Roamin’ in the gloamin’ (1928)

CHAPTER FOUR IN THE COAL-PITS As time went on I tackled all sorts of jobs in the pit. You may be sure that if there was an extra shilling or two to be picked up anywhere, and at any work, hard or easy, I was well after the money ! For months I acted as a waterdrawer in the well-known Allenton Colliery. Some pits are wet and some dry. Allenton was a very wet pit in my time and the water was so bad in the lower workings that "drawers" were employed at night to remove it. This was done by baling the water into wagons ; the ponies pulled these to the "top of the rise" where the plugs below the wagons were released. This water was afterwards pumped out by the great pumps at the pit bottom. Night after night I was the only boy on duty at Allenton. Forty or fifty tons of water had to be removed each night so there was no time to "dawdle" ; it was hard graft for ten hours with only a brief "piece-time" interval. And wasn't it drear and lonely! I had to sing to keep my spirits up. I even made friends with the pit-rats — great, grim, phosphorus-eyed creatures that gathered round you as you ate your piece and fought each other like miniature lions for the crusts. One night I came across a thousand of these monstrous rats moving from one part of the colliery to another. I got it into my head that they had made up their minds to make a massed attack on me. Horror took possession of me and I ran shrieking to the place half a mile away where the only other living soul in the pit was working. This was Jamie McCulloch, the roadman. Jamie quietly stilled my fears by assuring me that the "rodents" were harmless, that they 55