Black Gold
The Dad was dour, his face was sour
When he came home from the pit,
He looked like a furnace stoker but
That wasn't the half of it…
His fists were like a couple of hams
And he used the blighters, too,
The Mam would hear his foot on the step
And hurry to serve his stew.
She wore his bruises over her face,
Her arms and her legs and more,
I'd seen her body all over then
For I was coming-up four,
I'd watched the blood run down her leg
As she cleaned herself with a rag,
Whenever he'd come home roaring drunk,
Use Mam as a punching bag!
My sister Else was barely ten
When he made her work at the pit,
She struggled to push a cart of coal
Until she was almost sick.
The manager was a brutal man
With a knotted, leather strap,
If Else was slow or got vertigo
He'd lay it across her back!
I never heard Mam complain to him,
I guess that she didn't dare,
She'd rub some cream into Else's wounds
And run a brush through her hair.
‘It's hard, but you'll toughen up, my girl,
He said, as a sort of scold,
‘You'd better respect what we're mining here,
Just think of it as Black Gold! '
‘Think of it as Black Gold, ' he'd said…
(The sort that gets into your pores,
The dust that gives you a crippled lung
And your skin gets covered in sores.
The cough that's keeping the house awake
When everyone needs to sleep,
The sulphur smell round the chimney-piece
As you watch your mother weep!)
He dragged me out, and he took me in
When I was only eight,
He said, ‘Now look here, fella-me-lad,
It's time that you pulled your weight! '
They started me at tuppence a day
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poem by David Lewis Paget
Added by Poetry Lover
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