A Lesson in Dying

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At one time you could see fifteen working mines from Heppleburn churchyard. Now the nearest pit was miles away to the north beyond the horizon and only the chimneys of Blyth power station spoilt the impression of rural beauty. To the east farmland sloped down to the sea, the clean sweep of ploughed fields broken by the wooded valley which followed the burn to the coast and the houses of Heppleburn village. The sea was blue, almost purple, the tower of the old St Mary’s Island lighthouse was clear and white in the sunshine. Jack Robson put a bunch of chrysanthemums on his wife’s grave. He had come with flowers every week since she had died two years before.

The school and the church stood together on the hill, and as he straightened he heard children singing ‘We plough the fields and scatter’. The Northumberland voices shortened the consonants and lightened the vowels. Jack Robson had sung the same hymn in exactly the same way more than fifty years before in Heppleburn school. He thought he had wasted his time there. It seemed to him now that he had been a dull and unimaginative boy. There had been no dreams, no ambition. It had never occurred to him that he might move away from south-east Northumberland, and during National Service he thought of nothing but coming home. People said that the mind grew slower as it got older, but he thought his brain was sharper now than it had ever been. With his retirement from the pit he had begun to read voraciously as some children do, and became immersed especially in history and biography. He found he could understand what he read, that he even occasionally had the courage to disagree with the opinions expressed.

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