Ian McMillan: Tomorrow I will mourn what we have lost: continuity, collectivism and pride

My dad and I had been to Wombwell Baths in the morning as he carried on his determined but ultimately unsuccessful attempts to teach me to swim.

I thrashed about at the shallow end for a bit and then we got out and he had a cup of tea and I had a Kit Kat. His hair stuck up like a brush and he tamed it with an old comb he’d had since his Navy days.

My mam had promised us meat and tatie pie for dinner and I was happy because I loved her meat and tatie pie. She could make the most heavenly crust and her gravy was the kind I imagined the Queen might have when she had meat and tatie pie.

We got home and my dad went in the garden and I started reading my Batman comic. It was late morning by now and the meat should have been on for the pie, the kitchen filling with steam, and my mam should have been getting the taties ready. Instead, she was watching our little black and white TV. She had her pinny on and she was screwing a handkerchief up in her hand. Her eyes were red. My dad joined her in his gardening trousers and they sat on the settee together. It may be a trick of my fallible memory but I seem to think they were holding hands.

It was the day of Sir Winston Churchill’s funeral. The coffin had left Westminster Hall at quarter to 10 in the morning and made its way slowly along the streets of London to St Paul’s Cathedral for the service. And I never got my pie.

My mam and dad were of a wartime generation that venerated Churchill; they were always moved by great oratory and my mam knew some of his speeches off by heart. Round our way, of course, he was remembered for other things as well, like the authorising of the use of troops during a strike in the South Wales coal mines in 1910. But on that Saturday he was just someone being buried, someone who was delaying my dinner. I clutched my stomach and pretended to be suffering severe hunger pains, and my mam tetchily authorised the opening of the biscuit barrel. I chomped on a Rich Tea pretending it was pie crust. The cortege moved terribly slowly. And now, tomorrow, we’re going to have another big occasion, a state funeral in all but name. And I know where I’ll be, whatever the weather: I’ll be on a long walk, as far away from a TV as I can get. I’ll set off from my house, walk down the street and turn right down Edderthorpe Lane past the cottages built for old retired miners. I’ll walk to the gap, to the stile by the field and I’ll walk down to where the river bends, towards where Houghton Main pit used to be. I’ll stand at the top of the hill and remember when the pitmen used to walk down and up the path when the shifts changed.

I’ll think about what old Jim Marsden told me when he passed me once on the path, that if you stood very still you could hear the miners calling to each other underground.

I stood and listened many times, but I never heard a thing. Sometimes a distant ice cream man playing My Old Man’s A Dustman, but I knew he wasn’t at the coal face; it would melt his 99s.

Back in 1965, I never got my pie. I cut myself a big lump of cheese and ate it too quickly and thought I was going to be sick.

Every so often my mam would make a half-hearted attempt to roll some pastry or peel some taties but the solemn music and the gravelly narrator drew her back to sit in front of the television. Eventually, at teatime or what felt more like bedtime, we had corned beef sandwiches and I picked every last crumb off my plate.

Tomorrow I’ll walk down to where the pit used to be and I’ll cross the main road, walking over the bridge. If you carry on down from the bridge towards Grimethorpe you pass loads of industry: the huge ASOS Warehouse that distributes fashionable clothes all over the world, a brickworks, a kitchen place and lots of other businesses. But something has been dented and almost lost: continuity, collectivism, pride.

I’ll stand and look at the big pond, watch a swan taking off slowly, majestically, into the spring sky. Maybe I’ll hear that ice cream man again.

The person they’re burying tomorrow called the miners 
“The Enemy Within”. I think 
I’ll go home later and make a 
meat and tatie pie. Lots of 
gravy, fit for a king. After the funeral, of course. I’ll still be walking for a while.