A Welsh Miner's Life
HENRIQUES, FERNANDO
A Welsh Miner's Life Weekend in Dinlock. By Clancy Sigal. Houghton Mifflin. 197 pp. $3. Reviewed by Fernando Henriques Author "Coat Is Our Life," "Love in Action" Sociologists have often been...
...The result is that unsatisfied wives turn to men who also work at the pit but on surface jobs...
...Part of Britain it may be, but the standards and values of that Britain are here irrelevant...
...Yet it is the endeavor to appear a man in her eyes and those of the community that forces Davie back to the pit...
...The physical exhaustion engendered by work at the coal-face inhibits sexual activity...
...Several names on both sides of the Atlantic spring to the mind...
...The theme and story are only meaningful when played out against this background...
...The man pays her her "wage"—as he calls it—and expects her to look after the home and kids—that's her job...
...For me, at any rate, knowing the Yorkshire coal fields, its authenticity was remarkable...
...Davie cannot make up his mind...
...But how real is this supported uniformity...
...Adultery is not a pastime in a place like Dinlock...
...The great merit of Weekend in Dinlock is that it brings alive in a terrifying way one of these claustrophobic worlds...
...The very nature of mining creates the forces which dictate the pattern of life: the essential danger and extreme exhaustion inherent in coal-getting...
...Right at the outset it must be said that, whatever other merits the book may possess, it is a first-rate piece of sociological reportage...
...His is down the pit...
...Many Dinlock men served in the forces all over the world during the war...
...How does a world like this survive in the face of the great levellers of our society—the mass media of communication...
...The average person in our society has little knowledge or understanding of these closed worlds of industrial workers...
...That fact alone symbolizes the inescapable influence of the pit...
...And for the next quarter of an hour orates like a dynamilero or Hyndmanite, about the class war, and who will rule the roost, them or us, and its the end that counts not the means...
...Put in another way, sociology deals with that with which we are familiar—the society in which we live—anthropology with the unfamiliar...
...We are back to the pit again...
...Davie's predicament in Welfare State Britain is a very real one...
...Today educational and economic opportunities are open to thousands which before the war were denied them...
...Without it he will never be comfortable...
...Anthropologists do not suffer the same disadvantage...
...A pit village in Yorkshire is a world entire to itself...
...Bolton in a sense steals the book...
...Reviewed by Fernando Henriques Author "Coat Is Our Life," "Love in Action" Sociologists have often been accused of writing about the obvious in an unintelligible manner...
...Dealing as they do in the main with strange, exotic peoples any unintel-ligibility in their writing is written off as part of the arcane quality of these same peoples and thus not the anthropoligist's fault...
...In the United States this assumption, that we are familiar with our society because we live in it, has never been entirely accepted...
...As the picture unfolds we begin to understand the reality in Davie's mind...
...The young, who realize these opportunities, are faced with the problem of either cutting off their roots with the people from whom they come, but who no longer understand them, or of sacrificing the new life...
...Thus, there are only a handful of studies which purport to give an analytical picture of British institutions...
...She looks after the children and the home as any self-respecting miner's wife should and is forever reading trashy love stories...
...To return to my premise...
...Fine, fine, says Bolton...
...Without waiting for encouragement, he will yammer far into the night in a vein compounded of Keir Hardie and the ancient propaganda of the Wobblies...
...Leisure for the miner is bounded by drinking, gambling and watching soccer...
...My own research work in Britain has demonstrated to me very forcibly that the average middle-class individual in southern England is as familiar with the way of life of the northern miner as he is with life in the Trobriand Islands...
...Drinking is a universe of men to which women are grudgingly admitted—on weekends...
...Trade unionism as a sociological topic has produced a fairly extensive literature...
...it is made up parts of several actual mining villages...
...When he comes up, he relaxes in the pub or his club rather than at home...
...A partial explanation lies in the fact of the immense diversity of patterns of life in the U.S...
...The theme of the book is the conflict in the mind and heart of a native son of Dinlock—a mining village in the north of England—as to whether he should give up the pit and all it stands for to concentrate on his career as an artist...
...In his indecision he symbolizes the dilemma of much of British youth in this age...
...So long as coal continues to be mined in the traditional way, so long will the mores of Dinlock continue to function...
...In this community only by working in the pit does a man show his worth...
...Work-mates have to rely implicity on each other if injury and even death are to be avoided...
...Dinlock has its own.You can see the slag heaps from almost every house in the village...
...Britons, on the other hand, have always assumed that they know themselves...
...It was Bolton who moved the branch resolution supporting the revolutionary miners in November, 1956 and it was Bolton who organized the women to send food and clothes parcels to the Hungarian refugee camps in Austria...
...Davie warns me not to take Bolton seriously when he gives out with all that Bolshevik talk...
...On the other hand, his approach to day-to-day problems shows a startingly real appreciation of what really matters...
...For a woman to gamble on horses or dogs is regarded as out of place...
...In fact, as Sigal points out, the miner is really happy only when surrounded by his work-mates with a pint of beer in his hand...
...Yet he knows that outside, in a world that he has tasted and likes, people think differently and feel differently...
...The village is round his neck like a warm, comfortable scarf...
...it is a necessity...
...These are all passive male pursuits and listed in their order of importance...
...A long line of inquiry from the Lynds to David Riesman is testimony to this...
...Part of the answer lies in the tremendous tenacity in tradition and custom built up generation after generation...
...This at times bizarre combination is typical of many of the older generation of union leaders in Britain...
...Afterwards...
...as compared with the supposed uniformity of life in Britain...
...Dinlock as a place has no real existence...
...The relationship between this couple cannot come alive, as it cannot for so many others in Dinlock...
...It dominates every aspect of life...
...In the character of Bolton, Sigal has created a splendid picture of the British union boss...
...What this literature lacks is any sense of immediacy, any feeling of what actually happens at union meetings, what in fact the union is like as a living organism...
...For this we are greatly in Clancy Sigal's debt...
...What has Davie, with his painting and his London friends, in common with his good-natured but dull wife...
...It speaks well for Sigal's capacity as a drinking man that he stood up to several weekends in Din-lock while in search of his material...
...Part of that deficiency is made up by another aspect of Weekend in Dinlock...
...It is a conflict never fully resolved, nor in the nature of life could it be...
...The brilliance of the book lies in the way the storyteller, the author himself, manages to convey the feeling and actual smell of this confined, narrow but intense group of people...
...Yet we are brought back again and again to Davie's predicament—to the struggle between all that Dinlock represents and his art...
...Fool me if tha don't live to see the day when we shoot the bluidy capitalists instead of compensating them.' As for the bloody Hungarians, they were counter-revolutionary traitors to the cause of international proletarianism in the pay and under the directions of that Papist bitch, Mindzentv, and deserved what they got...
...On their return, the old way of life asserted itself and they picked up where they left off...
...Clancy Sigal's novel, Weekend in Dinlock, should do much to dissipate the ignorance of British working-class life...
...The dictation of the pit is felt in other fields...
...These closely knit groups of men tend to be associated not just in the pit but in the outside world, which leads to an obsession with the job marked by extraordinary preoccupation with price-lists (the pay for the job) and which forms the major topic of conversation in leisure moments...
...The scarf will suffocate him yet he hugs it to him...
Vol. 43 • September 1960 • No. 37
