FIVE
I thought thee were about to bring your lungs up, an' all.
Jack Garforth had finished the kerving, undercutting of the coalface and hewing out the base of the seam, chopping out a foot-high groove at the thrill or floor of the mine. Now, he was cutting the vertical grooves at each side of the mass he wanted to bring down.
It was a poor cavil that he and his team of 'marras' had pulled this quarter, drawing a narrow unyielding seam, wet bottomed, with the ceiling barely 4'0’high, and it was desperately hard work to make up good weight, the headroom too low to swing the pick effectively.
He sat back on his small stool, called a cracket, taking a short breather, wiping the sweat from his brow with his arm. Jack Garforth was now 57 years old, a nuggetty little man with great strength
