Doctor Who_ The Green Death - Malcolm Hulke [2]
Elgin sidled up beside Dr Stevens and spoke quietly. ‘That’s Professor Jones. He’s a trouble maker.’
‘If he’s the Professor Jones,’ said Dr Stevens, ‘he is also a Nobel Prize winner.’ Dr Stevens was always impressed with success because he was a snob.
‘Because of that Nobel Prize,’ said Elgin, ‘he gets his name in the newspapers a lot. I suggest, sir, you go easy with him.’
Dr Stevens nodded, then raised his voice again to the crowd. ‘It seems that some do not agree with my vision of the future. But there are always those who resist progress.’
‘You call it progress?’ shouted Professor Jones. He turned to the villagers. ‘Don’t listen to him. He’s only interested in fatter profits for Panorama Chemicals at the expense of your land, the air you breathe, and the health of your kids.’
Dai Evans, one of the older villagers, spoke up. ‘It’s all right for you,’ he shouted at the young professor. ‘You can afford to live the way you want to. We need jobs. We don’t want to live on nuts.’
The crowd laughed. In Llanfairfach, young Professor Jones was respected but not accepted. To be accepted you had to have three generations of dead behind you in the village graveyard; above all, both you and they had to he miners. Professor Clifford Jones had come to the village only two years ago. He and some friends had bought a big old house where they set up The Wholeweal Community. They lived together communally, refused to own motor cars and would cat only natural foods. Thus they carried out a living protest against pollution and the destruction by industry of our natural environment. The villagers recognised the good intentions of The Wholeweal Community, but couldn’t help joking about them. Their house was known locally as The Nut Hatch because the Wholewealers were believed to eat nuts instead of meat.
Professor Jones went red in the face at Dai Evans’s mark. He earnestly wanted to help the villagers—to help everybody—and it threw him off his stroke when they were too ignorant to understand him. He replied in a stream of Welsh.
Morgan the milkman cut in sharply: ‘For goodness’ sake, man, stop talking Welsh with that stupid Cardiff accent. You only learnt it out of a book. You know half of us have forgotten how to speak it.’
‘Then more’s the pity,’ said Professor Jones. He turned to Dai Evans. ‘I’m surprised with you, Dai Evans. Of course you need a job—it’s every man’s right to have work. But there should be a coal mine for you to work in, not a chemicals factory!’
‘I’m facing facts,’ replied Dai Evans. ‘The Government says coal is finished. It’s oil now.’
Professor Jones asked, ‘Were you facing facts when you went on strike for seven months?’
Dai Evans blushed and everyone went quiet. The memory of the General Strike in 1926 was still with many of them. For seven bitter months the coal miners had remained on strike until finally they were defeated because they had no food.
‘I was only a boy in those days,’ said Dai Evans quietly, remembering the humiliation of the miners’ de-feat. ‘I learnt that sometimes you have to give in.’
‘Even if it means you are being exploited?’ asked Professor Jones.
‘The workers have always had bosses,’ said Dai Evans, ‘people who live off our backs, so we might as well accept that. It’s all right for you to tell us what to do, boyo, with your university education. But we’re simple people, and none of us has got himself tens of thousands of pounds winning a Nobel Prize—’
Dai Evans stopped mid-sentence. From the direction of the mine they all heard the wail of the pit head siren. It could mean only one thing—a disaster in the mine. Without another thought the crowd of villagers turned and ran towards the closed mine.
‘There’s no one down there,’ said Professor Jones as he ran beside Dai Evans. ‘How can there be an accident?’
‘There was Ted Hughes went down for an inspection this morning,’ Dai Evans answered, panting to keep up with the younger man.
The first villager to reach the mine was Bert Pritchard, in his fifties but lithe and wiry as a whippet. He went