The village slowly beings to shake off its slumber and come to life.
The mothers are the
first to stir, leaving the warmth of straw-mattressed beds to hitch up night
clothes and squat over porcelain nightjars, emptying their bladders.
Shivering in the dawn
chill they lace coarse woollen dresses over petticoats and descend to the kitchen
to coax the fire into life, pushing a heavy blackened kettle across it. Next come
their husbands, tumble-haired and granite-faced, accepting the bowl of steaming
gruel held out to them and eating in flinty silence.
They’re joined at
intervals by children, ranging in size and wakefulness, alert and chatty to sleepy
and yawning, called to the hearthside by the aroma of simmering pottage and the
voice of their mothers, prompting them downstairs to prepare for the day ahead.
Young girls, miniatures of their mothers, tie on aprons and smooth down caps,
take over the slicing of bread doorsteps or the shovelling of food into infant
mouths.
Brothers pull heavy
nailed boots over thick socks, take oilcloth-wrapped sandwiches from their
sisters’ hands and clatter from the houses, their young voices shattering the
frosty morning air. They join the throng heading for the pithead, and so the
morning begins.
The streets return
again to semi-quiet, to become the domain of the women and infants until the
work of the day is done.
Alison Mott
This snatch of writing was first created at a session of the Informals Writing group in March 2016. It was prompted by a memory my mother-in-law had shared of watching her grandfather prepare for a day's work at the pit in West Hallam, Derbyshire, in the 1950s (but I gave it a historical twist).
