Memories of Childhood
by John Appleby

~ 25 ~

This was the time of the big strike. I don't know how it started - you would need to look into history books, but it rolled on. It seemed that almost everybody in Britain was on strike, and there were stories of University students driving the buses, and soldiers manning the railways and so forth. The strike was broken, but however, the coalminers of Britain stayed out. They stayed out for nearly a year, and this hit particularly hard in our region, which was almost completely dependent on coal and it's allied industries. The results were a blow to those parents deprived of a weekly income, but as children we were cushioned from the worst. However, I remember joining with my sisters on a daily walk along the cliff top south of the village, through a fragrant coconut smelling gorse grove, carrying a basket of sandwiches and a flask of tea.

We stopped at a place where Dad and two friends were hard at work at the base of the cliff, where there was a narrow seam of coal about three feet thick near the base of this cliff. With only a small strip of sand which was exposed at low tide, they were hewing coal from this seam. They had to keep a wary eye on the advancing tide. The coal was loaded into sacks, and carried on their backs up a sloping and crumbling cliff path which zig- zagged up to the top of the cliff. The cliff was not at its highest at this point. They would climb, and Dad would stretch out upon the turf to eat his meal, then we would wheel home one of the bulging sacks of coal, either to be sold or burned in our fireplace. Imagine the irony of this, we were sitting and living and sleeping above millions of tonnes of coal beneath the ground.

© 2003 John Appleby, New Zealand

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