In Sherwood Forest

Roy Kerridge

'To the Visitors' Centre' ... 'To the I Major Oak' ... `To Robin Hood's Larder'. These are just a few of the signs Placed here and there along the new gravel Paths laid among the oak and birch trees of Sherwood's municipalised Forest. At the Nottinghamshire village of Edwinstowe, named after a Saxon king, the Robin Hood industry and the mining industry exist side by side. Half a mile from the tea and souvenir shops is Thoresby Pit, which was recently the scene of violent battles between miners, pickets and police. `It can't be legal!' I overheard one housewife saying to another on the day o f my visit. `Those pickets poked my Derek in the eye and punched him in the belly. That can't be legal.' Expecting slag heaps and raw, ugly scenery, I was pleasantly surprised. In the fields, sheep and lambs munched con- tentedly on scattered turnips. Skylarks

leaves and in the woods last year's oak 'eaves made a spongy carpet for my feet.

With a clatter, a gypsy and his wife raced through Edwinstowe, the man running beside the pony that pulled his old- fashioned painted caravan. A stove pipe leaned crazily from the barreltop roof. Behind the tent cart driven by the impassive wife, a tethered colt anxiously trotted. The local gypsies were great bird-catchers, I was told. They used a singing bullfinch in a cage as a decoy. When another bullfinch landed on the cage roof, a trap door tipped it in and it could be sold for £20. This information was given to me at my hotel, The Dukeries, an enormous mock- Tudor building on the other side of the Village Built as a `miners' palace' in the Twenties, it still holds discos for today's Young colliers. In the public bar, big genial men puff pipes and play cards or dominoes. Over the door, a carving of a satanic beard- ed Friar Tuck grins beneath a halo of oak leaves, the artist evidently confusing the Man of God with the Green Man of pagan legend.

Thoresby Pit is set among the fields out- side Edwinstowe, a large ugly industrial complex. Five police vans, all full, were lin- oP at the gateway and a helicopter buzz- ed about in the air, but no pickets were in sight. I had imagined a pit entrance to be a deep, black hole in the ground, and was a trifle disappointed at the sight of a barrier and check-point but by the roadside, and a

Ong path studded with other huts and bar- riers stretching across the hill. A tall young

ms Ter in a camouflage jacket strolled out, masked a plastic bag. Golden stubble masked his face, and he seemed in a hurry to be home. ‘Pro just saying the same as all the other

Nottinghamshire miners,' he told me, `We're not for or against a strike, we just want democracy. By that I mean fair play and a proper ballot. Now if you'll excuse me, the mine bus will be here in a minute to pick me up. The next shift doesn't begin till ten at night.' This gave me an idea. If miners swung plastic bags as they walked, then I could easily pose as a miner and see what Thoresby Pit was like on the inside.

To while away the time, I went for an evening stroll in Sherwood Forest. In the damp misty half-light, the iniquities of the Tourist Board were hidden from view, while the great black oaks stood out sharply on a background of grey. Slowly dying from the top downwards, the honoured giants leaned menacingly towards me, grip- ping the earth with their roots and sending out branches like jagged, curly tentacles. Malevolence and a grim sense of humour seemed to exude from their every pore, and I could quite understand why our ancestors gave them each a goblin-like spirit, oak man or Robin Goodfellow. Robin Hood, main- stay of Edwinstowe, surely originated here. Postcard and souvenir inscriptions solemn- ly declare that he and his Merry Men once hid in the hollow Major Oak. But what if bold Robin were the spirit of the oak itself? Did he step in and out of the trunk in ghost- ly dryad form? An owl hooted and I return- ed to Thoresby. Expensive cars swished up the driveway one after the other, and I was the only one to enter the pit on foot. No pickets stopped me, for the last of the flying pickets had flown two days before. Enormous buildings with odd, impossible shapes, as macabre in their way as the oak trees, towered hun- dreds of feet above me. Here and there, fires flickered in the darkness. A rickety bridge crossed a narrow railway line. Beyond that, I could see the miners' en- trance across a courtyard. I toyed with the idea of singing the 'Heigh-ho' song from Snow White, but decided that it might be overdoing things

