Innocence

When I was a university student up in Scotland, I often rode upon the east coast railway that links Edinburgh with Newcastle and Yorkshire.

One dark winter evening, I was sitting in the buffet carriage of an east coast train when it pulled in to the station at Newcastle. The train was pretty full with seats at a premium. An older man bustled into the buffet car and asked if he might sit at my little table. Naturally, I consented.

I soon found myself in conversation with this newcomer. Communication was challenging simply because he spoke with such a broad north eastern accent. Many would have found that accent impenetrable but my step-grandfather Foster Morris had been born and raised in Newcastle so I was somewhat accustomed to the brand of English spoken by working people in the north eastern region.

My new companion was wearing a brown tweed coat with frayed cuffs and an old tartan scarf. His hands were like shovels and hardened through hard work. He told me that he had retired as a coal miner that very week having just reached his sixty fifth birthday. As I recall, he was from a coal mining area just south of Sunderland where many of the coal mines had tunnels that went right under The North Sea.

Clearly, the horizons of his life had been very limited. He told me he had never left the north east before and he had also never been on a train till that very evening after catching a bus into Newcastle. However, he had raised a family and he had laboured as a coal miner for fifty years.

I was warming to him. It was nice to be a twenty two year old university student talking to a man who had worked hard all of his life and I felt a kinship with him because of all the coal miners there had been on my mother's side of my family - including my maternal grandfather and great-grandfather.

"The Coal Face" by Alan Glasspool

Nosily, I asked him what he was doing on the train. Where was he going?

With pain in his eyes, he told me he was heading to Manchester. It seemed that one of his sons had been sent to Strangeways Prison after being sentenced that very day for burglary. "I warned him. I bloody warned him it'd end up like this!"

As soon as my companion had received the news he had headed for Newcastle, determined to visit his wayward son

We were half an hour into our journey south and at that point a man in British Rail uniform entered the buffet car. It was a rare ticket inspector. I showed him my student railcard and my ticket but the coal miner looked puzzled. He didn't have any sort of ticket.

He tried to explain himself to the inspector whose own English accent betrayed the fact that he was from the London area. It was like a Swahili-speaking herdsman meeting an Inuit - such was the success of their conversation.  I was obliged to intervene and quickly found myself playing the role of a translator.

The retired coal miner said he didn't know that he needed a ticket. He'd just walked onto the platform and onto the train. He had assumed that he could just pay on board the train and pulled a cheque from his inner pocket. As I recall it was a cheque for two thousand pounds - being the lump sum from his retirement package.

The inspector was unimpressed and showed not a single iota of sympathy or understanding. "That's no use to me! Why isn't it in your bank?"

"Because I don't have a bank account. Can't I use it like cash mate? You can give me the change."

I continued to translate, explaining to the ticket collector what I already knew about my fellow traveller.

I begged him to take the man's name and address and to bill him but this official was a jobsworthy and said he'd be phoning through to York to have the coal miner arrested for ticket dodging.

"Have a heart man!" I protested.

But at York where I needed to meet my own connecting train, the transport police were waiting. I interrupted the ticket inspector's explanation in defence of the coal miner and the lead policeman seemed to be listening with understanding. I shook the coal miner's hand and wished him all the best as he was led away. And that was the last that I ever saw of him though I have thought about him many times since that dark night heading south.