He walked behind his da and the others as the road got narrower and the roof got lower until they were all doubled up and only the light from their lamps pierced the darkness. No one hung about. They only got paid from the time they reached the place where they would begin work and that could take half an hour or more. It was now pitch black, blacker than the darkest night. When he was a little lad he had shut his eyes in bed sometimes and imagined that was how it was down the pit, but on his first day down he’d realized that the pit’s blackness was something beyond that. It was the kind of primeval malignant darkness where you can see nothing at all no matter how long your eyes take to get used to it, something that could turn you into a gibbering idiot if you let it. That blackness could accomplish what the mice and rats and blacklocks – huge, ugly, shiny black-backed beetles with feelers as long as bootlaces and a nasty habit of dropping down your neck – couldn’t do, and that was why he and the other miners took care of their lamps as though they were made of solid gold.

Once he reached the face where he was working, Adam brought his mind to bear on the job in hand and put all thoughts of his tortured private life out of his head. It was a relief to think of nothing. In fact, he often told himself his hours down the pit each day had kept him sane the last few years, and he dare bet there wasn’t another miner in the county of Durham who would know what he meant if he was foolish enough to voice such a sentiment out loud.

Chapter Thirteen

It was the middle of March and for the first time in weeks the pavements were free of ice and snow due to a sudden thaw. Although still cold, the day had been bright and sunny with a clear blue sky and a smell in the air that heralded spring was definitely around the corner. A thick twilight had fallen by the time Ruby and Bridget left the workhouse, but nevertheless it felt good not to be walking along Bath Lane Terrace in complete darkness when they got off the tram. The winter had been long and hard, unemployment was rising slowly and insidiously, and several choking pea-souper smogs which had blanketed the skies over Newcastle for days on end had affected the very young and very old adversely, increasing the intake into the workhouse for the latter when illness had proved the last straw to staying in their homes. Ruby had seen first-hand that the fine line between merely being poor, and living in a poverty that became unsustainable, could be as simple as the loss of a couple of wage packets.