WILFORD PIT

Wilford pit is the only coal mine I have been down. Dave Turner, musician and comic, was working as a ganger there ( in charge of the pit ponies). We went out to the coal face under the Trent towards Ruddington, and the air became very hot and sticky. A strange and enlightening experience: one I shall never forget. I salute all those brave men who worked underground. Here's a poem I wrote afterwards.

Black and crumbling shearing coal glittering in the shone lamplight

Up against the face

Day after day after month after year he kept a mute tryst

With the coal

His life was the coal

His friends laughed at the love he had

Deep down dark in the distant fields

Of blackgold corn

He reaped his dusty harvest

He knew the carbon forests of his dreams

Where the giant trees toppled and fell

And the swamp's silent breathing which on its death

Lay stopped

To make a fuel for the fires of his mind

The clean awakening was the dirt of the day

For as he travelled down

And rode the manrider to a dusty blackness

His mind became lighter

A shining candle in the afterdamp