Burly young men, many with plastic bags like me, walked in and out of a brightly lit doorway. In the hall, doors led to the can- teen, the pit baths and the main shaft and cage. Making up my mind, I entered the canteen and asked for a cup of tea. Big solemn men, the miners sat side by side among the canteen tables. They seemed in

the grip of an unnatural silence, but this was not due to my entrance. Evidently I passed for a funny-looking miner. Perhaps

they were examining their consciences. When I was a boy, I had been mystified by

the many scathing references to 'scabs' and `blacklegs' in the Daily Worker. Who were

these terrible people, and what did they do to be so hated? No doubt the miners had absorbed some of the same mythology. They seemed unusually pensive, even allow- ing for the fact that some of them had com- pleted a hard day's work. Were they the heroes of `Fortress Notts', as the local peo- ple called the county, or were they in some way letting the side down?

`Sorry dear, we shut at half past nine,' the canteen-lady told me.

`I don't work here, I'm from a magazine in London called the Spectator,' I announc- ed, handing her my card. She stared at me incredulously, the card falling from her nerveless fingers. `Has there been much trouble here? Are the miners all at work? Is everybody happy?'

`Yes, the mine's working normally,' she replied, hiding behind her friend.

I approached some of the miners, choos- ing a table where elderly craftsman-like men were sitting.

`Have you any message for the readers of the Spectator?'

`No, none at all,' they chorused, passing my card from hand to hand in wonderment. One of them, who wore a cloth cap and wire spectacles, hid his face bashfully with his hands.

`Well, can you give me your opinion of Arthur Scargill?'

`I'll forget thou ever asked that question!' a big man said heartily, by which I assumed that the so-called leader was not popular. I walked back the way I had come, noticing two vans of policemen half-hidden in a thicket across the road to the mine en- trance.

Next day a publisher from the Brynmill Press of nearby Retford offered to drive me around the former trouble spots. Enormous amounts of policemen, paid for by a fairly grateful nation, had, between them, per- suaded the violent gangs of pickets to disperse. So a day spent mine-hopping was not an exercise in anguish but a tour through some of the most delightful scenery in Britain.

011erton, where a Yorkshire picket had died a week earlier, was bathed in sunshine and tranquillity. Wheels on the cage- winding-posts spun merrily, and white smoke poured from a tall chimney. In the open space beyond the entrance, policemen in shirt sleeves booted a football around with cheerful cries.

Creswell, over the border in Derbyshire, is still North Notts, as far as the Coal Board is concerned, and the miners are at work. Two days before our arrival there was violent picketing there. The town, where a large and grand funeral was taking place on the day of our visit, conformed more close- ly to a Southerner's idea of a mining area. It was stark and grim, with slag heaps and shabby terraced houses. A rustic note was struck by the ducks and hens that scratched about the place, wandering freely. Near the churchyard, a line of plump grey geese wad- dled across the road. Leaving my friend in the car, I walked past a single-decker bus, whose sign, Cheshire Constabulary, adver- tised its contents, and roamed around the upper parts of the mine.

I found a pay-office, with time clocks and a notice on the wall complaining of 'the Conduct of a Few Miners'. These few, it appeared, were in the habit of emptying water bottles out of the lift cage on to the heads of their comrades below. Throwing water about underground was also disap- proved of. For myself, this picture of carefree, skylarking miners was not a disagreeable one. It was good to know that the men had cheered up since the day of `the great disaster' in 1950. Eighty miners had been suffocated when a fire started on the rubber conveyor belt, or so a miner friend told me. After that, 'self-rescuers' to purify poisoned air were introduced, to the annoyance of some miners, who complain- ed of the extra weight they had to carry.

`We're not allowed to talk to anyone union orders,' a good-humoured man in a red helmet informed me. That explained the reticence of the Thoresby miners. A young girl arrived on a pilgrimage to see if anyone remembered her grandfather, who had left the pit shortly after the disaster and never spoke to anyone of his mining days thereaftgr.

`Old Ben Hunt — he was in the colliery band,' she was explaining to Red Helmet and a friend as I left. They looked concern- ed and chivalrous, but couldn't recall anyone of that name.

Later on, in a workman's café, I found the young power station workers to be a noisy, lively, laughing lot. The young waitresses ran around giggling in coy admiration. Approaching two curly-headed young men in leather jackets, I asked them their opinion on the miners' strike.

