54. What's All the Fuss About Coal?

...being a few thoughts on the fortieth anniversary of the miner's strike, the perils of mining, and the difficulties of teaching.

It has been heartening to hear of the successes of two of my fellow poets from the South Yorkshire region this week. Sarah Wimbush saw her collection “Strike”, just miss out on the Forward Prize, an international award which is worth £10,000. Obviously it would have been great if she had won it, and it was disappointing to just miss out on such a large amount of money, but it must have felt really satisfying on some level just to have been shortlisted.

Then, a day or so later Tracy Dawson learned that she is to have one of her poems included in The Coal Anthology, a much anticipated book which is to be published in November, and has already earned an impressive review by Stuart Maconie.

These achievements underline the position that South Yorkshire occupies as a centre of poetry and arts in general. Its a great time to be living here, and involved in such a vibrant scene.

I myself submitted a piece to the Coal Anthology, a piece which was unsurprisingly and deservedly passed over. It’s rejection was perhaps an object lesson for me, underlining the need to actually write about what the editors have said that they are looking for, rather than going off on a tangent, and writing about the sort of thing that I habitually obsess about, mainly men of a certain age, who are very often teachers who I recall from my schooldays. Unfortunately, I doubt that I will learn from the experience.

The call was for poetry about coal mining, people’s experiences of working in coal mines, living in mining communities, the strike of 1984 - 85, and related subjects. I thought that it would be a great idea to send the editors a poem called What’s all the Fuss About Coal? and make it about a teacher called Mr Cole. The pun amused me, and submitting the piece ensured that I would be able to tell myself that I had submitted something, allowing me to stop thinking about it and get back to writing other stuff (about bygone teachers and similar obsessions).

Now that there is no chance of the piece being included in the anthology, I am free to publish it here, for my pleasure and your delectation (should you find any delight in it)

First, let me make it clear that the Mr Cole in my poem is in no way representative of Mr Roger Cole, the headmaster of Sir Henry Cooper Senior High School when I was a pupil there in the 1970s and the author of Principles of Human Geography.¹ That particular Mr Cole was a decent fellow and a fine teacher as far as I remember. The rumour was that he was of the Quaker faith, which meant that he was opposed to corporal punishment of any kind. He could still shout a bit and go red in the face when he felt the need to do so, but fortunately that wasn’t very often. Besides I was in a fairly high group for geography and we were all relatively well behaved.

The Mr Cole in my poem is an imagined mixture of a number of other half-remembered teachers, much wearier and much more disillusioned than my old headmaster. They were teachers whose hearts were probably no longer in the job, who had to put up with a bit of cheek, a bit of messing about and a lot of general inattention from their pupils. They were teachers who probably just wanted to get through each day as best as they could, but having to deal with some of the more difficult lads had ground them down over time, and made them bitter and miserable in their labour.

Of course, The Mr Cole in my poem wasn’t exactly working down a coal mine, in hot, sweaty and dangerous situations, using his brute strength to hack away at a seam of Pre-Cambrian rock until his every muscle ached. He didn’t suffer the indignity of having fine black dust invade every crevice of his body, much of which couldn’t be removed even with scrupulous showering and scrubbing. He didn’t feel the exhaustion of men who went home at the end of a long shift to eat, drink and sleep for a few hours before going back down into the very bowels of the Earth for another arduous session. He didn’t do that at all, but sometimes he might have referred to his job as working on the chalk face, and he dreamed of getting out as much as any tired miner did, but the need for money to pay for the mortgage, the car and the holidays kept him returning to the classroom for further punishment.

I can see that sort of a teacher now. I have been there in my own teaching career. The seeming futility of school life. The demands of the management and the curriculum. The kids who will not learn. The difficulty in switching off from it, even in the dead of night, when you wake up and feel as if you are still there. Being unable to get back to sleep and counting down the dwindling amount of minutes before you will be there again. Teaching is certainly not coal mining, but it is still a difficult job. I feel a twinge of remorse, when I reflect on how I might have added to the difficulties of many of my teachers during my time at school. Then again, it is in the nature of teenage boys to be hard to manage, just as it is in the nature of coal to be difficult to get out of the ground. The miner and the teacher are both in a situation where they are essentially on their own, using either their physical or mental strength to achieve their goals.

Perhaps I was a little jealous of all the attention being focused on miners. Perhaps at some level I feel jealous of miners, who did a difficult job, but unlike teachers did something that was recognised as a manly. Teachers are often popularly seen as soft, enjoying too many long holidays, and having the opportunity to knock off at half past three in the afternoon. They can be seen as people who have never properly grown up, never had a job in the real world, and have nothing to complain about. Why should teachers make a fuss about their working conditions? What is all the fuss about?

What’s All the Fuss About Coal?

Whats all the fuss about coal anyway?
Back in the day, my geography teacher told me 
that it was only crushed prehistoric forests
Ironically, my geography teacher was called Mr Cole.  
He himself was crushed 
by the weight of callous teenage boys 
who couldn’t care less about geography
or anything else
apart from football and pop music 
and disturbing thoughts of a sexual nature.

Did he remain crushed after leaving the profession?
Was his very essence compressed 
into some dense source of energy
that someday would briefly flare up 
and warm the descendants of the boys who had abused him?
Would he somehow combine 
with the compressed souls of other hyper pressurised teachers 
and have a devastating impact upon the atmosphere of the planet
creating an even greater threat to humanity 
than any social decline 
wrought by the rise of popular cultural icons 
such as football and pop music
and disturbing thoughts of a sexual nature?

When I see the Aurora Borealis over the English Midlands
and TV weathermen praising the beauty of the display
whilst warning that it points to worrisome changes 
in the makeup of the atmosphere
I see the restless spirit of Mr Cole
wreaking his terrible revenge 
on a generation who just wouldn’t listen

1. I think that it was called Principles of Human Geography, but might have been Principles of Physical Geography. I can’t find it anywhere, online or off, but I would love to see a copy of it. I remember that he was very proud of it. One time he explained to us that it was printed on Chinagraph paper, (something else that I can’t find online) and told us something about the production process. The paper was a mix of the usual pulp and some sort of powdered clay. It was good for reproducing photographs but made the book very weighty. It was a hardback with a glossy board cover rather than a dust jacket. Listening to him talk about it was far more inspiring than any geography lesson he ever gave, human or physical. I wanted to be the author of a book from that day on. Thank God for Amazon and self publishing!