20.05.1999

Enriched pit culture

Dave Douglass reviews 'The Foreigner' by Paul Cox

It says something for the impact of coalmining on British society that the volume of literature is still being added to, despite the current microscopic size of the industry.

This book adds a dramatic contribution to a wealth of historic novels set among the pit communities, deriving their strength from intimate knowledge of pits and pit folk. It adds something new and special, a perspective long absent from the volumes of miners’ stories. It deals with the emigrant miners of eastern Europe, the refugees, the political victims and outcasts, continuing their trade in the British mines or being drafted into them.        

The book focuses on Milos, a young German boy driven from his native Sudetenland by Czech partisans. He ends up in a foreign work camp to be allocated work by the state employer. The story drifts back and forth through the social divisions of the Nottingham coalfield and the struggles for and against the union in the 1920s and 1930s. At the same time it drifts back and forth through the social and ethnic divisions of Sudeten-land. The mixed community belonging and not belonging; then the German occupation: unwelcome liberation which further divided them.

More by supplement than by contrast, we see Milos’s attraction to militancy; the reluctant militancy of the Notts coalfield in 1969 and then in the 1970s the flying pickets:

“He stood back and watched as small groups of men received their instructions and drove away. Some of them were laughing and joking; most were serious; others looked as though they were a little bit scared. But every one of them more alert than when he saw them at work. There was an atmosphere like that he had witnessed when at school, where boys were together and there is something to do. Only this time he felt part of it and it no longer seemed so cold.”

By the advent of the 1984-85 strike the divisions of his entire life, his foreignness, were evident again: “And there was just Milos, and maybe half a dozen others who supported the union and were out on strike. The whole village, just about, was working or supporting those miners who worked.” The whole village, it seemed, fought the pickets who came down from Scotland, Yorkshire and Wales.

“He cuilda go away, ye know? Cuilda taken the blood money the Coal Board w’s offer’n and gone. In fact after the third vote against I said to ’m, ‘Milos, why do you no go hame? The miners dinnae want tae defend their own fack’n industry. An ye know what he said? He said, ‘This’s hame. There is naewhere else’ ...”

This is a great story, brilliantly told. Too close, too real and too poignant to be anything but true, doubtless of a thousand Miloses in a half dozen coalfields.

Dave Douglass