`They're a lazy, idle lot, those striking miners!' I was told forcefully. 'Just 'cos they don't want to work doesn't mean that we're the same! If they don't like work, there's three million unemployed who'd be glad of a job. At our place, the pickets went home for lunch today and never came back. Our coal comes in by rail, not road, and we've got enough for six months. Strikers — sock 'em all!'

Back on the borders of Sherwood Forest, I finally found a young miner who would talk to me. (`I've asked everyone I know, and nobody's heard of the Spectator, so it doesn't matter what I say.') He asked me into his Coal Board house, which he had long ago bought for himself, 'like most of the miners here.'

`My job is Colliery Deputy, that's a kind of underground foreman. You do haulage work, face work, then college to learn about Safety, and then you can be a Depu- ty. It's a different union, is Deputy, and we're not so militant. There's not many Deputies needed, so I couldn't afford to lose my job. Lots of pits are closing now, and I know some miners who've gone to South Africa. I had a friend who worked in a gold mine there, but he came back as he found it boring. When this pit here opened, after the war, they were recruiting from all over. Geordies, Scots — they even sent a bus into Lincolnshire with the slogan 'Be a Man, Be a Miner'. They brought back dozens of country people and their wives to see this place. None of them lasted more than ten days at the pit, 'cos they were real- ly cut out for farming.

'I came here myself from a mining village near Rotherham in Yorkshire. There were Geordies and Scots miners there, too. They had their own sides of town, and we had pitched battles when we were kids. I en- joyed myself growing up there, but I wouldn't like my own kids to do it. When I take the wife up there, she says it's like go- ing 20 years back in time. It looks much poorer to her, and the men are still teddy boys in side-whiskers. There was talk of closing the mine where I was brought up, so I came down here where the pit's secure. But my old mine still keeps going. My dad was a miner there, and so was my grand- dad. The teachers at school assumed us boys would all be miners, we took it for

The Spectator 7 April 1984 granted. That's why, although I'm going to work, I have every sympathy with the pickets. Mining's a hard life — I've worked in a factory, and if the management there . had sworn at the workers like the Pit omuatn1 management do, it'd be "EverYbadY `Are all the Nottinghamshire miners working?' I inquired. `No, quite a lot are on strike. They kid . you things are normal, but yesterday the 11 only ran ten yards of coal. A young lad 0 16 could do better than that with a shovel. Imagine the wall of this room is coal; well, the machine cuts in two feet deep and runs along, doing 20 yards of coal easily. It so hot that we're stripped to the waist and sweating. We often dream of having an ice- cream van down there! When I told an ice- cream seller that, he was so tickled that he got me to organise an ice-cream men's tr1P down the mine. So I took them all down, but they weren't allowed to take their tee cream with them.'

`Have you had any trouble with the pickets?'

:Not with the police! There was St) pickets there the other day, and 200 Pollee' You couldn't see the pickets! Now, I was sorry for them, standing there hour after hour in the cold and wind and rain. I'd talk to them, find out their views. Every time go near them, the police grab me and move me on! Mind you, one day when things were rough, and everyone was shoving" was glad of the police. But on the whole it s like the management have got their 001 private army. Police everywhere, stopping you on the roads, even after all the pickets have gone. One day last week, what hap- pened, I thought I'd come early and Park my car along with the pickets. A copper come up: "Where are you from?" "Rotherham, up in Yorkshire." „ "Well, f — off back there, then.. "Wait a minute, that's where I said I'rn from. I live here now, and this is mY pit

where I'm going to work. Ha!"

`You see, it's got so bad that it's in- timidating going to work, with P°11e,e, everywhere jumping out on you. They mr,a11.1. us to carry identification cards. But this what I tell everyone: "I live in Great Britain, and I don't need an identification card! Just then I had a bright idea, and I pulled out a souvenir I had bought at a Robin Hood shop. It was an imitation parchment, `signed' by the outlaw himself, Friar Tuck' Will Scarlet and so on, and declared that . the holder had free right to travel wheresover he wished throughout Sher- wood Forest. Any serf or freeman who hindered 'ye bearer' would suffer the vengeance of Robin Hood and his MerrY Men. `Show this to the police as a pass next time you're stopped,' I suggested. 'Say Y°,t1,, think it might be a bit out of date. That a mystify 'em!' `Good idea!' he said, shaking mY hand. And so, feeling like a carefree outlaw to London. Sherwood Forest and returnee'