The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [49]
Olive Grimwith persisted in Olive Wellwood, not least because of the steady presence of Violet Grimwith, who had been little at the time of the disasters, and nevertheless felt the pull of roots, wanted to remember things, would say suddenly “Do you remember bread and dripping on Sunday? Do you remember greasing pit boots?”
It was Olive who, when she could not avoid it, could remember Peter and Petey, Lucy and Dora. Or so Olive thought.
The storyteller was not Lucy, who taught them their letters, and tried to teach them manners. It was Peter, who came home for his tea, his clothes stiff and black with coal dust, his eyes and lips red in his coal-black face, his fingernails broken and engrained with jet. He took Olive on his knee, after his bath, and told her tales of the world underground. He told her about the living creatures down there, the soft-nosed ponies who trundled tubs of coal along the tunnels, the mice and rats who whisked in and out of the ponies’ nosebags, ate the miners’ snap and chewed their candles, if they were not careful. He told her about the bright yellow canaries, trembling and hopping in their cages. They were a living alarm-system. If they suddenly fell dead, it was a signal of the approach of one of the invisible terrors, choke damp, white damp, fire damp. These were gases released from the deep slumber of the coal by the hammers and pickaxes of the miners, or by the collapse of a section of pit-props. For the coal, Peter Grimwith told his daughter, had once been living forests—forests of ferns as high as trees and brackens as fat as barrels and curling things that were scaly like snakes. And they were sunk and compacted into ancient mud. You could find the ghost of a leaf, millions of years old, or the form of a thirty-foot dragonfly, or the footprint of a monstrous lizard. Most wonderful was the idea that their vegetable death had only been suspended. The three damps were the exhalations of the gases of their interrupted decay. He told her the names of the dead plants which now smouldered and flared in their kitchen grate. Lepidodendron, sigillaria. He told her the scientific names of the gases that were the “damps.” Carbon dioxide, which smothered you fast. Carbon monoxide, which crept up on you, peacefully so to speak, smelling of violets and other sweet flowers. And methane, “which is what comes out of the back end of cows, Olive,” which was the fire damp. There were tales that rats sneaking off with smouldering candles had sparked huge explosions. “Perhaps you could put a match to a cow, Olive,” said Peter, and Lucy said “Hold your tongue, that’s not a nice thing to tell a girl.”
There were stories too of invisible inhabitants of the mines—beings known as knockers who could be heard tapping, a creature called Blue-cap, who was clothed in a flaring light-blue flame, and sometimes helped to push the tubs, a mischievous bogle-thing, called Cutty Soams, who delighted in cutting the soams, or traces, by which the ponies and the workers pulled the tubs and trams. You did well to put out a ha’penny for them, if you knew they were there. His tales of kobolds were as practical and as vivid as his tales of rats and canaries.
He brought home in his pocket, from time to time, a coal with a fernleaf apparently incised in it. And twice he brought one of the “coal-balls” for which the Gullfoss mine was famous. A coal-ball is a preserved knot of once-living things, compacted together, leaves, stems, twigs, seed-pods, flowers and sometimes even seeds, millions of years old. Olive Wellwood still had these petrified lumps, but she showed them to no one.
Edward, a big boy like his father, had gone cheerfully down the mine, or so Olive thought, if she thought about it,