The women emerge from the mouth of the shaft, a rough shelter above the winding staircase into the pit. They are lean and strong, gaunt. Coal dust smears across their cheeks where they have wept and sweated with the exertion of the climb. Their rags are stiff with coal dust and sweat. They blink, feral, into the grey light of this dour morning then coup their heavy burden of coals onto the heap. The coals are black and shiny in the rain.
Unburdened for a brief moment, they straighten, stretch, stare at him with bitter-amusement. Their snaggled teeth seem unnaturally white in their coal-blackened faces, the flesh in their mouths so red it is obscene. A few nod. Most do not. All turn, the empty creels back on their backs, and descend into the pit again.
Their coals are not yet tallied and paid for by the collier’s grieve. Behind Robert, young boys, black as the women, load purchased coals onto the back of his cart.
The weather is dire. Cold and damp with squalls of rain. The chill seeps into his clothes, into his bones. His fingers are raw and there is that same dull ache in his hips. It feels as if it has been raining all of his life.
He was born in the year of the Black Spring.[i]
When he was eleven, the lean summer of the previous year was followed by severe frosts in the early part of 1782, a heavy snowfall in March and then the rain. The rain chilled the corn and, despite two hot weeks in July, the oats were still green in September when the snow began to fall again. What corn could ripen through the Autumn frosts and snow they cut in November. The earth was frosted hard, prevented lifting their tatties.
They were hungry. Short on seed and stock. His father persevered. Borrowed and planted what he could. In July of the following year, the clear summer skies were replaced by a sulphurous fog that obscured the sun for 3 weeks[ii]. Through the days and into the nights, vast thunderstorms rumbled and flashed. Oats and bere yellowed in the parks and the haulms of the potatoes blackened. They called it the year of the yellow snow.
By December the snow lay very deep, deep drifts that trapped them in the house at Bield, ice on the inside of the windows, the water in the basin frozen though the fire was lit. The snow was constant into March[iii].
The next winter lasted 4 months. The winter after lasted five! Bitter cold.
By then they were ruined.
*
To the South, the smoke from the glass works and manufactories sinks back towards the houses, smoored by the thick damp cloud that blankets the land and the Firth beyond.
He can see the ferry setting out across the Forth towards Airth. The masts of ships prickle above the roofs of the town. The ships await cargoes of coal and glass. A tall ship sits, nose in, in the drydock, undergoing repair.[iv] Near the drydock, there is a tannery and a brick works.[v]
Sometimes, these coals he carts are destined for the hold of a ship for immediate export to Edinburgh, Leith or Aberdeen. Mostly, Robert carts the shiny black rock to the Glass Works to be unloaded by labourers, reddened by the scorch of the glass furnaces.
There is a good wagon way, better than any of the local roads had been in Gargunnock, which connects the collieries directly with the Glass Works.
Robert recalls his father, William, extolling the virtues of the division of labour, enthusing at its efficacy in improving return on capital and enhancing the wealth of nations. Those lectures were expounded in Gargunnock, where his family had farmed for a century, clearing the soil and enclosing the parks, draining the bogs and bigging up the barns and byres that they needed. Working with the cadence of the seasons – hard darg but varied, ploughing and riddling, sowing and shearing, threshing and milling, selling their meal, butter, cheese and yarn.
But the weather, the extremity of the seasons, was always against them. Whatever the thoughts of Adam Smith, whatever new idea William conjured to squeeze another bawbee out of the earth, the weather thwarted them.
Eventually, when his father lost the lease at Gargunnock – the land being engrossed into a bigger farm – Robert Forrester moved to Alloa, taking moveables, plough horses, carts.[vi]
Robert’s primary trade was with the glass works and the collieries. Sometimes they carry crates of bottles from the Glassworks to the quayside. It pays to be willing. Not fussy.
“That’s you!” the collier’s grieve shouts, his back already turned and walking back towards the heaps of coal.
Robert flicks the reins and moans “Gaun!” The cart feels the strain then moves forward, slowly.
Another young woman emerges from the mouth of the pit, bent double beneath her load and Robert is grateful that his wife, Elizabeth, is at home with their two young children, Janet and Robert. Warm and dry, he hopes, not struggling like a pack animal under two hundred weight of coals.
Elizabeth bore another child, a girl, six months ago but the bairn – they christened her Catherine – did not survive the winter and Elizabeth has been gaunt and distant since the baby’s death. Haunted and bitter. She blames the smoke from the Glass Cones. She blames the rats from the trading ships that come and go in the port. Sometimes, he worries if she blames him.
Her folk are from Pittenweem. She says this would never have happened on the coast away from the black ash of the manufactories.
Fresh air. Aye.
If he had land still, Robert would be ploughing despite the weather. They would mostly plant tatties if they had the choice. Some carrots and turnips, less oats and barley these days. The pattern of activity was more intense than in the old days when two ploughings and a hairst was all of it. And all the crafts of liming, manuring, drainage and fencing that went with modern farming. Life at Bield was hard but various: and not so hard towards the end, despite the foul weather. They had linen on the beds, a pot to piss in. Meat three days a week. And yet they were ruined. Unable to match the bid of some Southerner for their lease: his silver not depleted by the five years of meagre harvests and wasted effort.
Ironically, the war with France drove up the price of grain and beef and wool after that. If he still had the lease on the Bield, he would be prospering. But he has not and only the constant too and fro from pithead to quayside will claw back the progress of a century of diligent farming.
Ahead of him, the chimneys leak smoke and ash over the town and here and there a flash of flame escapes its custody. Ships tentatively extend their sails, sifting the wind for steerage-way up the firth. The smoke of Edinburgh is lost in the pervasive drizzle.
Somewhere between God’s Providence and the Invisible Hand his father told him of, there must be hope. Yet here, it seems, each soul is yoked to just one thing. The hewer to hack at the rock, the women to carry these stony burdens, the stokers to fill the furnace, the glass-worker to make bottle after bottle amidst the heat and smoke: and Robert to trail back and forth along the same road, six days a week, laden with coal or empty, the old plough horses straining with the weight.
Notes
[i] 1771
[ii] A consequence of the Laki eruption, 1783.
[iii] Temperatures -3 to -12 F.
[iv] Old Statistical Account, Alloa.
[v] OSA Ibid