. Pastries, small sweet rolls or buns.

  Chapter 2

  Friday, June 13, 1862

  By early afternoon, Anne Dickinson was quite exhausted. And yet she felt a deep satisfaction. At least a dozen times that day—the latest just minutes ago—David had paused in his frenetic rush to exclaim, “Oh, Mum. This be the grahndest day of me ’ole life.” In fact, it had been such a delight to watch him, she had not corrected his language once all day.

  They had walked long and laughed much and he had pelted her with endless questions. Every store became a new adventure. The millinery shop, the haberdashery, an ironmongerc, the tobacconist’s and a bookstore. He had to see every one. But it was the sweet shop that absolutely dazzled him. He just stood there, struck dumb, eyes moving slowly across the shelves, counters, and cases. In the end, deciding how to spend his six pence proved to be pure agony.

  Anne steadfastly refused to help. “’Tis your money,” she kept saying. “You must decide.”

  He finally settled on a stick of black licorice and six pieces of Turkish delight.d

  Now, late in the afternoon, they were finally on their way back to Cawthorne. And for the moment David was quiet. Suddenly he stopped. “What’s that, Mum?”

  “What, darling?”

  “That big building.”

  “That’s the Church of the Holyrood.”

  “Church of the what?”

  “Holyrood. It means the holy cross. It’s a Catholic church.”

  “Can we go see it?”

  “No!” The sudden change in her voice brought his head up. “We have to be getting back.” But it was still afternoon, and she had said they could stay until evening.

  “Please, Mum. It’s beautiful. Please.”

  “It’s just a church, David. Like the All Saints Church in Cawthorne.”

  “So is this our church too?” he asked.

  She gave him an odd look. “Our church? We don’t have a church.” />
  “We have the All Saints Church.”

  “But it’s not our church. We don’t attend there. All Saints Church is an Anglican church, which means it belongs to the Church of England. That’s different from the Catholic church.”

  “Please can I go see it, Mum? Joost peek in.”

  “No, David! Church be no place for people like us. No church.”

  “David?”

  He looked up. They were out of Barnsley now, walking leisurely between the hedgerows that lined both sides of Cawthorne Road. She pointed ahead to where a small meadow with scattered oak trees opened up. “Do you mind if we stop and rest a bit?”

  He shrugged and turned aside. He hadn’t spoken since she had cut him off so abruptly. A heavily loaded coal wagon was approaching, stirring up clouds of dust. “Let’s move over under that oak tree,” she suggested.

  Fifty yards back from the road, the noise and dust receded. David plopped down on the grass, stretched out on his back with his hands beneath his head, and closed his eyes. Anne watched him for a moment, then sat down beside him.

  “Are you tired, Mum?”

  “A wee bit. But it’s been a glorious day together.”

  “Aye, Mum. It was brilliant.”

  She cocked her head. “Brilliant? And where did you learn that word?”

  The familiar grin reappeared. “Dunno.”

  She just shook her head, then lay down beside him and closed her eyes. Nearly five minutes passed with neither of them speaking, and she found her eyelids starting to droop.

  “Mum?”

  “Yes?”

  “Tell me aboot when ya were a little girl.”

  She turned her head, surprised at the request.

  “Tell me aboot London.”

  “I don’t know about London.” She stressed the proper pronunciation. “I did not live in London when I was little, David. I was born in a village called Battersea, about five or six miles to the southwest of London.”

  “Dahdee says that you lived in a grahnd ’ouse, Mum. Be that true?”

  Her eyes closed, warm remembrance and dull pain flooding over her at the same moment. “Aye,” she finally answered, “it was a grand house indeed. Guess how many bedrooms.”

  “There was more than one?”

  She smiled. Two bedrooms would seem fantastic to a boy who had only ever known a room partitioned off by a blanket for his parents. “Astle Manor had fifteen bedrooms.”

  “Whah!” he blurted. “Tha canna be so.”

  “’Tis true. Lord and Lady Astle were very rich. Lady Astle was related to the royal family.”

  “Whah!” he said again. “I canna picture such a thing.” He sat up, thoroughly fascinated now. “Did you ever get to be inside such a grahnd place, Mum?”

  She laughed. “I was actually born inside the house, my darling. We had our quarters in the basement with the other servants.”

  His eyes were as round as the wheels of a coal trolley. “Dahdee never tole me that,” he finally managed. “So were you rich?”

  “Oh no, David. My parents—your granddad and your grandmum—were servants at Astle Manor. Papa was a groomsman and took care of the horses and such. Mama was the head chambermaid. That means she took care of all the bedrooms. It was a very important responsibility. Making the beds each morning, emptying the chamber pots, washing the sheets, keeping the fireplaces clean and filled with wood in the winter. When the Astles went to Brighton for the summer—that’s down by the seaside—Mama would let me help her, so I got to be in every bedroom at one time or another.”

  “Was it Grandmum who taught you to read? Or did you go to skoo-ul?”

  “In London, they don’t say skoo-ul, David. It’s just school. But no. Neither Mama nor Papa could read. Actually, it was Lady Astle who made it possible. The Astles had a little chapel on the estate, with their own vicar.”

