THERE is a thick wad of mansize paper tissues under Ben Aitken's pillow ready for when the coughing starts every morning. Just in case he runs short, he has 17 large boxes in his cottage kitchen in Wheatley Hill, County Durham.

"I cough for hours in the morning to try to clear my lungs," says Mr Aitken, 78, who is one of 110,000 ex-miners waiting to have their compensation claim settled.

Like so many other North-East men of his generation, who had no alternative to mining, he left school to follow his father down the pit.

In 1936 he started a hard life underground that was to last 46 years, wreck his lungs and give him permanent pins and needles in his hands.

"Even if you were not at the face everybody was breathing in the muck in the air," he recalls.

Starting at the age of 14, one of his first jobs was manhandling heavy metal tubs onto the conveyor belt.

He takes pride in the fact that he worked alongside his father, George Lindsay Aitken, at the local pit.

Mr Aitken senior had ten children and remarried a widow with ten of her own children after his wife died.

"He was a very strong man. He hewed coal until he was 66," says Mr Aitken.

By the mid 1950s Ben Aitken qualified as a deputy but not before spending many years working in appalling conditions, breathing in clouds of fine coal dust that gave every miner his characteristic black face.

"You see the height of that," he says, pointing to a table about 18 inches high, "I was working on my side in seams that high with just a pick and a shovel." He wheezes and pauses between sentences to get his breath.

"In some districts it was so hot you were working in just your boots," he recalls.

From hewing coal by hand to using heavy drilling equipment, Mr Aitken has done most jobs underground.

While he retired in 1981 he remembers the many men who didn't make it.

"A man died in my arms in my district after a shotfiring accident," he says.

"It happened at 5.25am on September 21, 1966," he says.

Two months later he saw another man fatally injured beside him after a metal tube fell on him.

Although his aged miners' cottage is filled with memorabilia, an image of a miner carved in black coal, a Davy lamp and a watercolour of the local pit, Mr Aitken has no illusions about the way of life which is slowly fading away.

"It was a terrible, hard life. I always told my sons, I never want you to go down the pit."

Even though he already has a pension for 80 per cent disability for emphysema - and recently received an interim payment of £2,000 - he has been told he will need to see a specialist before his full compensation claim can be considered.

A basic breath test reportedly revealed signs of asthma - which meant his claim would be put on hold. He admits he was "raging" with anger when he was told.

"A specialist told me I had emphysema years ago - nobody has asthma in my family," he says, visibly upset, loosening his black tie.

The tie is worn in memory of his beloved wife Ruth, who died on July 1. They had, he says, 54 blissful years of marriage.

Although she died of cancer, Mr Aitken says his long fight for compensation played a part. "Watching me suffering every day caused the death of my wife," says Mr Aitken, who does not expect you to contradict him.

Long retired from Easington Colliery, where he was transferred in 1968 when Wheatley Hill pit closed, he lives mainly for the local working men's club, where he has been chairman or secretary for the last 43 years.

He can just about walk the short distance to the club but he has to stop four of five times to get his breath. "Without the car I'd be knackered," says Mr Aitken, an amateur historian and poet, who has written about the origins of Wheatley Hill club since it was founded by a choir in 1903.

A life-long Labour supporter who claims he is distantly related to one of the party's early pioneers, former Scottish miner Keir Hardie, through the Fife branch of his family, he feels bitter about the length of time it is taking to compensate the thousands of Durham miners.

"The whole business is a bloody shambles. The people around here are all saying Tony Blair is letting us down," says Mr Aitken.

He says he has ample to live on, but wants what is due to him because of what he has suffered in the past and what he continues to suffer.

"The solicitors say I might get £40,000 but I would give it up for a chest like yours," he says.

Mr Aitken wonders if he will be still alive to enjoy the pay-out but he has no doubt what he wants to do with it. "I would give it to my grandchildren," he says, looking proudly at the many framed photographs of his family.