‘And the only way to the mine was across the bridge.’

Alice nodded, slowing down to pull a sharp turn onto a dual carriageway. ‘They blockaded it, day after day. The New Siders had to push through, getting spat on and kicked and shoved. Plenty of times men ended up floating in the river, from both sides. New Side started using boats, but then one of them was tampered with, and an old guy died. As the Old Siders got hungrier and colder and angrier and more disheartened, the worse it got because they blamed the New Side scabs. It soon reached the point where you didn’t dare cross the bridge for any reason. Young women were getting hassled, people knocked off their bikes. Fights breaking out in the miners’ club, windows smashed and worse. And then, a year or so after the strikes were all over, we demolished the bridge. And that was the last time the whole village did anything together. Now, we’re two villages who happen to share a name. There’s a campaign to officially change to New Ferrington and Old Ferrington, but these things take time, and the powers-that-be don’t understand it so they aren’t exactly hurrying things along.’

‘Wow.’ I let all this sink in as we began to re-enter the village, on the other side of the river this time. Someone had scrawled ‘NEW’ in black spray paint on the Ferrington sign.

‘So, are both sides back working in the mine now?’ I asked.

‘You’re joking?’ Alice glanced at me. ‘You really aren’t from round here, are you? The mine closed in ninety-four. Over thirty-five years since the strikes, twenty-five since the mine shut for good, and we are still just an ex-mining town, because we don’t know how to be anything else, and we don’t have anything else to be.’

Well, I could relate to that…

‘When the mine shut, it broke us. I mean, don’t get me wrong, there are towns and villages all over who faced the same. No jobs, no purpose, defined by a miserable past, with no hope of a future. I’d not let anyone else hear me say it, but it’s not as though mining is all that. Dangerous, dirty, knackering work with crap pay. But it’s like even people my age, who weren’t born when the strike happened, we’ve grown up feeling wronged, like we’re the bottom of the slag heap, abandoned and left to rot. Maybe the anger will fizzle out, die with the mining generation. But I think it’s more likely we’ll still be angry – no jobs, no money, no help – just no one will remember how we ended up here.’

And I’d thought my life was depressing…

We pulled up then at the Co-op. The road mirrored Old Main Street almost perfectly. There was a Gregg’s and a hairdresser, only the off-licence was a betting shop and instead of Pepper’s Pizza, it was the Ferrington Fish and Chippy. Opposite the Old Boat House stood the Water Boatman pub, and instead of a replica old church, a white Methodist chapel squatted.