George Harte

They say we are made of stardust but my folk were made of coal dust, ingrained in their faces and their lungs until it eventually killed them, my dad was a coal miner and his dad before him, they were both tea total, i was neither but I was born and raised in the great North Durham coalfield six years after the end of the second World War which no one in our village who lived through it ever spoke about. Our childhoods were spent playing in the looming shadows of the brick built pit heads crowned with their iron, cage wheels and along side them the ominous pit heaps that scared us and drew us to them at the same time and which we regularly climbed against our parents wishes to see the world from above and wonder.