I'm Nick Borrett living in the local village of Oxten, not far from Calverton, but I'm deeply interested in Calverton for lots of reasons. I'm actually involved in the medical practice - I chair the patients' groups. I'm very interested in looking after patients' interest. When we arrived here 27 years ago, the coal mine was just being dismantled and everything [was] being closed down and I saw its death and its rebirth and it prompted me to write some dramatic poetic verse which I'll begin with shortly.
So this reflects my thinking and feelings walking around the top of the pit after it had been landscaped over many years to offer places for people to walk and exercise and I call it pit plight.
Pit Plight
"Guns that shoot a toxic waste into the air”
Lying, compacted by millennium, are trees,
Held in earths hot deep freeze.
But man sniffs out this latent force
Digging down to seams, on course
For carbon bearing ancient ground
Some hundred metres where its found
Miners from a northern county,
brought to find the hidden bounty.
Make a village round the Calvo pit,
to find it,tunnel,dig,then flog it.
Shafts are sunk below stately steels,
Holding massive, whirring pit head wheels
Sending stone-faced caged men down
With song and stare and laboured frown.
A ten hour dig awaits their shift,
Fixed faces pressed against the lift.
Gases and the endless dust,
water, stench and dirty rust,
Noses clogged and eyes bone dry
Aches and pains, that make some cry.
But mining madness has a brighter side
As the cages upward glide.
With light and air and thoughts of a drink,
Men descend, cages shake and swiftly sink.
The fossil fuel is 6 day mined
Year on year the miner’s grind
Brings jobs and hopes and families
But some are brought down to their knees.
Their bodies too long stretched and bent
Crawling,digging, some lives spent
in search of ever richer seams
with targets that appear in dreams.
Men are tense and worries grow
Tonnage missed, its time to go.
Then when cheaper coal is found,
no more jobs are underground.
Close the pit and sack the men,
fill it up,and start again.
Leave the stubborn rock that tests our wit
And seals the plight of another pit.
Then politicians make their move
But miners’ anxe they cannot smooth
Jobs are lost and families fume,
Communities see the pending doom.
Amidst the gloom and hue and cry
Men’s awful fate we can't deny.
Calvo miners don’t down their tools
Whilst other pits broke all the rules
The strikes and anger ‘gainst Thatcherites
Left many men in worsened plights
Privatised just for a while
RJM gave it a trial
Then jobs and lives turned inside out
Pits are closed, families have nowt.
Coal board promises don’t appease
For those who have black lung disease.
Fibrosis, broken backs and knees
Laboured lungs and a constant wheeze.
Machines lie still with gates locked tight
They drown their sorrows , give up the fight.
Politicians try to passify with token grant,
Then come the diggers and earth-moving plant,
They shift a million tons of ash,
Pit head structures creak and crash,
Dust and debris moved around
As pit becomes a shapely mound
as muck & spoil are piled on high
Such a massive grave where memories lie.
In shafts and tunnels, seams deep down below
Are water logged, not safe to go.
There’s shafts filled in and structural smashes
But a Phoenix rises from the ashes
And grows like a massive turtle shell
that masks the blood and sweat and hell.
The land spews out its trapped methane
as red-faced owners count their gain.
Pipes and tubes direct the route
with pumps and valves and guns that shoot
a toxic waste into the air
but happy hikers don't know that it's there.
Masked behind the barbed wire fence
A threatening sort of lame defence.
Then shadows fall across the empty site
The sun goes down on the miners plight
Just memories of what is buried there
Brave men, hard graft and then despair.
The Pit’s response:
I'm a shadow of my former self-
Just like a lover left on the shelf.
I held onto things so dangerous and temporary.
A fond farewell to blackened miners once so bright and merry.
I need to boldly go where others dare not go.
I need to vent my inner self so that I no longer puff and blow.
Please release the pressure in my deepest ground
So others might walk more safely and beauty maybe found?"
Is there anything you'd like to say, about the poem?
I think the poem for me, having nothing to do with mining and knowing so little about it coming from the deep south into Nottinghamshire many years ago, I realised the importance of mining and mining communities and places like Calverton which were developed around the pit, and people that had to move away from families and relatives to form a new life around work that they thought would see them through to their end- of their working life. And to see that cut off probably so quickly and sharply and devastatingly with all the miners strikes and all the devastation that went around with there politics, it felt to me like it shouldn't be lost.
And so the poem is my way of reflecting grief really, grief at what has been and what might have been. That's probably why I wrote it.