  “What’s a vicar?”

  “A minister, a parson, the head of a local church.”

  “Ah.”

  “But Reverend Pike served only Astle Manor. He was also a teacher for the Astles’ three children. Then Lady A—that’s what we all called her, but not to her face, of course—decided it would be useful if a few of her servants could read and write. The adult servants were too busy, so she decided to train up the next generation. She had a few of us attend school with her children.

  “We went two hours each morning after the chores were done. Reverend Pike, he taught us some basic reading and writing, and then later our numbers.”

  “I would give anything to go to school,” he ventured wistfully. “Dahd says there ought to be school in Cawthorne, but the mine owners don’t like that idea.”

  “Of course not,” she muttered, half to herself, “wouldn’t want their little employees getting minds of their own now, would we?”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. I hope they get a school in Cawthorne someday, but it doesn’t matter. I’m going to teach you everything I know, David. You and me, we’ll have our own school.”

  “I am so glad, Mum. I love it.” Again they fell silent. Again it was David who broke it.

  “So if you lived near London, and Dahd was a miner here in Yorkshire, how did you meet?”

  She sat up abruptly, then got to her feet. “It’s time to go, David.” He looked hurt. She reached out her hand. “Come. We still have to stop at the store and get supper.”

  He stood and fell into step beside her, confused by her abrupt change of mood. As they reached the road, he tried again. “How come you didn’t become a chambermaid, Mum?”

  “No more questions, David. You’ve asked more than enough for one day.”

  “Oh.” His mouth shut and his chin dropped. He moved a step away from her, studying the puffs of dust his shoes made as they hit the roadside.

  It was half a mile before the guilt got the better of her. He looked so crestfallen. She touched him on the arm. “I hope it was a happy birthday for you, David,” she said.

  He brightened immediately. “Aye, Mum, ’twas more grahnd than I could ever imagine.”

  That pleased her, and in spite of the pall of gloom brought by the thought, she decided it was time to let her son know about the rest of his birthday surprise. “David?”

  “Eh?” He was off in his own thoughts again.

  “Your father has another surprise for your birthday.”

  “What?”

  “He spoke yesterday with Mr. Rhodes, supervisor of his pit at the mine.”

  His head jerked up. The excitement in his eyes was like a lance in her side. But she forced a smile. And she told him. Her voice was dull and lifeless, but she told him—about his starting work in the mines three days hence. She didn’t tell him about the argument she and his father had had, nor of the deal they had finally struck. His salary would be turned over to his parents anyway. There was no need for him to know where it was going.

  By the time she finished, he was literally dancing in excitement. “Ya dunna be teasin’ me, Mum, are ya?” he said, lapsing back into the language of his father. “Da ya spek trulee?”

  She felt utterly weary. “Yes, I speak truly. On Monday you begin work in the mines.”

  She looked away. But, God willing, you will not spend your life there.

  Notes

  ^c. Monger is an old English word meaning “one who sells” (Random House Dictionary, s.v. “monger”). So, for example, a fishmonger is one who sells fish. An ironmonger sells iron products. An ironmonger’s shop is what we in America would call a hardware store. Even today, they are much like the old neighborhood hardware stores of the late 1800s and early 1900s in small-town America.

  ^d. A candy that seems to have originated in Turkey but is very popular in Britain. It has a soft, jellylike consistency, much like our gumdrops, but it is cut into small cubes and dusted with powdered sugar. It comes in many flavors.

  Chapter 3

  Monday, June 16, 1862

  David and his father walked through the f
irst light of dawn toward Cawthorne Pit Number Three. David trotted to keep up with his father’s brisk pace. It was five-thirty, and no one else was about. As they approached the entrance to the winding tower, David’s eyes kept lifting to the giant winding wheels perched atop the derricklike structure. He had seen the tower many times from outside, but approaching it now, he felt like an ant approaching an oak tree.

  “David?”

  He looked up to see his father watching him. “Yes, Dahd.”

  “Do ya un’erstand ’ow important a trapper be in the mines?”

  “I think so.” Then he shook his head. “I’m not sure.”

  “Thare be large doors placed throughout a mine. They be fur ven’lation.”

  “Ven’lation?”

  “Yah. That means ta keep the air movin’. That buildin’ over thare—” he pointed to a low brick building behind the winding tower—“’olds two big steam engines. One powers the windin’ gear, the other pumps fresh air down inta the mine. When the doors throughout the mine are shut, the air be trapped an’ forced inta the side chutes an’ minin’ chambers. That’s why ya be called trappers. Yur job is ta open the doors when a coal car approaches, then shut ’em agin.”

  “Oh.” David knew that his job was to open and shut doors, but he had not understood why.

  “Anuther thing. Op’nin’ the doors frum time ta time allows the air ta flow more freely and that stops the gas frum puddlin’ up.” He peered at him. “Da ya ’member what be fire damp?”1

  David nodded gravely. “Gasses in the mine that catch fire?”

  “Reet. It be cuz of fire damp that they invented the Davy lamp. Best thing ta happen in the mines fur a long time.”2