Lodge Row, by Gareth Allonby
An original novel extract set in the twentieth century.
By the November of 1926 the lockout had lasted seven months, and in Easington Lane the children had learned to stop asking for bread before Thursday. Tom Rutter had dug the last of the potatoes from the allotment in October. He had sold the clock, then the fender, then his father’s fiddle, which he could not play. Each Saturday he stood in the queue at the chapel hall with the other men for soup ladled out by the lodge women, and each Saturday he looked at the floor so that he would not have to look at his brother Sid, who stood at the head of the queue with the lodge committee and shook every man’s hand.
On the Sunday night Tom told Annie he was going back.
The colliery had opened its gates again the week before. Longer shifts, less money, and the owners’ word that no man who came back would be victimised. Eleven men had gone in. Their names were chalked on the wall of the institute with a word beside them that the children were slapped for repeating.
Annie did not argue. She sat by the fire with his pit clothes across her knees and mended the knee of his trousers, which she had patched twice already, and the only sound was the needle going in and out and the coals settling. When she had finished she folded the trousers on the chair, set his boots beside them, and went up to bed without a word. He sat a long time looking at the folded clothes. Upstairs the youngest was coughing, the dry, rattling cough that had started in September and had not stopped.
He left the house at half past four. The street was dark and the frost was in the cobbles, and every window he passed seemed to him to have someone standing behind it. At the bottom of the bank he could see the lamps at the pit gate and the shapes of men round a brazier. He had known they would be there. He had thought about it all night and still he had not prepared himself for the sound of his own boots on the road, which seemed to fill the valley.
There were twenty of them. Some he had worked beside for fifteen years. Nobody shouted. A policeman stood by the gatepost stamping his feet, and the pickets moved aside to make a lane for Tom to walk through, and the silence was worse than anything they could have said.
Sid was at the end of the line, nearest the gate. He did not move aside. Tom stopped in front of him and they stood there with the brazier smoke between them.
‘The bairn’s badly, Sid.’
His brother looked at him. Then he looked away, out over the black heap and the winding gear, as if Tom were not there at all, and he stepped back half a pace. It was enough room for a man to pass.
Tom went through. In the lamp cabin the clerk wrote his name in a ledger without looking up. He took his lamp and walked out onto the bank towards the cage, and behind him, outside the gate, one of the men began to sing. It was the hymn they sang at every lodge funeral. One by one the others took it up, low and steady, and they were still singing when the cage dropped, and Tom stood in the dark with his lamp in his hand and listened to it go up and away from him until there was nothing above him but the rock.
“Tom is presented as a coward who betrays the men he works with.”
To what extent do you agree with this view?
You should write about:
You must refer to the language used in the text to support your answer.
120 exam-style questions on Eduqas GCSE English Language 1.3 Critical reading and comprehension, covering 1.3.1 Identifying and interpreting themes, ideas and information, 1.3.2 Reading in different ways for different purposes, 1.3.4 Supporting a point of view with textual evidence, and 1.3.6 Reflecting critically and evaluatively on text. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.