Watching him going through his routine I was assailed by revolutionary emotions. It was hugely depressing, suddenly, being down there, thinking of the noise, the darkness, the discomfort, the risk, and the entrepreneurs on the surface, where it was light, waiting for the gold to come up. As if he’d read my thoughts – and why shouldn’t he? he’d put them there – John Yellard said, ‘Many people ask, after they’ve seen what I’ve just shown you, why anyone would become a miner. I’ll tell you. Mateship. There’s no camaraderie in the world like that between miners. All politics get forgotten. If a miner is trapped in South Africa or Ireland, no one asks if he is black or white, Protestant or Catholic – they get him out.’

Well, if he said so. But it seemed to me that what the voice pronounced, the face denied. Somewhere within himself John Yellard was more radical than sentimental. But the idea of loyalty engendered by deprivation had got him, and turned him inside out, and drawn his teeth, as it had millions of others.

Back on the surface, buying postcards in the Hainault Mine Gift Shop, we heard on the radio that President Reagan had bombed Libya. It crossed all our minds that we might be better off heading underground again.

I invented an expression, while I was in Kalgoorlie, to go alongside ‘As good as gold’. It was, ‘Less fickle than nickel’. Only a few years before, when gold was in the doldrums, nickel had been adjudged to be the goldfields’ saviour, ‘the key’, as a contemporary report put it, ‘to the region’s and to Kalgoorlie’s future’. Now you couldn’t give it away. Kambalda, where the highest grade sulphide nickel ore in the world was mined, was surviving on whatever bits of gold turned up accidentally in its nickel pans. That’s if it was surviving at all. When we drove out there that afternoon we found it strike-bound. Deserted. Just as earlier we’d found the smelter silent, a handful of men in hard hats pretending to be busy sweeping the access roads.