Yanked down t’pit

Running my eyes along my disorganised bookshelves I spot and old-style Penguin cover with the orange spine and the instantly recognisable Penguin at the top; when I was a young man I bought loads of Penguin books.

The Penguin Modern Poets series and the Penguin

Modern European Poets introduced me to writers I’d never otherwise have come across as did the Penguin Classics and the Penguin Modern Classics. I’m looking forward to the day when I can spring out of lockdown and go to a charity shop and hunt out any Penguins I might not have read.

I pull the book from the shelf in my room and it’s a pretty old one from one of the aforementioned charity shops. The cover is by someone called John Griffiths and it features some stark-looking pithead gear, a couple of miners, an ashtray, a few paint brushes and some bottles of beer. The book is called Weekend In Dinlock written by an American journalist called Clancy Segal.

It was published in 1962 and at the time it caused a bit of storm in a snap tin because of the way Segal portrayed the people of the coalfield.

In the book Sigal makes the acquaintance of Davie, who works down the pit in Dinlock but who also has aspirations to becoming an artist; they meet in London and Davie invites Sigal up to Dinlock which could be any mining town but which was said to be based on Maltby near Rotherham. To be kind to Sigal, he is plunging into a world that’s different to the one he’s used to and I guess he’s trying to be objective but if you want to use that contemporary term ‘othering’, he’s certainly othering the good folk of Dinlock.

Here’s his first view of the place: “I walk along the windswept cold streets of Dinlock without any people on them. Ugly and dreary, certainly, but no more so than many such coal towns I’ve visited. The usual semi-detached and backto-back malignancies, shabby brick dwellings with unkempt gardens, the brick old and cracked and sooted.” A tourist brochure it isn’t!

Sigal is taken down the mine and the writing springs to life as the cage plummets down: “Suddenly we are plunging down at a dizzying, terrifying pace into sheer, impossible blackness. Without my willing it my head jerks up, my eyes explore for the last sign of daylight. We appear to be dropping at a rate too fast to let us stop short of disaster.”

If you can get hold of it, Weekend In Dinlock is well worth reading; it’s of its time, certainly, but it’s still a very interesting outsider’s view of a vanished world.

Wonder what I’ll find on my shelves next week?

motivated only by money, and that the exercise of individual greed and selfaggrandisement will eventually set us all free.

The conviction that greed and lust is all there is to the average human being, and that every other moral sentiment is mere hypocrisy and “virtue signalling,” is now the dominant big lie of our time; and it apparently takes a crisis like the current Covid-19 pandemic to remind us that this is not even half the truth about human nature.

And this, in the end, is the aspect of Bregman’s book that leaves the sympathetic reader uncertain whether to smile or weep.

In outline, though, this is a long book pointing out what should, in any rational world, be absolutely obvious: that human beings can do evil, but most of the time do not; that we can seek war, but tend, in the vast majority, to prefer peace; that we are sometimes motivated by greed and self-interest, but more often by a simple need to be involved with other people, and to be liked and accepted.