Never Such Innocence Again

PROLOGUE Immutable, as permanent as the earth itself. We will remember them. The War Memorial in the village of Ashbrook Stills in the county of Durham, stands at the junction of Whitton Lane and Ashbrook Road. It is a grey granite obelisk, standing proudly on a tiered plinth upon which are laid the poppy wreaths on Remembrance Sunday. It is some nine feet tall and is inscribed with the names of men from the village and surrounding countryside who died for their country in the Great War of 1914-18. In 1914, the population of the village stood at 267 men, women and children. Twenty-nine of them are commemorated on the Memorial. Seven more names were added after World War II. Below the list of names, the stanza of a poem reads: They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old, Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning, We will remember them. In 1953, Councillor Mrs Edwardes donated a wooden bench in memory of her husband Percy, a survivor of the trenches whose lungs finally gave out after having been gassed in the Ypres Salient in 1917. The bench sits alongside the memorial; old women, many of the widows of those whose names are on the roll, used to sit to rest there on sunny days as they walked down to the Post Office to collect their pensions. If you carry on down Whitton Lane, you will come to the rows of miners’ cottages built in 1848 when the mine, Pit No 1, was first sunk. The cottages, six rows in all, running from the derelict railway line up to Whitton Lane, are all identical. The front door, which was rarely ever opened except for a wedding or a funeral, leads directly into the two-up two-down cottages with kitchens at the back. An entry passage, serving four houses, leads into the backyard where the privy used to be, and where the back gate leads out onto the back lane. The streets are all named after Queen Victoria and her family. At the top, naturally, stands Victoria Street with Albert Street next (never very popular), followed in quick succession by Edward Street, Alice Street, Alfred Street, and Helena Street. They stopped building then, because No 2 Pit proved to be so wet and thin-seamed as to be unprofitable. The pit head buildings, which were a couple of hundred yards beyond the cottages, have been dismantled for some years now. The tall stone engine house, with the dragon-breathing steam winder that drove the huge fly wheel and cable drum (built in 1852 by J.C. Joicey of Newcastle upon Tyne), was a masterpiece of Victorian industrial engineering. Next to the engine house stood the heapstead building, standing directly over the mineshaft with the great spinning headstock pulleys guiding the cables that sent down the cages full of men, and brought up the tubs full of coal from the depths below. It was thought that those pulleys would turn forever; they seemed moulded into the earth, immutable, as permanent as the earth itself. The spoil heaps have been grassed over now, and a stand of new trees follows the line of the railway tracks that used to carry the coal to the Penshaw Staithes on the River Wear or the Dutton Staithes on the Tyne, there to be loaded onto colliers and shipped all around the country, to East Anglia and the Thames, and across the North Sea to Scandinavia and the Baltic. The pit cottages are still there, but the spirit that lived with them died with the closing of the mine; they are still cottages, homes even, but they are homes without soul, the very reason for their existence died years ago. The 'Green Tree' pub is still there on Whitton Lane, at the bottom of the hill that leads up to the village of Bitchburn, too small to be even called a village, merely a single street of houses by what used to be the Queen Mary Drift Mine, also long since closed. The names of the dead of Bitchburn are also commemorated on the Memorial. Number 2 Ashbrook Road is the first house on Ashbrook Road and is where Mrs Ida Cantley used to live. Ida, who died in April 1995 when she was 98, had lived there ever since her marriage to Jackson Wragg in 1913, moving two doors up the road from number 6 where she had been born in 1897, Queen Victoria’s Jubilee year. Widowed in 1916, when Jackson had been killed on the Somme, she married Fred Cantley in 1924 and was widowed again in 1929, when gas exploded in No 1 Pit, killing 17 miners. Ida lived alone for the best part of 65 years. Her children had long since left home and scattered far and wide. Only her youngest daughter, Mary, used to visit regularly, every two months or so, but Ida did not feel lonely or neglected. She had her memories and as she sat by her front room window, she could see the War Memorial without even turning her head. She drew great comfort from it; even after more than 75 years, it solaced her to know that Jackson Wragg’s name had not been forgotten. Her tears had long since dried but the pride she felt for the fallen lived with her until the day she died. When the Boy Scouts, Freemasons and old soldiers stood to observe a minute’s silence by the Memorial on Remembrance Sunday, her heart seemed fit to burst with pride and it was as well to have a hankie tucked in her sleeve, as the tears sparkled at the corner of her eyes. Ida had known that she had not much time to live; the hard winters seemed harder to get through than ever before, but the prospect of her death had not dismayed her. She knew she would be re-united with Wragg and Cantley, who had been good friends to each other and good, if brief, husbands to her, and after she had gone, the Memorial would live on forever, of that she had no doubts. The Memorial would live on forever. At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, We will remember them. PART 1