Memories, heart-warming or heart-breaking? They build courage and resistance or summon fear and trauma. Memories create who we are, who we are becomes memory for those whose lives we touch. We control memories people have of us, to an extent. We can live a good life so, when they tidy out dusty attics and a photograph emerges from a box, it will be looked on with a smile. But not all life can be controlled. There are memories that wouldn’t exist if we had slept in, didn’t walk that way, or didn’t take the chance. Memories can save you or destroy you. Life is fickle.

Assumptions

On the 9th of September 1967 disaster struck down the mine. Men were trapped for over 12 hours, some surviving, others dying. That shift started like any other. The rusting red metal caged elevator shaft began to fill. Lines of men in overalls stand shoulder to shoulder, piece tins and tools clanking, head torches flickering. Descending into darkness leaving the light sky and the autumn air,430 fathoms deep, hot stuffy, black. Down to another world where no living thing is safe.  The cage hits the floor, the metal door opens, men pour out heading to their stations. The caliginous darkness engulfs anyone who has forgotten to switch on his headlamp. 

Images come from memories. Not my memories but memories from stories I heard. I don’t remember verbatim, knowledge of life in the pits was part of our lives, from school, reading and films. Tales which leave you feeling you were there, in a dark corner of a damp mine watching the men stroll out of the elevator ready to start their day. 

I see their faces, clothes, and the detail creates a vivid picture in my head. I grab for direct physical clues to reassure me I can write those pictures, my memories, without feeling I’m making up stories. 

My gran and grandad moved out of their council house to a bungalow my aunts and uncles built for them on my aunt’s land. Their new bathroom had no window The newly tiled room only had a vent to circulate air and a heavy dark door.  Grandad would hustle us through and tell me and my cousins to “go ben there and shut yon door.” We would, nerves tingling with excitement. He closed the door and switched the light off, shouting that this would give us an idea of what it was like “doon the pit.” We couldn’t see each other, not even our hands in front of our faces. He opened the door, only after it had been closed a tad too long. Our eyes strained from stark difference between dark bathroom and summer sun; he would laugh as we rubbed them and smiled. And that’s all, the only palpable way he could show us his experience, knowing that the miner’s way of life was over; none of his grandchildren would follow those generations down the pits. 

How did Grandad realise that this space in his new house reminded him of the engulfing darkness of the pits? Was he standing there one day when the light bulb blew, grabbing the sink, knuckles whitening, frozen, as he was engulfed in darkness like that night 35 years ago? Did he feel comfort in the memories and darkness of his working life? I’ll never know.

Integrity

There was a fifteen-year gap between his last day underground and meeting me, but that is my memory of him. His stories, his memories of his time in the pits, not just the disaster but the normal working, his family's history in the pit and of course the strikes. I consider myself lucky to have these stories locked up in my memory but if I don’t tell them will they just die with me like paper fragments, floating around in a dusty room. To write, I must catch them all, stitch them together while knowing there will always be holes. Barret J, Mandel talks about discovering that a distinct memory of an event at school was in fact a “screen memory.”1 Something very vivid and believable but that never happened. That’s a difficult concept to grasp when trying to write about the past. 

To fill these gaps and solidify my confidence in my own memories I approached the local Miners’ Centre, googled the accident and spoke to my family. The problem with the latter was I might hear things I didn’t want to hear. Can we fabricate memories, choose the ones we want to keep, crumple up and throw away the ones we don’t? And is that the purpose of a “screen memory”, to create less painful versions of events? Does that make writing an entirely truthful piece all but impossible? Should I worry about the integrity of a piece of writing? I’m not a journalist, I’ve just found myself on a journey, and while I travel through bits and pieces of reading and writing, maybe the most important consideration as a writer is to be more conscious of my present thoughts about the past and the process I go through as I write. I want my responses kept from floating away. 

Spaces

I visited my Auntie Anne’s, who moved into my grandparents’ bungalow when her hardworking husband unexpectedly died of a heart attack. Images flood back as I walk up the drive. The bungalow was an old shop before my time, you can still see the faded vintage sign which bizarrely advertises tyres and antiques. 

Stepping into the house always throws me. Brian Dillion in The Dark Room writes about the harshness of loss. Looking around his childhood home, he notes the importance that children put on small objects that provide comfort and familiarity, and how they mourn their disappearance. It is not space but objects that hold stories and elicit feelings.2 I think of this as I look around. The décor has changed but it’s still the same home. This building no longer holds the memories of customers coming in for tyres for their Austins, leaving with a cracked vase. Those are long gone and are now replaced with the pictures I have in my mind, for each space. 

A living room: Grandad picking horses randomly from the newspaper to take a punt on or Gran making tea and buttery Scottish Plain toast for supper, ready to curl up to watch Midsomer Murders. 

Kitchen: my gran worried, knowing from her own 12 pregnancies, that my ‘niggles’ were contractions. 

Bathroom: Looking in mirror at the hard to hide wrinkles and pale blue eyes, watery from coughing, then down to the blood-stained handkerchief. 

Bedroom: Holding vigils for the dead each night, around their open coffins. 

Hall: acting as an overspill so everyone who visited could recite Apostles Creed or Hail Mary.

