My Wife Knitting by
Norman Cornish
She is always one step ahead of me.
All I can do is dig out coal, ride the paddy mail to the
showers,
take home a brown envelope, eat my tea.
She knits the bones of our family together,
stitches our wounds, tacks the seam of every day
with deep knowledge of the shape our lives should be.
Angular as a gallery of half-drilled coal; soft as talc.
Strong as a wooden prop; vulnerable as an apprentice.
Stoical as a pit pony; mysterious as hidden gas.
Her crows’ feet are not white estuaries in black lands.
No speck of coal dust on her.
But I know it stains her soul.
I paint her as I see her. Her hands never still.
She creates the tapestry we live within.
She is my place of safety. My rock.
Sharyn Owen
The Hand
The hand that winds the wool round the needle’s shaft,
Wrings black coal dust from mangled shirts in steaming
sculleries,
Pegging them out to bleach beneath a canary sun.
The hand that works the stitches one by one,
Knits up the coughing nightmares in stoical silence,
Trapping dark fears like bread in a snap tin.
The hand that holds the knitting on her lap,
Props up the mine with every twist of her wrist,
Every meal on the table, every scrub of the step.
The brush that paints the hand that holds the miner,
Freezes forever a bitter-sweet memory of shared toils,
When in suffocating darkness, there was always a lamp.
Larraine Harrison
Closely
Knit
Click. Click. Click. His eyelids drooped. A result of hypnotic
tapping and the mesmerising flames. He marvelled at the concentration on his
wife’s face. He pushed his chair back a foot, away from the sweltering heat.
His clumsy, blackened hands knew nothing of knitting, but he knew a lot about
coal. He ripped the stuff out of the
ground, he and his team.
Digging. Like a colony of ants excavating, or moles burrowing,
large mounds above them a testament to their labours. The dust got everywhere.
In the sandwiches, up their noses, in the lungs. It’s in the blood. No amount
of steamy water and gritty carbolic would wash it away.
He would be down there tomorrow. He could feel the drop of the
cage. He never got used to the fall. Wind down. Wind up. Repeat. Wind down.
Wind up. Repeat.
Lyn Graham
Hardworking Women
I married into a mining family. My husband worked at the pit
as did his three brothers, his dad, both grandads, two great grandads and a
great, great grandad.
Miners provided their own clothes and the women washed them at
home. Later the NCB did provide workwear
and they laundered the outer clothes but the underwear and socks were still
washed at home. I don’t miss that!
Depending on how many menfolk you had at the pit, women could
be making a dinner two or three times a day, according to their shifts.
Mining was not a well-paid job and women were inventive. For example, rugs could be made from old
clothes. My husband’s aunty used to get
old jumpers and unravel them. She would
then knit them into thick, warm pit socks.
Many women were as supportive as pit props.
Lesley Moore
Much Loved
I married a miner from Spennymoor.
He broke himself hacking out the black stuff.
He took a risk and became a painter.
Pictures,
not walls.
He told me to sit still
pretending to knit.
I have a crick in my neck.
My fingers twitch.
Lowry advised him to paint what he knew.
He filled notebooks with details of beer glasses,
straight pints of Newcastle Brown
that swept out the dust cancers of the mine.
Sort of.
He sketched the men with bent backs and coughing lungs
slaking their throats, hunched over mahogany bars.
Now it is my turn.
He loves me well,
hunched over my hands
pretending to knit.
Fidgeting.
Full known, rounded.
Hair set just how I like it.
No stick women here.
Viv Longley
The Knitter
She sits there, knitting all her love and fears for her man
into some article of clothing. Maybe it’s a thick undervest or perhaps
something he can wear with pride at weekends when they are reunited above the
surface.
She’s bent over the garment not in submission but in pride, as
the comfort-giver and provider for the family. She’s his steady rock in the
stormy sea imagined in the background.
That’s the burden she has to bear, trying to keep calm and
clearheaded both for his sake and for the bairns' sake. They’ll need her even
more if anything happens to him.
Maybe she symbolizes all the pit wives, bearing on her
shoulders the fragile lives of their husbands and sons down the pit.
Or just thinking about the joy her task will bring to its
wearer. In turn he is expressing his love and admiration for her.
John Seacome
Sarah, Knitting
I hate it when he’s on nights, ever since the lads woke me up
regarding the accident… knitting’s a great way of filtering the mind but it
doesn’t remove the dread. My risk thermostat works overtime...
The belt swung! Hit him on the temple! Hospitalised,
unconscious!
Left me feeling fragile...Left him an indigo tattoo he calls
his trophy.
He’s into trophies!...
If I cast on this sleeve now, he can wear this cardigan on
Saturday at the Miner’s Welfare harvest do...
Meanwhile, above the shaft, free of insidious black, his first
call is breathing the sweet air of the
allotment, where he administers to my rival.
I badger him about it being the kids, dog, and that bloody
marrow, coming before me. He just winks! A man of deeds not many words!
However, when we trundle home on Saturday, 1st Prize glowing
in the wheelbarrow.......
My heart will sing like a canary.
June Hurst
A Child’s Dream
What did you do down the mine Great Grandad?
Harvested the
jungle, the Carboniferous.
Hot down there was it?
Aye, tropical.
Why did it die?
Climate change they
say.
Same today. They told us in school.
Should we worry?
Nay, it’s
geological, climatological.
Don’t waste time,
it’d be illogical.
It’s just natural
decay, and as your Granny would say:
‘Patterns of life
Spun and woven
Torn and stitched
Frayed and holey.’
Ask her, she’ll tell
you how it is and was.
TISWAS! She told me about that too.
Today Is Saturday: Watch And Smile
Said she watched it from ‘74 when it started
And re-runs in the strike in ‘84 to steel her resolve.
Said everything’s just natural decay in the end.
Some smart cookie
your Granny.
Champion knitter to
boot.
Chip off the old block eh, wouldn’t you say Great Grandad?
Nay, I really
couldn’t say...could I?
Martyn Harrison
