Round for Six Bells

This photograph of women waiting at the pit head for news of their loved ones following an underground explosion at Six Bells Colliery near Abertillery in June 1960 has haunted me ever since I first spotted it in the National Coal Mining Museum at Big Pit, getting on for a decade ago.  I knew as soon as I saw the stoicism of those women that I had to come up with a response. 

It took years of waiting to be in the right place in my own life, a subsequent visit to Big Pit last year and a trip to the moving memorial at Six Bells itself before I finally set about writing my poem.  

It seemed to me that a form poem would best suit my purpose - one in which lines are repeated in a set order, to mimic the circling of thoughts that go through your head while waiting for news that could go either way, each time worse than before. I was also very aware that the news at Six Bells turned out to be as tragic as it could be, for only three of the 48 men working in the district of the mine where the explosion happened survived.  This meant whatever I wrote had to be unsentimental yet empathetic, and as good as I could make it.  
Eventually I wrote a pantoum and called it 'Round for Six Bells', the idea being each of the six stanzas would toll a litany of loss.  Well, that was the idea, anyway, and this is what I came up with.

Round for Six Bells

Above ground the women are waiting.                                      

Stretchers are piled against the wall.                                           

All that they know is sliding away.                                                         

Their hands grip the railings to steady their fear.   

                                                                  

The stretchers are piled against the wall.                                               

The sound of the hooter is like a wail.

Their hands grip the railings to steady their fear,                                 

to keep worry out of the shadows and small.

                                                           

The sound of the hooter will be their wail

as long as they cling to iron and rust,                                          

to keep worry out of the shadows and small                             

like the bacon left boiling on the stove.                                      

As long as they cling to iron and rust,                                         

they won’t imagine the flesh of the dead            

like bacon left burning on the stove,                   

no point turning worrying into dread                 

                       

so they don’t imagine the flesh of the dead        

their husbands’ skin is blackened with dust                  

it might not be as bad as they dread                    

it was just the faintest of shudders felt    

                       

and their sons’ skin is black, yes, but only with dust               

and all that they know is sliding away               

in that faintest of shudders felt                 

above ground. The women are waiting.             

  

© Deborah Harvey 2014

Once written, the poem lay around for a bit.  I read it at Bristol Poetry Festival in the autumn of 2013 and earmarked it for inclusion in my second poetry collection, Map Reading for Beginners, which is due out this September.  Then I remembered something I had read years ago: an observation Leonard Cohen had made about being duped out of the rights for 'Suzanne' and how he had once heard some people singing it on a ship on the Caspian Sea, concluding that maybe it was appropriate that such a well-loved song didn't belong just to him. 

I'm not deluded enough to compare 'Round for Six Bells' with 'Suzanne' or to think that I will ever make any money out of my poetry, but I do believe that poems are like songs in that once they are take their place, however modest, in the world, they don't really belong to the poet any more.  In the narrowest sense, that hopeful little © above can easily be ignored, as recent notorious acts of plagiarism have shown.  But what I'm really talking about is the way they contain enough space for the listener or reader to interpret them in the light of their own emotional truths, which means that each time it is read, a poem takes on a new existence. 

At any rate, I wanted to give something back to the community that inspired me so I contacted the curator at the National Coal Museum and asked if they would display it or maybe just keep it in their archive.  Almost immediately I had a response to the effect that they would 'frame it and hang it where people could read it'.  What's more, it will also be on display at the Visitor Centre of the Mining Memorial in the village of Six Bells itself. I'm honoured beyond imagining. My poem's going home.  

Into the Valley

Our plan was to criss-cross Dartmoor, scattering maps of three hares churches and cards in our wake (Dru) and chatting to passing book traders in the hope of getting a couple of readings (me).  But Dru found she didn't have sufficient three hares cards to make it worthwhile, so we postponed our trip south and west and headed back to Wales instead.  

It was still snowy. Look, up above is the Sugar Loaf looking like ... well, a loaf of sugar.

And here's Abergavenny, the spit of Salzburg.  Sort of. 



And at Clydach Gorge, I saw what I suspect might be my Best Thing of 2013. Already.  

The former mining village of Six Bells was our destination, in part because I am currently writing a poem inspired by the picture at Big Pit of the women waiting for news at the pithead following an underground explosion on 28th June 1960 and felt the need to go there, but also because there is now a 20 metre high monument, the Guardian of the Valleys, to the 45 men and boys who lost their lives that day.  

On our way Dru coaxed the Morris Traveller up a very steep hill to the Church of Saint Illtyd at Brynithel.  Unfortunately the door - carved with hearts and initials - was locked but we braved the sharp-toothed wind to have a fossick around the hummocky, circular (and thus pre-Christian) churchyard with its ancient yew stumps, out of which new saplings are growing.  

Then it was down down down to Six Bells to see the statue known as The Guardian Of The Valleys.  It's been dubbed South Wales' Angel of the North, and there does seem to be a sense of each figure watching over its landscape and offering protection.  But the respective styles and purposes are very different.  

One of the most ingenious aspects of the Guardian is the method of its construction, from over 20,000 strips of cor-ten steel.  Viewed from a distance, the figure seems almost gauzy, there and not there yet solidifying as you approach it.

