Elegy For Coal Power (Ready For When Coal Power Finally Retires)

Robin Ford

Over the breakfast table, Lyndell said “We need an elegy for coal.” so I wrote one. Although it says ‘poem’, it’s actually blank verse. And if you are wondering why the image is of South Woodford, that is where I lived when the Elegy begins.

Back then we had two sections in our shed.
One was for coke, the other was for coal.
I’d watch the coal-man fill them from the sacks
He tipped from over his shoulder, one by one.
In winter, home from school through pea-soup fog
I’d warm myself, and if the fire was coal
I’d watch the hissing flames that danced and spluttered
As gas escaped from fissures in the rock.
These flames, though full of life, brought early death
To Londoners who struggled to draw breath.

To visit my dad’s parents took a day —
A bus to London’s Underground and then
A red electric train to King’s Cross Station,
Where hissing express locos brought their trains
From distant towns, and willing shunters bustled.
All these were pow’red by coal; so too the plain
Tank locomotive that would haul our carriages.
No wonder sunlight struggled to get through
The glass roof panels — dust accreted there
A witness to what hovered all around us.
Our visit over, making our return
And standing on the dim-lit station platform,
I’d watch our train appearing through the night,
Its driver’s cab aglow with furnace light.

Is coal a demon? It has served us well,
Though what it served came always at a cost
In lives of miners, cruelly cut short
By accident, or else by chronic illness.
One high school break I visited a mine.
We put on overalls, and belt, and hat,
And miner’s lamp, and heavy battery.
And from a numbered hook each took a tag
In case we might encounter misadventure.
By miner’s cage, we dropped, and reached a place
Where men hewed coal with well-struck pick-axe blows.
I can’t recall, was this how coal was won?
Or were they making space for a machine?
In either case a high-risk occupation.
They stayed below and worked, but as for me —
Back on the surface, I had morning tea.

While reading once, a captioned photo told
How ‘coaling ship’ required all hands to carry
Numerous bags of coal to fill the bunkers,
Where later, men with shovels fed the fires
That made the steam to drive a battleship.
I marvelled at this feat of human toil:
The old book said, “The modern way is oil.”

We knew that on these tracks once hurried North
The proud Elizabethan, A4-hauled
Non-stop, 400 miles, from tired Kings Cross
To Edinburgh’s far sophistication.
We’d cycle home from school and reach the bridge
And wait there for the diesel prototype,
Whose lairy blue-gold paint bespoke a challenge.
In time, its offspring hauled the top expresses
While clanking, worn A4 steam locos passed,
Unkempt, in charge of lowly un-braked wagons.
Yes, this was change with two sides to the coin —
Effective and efficient: the obverse,
While strangely melancholic: the reverse.

Beside a road, when young, I wondered,
“Where Do cars’ exhausts, and smoke from bonfires go?”
Now science clearly shows, or so it’s said,
That humankind has found a limit which,
For us to prosper, we must keep within.
“Not so” say the opponents (they mistrust
The work of experts). “Coal must hold this fort”,
They fear, “or electricity become
Another battle won by new inventions.”
Tilting at windmills; blinded by the sun:
The final fight for coal pow’r has begun.

Throughout the ages coal pow’r underpinned
Our ways of life, some formed by coal’s disruptions.
But now coal has itself become disrupted
By new ideas whose time has just begun.
An elegy? Before coal pow’r has ended?
Yes. Surely, it will soon be pensioned off
To show, in cool museums, what was learnt
Through sev’ral hundred years of faithful service.
When that day comes, this is the tale I’ll tell:
“Though at a cost, coal power served us well.”