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more. Your friends have all gone off to become mature adults in boring jobs. You've not got enough brains to get a really good job, one that would take you away from the area. So what's left? The pits are closed. This town is becoming a dump. I'm not going to stay put in a dump. Not me. Maybe I'm not going to make anything of myself in Canada, but I'm not going to make anything of myself here either, so where's the difference?'

    'But you've got us!' Mary whispered in anger and frustrated love. Tom was silent for a moment, his eyes forced finally to turn away from those of his fiery sister.

    Tes,' he said, 'but what happens when that's not enough?
    When that's not enough and I'm too old and weighed down to do anything about it? You won't always be here . . .'

    'But I will, Tom, I will.'

    '. . . and Mum and Dad haven't got more than ten or twenty years left, have they? Everybody dies, Mary. It's the only fact of life.'

    Tou're sick!' she shouted. He shrugged his shoulders.

    'Maybe I am,' he said, closing his eyes.

    Mary ran to the window and stood there, her blurred eyes staring out on darkness. The night was still. She used to be able to see the winding-wheel at the colliery from this window, but now it had been dismantled. A good home had been found for it in a mining museum in the Lothians.

    An old man was shuffling past uneasily below her. He stopped and leaned against the lamp-post, seemed to gasp for breath, then finally forced himself to move off again, his shoes dragging over the pavement. Tom was speaking behind her. He was approaching the window. She did not want him to look out. She turned and went to hug him, and there they stood, in an embrace of silent childishness, until Tom's feet got cold on the linoleum and he persuaded Mary to get back into bed.

5

    It was a strange time, that autumn. Mary's father was drinking quite heavily, though her mother tried to hide the fact from everyone and succeeded only in hiding the truth from herself. Hugh Miller would sit in his chair until the early hours of the morning. Then he would say that he was going for a walk and would not be seen again until late evening, dead drunk usually and shouting along the length of the street about the treachery of the National Coal Board, the dirty tricks, the cruelty of it all. Mary, horrified and in her nightdress, would watch him from her bedroom window.
    She would watch her mother, hair falling to her waist in preparation for bed, having to leave the house and manoeuvre the roaring drunk around the lamp-post, which threw a garish orange glow over the proceedings, lending to them the hazy quality of something happening on a screen.
    Mary would watch them weave their way into the house, would hear her father retching into the toilet bowl or the sink. Tom would breathe heavily, pretending sleep, his pillow over his head. Mary was sure that he saw it merely as a ploy to stop him from leaving, and this seemed to make him all the more determined.

    'What's the use?' her father cried. 'What's the use, eh?

    Where's the reason in it? They've shut the pits and they've shut this and they've shut that. What's a man supposed to do? No bloody use to anyone. That's me.' Mary's mother would whisper with patient vehemence at him, and having got him into bed at last, a basin at his side, would look in on Mary and Tom, both of whom would be lying in shade and in heavy silence, a lack of even breathing, which would confirm their mother's worst fears.

    In the morning the pattern would be repeated. Mary grew sullen. A lot of things were to blame apart from her father's new-found dependence. Some of it had to do with a large prevailing mood in the town. Teenagers there had been brought up in the Sixties, had been told of the good life to come. Now, the Seventies approaching, they were being shown something else, and were seeing at last that behind every promise lay the bad news. There seemed nothing left to hope for. Everything was slipping further