The sculptor, Sebastien Boysen, describes the impetus behind his work thus: 'I just had this thought, this image of this man - almost stripped bare. Maybe he's one of the helpers or maybe one of the survivors who has managed to come out from the pit.  This man is conveying the sense of loss.  A sense of something that's almost impossible to understand.'  

And there is a feeling of irredeemable loss at Six Bells.  The loss of the valley's pastoral tranquility when the mine opened.  The loss of light, health and life working underground.  The loss of work and community pride when the mine closed with  nothing to replace it.  But at the reclaimed site of the former pit, there is peace, reconciliation and remembrance too.  

After Six Bells we again braved wind and residual pockets of snow to picnic in grand style on Marland Mountain - otherwise known as Hafod Fach - where for a time Dru's family used to farm.  

 

We then headed for Newport Cathedral, which is dedicated to St Woolos the Warrior (or Bearded), whose name is a corrupted, anglicised version of the original, St Gwynllyw.  Apparently he was a King and Confessor, who, like St Illtyd whose church we saw earlier, had a somewhat nefarious career  before he found God and founded the city of Newport.  At one point he even abducted the beautiful Gwladys, daughter of neighbouring King Brychan, who had refused to allow him to marry her, taking 300 men with him to do so.  Only the intervention of King Arthur stopped the ensuing pitched battle.  

Gwladys soon had a son, we are told, who later became St Cadoc the Wise and whose birth Gwynllyw celebrated by going on a cattle raid.  Presumably he indulged in some heavy-duty repentance later.  

The greatest treasure of St Woolos' Cathedral is the Norman arch with its Roman columns stolen, apparently, from the fortress at Caerleon and carved with images that might represent either Noah's flood or the baptism of Christ. Through it, at the East end of the Cathedral, you can see the distinctive wheel window in stained glass designed by John Piper.  

The best journeys end with the sea, or if not quite attaining that, rivers and on a bitterly cold but brilliantly lit April day, the Usk and the Severn both rose to the challenge.  Here is the Transporter Bridge at Newport.  I fancy I'll be back for a ride maybe, on a warmer day, whenever such a dawn might come.  

Five go to Big Pit

I confess that the inclusion of the word 'World' to the title 'Heritage Site' often bugs me, but as Dru pointed out, in the case of Blaenavon it is entirely justified. This is where the Industrial Revolution began.

It is three decades since Thatcher turned on the mining communities of Britain, and their struggle to preserve their livelihoods has passed into history.  Unfortunately the Tory party has not, and in the week preceding the biggest cuts yet aimed at the poorest in our society, Big Pit served as a reminder of the callousness of the right and its drive to preserve privilege at the expense of others.

(Again, most of these pictures are Dru's.)

When I was last up here, years ago, it was a hot summer day.  This time snow lent the valley an unwonted beauty, softening the bumps and bruises of excavation and turning the rusting relics into ghosts.  




Jan being a bit wary of going underground and John being cold to the bone and Dru being a kindly soul, only Colin and I opted to go down the mine.  The ex-miner kitting me out with my helmet, lamp and battery pack assumed I was a teacher, and when I told him I wasn't, he looked at me very straight and asked me what I was.  'A poet,' I answered and he said 'There's lots for you here'. 

The stories of working underground are not easily forgotten, but the ones that hit hardest are those concerning the children and the horses. 

Children would work 12 hour shifts, six days per week, from the age of five.  The youngest were 'trappers', tasked with opening the air doors to let the trucks of coal through when they heard them coming.  This involved staying alert for hours with no food (because of colonies of rats) in complete darkness.  Although the employment of children under ten in the mine was outlawed in the Mines and Collieries Act of 1842, in practice it lasted for decades afterwards

because there was only one mines inspector for the entire country.  

Horses were not so lucky.  They only worked one shift per year, but that was 50 weeks long - at the end of July each year, they had a two week holiday above ground - and probably the last horse to work underground, Robbie, retired from nearby Pant y Gasseg in 1999.  It was vital that horses were kept as injury-free as possible to minimise the likelihood of attack by rats, but the impossibility of keeping their feet dry in the wet conditions made this difficult and I don't like to think any further than that.  

We had a pleasant late lunch in the canteen.  

After the darkness of the mine, the snowlight was dazzling.  

Then we explored the outlying buildings, including the state-of-the-art pithead baths built in the 1940s, which must have lightened the load of miners' wives, who, in an earlier era, had a lower life expectancy than their husbands.  

A photograph from the exhibition at the Pit had stuck in my head for years, since my previous visit. It was of women waiting at the railings for news after a major accident at a nearby pit.  I knew I had to write about it but I couldn't remember which disaster it was, just the look on their faces.  I recognised it as soon as I saw it again - Six Bells Colliery Disaster in 1960, in which 45 men died and three were injured.  

This is the picture.  

 

                Dru Marland and poet, John Terry                                    John Terry and Jan Lane

Time had run away with us and it was too late to pop Dru's Partrishow cards into Abergavenny Tithe Barn, which, having vetted them for religious content, is going to sell them, so hooray! There's another trip in the offing,  this time hopefully taking in The Guardian Of The Valleys, a memorial to the dead of Six Bells.