The Hiding Place(33)
Locals would recall how the bellowing tremor shook the whole village. At first people thought it was an earthquake. People ran, panicking, out of their houses. The teachers ushered children quickly out of their classes. Only the older villagers didn’t run. They remained, supping their pints and exchanging troubled looks. They knew it was the pit. And when the pit roared like that, you were probably already too late.
After the roar came the dust: black, billowing clouds that filled the sky and eclipsed the sun. The high-pitched wail of the colliery alarm shrieked to the dark heavens, followed by the sirens: ambulance, fire and police.
There were reports and inquiries. But no one was ever held to account for the accident. And the three lost miners remained buried, deep beneath the ground.
Officially.
Unofficially—because who would ever tell such things to an outsider or a newspaper?—many swore, my grandad included (especially after a few pints), that they had seen the missing men, up on the colliery site, at night. One urban legend—retold with fresh embellishments each time—had it that a few of the surviving crew were sitting drinking in the Bull after hours one night when the door burst open and Kenneth Dunn, the youngest of the men lost that day, at just sixteen, walked right up to the bar. Bold as day and black as the night with coal dust.
Allegedly, the barman put down the glass he was drying, looked the dead lad up and down and said: “Get out of here, Kenneth. You’re under age.”
A good ghost story, and every village has plenty of those. Of course, no miner would admit to being in there that night. And when asked about it, the barman (long retired by then) would just tap his red-veined nose and say: “You’d have to buy me a lot of drink to tell you that tale.”
No one ever did buy him enough drink. Although plenty tried.
Just off the high street stood the Miner’s Welfare. Not the original building. That was demolished in the sixties when subsidence caused a wall to collapse, crushing several miners and their families. Two women and one toddler died. People claimed that the little boy still roamed the new building, and sometimes you’d see him in the long, dark corridor between the main bar and the toilets.
As a kid, left to sip soda while Dad downed beer and Mum drank half a lager and lime while rocking Annie in her pram (because Friday was Family Social Night at the Welfare), I would will my bladder to hold until we got home. If I absolutely had to go, I’d run as fast as I could down that dingy corridor to the toilets and back, terrified that one night I might feel a cold hand around my wrist and turn to see a tiny boy, face still smeared with dust, clothes ragged and torn, a bloody red dent in his head where his skull had been crushed.
In 1857 a man by the name of Edgar Horne stabbed his wife to death and was hanged from a lamppost by a lynch mob, his body left in a shallow grave on unconsecrated ground. Legend had it that he was still alive when he was buried. He clawed his way out and could sometimes be seen, dirt crusted on his hair and clothes, sitting by his wife’s headstone. On Bonfire Night, instead of a guy, for years the tradition in Arnhill was to burn an effigy of Edgar Horne. To make sure that, this time, he was really dead.
My dad would always scoff at such things. If he heard Grandad telling the story about Kenneth Dunn, his face would darken and he’d say: “Leave it, Frank. There’s more hot air spouted out your mouth than out the pit stack.”
But sometimes, the way he said it made me think he wasn’t angry but afraid. His words not derision but a defense, against stuff he’d rather not think about.
Even my dad couldn’t deny that Arnhill was a village plagued by misfortune. There were never any more fatal accidents down the pit, but several smaller ones claimed time, money and, in one case, a miner’s legs. The pit gained a reputation for being jinxed. Some miners were reluctant to send their sons down there. Despite still being profitable—with tons of coal beneath the surface—in 1988 the decision was made to close Arnhill Colliery for good.
Whatever remained down there would be left, abandoned and undisturbed.
—
I flip through page after page of the folder. It makes for morbidly fascinating reading. Some of it I know, or thought I knew. There are details I wasn’t aware of. Facts obscured in the retelling. I had always imagined Edgar Horne as a boorish monster. In fact, he was a doctor, respected in the community. Until one hot summer night he went to church, ate a supper of potato broth and cut his wife’s throat with a scalpel as she slept.
Remarkably, no villagers were ever held accountable for his lynching. All covering each other’s backs. I wonder how many of their descendants still live in Arnhill today and how many know—or care—about the blood on their forefathers’ hands.
Further back, the history of the village becomes vaguer: the usual tales of poverty, disease and untimely death. A lot of death. Some pages have been highlighted. I lift one of them out:
NOTTINGHAMSHIRE’S SALEM
During the sixteenth century witch hunts were prolific across Europe. The trials in Arnhill began when a young man by the name of Thomas Darling accused his aunt of consorting with devils to bring babies back from the dead. According to Darling, Mary Walkenden took ill babies up to caves in the hills and exchanged their souls for eternal life.
The name Darling doesn’t ring a bell, but I remember a Jamie Walkenden at school. The bus really does never leave, I think. Generation after generation. Born, living, dying here.