the other side of the road the glass
walls of the control station gazed back at him blankly. Where
was PRESTONLINKS COLLIERY where it had all begun for him nearly
30 years before as a young laddie starting at the pithead? He
closed his eyes trying to put together in his mind the scene in
the early 1950's of a pit where so many local men had spent their
working lives working the coals below the Forth .....
The four youths stuck out like sore
thumbs that Monday morning in late July outside the pit office.
They were branded by the shininess of their tea flasks and piece
boxes, the pristine newness of their shins and trousers but mostly
by the solid glow from the pit boots, their virginity untouched
by scuffs or dirt. The day shift of colliers slowly trudging past
the check office poked fun at the newcomers waiting for the training
officer to take them to their first jobs on surface to await their
turn for underground training. "Mind and no get thae bonny new
bits dirty or yer mither'll skelp yi' when ye get hame". "Watch
oot for daft Wullie on the pithead — he eats laddies like you
for breakfast". They turned away red faced praying for the day
when they could develop that casual. manner of dress, the boots
well greased and worn-in, the clothes inpregnated with coal dust,
the helmet at a jaunty angle with the cap lamp swinging casually
over one shoulder. It would come with time but they had to serve
their apprenticeship first.
They were taken over the yard, past the rows of waggons being marshalled
into train loads, steam shunting locomotives huffing and puffing
busily about. They passed under the screens where showers of coal
emptied into the wooden-sided wagons. A long iron staircase led
up to their first workplace — the picking tables. The noise was
deafening, a continuous cloud of coal dust hung in the air. Three
long, slow-moving steel plate conveyors clanked and screeched from
one end of the building to the other. At the far end the coal was
tipped onto the screens which separated the fine dross and the smaller
pieces leaving the larger lumps of coal and stone, (they called
it redd) to travel down the picking tables. Their first job was
to separate the coal and stone, to remove the redd and put it down
a chute into one waggon while the coal travelled on and dropped
into the coal waggons. Their workmates were a motley crowd, old
men no longer fit for underground, some minus an arm or a foot in
accidents, misfits and a few dafties — they were afraid to ask which
one was daft Wullie. The work wasn't too hard, the coal, and redd,
came in bursts with quiet periods in between when there was no coal
corning up the pit and laddies could get up to mischief, like hiding
wee Charlie's piece bag or filling auld Tarn's pockets with heavy
lumps of ironstone. And then there was the "Howff", a low brick
building at ground level with no windows,
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