I OFTEN begin these posts with an apology, and once again I hadn't realised that it had been so long since I added to the Memories blog. This week, though, I've been reading What Price Happiness? by Dick Beavis, the Communist Spennymoor miner, and whatever you may think of his politics, he certainly wrote some fascinating descriptions of pitlife.

I have to admit that I don't understand all of his pitmatic vocabulary, but the description below is, I think, extraordinarily vivid about what life was like underground:

During the 1950s, of all the arduous tasks endured in the pits, none was worse than taking crop up. 'Crop coal' is what is left on the floor of the face of coal after the xcutting machine has gone over it, the fillers have filled off all the other coal and this crop, whish is still hard fast to the floor, must be taken up.

So my marra and I are detailed at the kist. There are about ten yards of crop halfway up number two face - we must go there.

The face is over 100 yards long and the coal two feet high. My marra was a very fat chap and creeping up that face was no joke. With the supporting timber in, planks and props, it would be about 18 inches high i some places. We would have a pick and shovel, our knee pads on, just shorts and vest, plus helmet and lamp. After crawling up the face to where the crop was, it was belly flapper. We could not sit up, we could not lie down, and the crop was as hard as the hobs of hell. So this was it. If you had a hard swipe at it sideways you got an eyeful. You had to just keep on hacking.

The pullers would be on pulling the belt into the new track, the drawers would be drawing the timber out from the old track, the cutters would be jibbing in to start cutting again: the whole face in turmoil.

As the drawers pulled or hacked the props from the old track, the whole lot of roof would cave in, and so it went on.

One of the pullers would say as he passed: "Which way would you run if the roof started to weight on?"

My marra would say, the sweat oozing from him: "The bugger who left this crop wants to come and get it off."

Then to make matters worse, the cuttermen, who had been changing the teeth on the jib of the cutting machine (which is best described as a huge black coffin), were starting and air blew from the main gateway at the bottom up the face and out into the return gateway, so the whole atmosphere was thick with dust kicked up by the machine.