DIGGING DEEP

Sweat and grime constantly pours into your eyes and as you try to blink it away there’s always more of it. There’s the constant noise of the drills and the clanging of metal on rock, and the horrific odours of men and oil, and the endless all-pervading dust that gets into your mouth and eyes and pores, and, if you’re really unlucky, could coat your lungs with microscopic deadly particles that will find other ways to kill you. The heat down there is unbearable and there’s no getting away from it. You’re bent double, straining every nerve and muscle in your body, hacking away at the wall of rock in front of you for hour after hour after hour in a space you can’t even stand up in with only artificial light keeping you from total darkness. Above your head is a million tonnes of solid rock that is shifting and moving as you remove its foundations and could collapse at any and every moment. Anyone around you could hit a seam of poisonous fumes or gases at any moment. Flood waters could rush in and drown you all. A single spark at the wrong moment could doom you and everyone around you and you’re only safe as long as nobody makes a mistake.

The solid ground you walk on, the good clean air that you want to breathe, your family and your life are all a mile above your head although they might as well be on another planet, and only accessible via a single shaft and some machinery that you spend every day hoping is reliable enough and well enough maintained to get you there. When you gratefully get home at the end of your shift after scraping what you can of this dust and filth off your body, you’ll snatch a few hours sleep and head back down here to do it all again tomorrow.

Whenever I think I’ve had a bad day, or I hear someone in a relatively easy job going on about how hard they work, a little phrase always pops into my head:

“It’s hardly coal mining, is it?”

I know that modern mines are comparatively safe places to what they were, and that many people have had long and happy careers down the pit, and live in the closest and most supportive of communities, and have been grateful for it, so it’s become a bit of a flippant little cliché recently, but still we sometimes forget the reality behind that little phrase, and what a back breaking, hard life the life of a miner is.

Until a day like today.

Until we find out about a tragedy like the one in New Zealand we’re hearing about this morning.

Then we remember, and those of us who have never had to go down the mines to make a living are very, very grateful for that. Miners and mining companies have been in the news a lot of late. You could almost say that it’s been a tale of two countries (although there was another in China as well last week and 29 miners were saved). In Chile, thanks to some rather brilliant engineers, those miners were able to return to their loved ones. This morning, the opposite was true, as nature struck back in all its horrific force. Miners seem to be getting trapped all over the world and I simply cannot imagine what it must be like to be buried underground like that, and I hope I never will. Nor can I imagine what it must feel like to be a member of one of their families when something like this happens. I can only repeat those hollow-sounding words that we are thinking of you at this dreadful, dreadful time and our hearts go out to you.

In 1941, my seventeen-year-old father avoided a life down the pit by going off to war, which for him seemed the better option, and never returned to live in Wales after he returned from Burma. After that, so far, nobody else from our family ever had the remotest possibility of having that as one of their career options.

I’m thankful for that.

Especially today.

So, no matter how bad today might get for you, if it’s only something to do with your job, and that job doesn’t take you down a mine, remind yourself:

“It’s hardly coal mining, is it?”