A Place Called Freedom by Ken Follett Page A

shiver of excitement in her loins.
    The miner had undercut the coal across the width of the room and was hammering wedges into the face higher up. Like most of them he was half naked, and the massive muscles of his back bunched and rolled as he swung his hammer. The coal, having nothing below to support it, eventually crumbled under its own weight and crashed to the floor in lumps. The miner stepped back quickly as the freshly exposed coal face creaked and shifted, spitting tiny fragments as it adjusted to the altered stresses.
    At this point the bearers began to arrive, carrying their candles and wooden shovels, and Lizzie suffered her most horrifying shock yet.
    They were nearly all women and girls.
    She had never asked what miners ‘ wives and daughters did with their time. It had not occurred to her that they spent their days, and half their nights, working underground.
    The tunnels became noisy with their clatter, and the air rapidly warmed up, causing Lizzie to unfasten her coat. Because of the dark, most of the women did not notice the visitors, and their talk was uninhibited. Right in front of them an older man bumped into a woman who looked pregnant. “Out of the damn way, Sal,” he said roughly.
    “Out of the damn way yourself, you blind pizzle,” she retorted.
    Another woman said: “A pizzle’s not blind, it’s got one eye!” They all laughed coarsely.
    Lizzie was startled. In her world women never said “damn,” and as for “pizzle,” she could only guess what it meant. She was also astonished that the women could laugh at anything at all, having got out of bed at two o’clock in the morning to work for fifteen hours underground.
    She felt strange. Everything here was physical and sensory: the darkness, holding Jay’s hand, the half-naked miners hewing coal, Jay’s kiss, and the vulgar hilarity of the women—it was unnerving but at the same time stimulating. Her pulse beat faster, her skin was flushed and her heart was racing.
    The chatter died down as the bearers got to work shoveling the coal into big baskets. “Why do women do this?” Lizzie asked Jay incredulously.
    “A miner is paid by the weight of coal he delivers to the pithead,” he replied. “If he has to pay a bearer, the money goes out of the family. So he gets his wife and children to do it, and that way they keep it all.”
    The big baskets were quickly filled. Lizzie watched as two women picked one up between them and heaved it onto the bent back of a third. She grunted as she took the weight. The basket was secured by a strap around her forehead, then she headed slowly down the tunnel, bent double. Lizzie wondered how she could possibly carry it up two hundred feet of steps. “Is the basket as heavy as it looks?” she said.
    One of the miners overheard her. “We call it a corf,” he said to her. “It holds a hundred and fifty pounds of coal. Would you like to feel the weight, young sir?”
    Jay answered before Lizzie could speak. “Certainly not,” he said protectively.
    The man persisted. “Or perhaps a half-corf, such as this wee one is carrying.”
    Approaching them was a girl of ten or eleven, wearing a shapeless wool dress and a head scarf. She was barefoot and carried on her back a corf half full of coal.
    Lizzie saw Jay open his mouth to refuse, but she forestalled him. “Yes,” she said. “Let me feel the weight.”
    The miner stopped the girl and one of his women lifted the corf. The child said nothing but seemed content to rest, breathing hard.
    “Bend your back, master,” the miner said. Lizzie obeyed. The woman swung the corf onto Lizzie’s back.
    Although she was braced for it, the weight was much more than she had anticipated, and she could not support it even for a second. Her legs buckled under her and she collapsed. The miner, seemingly expecting this, caught her, and she felt the weight lifted from her back as the woman removed the corf. They had known what would happen, Lizzie realized as she