The Black Diamond

by Francis Brett Young

The piece of work on which Abner and his friends were now engaged was no more than the result of one of the last feeble struggles of the gods of stone against their iron masters. In this part of its course the pipeline, crossing the swollen head waters of the Teme, had been lodged upon a deposit of old red sandstone, a rock that was easily worked and lent itself to Barradale’s plans. A hidden leak, caused possibly by some obscure subsidence, had distorted its bedding. Two unsuccessful attempts had been made to deal with it, and now the engineers had decreed that the whole track must be deflected northwards for half a mile on to a shelf of harder Silurian stone. The scene of these new workings was placed at the mouth of the valley, some three miles below Wolfpits and immediately under the shadow of two hill bastions: the high peak which culminated in the earthwork known as Castel Ditches and a wide hog’s back known as Callow hill.

Hither, in the early morning, Abner and George Malpas would set out together carrying the packets of fried bacon sandwiches with which Mary supplied them overnight. Spider, eager to follow them, would watch them go, quivering with anxiety; but George Malpas had lately taken a dislike to the dog and would curse her if she moved a step in their direction, throwing a stone that made her scamper back into the garden. These morning walks were very pleasant to Abner, and pleasant too was the sudden change from a green solitude to the sight of working men who swarmed in the cutting beneath their feet. A trolley way, crowded with iron trucks that were reddened by rust and by the sandstone of the Dulas valley from which they had come, cut through the workings, and beside it ran a deep trough cut ready to receive the black iron pipes that were dumped along its edge. Most of the workers were old hands at the game, but there remained a certain amount of rough digging labour for which Abner’s strength and his experience in the colliery made him suitable. This was allotted to him by the foreman on the first day of his employment.

He looked eagerly for Mick Connor, who soon showed himself and appeared none the worse for the debauch in which he and Curly Atwell, the huge west-countryman, had engaged. He declared he was seven pounds better for it, expressing himself as usual in terms of the race-course, but Abner saw from the first that their travelling acquaintance was really at an end.

During the day’s work he did not even see George Malpas, being paired, in his new labours, with a youth named Joseph Munn, whose face was disfigured by a hare-lip. These two were set to work at some distance from the rest, clearing the sub-soil from a shelf of rock where a culvert of stone would soon be built to carry storm water from the slopes of Callow. Chance had been kind to Abner in the selection of his companion, for it soon appeared that Joe Munn was a black-country boy who had been born in Dulston, and in his early days had even seen Abner himself playing football for Halesby Swifts. He spoke Abner’s own speech, he knew the streets that were familiar to him, and a common knowledge of distant places is a greater bond between men than a common knowledge of their fellows. As far as actual work was concerned Abner might well have had a more satisfactory partner, for, physically, Munn was a typical product of the black-country at its worst, pale of face and lank of limb. He seemed indeed altogether too puny for the work on which they were engaged, and only a congenital consciousness of being born to labour induced him to accept a state that made demands above his strength. Abner would sometimes watch him as he stood panting with the sweat breaking out in beads along the unhealthy skin of his bossed forehead and matting the wisps of his neutral-coloured hair. In the end their partnership resolved itself into one in which Abner did most of the work when the foreman was not there. And he did not grudge this, for he had strength enough for two and so much vigour that he enjoyed the using of it. Munn would lie down in the sun with his chin in his hands, watching Abner at work, talking of famous cup-ties that he had seen, or of the excitements of Dulston Wakes.

‘I don’t know how you ever come to find yourself on a job like this,’ Abner said one day.

‘It was company I wanted,’ Munn explained. ‘Before I come here I was driving a traction injin down in Gloucestershire . . . what they call the Forest of Dean. That was a place, if you like! The other chaps used to go off into Cinderford and leave me alone with the engine up in those woods. Lonely . . .! I went half balmy, straight I did! Yo’d never guess what it was like. I used to start talking to myself for company like. Ever done that, Abner?’

Abner laughed. Of course he had never done that.

‘So I went up to the foreman and says: “Mister, I can’t stick it.” I couldn’t say no more, I couldn’t . . . trembling like a bloody leaf. “What’s up with you now?” he says. “I wants company,” says I. “What you want is a nursemaid,” says he, and gives me my money on the Saturday. Then I comes along here. Strike, if I wasn’t glad to get away from all those trees! And Gunner Eve, he look after me a bit. He’s a good chap, the Gunner, ain’t he, kid?’

Working with Abner, or, more exactly, watching Abner work, Joe Munn recovered a little of his broken spirit; but the story of its destruction was older than his experience in the silences of the Forest of Dean. His earliest days had been spent in a double-back house in a Dulston slum, where, half-fed by an aged grandmother, he had made the pallid growth of a potato sprouting in a cellar. Thence he had passed to the children’s ward of Dulston workhouse, being shot out at the age of fourteen to make his best of the world. Even now he laboured, without knowing it, under the shadows and suppressions of those early days. These summer mornings, working with Abner, were the happiest that he had ever known. They became sound friends in a partnership wherein Abner was canonised as a hero and protector, a position which he sustained with an amused tolerance.

His relation with George Malpas remained equally happy. They always walked down to work together in the morning, but after that Abner rarely saw his friend, for Wolfpits held no attraction for him, and he preferred to take himself, when the day’s work was over, to the Pound House, or sometimes to the old people at the Buffalo. In a few weeks Abner’s temporary lodging had become a permanency. Mary Malpas, in consultation with her husband, had settled the sum that he should pay for bed and keep, and Wolfpits itself, that sinister and desolate mansion, had become a pleasant and homely place.