Is there life elsewhere?

I learned not to chop down trees because the fairies would take revenge from my Irish grandmother and have treated it as something of a joke all my life but one thing I’ve never treated as a joke, nor can explain, is how the rock in a mine gives warning. I’m not talking about deep gold mines but the old coal mines where the roof was deliberately induced to collapse to fill the mined out void and take the pressure off the workings. When the roof was collapsing regularly there was a calm atmosphere, but when the roof hung, there was a tension about the place. That could be accounted for by the humans worrying in the face-line, but I was lucky to be taught to ‘listen’ to the mine ghost on my first experiences of mining. The incident is recorded in Sadie’s Boy but let me summarise – I was working night shift with an old chap replacing wooden props that had been damaged by the roof sagging a bit when he suddenly told me to go further out. I couldn’t understand it at the time but he told me to listen. About five minutes later there was a roof fall where we had been working. When I asked how he knew, I was told the mine told him. He maintained each mine had a ghost, not the spirit of men who had been killed, just its own spirit, and I would ignore it at my peril. I never have.

Does the earth have a spirit? I don’t think so. My thinking leads me to the idea that the people working in the mine create a spirit, sometimes benevolent, sometimes vindictive, but certainly a spirit. (A bit like ships, you will never convince a sailor that some ships are not unlucky.) I worked in a copper mine where every Christmas break there was a serious accident or near accident.

The truth is we are so taken up with finding if there is live on another planet that we are ignoring the fascination of alternative life and its spirit in the world around us.

I’ve written other stories about those early days in the mine, one of them Love in a Poke is included here under Short Stories.