Red Hill (eBook)

Tony Parker (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2013 | 1. Auflage
236 Seiten
Faber & Faber (Verlag)
978-0-571-30441-7 (ISBN)

Infos

The miners' strike of 1984-85 was one of the longest and most acrimonious in Britain's history. Six months after it ended, Tony Parker travelled to the North East of England to speak to people on both sides of the dispute and discover the views and feelings of a colliery community contemplating the bitter end of a whole way of life. '[Red Hill gives a] powerful idea of the tribulations suffered by everyone affected by the miners' strike.' Today 'Here are men and women with all their quirks and oddities, their emotions and prejudices.' TLS 'The reader is allowed to enter a secret, remote world which is at times heroic, but more often poignant and lonely.' Listener

Tony Parker was born in Stockport on June 25 1923, the son of a bookseller. His mother died when he was 4. He began to write poems and plays in his late teens. Called up to military service early in the Second World War he declared himself a conscientious objector and, in lieu, was sent to work at a coal-mine in the North East, where he observed conditions and met people who influenced him hugely. After the war he began to work as a publisher's representative and, voluntarily, as a prison visitor - the latter another important stimulus to his subsequent writings. After Parker happened to make the acquaintance of a BBC radio producer and imparted his growing interest in the lives, opinions and self-perceptions of the prisoners he had met, he was given the opportunity to record an interview with a particular convict for broadcast on the BBC. The text of the interview was printed in the Listener, and spotted by the publishers Hutchinson as promising material for a book. This duly emerged as The Courage of His Convictions (1962), for which Parker and the career criminal 'Robert Allerton' (a pseudonym) were jointly credited as authors. Over the next 30 years Parker would publish 18 discrete works, most of them 'oral histories' based on discreetly edited but essentially verbatim interview transcripts. He died in 1996 (though one further work, a study of his great American counterpart Studs Terkel, appeared posthumously.)

Textauszug

Just one of your ordinary people like
Bill Barrymore

– Oh I’m a man with problems at the moment I’d say. One of us bairns is not well, she’s in hospital but it doesn’t seem they can put their finger on what is wrong with her. Something with her chest and it’s worrying. The other two older ones are all right, but it’s only natural with it going on and on it’s getting the wife down. Most nights she stays over in the hospital, a three-year-old needs her mam eh? But it’s wearing for her what with that and a part-time job and looking after me and Esther and Lesley into the bargain, it’s a lot. I’m on the six o’clock morning shift this turn, so she tries to get home here for half-past five.

If they do close Red Hill pit next year like they say, we’ll not know where we are worse than ever eh? Sometimes I think we’re having more than our share of problems. But then you hear what someone else is having to put up with, you think well what am I complaining about, things must be much worse for them.

A broad-shouldered long-legged man in jeans and a red and green zippered cardigan, he stretched his feet out towards the banked-up coal fire as he lay back almost horizontally in his armchair. His voice was quiet. He spoke with long pauses, frowning sometimes at the flames as though looking in them for his thoughts.

– I’m different to what I was say three years ago. Very different. I’m thirty-six but sometimes I can tell you, I do, I feel like a hundred. A funny time of your life thirty-six is, you don’t know whether to look on it as the end of the beginning, or the beginning of the end like. I’d not say I was a good talker at the best of times, I’ve never known properly how to put things into words you see. And I’m more confused now in my thoughts than ever. But begin at the beginning would be the best eh, yeh.

Well I left school at fifteen, and went straight into Red Hill pit. I’ve been there ever since. My dad was a miner at Red Hill all his life, and his father before him, and I think his father before him. So it’s what you might say our family pit like. I’d uncles there too.

There was always the knowledge that Red Hill was where I was going to go. My dad didn’t want me to, I think most miners in those days didn’t want their sons to go down the mine. But then in those days the employment situation was better, you see. I think what he wanted was for me to try something else first, see if I couldn’t get into a better job. I had a brother older than me, and he did. He went into the merchant navy for a while but then he came back and went in Red Hill. He was the one moved a few years ago to the Yorkshire coalfield, and was at Cortonwood.

For my dad you see, the pit was what you might call a last option for me. He had a notion I might do better: but if that didn’t work out then there was the job in the pit waiting. But me, I didn’t look at it like that. I was happy, there was nothing else I wanted to do. I wanted to work in Red Hill pit. This is the area all my family is, my school mates were down the pit or going to go down it. I didn’t want to go off out into the world somewhere to seek my fortune. I didn’t look at it like that.

