The Twilight Shift

By Lisa Blower

Perhaps it’s the sky that does it for her. She’d only said she’d cover tonight’s shift so she could get out of Sunday – his mother’s roasting and all it demands - and she doesn’t understand, his mother, way into her 70’s now and still wearing ‘50’s ways: a wife like her almost ending up like her when she’d married into the pits but come from the pots and kids had come too quick. They’re 13 and 14 now – not against any law to leave them, and who’s going to call when no-one calls at this non-time of night between washing the dishes and running the kids’ bath? It wouldn’t wash with his mother or hers, perhaps not even with him with his old-fashioned turn-ups and fancying himself in a tie, but she’d still heard herself saying – “Yeah, I can do tonight for you, Jen” – without really thinking about anything else. Like the cold. Or the time it took for the kettle to boil under the lukewarm flame; that the hot water-bottle leaked, and she’d forgotten to bring gloves. Forgotten too about food – assumed she’d not need it when asleep, surely, for most of the shift - but sleep was the last thing on her mind now that she’d seen the state of the lock. “It doesn’t go all the way across,” Jen had shown her when she’d arrived ten minutes too early like she’d needed to impress. “God knows how old this caravan is but wedge that stool up against the handle if you want it stop blowing open in the wind.” And a box of cherry Bakewells pointed at then, what was left of the milk and instructions for the loo so it would flush properly. She hoped Jen would not assume this to be a regular thing and thought of wolves, of the war, and weirdos in that order.

Perhaps it is the sky then that does it for her. In the mornings, even when the clouds are bruised like they are now, there’s still a lightness to it all, doesn’t feel so serious in here during the day when there are visitors all the time – wanted and not wanted and sometimes a journalist looking for a new angle or someone’s child looking for their mum. The mums are not home anymore but elsewhere and not always close to home either. Sometimes the children relish in this new freedom but most find it strange, not at all sure what happens when mum’s not home barking her orders like a shop steward. Like she’d told her own kids not an hour ago – “Wash your dirty plates and faces and don’t answer the door. If grandma calls about Sunday don’t tell her where I am. Your dad’ll clock off at 8, be back for 9. Bed for 9.30 or else.” So easy to tell someone else what to do with their life.

So perhaps there is something about the sky right now. In this time that is no longer day but not quite the night - this in-between-ness of two separate times that have too much definition. She too had definition once, especially in her thighs, but now that definition had gone. She thinks: This is usually the time when I watch the soaps, when I toy with the idea of a bath that I never run for myself. Instead leaning on the doorframe of the living room that needs redecorating with the tea-towel still in her hand, half-watching what the kids are watching and thinking, if I sit down right now, I will not get up again. Then he will say to her when back from his shift – “How long have you been sat there for?” – like his father had said to his mother, their mothers and fathers before that when part of generations who did not sit down, which is why she’s still to sit down on one of the caravan bunks. She moves things about instead. Newspapers, leaflets, a milk-bottle of dead flowers picked from grass verges as someone walked here, and pens drop onto the floor one by one. So many pens with so much to say, and she picks them up with other things that have fallen into the crooks and the crannies between table and bunks and finds something not dissimilar to herself down there; something like sediment, dusty and mute. She’d not been one of those wives back in ’84 but the wifely-wife who’d looked after, stayed home, and supported the cause from there a bit like this table leg: flimsily, about to come apart.  

It could then well be something about the sky out there that is making her re-see things for what they really are as the cold takes hold, and she blows into hands like the too-young wife she’d been on that Christmas eve: married in passed down wedding gown and rings that didn’t fit when gold is not to be buried with bones, and all these women on the rota had married young too with that sort of hope. Then life had unravelled, then life had been darned, and now the stitching had all come loose again. She looked about the caravan not yet needing to take a match to the Davy lamps she thinks crass when this is 1993. The women did not sew in here. Did not make beds. Launder clothes. Stretch the housekeeping until the word ‘no’ was all she said. These women planned and plotted, drove a big van with a rusted exhaust and no seatbelts to rally other women of other worlds by showing them the solidarity as they’d shown them. No pit will sleep but haunt the land, and she looked at her name on the rota sellotaped to a cupboard above the kettle, saw how the steam had almost erased her name. She used the permanent marker from the plastic cup to make her name stand out. 

There was still something left in the sky out there to shed enough light on what she’d begun to believe in – like whomever had ripped out their Libra horoscope from the newspaper as something to believe in should the scales tip the other way. A decade after the strike with the pit in terminal twilight; in this caravan inside the colliery gates where the banners can be seen from the dual carriageway and what’s left of the men salute – and she must not let the brazier die – that’s what it says on the back of the caravan door with its dodgy bolt. Do not let the fire go out. She tears up the newspaper into strips and makes Staffordshire knots with them. Did not know that paper could be this strong. 

Like she did not know that the sky could do this. Perhaps it is something to do with the redness of the banners propped against it or in the blunt definition of the last shaft illuminated by the first star. And though the men are still down there, they are not working it like they’d worked it but preparing it for what next. Her husband is down in its bowels right now for the last hour of his shift – always so far away from her - and she suddenly sees this sky as the only sky her husband has seen. There’s a beauty to it, a tranquillity – like she still sees the beauty in the way her husband washes away the day at the kitchen sink whilst she leans against the doorframe with the tea-towel in her hands; how she waits for the moment when the black foam turns white so she can remove his tea from the oven – and she thinks something then she has not thought before; that the colour of the sky out there will be the exact colour of her husband’s hands when all that black-stuff ingrained in the pores has completely washed off. Then he will think himself nothing, she thinks.   

Perhaps it was the sky right then, in its final moments before the blanket mining dark that had her list, with bullet point stars, all the things she could do to get her hands dirty in this fight. And with that permanent marker that seeped through the page, she wrote in the pit camp diary – Put me down for Sundays and two nights a week – gave no more thought to dodgy bolts and unlocked doors, then went outside to restoke the fire. 

Note on the text: In 1993, post the government’s announcement to close all 31 remaining working pits, the North Staffs Miners’ Wives Action Group towed a touring caravan to the entrance of Trentham Colliery and established a 24hour pit camp in protest of its imminent closure. Within three months of their occupation, three of the women had chained themselves to number two shaft where they remained for 80 hours until brought out by Arthur Scargill as women who belonged in history with the chartists and suffragettes. ‘The Twilight Shift’ is inspired in part by their Pit Camp diaries, in particular how women, who had not participated in the 1984 strike action, saw this camp as their contribution to the struggle. 

Lisa Blower is an award-winning short story writer and novelist representing the marginalised and underrepresented voices of women past and present from her home-city of Stoke-on-Trent. Author of ‘Sitting Ducks’ (Fair Acre Press, 2016), ‘’It’s Gone Dark over Bill’s Mother’s’ (Myriad Editions, 2019) and Pondweed (Myriad Editions, 2020), she is regular contributor to working-class writing such as ‘Common People’ (2019), and a champion of regional voices. She is currently working with the North Staffs Miners’ Wives Action Group Archives and The New Vic Theatre on ‘The Miner Birds Monologues’ as part of the 40year commemorations since the Miner’s Strike. She lectures in Creative Writing at Keele University.