Holocaust at The Felling

His shoulder ached abominably. Sitting there with Fenwick and looking down across the distant river on a bright but breezy late May morning the world seemed different, unreal - and painful. Not much more than an hour or so earlier, with the end of the morning shift in sight, a fall of stone in the new Felling colliery had all but buried him. Fenwick had pulled him clear and brought him, bewildered, up to the surface. Now they sat chatting on the steep slopes of the Tyne valley overlooking the large new busy colliery, observing the purposeful river traffic between Friars Goose and St. Anthony’s backed by the soft southern lowlands of Northumberland tapering eastwards towards the river entrance and the sea.

Nothing appeared to be broken. He was taken home where his mother had washed out and tended the various cuts. For the first time he could remember, she had not dosed him with the ever-present Gordon’s Cordial kept in the kitchen cupboard and he had resisted his father’s view that the doctor be seen. The colliery owners had, to be fair to them, arrangements with doctors in the locality of their workings and also with the Keelmen’s Hospital upriver at Newcastle, for surgery cases.

“You were lucky, really.”

“Thanks.”

“No, really. It was mainly one big boulder which must have knocked you to one side as it came down, and the other stuff probably hit and covered you before Long Tom and some of the Gateshead lads helped get you out. I remember one time when half a mast got shot away and hit the deck without seriously hurting anyone at all underneath. Quite a few got cut and bruised though in all the tangle of ropes and pulleys and falling spars.”

“Well, thanks again for getting me out, Fenwick.” Matt thought it best to say something at this point just in case his companion was inclined to get into one of his tales. Not that he told out and out untruths. It was just that to any ready or unsuspecting hearer his stories tended to be embellished only just within the bounds of possibility and his estimate of the listener’s credulity. It was one of Fenwick’s charms that he appeared forever to be unaware of the gradual and growing scepticism of his audience which, especially if non sea-fairing, was generally too polite to respond with blank disbelief. When anyone did, there was usually someone to whom he would appeal and get guarded tolerant support.

Matt was sixteen and about three years younger than Fenwick, who was a relative on his mother’s side of the family and who had certainly served at Trafalgar. Several years later he had returned home with some money, largely his share of the government’s miserly bounty. The deflected anecdote was doubtless another in a long line supporting his apparent lifetime thesis that the historic battle had been won with all due respect to Nelson and Collingwood, of course, but mainly by Fenwick.

“What was that?”

“What?”

The very ground they were sitting on shivered. There was a low rumbling sound like distant gunfire causing them both to look downriver where navy boats might be tied up at Shields. The skies weren’t right for thunder.

The next instant a roar and belch of orange and yellow flame shot out of the pit head below them, followed by a blast of coal dust, stones, splintered wood and general debris in a cloud rising above the John Pit workings and showering the surrounding farmland and cottages. They stood up, horrified, and started to move down towards the colliery and their home not far beyond.

They had covered no more than a few yards when a second explosion erupted with such a ferocity of heart-stopping primal noise they were first of all paralysed with fear and then both started in panic to scramble back up the bankies away from the inferno. Flames and debris now shot high into the air massively in excess of the first eruption and filled the skies with smoke, dust, burning embers and choking mephitic fumes which seemed to pour out of the bowels of hell itself. Mid-day turned to near nightfall such was the almost instant loss of light.