Chapter 1

CHAPTER I

THE EARLY MARRIED LIFE OF THE MORELS

"THE BOTTOMS" succeeded to "Hell Row". Hell Row was a block of thatched,
bulging cottages that stood by the brookside on Greenhill Lane.
There lived the colliers who worked in the little gin-pits two
fields away. The brook ran under the alder trees, scarcely soiled
by these small mines, whose coal was drawn to the surface by
donkeys that plodded wearily in a circle round a gin. And all
over the countryside were these same pits, some of which had been
worked in the time of Charles II, the few colliers and the donkeys
burrowing down like ants into the earth, making queer mounds
and little black places among the corn-fields and the meadows.
And the cottages of these coal-miners, in blocks and pairs here
and there, together with odd farms and homes of the stockingers,
straying over the parish, formed the village of Bestwood.

Then, some sixty years ago, a sudden change took place.
The gin-pits were elbowed aside by the large mines of
the financiers. The coal and iron field of Nottinghamshire and
Derbyshire was discovered. Carston, Waite and Co. appeared.
Amid tremendous excitement, Lord Palmerston formally opened
the company's first mine at Spinney Park, on the edge of Sherwood Forest.

About this time the notorious Hell Row, which through growing
old had acquired an evil reputation, was burned down, and much dirt
was cleansed away.

Carston, Waite & Co. found they had struck on a good thing,
so, down the valleys of the brooks from Selby and Nuttall, new mines
were sunk, until soon there were six pits working. From Nuttall,
high up on the sandstone among the woods, the railway ran, past the
ruined priory of the Carthusians and past Robin Hood's Well, down to
Spinney Park, then on to Minton, a large mine among corn-fields;
from Minton across the farmlands of the valleyside to
Bunker's Hill, branching off there, and running
north to Beggarlee and Selby, that looks over at Crich and the hills
of Derbyshire: six mines like black studs on the countryside,
linked by a loop of fine chain, the railway.

To accommodate the regiments of miners, Carston, Waite and Co.
built the Squares, great quadrangles of dwellings on the hillside
of Bestwood, and then, in the brook valley, on the site of Hell Row,
they erected the Bottoms.

The Bottoms consisted of six blocks of miners' dwellings,
two rows of three, like the dots on a blank-six domino, and twelve
houses in a block. This double row of dwellings sat at the foot
of the rather sharp slope from Bestwood, and looked out, from the
attic windows at least, on the slow climb of the valley towards Selby.

The houses themselves were substantial and very decent.
One could