If the pit’s your own community and that community’s the only one you’ve been in all your life, you look at it that here you’re in amongst your own so that’s where you want to stay. This is why like everyone else, the only one word for it is I hate and fear the idea we might lose Red Hill. If they close the pit they’re closing down my life. And not just mine mind, but everyone else’s who works there, who lives in the village here round the pit. When I said it’s our family pit, I’m not the only one saying that, there’s another eight hundred families all saying the same thing. All our working lives we’ve been together, same work mates, same people, same community. When they talk of shutting us down they pay no attention to that eh? It’s not important, not in the way they look at it. Close down the pit, let the men who worked there go their different ways. Some retire early, some take redundancy, some transfer to other places. Fuck the community eh, fuck the people, they’ve got to adjust themselves, that’s the only way to run the mines. Community? Who cares about that? I’ll not be the only one who tells you what a day that’ll be if they close Red Hill. We’re fighting it, we’re going to do everything we can think of to keep it going: because otherwise it’ll just be somebody closing a book and saying ‘Well that’s the end of that.’

I wouldn’t want to take a transfer myself. I wouldn’t want to work at any other pit I wouldn’t, for a whole lot of different reasons. The main one is I wouldn’t be happy working in any other pit. Wherever they are, the men there’ll be good men, I’m not saying anything about that. But they’ve got their mates naturally just like as I’ve got mine: and it’d take a long time to work in with them. It wouldn’t be the same place as here, and there’d be a lot of travelling to another place to work. Here it’s only just along the road see, and it’s home.

What I would do is take redundancy, then try for another job somewhere else in my own trade. In the pit I’m an electrician. And so the way I’m thinking at present, I’d try for an electrician’s job somewhere else, not in a mine. God knows where because there’d be lots of men similar to myself trying to find themselves new jobs out of the mines as well. But definitely I wouldn’t want to go to some other pit. The Coal Board says there’ll be jobs for everyone that wants them. Well so there might be, but I don’t want one of them jobs in another pit thanks very much, not after what they’ve done to us. You can’t rely on them.

The wife and I’ve talked over a time or two whether I should try and set up in a business of my own. We’ve talked it over time and again actually, sometimes I think we’ve been talking it over for the past two years. Only there are all sorts of problems attached to it eh? You read in the papers every day of small businesses going broke don’t you, and if that happened what little bit of money we had would be lost as well as everything else. It’s a big risk. When you’ve got a family like we have, three children, you have to give it a lot of thought before you go and do something of that sort.

Our house we live in, this one, we’re buying it from the council see. When they were encouraging us to do things of that sort, the Government weren’t telling us we could well end up buying a council house but there’d be no job for us, oh no. And the lasses: one twelve, one six and one three. Their friends are all here aren’t they, they all live round about here. So if I were to go and get a job somewhere else it’d mean they’d have to pull their roots up too. Going to live in a new place, selling this house, trying to get another one … it’s all a lot of problems eh, a big lot of problems. The wife gets depressed, I worry, the kids’re unsettled: perhaps we shouldn’t worry as much as we do but that’s the sort of people we are. And the wife’s family, they all live round here as well: going away’d be a complete break for her with everyone.

I’m a working man, I’m not frightened of hard work, I’ve worked hard all my life: but if they close down Red Hill … Well I do, I find it very hard to think about, never mind talk about, I do. I don’t want to face it. I sometimes wake up in the night and I think Christ what’ll I do if they do?

Well I fancy a beer I do, what about you?

*

– Last time I got a bit down didn’t I eh, yeh. It’s changed me you know, the strike and all the uncertainty afterwards. It’s like you’re living in uncertainty, waiting to hear what’s going to happen to you, not being able to do anything that’ll have any influence. Kites without wind, that’s what we are. You know there’s nothing you can do, and that’s not a nice feeling. It’s waking up to the fact that halfway through my life all the things I thought I’d been doing hadn’t really meant anything. I wasn’t a brain person, I was a hard manual worker, a physical worker, I’ve never been a shirker. I’d worked, and worked hard. All I’d wanted to do was to see the family got a few of the decent things in life everyone else has. Not a lot of luxuries, just what nowadays is the basics of a standard of living better than it was in my father’s day. A house, a second-hand car, television, a washing machine so the wife doesn’t have to labour like her mother did, a fridge, perhaps two weeks holiday in Spain where the sun is. These aren’t things much different from what most people have. You’ve worked for them, got them gradually one by one: we don’t have nothing on HP. You think to yourself ‘Well I’ve earned them by my own hard work, I’m entitled to them as much as someone who makes his living on the stock exchange selling shares.’

And you hope in their time your kids’ll grow up to do that little bit better than you’ve done, because they have the chance of more of an education. So you go on like that. When the strike comes you support it, because you think it’s justified. It’s for...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 15.10.2013
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Pädagogik
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
• Themenwelt: Technik ► Bergbau
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Volkswirtschaftslehre ► Makroökonomie
• ISBN-10: 0-571-30441-9 / 0571304419
• ISBN-13: 978-0-571-30441-7 / 9780571304417