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I like the rows of trucks, and the headstocks, and the steam in the daytime, and the lights at night. When I was a boy, I always thought a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night was a pit, with its steam, and its lights, and the burning bank, and I thought the Lord was always at the pit-top." As they drew near home she walked in silence, and seemed to hang back.
On the crest of the hill, Selby, with its stark houses and the up-pricked headstocks of the pit, stood in black silhouette small against the sky. He looked at his watch. "Nine o'clock!" he said. The pair stood, loth to part, hugging their books. "The wood is so lovely now," she said. "I wanted you to see it." He followed her slowly across the road to the white gate.
No empty trucks stand at the pit-mouth. The women on the hillside look across as they shake the hearthrug against the fence, and count the wagons the engine is taking along the line up the valley. And the children, as they come from school at dinner-time, looking down the fields and seeing the wheels on the headstocks standing, say: "Minton's knocked off. My dad'll be at home."
At Brinsley pit the white steam melted slowly in the sunshine of a soft blue sky; the wheels of the headstocks twinkled high up; the screen, shuffling its coal into the trucks, made a busy noise. "I want my father; he's got to go to London," said the boy to the first man he met on the bank. "Tha wants Walter Morel? Go in theer an' tell Joe Ward." Paul went into the little top office.
He was keenly alive on his walks on Sunday nights with Edgar and Miriam. He never went past the pits at night, by the lighted lamp-house, the tall black headstocks and lines of trucks, past the fans spinning slowly like shadows, without the feeling of Miriam returning to him, keen and almost unbearable. She did not very long occupy the Morels' pew. Her father took one for themselves once more.
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