We have only been underground for ten minutes when Alan, our guide, tells us to switch our torches off one by one. He’ll leave his on until last he says. One by one, our lights click as we turn them. Then darkness, more complete than any I’ve ever known. It amplifies the silence. It’s as if we can feel the absence of sight pressing on us, eyelids and mouths, trickling into us, filling our ribcages, getting into our bones. Pitch black, says Alan.
I think of walking down country lanes with my Dad as a kid, only the moon for guidance. I was anxious, squeezed his hand, but our eyes quickly adjusted. Darkness underground is not tinged with silver, punctuated by stars. It does not contain the gradations of shadow that startle in an unlit room at night. It is not tinged with blue or grey or green or purple. It is nothing like the darkness behind your eyelids. I vow to never use the term pitch black again if I’m not experiencing it like this, with my body, below ground. After what feels like an eternity (2 minutes by the clock) we’re allowed the comfort of our lamps again and we move on.
My visit underground is a controlled and measured experiment, sanitised tourism in the chambers of Britain’s industrial past. I’ve brought a group of writers and academics to the National Coal Mining Museum outside Wakefield for a creative writing workshop, timed to mark 100 years since the Miners’ Strike. When we emerge from the underneath-ground, I’m not sure anyone can write poetry: the darkness is its own ars poetica.
It is a strange thing to celebrate the anniversary of a civil war, a fight that changed the landscape of the area where I grew up physically, culturally and economically. But we remember, lest we forget. This year sees the publication of a host of excellent, nuanced works examining the strike, from Sarah Wimbush’s ‘Strike’ to Emily Webber’s ‘Mining Men’, a collection of curated stories that came from oral histories, interviews with Britain’s last generation of miners, men who emerged into the daylight for one final time, men like Alan who guides us round the underground museum. In my first collection ‘Division Street’, I was preoccupied with the legacy of the strike in South Yorkshire and North East Derbyshire, how feuds which began in ‘84 and ‘85 continue to ripple through communities. I was proud to stand on stage at the South Bank in 2014 and read from my long poem ‘Scab’:
A stone is lobbed in '84,
hangs like a star over Orgreave.
Welcome to Sheffield. Border-land,
our town of miracles – the wine
turning to water in the pubs,
the tax man ransacking the Church,
plenty of room at every inn.
And watch: a car flares
into a burning bush….
That year, I was told that the cover of my collection - which featured an iconic black and white image from the Battle of Orgreave - was divisive. I wanted it to be so. Or rather I wanted it to capture something of that seam that still ran through the community I group up in (or adjacent to, or whatever you want to call it - I never went down the mines and neither did my immediate family). How whenever Chesterfield played Mansfield at football, shouts of ‘Scab’ would still echo through town. If we’re thinking about a-time-and-a-place, some might (rightly) question my authority to have written a long piece about the clash between striking miners and police at Orgreave in 1984 when I was born in 1985. But - whilst I believe we should remain vigilant to issues of appropriation - I felt it was an imaginative leap (or rather an act of empathy) I could allow myself. In particular, I was intrigued and haunted by Jeremy Deller’s film The Battle of Orgreave and how sharply it framed the issue of ‘re-enactment’. Deller describes his unique work thus:
"In 1998 I saw an advert for an open commission for Artangel. For years I had had this idea to re-enact this confrontation that I had witnessed as a young person on TV, of striking miners being chased up a hill and pursued through a village. It has since become an iconic image of the 1984 strike – having the quality of a war scene rather than a labour dispute. I received the commission, which I couldn't believe, because I actually didn't think it was possible to do this. After two years' research, the re-enactment finally happened, with about eight-hundred historical re-enactors and two-hundred former miners who had been part of the original conflict. Basically, I was asking the re-enactors to participate in the staging of a battle that occurred within living memory, alongside veterans of the campaign. I've always described it as digging up a corpse and giving it a proper post-mortem, or as a thousand-person crime re-enactment."
The staging of a battle that occurred within living memory. It struck me as an audacious, moving thing to do. That notion of re-enactment and the miners’ strike is at the heart of my poem and forms its true subject (not ‘good old fashioned class guilt’, as one reviewer said of ‘Division Street’). And aren’t we all re-enacting in our work anyway, even if the subject is personal rather than political? Poetry as the return of the repressed. Poetry as cultural haunting. Poetry as misplaced nostalgia. Poetry as our-former-selves. Poetry as lost love. All of it at once, a breadcrumb trail leading into a past that was never really ours.
In that spirit, I want to finish with a shorter poem from Division Street, a poem that was inspired by a brilliant piece by Ian McMillan imagining ‘Pit Closure as Art’ (can I recommend ‘The er Barnsley Seascapes’, a genius sequence?). In Ian’s poem, we cry and the tears become the property of the artist. Here’s my piece:
Pit Closure as a Tarantino Short
after Ian McMillan
The Suit who pulled the trigger left
a card between the victim’s fingers,
printed white on red.
Business Closed was all it said.
He wiped his bloodless hands
down on his shirt for show,
as if someone still watched him
as he turned to go. And as he did,
he met the dead man’s stare
and noticed how the bullet hole
between those two dark eyes
made up a black ellipsis; then he swore
he heard the dead man’s voice
above the heartbeat of the clock:
Nothing’s finished, only given up.
Before he left, he checked the lock.