Children of the Dead End: The Autobiography of an Irish Navvy

by Patrick MacGill

I took my way over the slope of the mountain, over the pigmies who wrought beneath, fighting the great fight which man has to wage eternally against nature. Down in the cuttings I could see my mates toiling amidst the broken earth, the sharp ledges of hewn rock, and the network of gang-planks and straining derricks that rose all around them. The red glare of a hundred evil-smelling torches flared dismally, and over the sweltering men the dark smoke faded away into the rays of the pallid moon. With the rising smoke was mingled the steam of the men's bent shoulders and steaming loins.

Above and over all, the mystery of the night and the desert places hovered inscrutable and implacable. All around the ancient mountains sat like brooding witches, dreaming on their own story of which they knew neither the beginning nor the end. Naked to the four winds of heaven and all the rains of the world, they had stood there for countless ages in all their sinister strength, undefied and unconquered, until man, with puny hands and little tools of labour, came to break the spirit of their ancient mightiness.

And we, the men who braved this task, were outcasts of the world. A blind fate, a vast merciless mechanism, cut and shaped the fabric of our existence. We were men flogged to the work which we had to do, and hounded from the work which we had accomplished. We were men despised when we were most useful, rejected when we were not needed, and forgotten when our troubles weighed upon us heavily. We were the men sent out to fight the spirit of the wastes, rob it of all its primeval horrors, and batter down the barriers of its world-old defences. Where we were working a new town would spring up some day; it was already springing up, and then, if one of us walked there, "a man with no fixed address," he would be taken up and tried as a loiterer and vagrant.

Even as I thought of these things a shoulder of jagged rock fell into a cutting far below. There was the sound of a scream in the distance, and a song died away in the throat of some rude singer. Then out of the pit I saw men, red with the muck of the deep earth and redder still with the blood of a stricken mate, come forth, bearing between them a silent figure. Another of the pioneers of civilisation had given up his life for the sake of society.

I returned to the shack, and, full of the horror of the tragedy, I wrote an account of it on a scrap of tea-paper. I had no design, no purpose in writing, but I felt compelled to scribble down the thoughts which entered my mind. I wrote rapidly, but soon wearied of my work. I was proceeding to tear up the manuscript when my eye fell on a newspaper which had just come into the shack wrapped around a chunk of mouldy beef. A thought came to me there and then. I would send my account of the tragedy to the editor of that paper. It was the Dawn, a London halfpenny daily. I had never heard of it before.

I had no envelope in my possession. I searched through the shack and found one, dirty, torn, and disreputable in appearance. Amongst all those men there was not another to be found. I did not rewrite my story. Scrawled with pencil on dirty paper, and enclosed in a dirtier envelope, I sent it off to Fleet Street and forgot all about it. But, strange to say, in four days' time I received an answer from the editor of the Dawn, asking me to send some more stories of the same kind, and saying that he was prepared to pay me two guineas for each contribution accepted.

The acceptance of my story gave me no great delight; I often went into greater enthusiasm over a fight in the Kinlochleven ring. But outside a fight or a stiff game of cards, there are few things which cause me to become excited. My success as a writer discomfited me a little even. I at first felt that I was committing some sin against my mates. I was working on a shift which they did not understand; and men look with suspicion on things beyond their comprehension. A man may make money at a fight, a gaming table or at a shift, but the man who made money with a dirty pencil and a piece of dirty paper was an individual who had no place in my mates' scheme of things.

For all that, the editor's letter created great stir amongst my mates. It passed round the shack and was so dirty on coming back that I couldn't read a word of it. Red Billy said that he could not understand it, and that I must have copied what I had written from some other paper. Moleskin Joe said that I was the smartest man he had ever met, by cripes! I was. He took great pleasure in calling me "that mate of mine" ever afterwards. Old Sandy MacDonald, who had come from the Isle of Skye, and who was wasting slowly away, said that he knew a young lad like me who went from the Highlands to London and made his fortune by writing for the papers.

"He had no other wark but writin', and he made his fortune," Sandy asserted, and everyone except myself laughed at this. It was such a funny thing to hear old Sandy make his first joke, my mates thought. A man to earn his living by writing for the papers! Whoever heard of such a thing?

In all I wrote five articles for the Dawn, then found that I could write no more. I had told five truthful and exciting incidents of my navvying life, and I was not clever enough to tell lies about it. Ten guineas came to me from Fleet Street. Six of these I sent home to my own people, and for the remainder I purchased many an hour's joy in the whisky store and many a night's life-giving excitement at the gaming table.