Her mam slept for a couple of hours and once Cissy had come downstairs, Ruby asked the next-door neighbour, who was a great friend of her mother, to sit with her while she herself went back to the pit to be with Olive. She arrived just as word spread through the crowd outside the gate that the rescuers were about to break through to the men on the far side of the fall. She slipped her arm through Olive’s and whispered about their da after Olive asked how he was, but she could see Olive’s whole being was concentrated on Adam.

It was another hour before the survivors were brought up.

For ever and a day Ruby would remember the moment when Walter walked out of the pit gates flanked by the other two men who had been rescued alive. The sound of the gates clanking open, the falling snow, the silently waiting crowd and the hope on people’s faces as they rose on tiptoe and craned their necks to look for their loved ones, and then the low moans and cries as a deputy began to make the announcement that was the worst possible news for so many.

Walter’s wife had pushed through to meet him and was clinging to him as though she would never let him go as he reached his mother. He didn’t have to say anything – his face spoke for itself – and as she all but fainted Olive, along with Fred and Peter’s wives, helped hold her up, united in their grief and loss.

Ruby had stepped back a pace from the family group. She felt she was on the outside looking in, part of them but not part of them. She had no right to mourn as they were doing, but in this moment the loss of the Adam she had loved – the childhood friend she’d grown up with and the sweetheart he’d become – was nigh on unbearable. It was Adam’s father, who when she and Adam had been together had treated her as one of his own, who put his arm round her and held her tight, the tears rolling down his wrinkled cheeks. And only then could she let her own flow.

George Morgan was buried six days later and the day after that was the service for Adam and the other miners. The morning dawned bright and cold, a white winter sun turning the fresh fall of snow during the night into a beautiful glittering winter wonderland. It was cruel that it was such a lovely day, Ruby thought, as she and Cissy made their way to Olive’s house. The day before had been almost a blizzard when they had buried her father but that had seemed more fitting somehow. Today, the sunshine and the mother-of-pearl sky seemed a mockery in the circumstances.