That autumn I was quick getting away:

        only about

one-twenty on the rain-drenched Wednesday

I locked the premises and motored out,

all staff sent home, all workshop plant closed down,

all sense of any kind of business gone,

and not until I'd driven fifteen miles

along fast-flooding roads back into town,

past rival complexes just clinging on,

did rain let up and vision clear: those files

I'd never see again; that desk, the phone

        that shrilled all day

when first it was installed; not hear the moan

compressors made, be soothed by lathes, nor say

'Good morning George, alright?', or 'Nice one, Bert',

the human touch, no more, not to distract

them too long from their work, but just enough

to let them see I cared, and not to hurt

old feelings as I tried to breast the fact

of cancelled orders, creditors turned rough.

The friendly bank soon bared its teeth – drew blood;

        and then that bane,

the Tax Man, claimed his pound. And so, the flood.

(fine detail dims again as, too, the pain

recedes three autumns on; yet loss stays true.)

The rain comes vicious now – wipers full speed,

dipped headlights on, rear fogs – the journey seems

to lengthen every time I live it through,

involuntarily, as when the need

for sleep is scuppered by recurring dreams.

My crowd was breast-fed clichés, meal on meal:

        to pull its weight,

nose to the grindstone, shoulder to the wheel,

and, once it stepped inside the factory gate,

was wedded to its work; slapped all the time

by Newbolt's hand: Play up, and play the game.

Well, this sounds fine; but what about the bloke

who's anorexic, short-nosed, cannot climb

to reach the wheel, and never makes the team?

For him such wedding tales are guffs of smoke.

Again the morning paper hits the floor –

        banner headlined

PIT CLOSURES SHOCK – and umpteen thousand more

are facing broken marriages to mines.

A few, lured by that bit-of-fresh, fool's gold,

pin hopes on boarding-houses, market-stalls;

one man sits out his protest down the pit,

while lefties call for strikes with all the old

clenched-fist salutes, and aerosol the walls:

SCARGILL FOR KING and TARZAN IS A SHIT.

Their first few days of idleness will see
 
        in those it hits

undreamed-of traits in personality:

some will get by and others go to bits;

the strong become the weak, the weak make good

as quickly as it's said. Then, as the days

stack up to months or, as in my case, years,

high principles get trampled in the mud

where guile and self-survival point new ways

to quick back-pocket jobs, fiddles and fears

of being caught. But fears will yield, in time,

        a sort of pride,

though not the social pride that saw men climb

from old-world swamps: a sense that one's defied

the odds, the system; finger-licked the crème,

nose-thumbed some top brass, bested those who made

the rules and all the running. What survives?

Of Us: too early yet to tell. Of Them:

'Indifferents and Incapables'; their trade

in UB40s and P45s.

In brass-lined boardrooms up and down the land

        deep in regret

a million more redundancies get planned,

while chairmen's hiked-up salaries are set,

and Urban Councils chase arrears in rents.

Wide-boys, insider-dealers, some M.P.s

grow richer by a second home in Spain,

a custom-plated white Mercedes Benz,

that new portfolio. True-blue disease.

The spores of loss, somewhere becoming gain.