It’s rare for me to cry, but I wept buckets yesterday.
I was watching a DVD with the girls, to help them prepare for a performance in their drama group: Billy Elliott.
When this film came out, I was certain I’d hate it. I’d heard a brief summary of the plot and it sounded vile. I didn’t see it when it was at the cinema, and only ended up watching it out of politeness to a friend. And it broke me up. This is the third time I’ve seen it now and it has the same effect every time.
It’s not the whole boy-ballerina thing (although that is surprisingly not mawkish after all). It’s the part where the dad decides to break strike and go back to work. When I watch that part, it’s not just a stray tear running down my cheek. I sobbed for about ten minutes.
The pit-head scenes were all filmed at our colliery (long-closed by the time they made the film). Huge numbers of people turned out to see that bitter history come to life again. Stood silently looking on as the rocks hit the wire mesh on the windows of the lorries. Listened to the sounds we’d almost forgotten, “scab, scab, scab” as the police drummed their truncheons on their riot shields.
My dad wasn’t a miner, but everyone else’s dad was. Having seen how poor a family can get after no money coming in for more than a year, this recession doesn’t really scare me that much. I don’t foresee us having to saw up our own furniture, our own apple tree, for firewood; so I know things could be a lot worse. I don’t foresee us having to live on food parcels donated by our brothers in the struggle in the Russian, the French mines; I don’t have to pretend not to be hungry so the children have enough to eat.
There wasn’t much discussion at home, at school, about the rights or wrongs of the strike. It wasn’t in question. I went to a rally on Town Moor to hear Scargill speak, and despite his strange bri-nylon hair it was like listening to Jesus. Everyone wanted to follow him, logic didn’t form a part of it. We had no wish to hear the alternative viewpoint, as it was inevitably expressed in condescending tones by That Woman, and we simply couldn’t bear to watch her.
Of the hundreds of thousands, millions of people perhaps who have seen the film, only a relative few will understand exactly what it would mean to ride the bus through the picket line of your colleagues and cousins and old school friends and brothers.
I cry for our town, still broken. The men, still broken. Their sons, who have never worked. Their wives and daughters, who never stop, one job after another, to hold the family together. Women’s work - no job for a man.
Our pit re-opened last year. They bring the miners from Poland and Africa. Our ex-miners, in their ex-Coal Board houses, rent out the rooms of their children, long-left, to the new workers. The men still of the town have no training, no trade. They stay at home, drinking, smoking, fighting - and the coal sits deep and bitter beneath their feet.
I was watching a DVD with the girls, to help them prepare for a performance in their drama group: Billy Elliott.
When this film came out, I was certain I’d hate it. I’d heard a brief summary of the plot and it sounded vile. I didn’t see it when it was at the cinema, and only ended up watching it out of politeness to a friend. And it broke me up. This is the third time I’ve seen it now and it has the same effect every time.
It’s not the whole boy-ballerina thing (although that is surprisingly not mawkish after all). It’s the part where the dad decides to break strike and go back to work. When I watch that part, it’s not just a stray tear running down my cheek. I sobbed for about ten minutes.
The pit-head scenes were all filmed at our colliery (long-closed by the time they made the film). Huge numbers of people turned out to see that bitter history come to life again. Stood silently looking on as the rocks hit the wire mesh on the windows of the lorries. Listened to the sounds we’d almost forgotten, “scab, scab, scab” as the police drummed their truncheons on their riot shields.
My dad wasn’t a miner, but everyone else’s dad was. Having seen how poor a family can get after no money coming in for more than a year, this recession doesn’t really scare me that much. I don’t foresee us having to saw up our own furniture, our own apple tree, for firewood; so I know things could be a lot worse. I don’t foresee us having to live on food parcels donated by our brothers in the struggle in the Russian, the French mines; I don’t have to pretend not to be hungry so the children have enough to eat.
There wasn’t much discussion at home, at school, about the rights or wrongs of the strike. It wasn’t in question. I went to a rally on Town Moor to hear Scargill speak, and despite his strange bri-nylon hair it was like listening to Jesus. Everyone wanted to follow him, logic didn’t form a part of it. We had no wish to hear the alternative viewpoint, as it was inevitably expressed in condescending tones by That Woman, and we simply couldn’t bear to watch her.
Of the hundreds of thousands, millions of people perhaps who have seen the film, only a relative few will understand exactly what it would mean to ride the bus through the picket line of your colleagues and cousins and old school friends and brothers.
I cry for our town, still broken. The men, still broken. Their sons, who have never worked. Their wives and daughters, who never stop, one job after another, to hold the family together. Women’s work - no job for a man.
Our pit re-opened last year. They bring the miners from Poland and Africa. Our ex-miners, in their ex-Coal Board houses, rent out the rooms of their children, long-left, to the new workers. The men still of the town have no training, no trade. They stay at home, drinking, smoking, fighting - and the coal sits deep and bitter beneath their feet.
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