This home becomes what I make it, dependent on what goes on, deliberate and planned or by chance or necessity, all leaving imprints in my mind. Unlike the pit, I get to visit these spaces again. Revisiting the past, reinventing, reconstructing and adapting to suit. When a space of significant memory caves in on itself, burying your friends alive under tons of earth and soil, you never get the chance to do that. 

My aunt brought over a box, old, tattered, but full. Explaining that it has everything she has from that time, she doesn’t offer to open it up. We talk for hours. I can’t write as she blethers, but I feel tempted to record our conversation on my phone. I don’t, she wouldn’t be comfortable so I decide that working from memory will have to do. I leave dropping some of my memories and acquiring a bunch of hers, lugging them and the box into my car. I compartmentalize them in my head on the way home. 

Keepsakes

I lay the box on the oversized leather pouffe and empty the contents. The room is dim and cold, but I don’t bother switching the heating on. The memory of cold mornings in the old house comforts me.

The box contains the Disaster. I cover myself in a blanket, my hands stiff with the cold as I open it and sift through pieces of information, paper clippings, letters, health and safety reports. near the bottom, face down, I find a photograph.

Photograph

I’ve never seen this photo before. It was taken not even a full day after the incident, you can see that, in his eyes. I recognise the chair, his big powerful bones resting his weight and woes against the tweed and wood. I know the photograph was taken in the house that I grew up in. The one before the bungalow, the one with the fields and the fireplace and the tin bath. I look at his hands, they are familiar to me. His fingers, no matter how much he scrubbed, were always discoloured. When he was dying, his hands turned to translucent paper. Thin, smooth, see through. But the tips of his fingers retained their colour. Greying nails framed by yellow and black skin, caused by smoking roll ups and spending years handling sticky black coaI. I look at my hands and see where the paleness comes from. My veins are like road maps. My fingers longer, his nails were stronger because I have no underground story.  There are similarities.  Like our memories. Intertwined.  My memories of him and his memories of the past lie side by side. I wonder how traumatised he had been hours before this photograph was taken. Is that what created my memories of him? I often wonder if that night had never happened, would life have been easier? Would I be different because my mum's childhood was different? I read Thomas Larsons, The Memoirs and the Memoirist where he discusses a woman who writes about her experience with male suicide in her life and suggests that these events had been coded into her DNA, recording her responses, her modifications and expressions. These memories like us, grow and change, they are not isolated. This makes me think of my memory, of being shut in the bathroom and how my view of that has changed as I grow. Did his response to being trapped underground, with his friends dying beside him and the thought of being buried alive change over time? Did the initial trauma of the event cause his alcoholism that then grew into him glamourising the event while still needing the whisky?3

My auntie Bibi’s just a baby there, but now older than he was, leans her head against his chest unsure about the commotion taking place behind the lens. The journalist asked if one of the children could sit on their daddy’s knee, before instructing the photographer to take the heartfelt and sellable shot. Is that why she looks plonked, her eyes likely fixed on her Mammy, her constant, her security? Her curls, that disappeared in her youth only to come back stronger than ever, fall against her chubby cheeks.

I know what would have gone on in that house before the photograph was taken, before the ‘people from the papers’ turned up at their door.  People with no money and who live in less fancy houses than some, do their best to appear as good as possible to dispel any preconceived notions others may have about them. Knowing t these important people were coming to the house would have sent the family into panic. Daughters running down to the shops for tea and biscuits, sons running to fill the coal. Gran would have scrubbed the house and the young ones from head to toe. Grandad would have had a shave and washed the bruise like soot marks off his face. Even if, less than 24 hours earlier, he was lifting his head high into air pockets for hours on end, to try and stave off the poisoned air, sweat and fear running through him, knowing how likely it was that he would end up like so many others. But that’s just my assumption. My eyes are still fixed on this snapshot. I wasn’t born then yet I feel I am there now. Sitting next to the journalist, looking over his shoulder as he takes notes on his note pad. I wonder what they were asking Granddad at this point and what he was saying? In those days, people didn’t suffer from PTSD. Even though we have seen the videos of war, of men unable to stand as their nervous systems were shattered like glass over things they should never have seen. But the ones who were able to hold down a job and deal with a family, their memories beat inside them, walked with them wherever they went and affected all that they did. My gran, well into her 70s, still automatically ducked when a plane came overhead after carrying out evacuation drill in school during the war. But my Grandad didn’t do anything like that. 

As I write, investigate, question and process, I think of Virginia Woolf and her exploration when writing her autobiographies and memoirs. There are layers to hers and that makes me question memories, memoirs and the truth of it all.  In a ‘A Moment of Being,’ she talks of her earlier memories, like mine, but knows that they are rarely reliable or enough. “These are some of my first memories. But of course, as an account of my life is misleading, because the things that one does not remember are important; perhaps they are more important.”4 Can memoirs even be written based solely on memory? Similarly, I feel that the tone of her writing changes depending on what she is going through in the present time. Strange to think that your present self can change solid memories, our responses to them, the way we view them or what we think happened. I found this photograph during research. Would my initial response or memory of him be different if I just found it one day cleaning out the attic? Will any memoirs I write be ever changing? Being relevant only in that moment of time, turning memories into growing, changing things. Maybe, in ten years’ time, when I read this, I will not recognise these memories. The one that is solid is today these are my thoughts and feelings, and no amount of reading, research, memories or emotions can change that.