Below is an extract from Joseph Keating - My Struggle for Life (1916)

...All the boys in school looked forward with longing to the day when they would be allowed to be-in work. Release from the boredom of school might have influenced them but my happiness was not so much in leaving school as in the idea of actually going to work underground. We saw the pit boys coming home in their black clothes, with black hands and faces, carrying their food-boxes, drinking tins, and gauze lamps. They adopted an air of superiority to mere schoolboys. We humbly bowed to this. They did experienced danger amidst thundering falls of roof, and had mysterious adventures ' in deeps, levels and headings with blue balloons of gas threatening to explode around their lamps. They associated with big men and wonderful horses. They earned six shillings and nine pence every week. Never would one of them dream of giving up the pits. Life began to be worth living when once they had gone down...

My eagerness to go down the pit was so great that as soon as I came home, I interviewed Dai Morgan the overman of Navigation Colliery, on my own initiative, and showed him my qualifications: I should be twelve years of age on the following day and had entirely satisfied Parliament that my education was complete. He said:-

‘Right you arr, Kaet'n.'

Next morning, I was up at half past five. It was a grey, sunless morning, but I was thrilling with happiness, and I could scarcely sit peacefully at the table to take my breakfast of bread and butter and tea without milk.

My mother put my food in a small tin box and filled a tin 'jack' with cold tea, and said 'May the Lord bring you safe home!' as I left the house.

I went to the pit-head in an ecstasy - the colliery was just behind our house - with a thousand men and boys, amidst iron trams, iron tracks, grease and machinery. I was given a long gau4,e-lamp, called a 'sprag', entered the pit-cage and, crushed in between about a dozen boys and men, was lowered into the darkness. The swift descent took my breath away and I gasped with fright and clung to my friends' dusty clothes.

That first descent into Navigation coal pit, at half past six o'clock, on the morning of my twelfth birthday, April 16^th., 1883, interested me wonderfully. As we dropped below the brink of the shaft, the pale daylight seemed to spring upwards and vanish like a flying ghost. For a moment after that I could see nothing at all. Then faint yellow rays appeared from our lamps, and I could see as well as feel the forms of men and boys with me.

They had ranged themselves in two lines against the iron sides of the 'carriage', as they called it. Each man and boy had his hand raised, clinging to a bar. One of the men lifted my hand to a bar and said good-humouredly:

'Ketch by here, wassy; or you'll tumble out, p'raps.'

All were kind to a beginner. They could tell by my schoolboy clothes that this was my first day in the mine.

We were going down so rapidly - the pit was a quarter of a mile deep - that our lamplight seemed to me to be always running up.

I the time a terrific wind kept shrieking and blowing bits of coal into our faces. The tiny, flying things struck my forehead and cheeks sharply and painfully. I felt as if I were falling through the earth.

The quarter of a minute which was all the time taken for the quarter of a mile drop, had been a magical period in which I had passed from happiness to terror, and back again from terror to happiness. I was delighted to be in the pit.

There seemed to be a kind of distinction about it which made me think I was doing something very fine. I was especially proud of being with men and horses. The good humoured voices of men and boys, as they tramped slowly inwards, their laughter, snatches of song, and lively chatter, the neighing of animals, jingle of harness, and thud of hoofs in the dust, gave me a feeling of real happiness.

‘Kaet’n,’ Jim said, 'you shall go with Darling. Take care of yourself now, mind you. She is nasty sometimes. Tom Pugh!’ he shouted, to the darkness beyond. Joe Kaet’n will door with you.’

‘Darling’ was a little brown mare with one flashing eye and a red hole where the other eye ought to have been. She had run wild once too often in the pit, and had knocked the eye out by colliding with a tram of coal which was in her way. Tom Pugh was her driver, and I was now her door-boy.

All that day I followed Darling and her vagaries. I rode behind oil the coal trams which she pulled. When she stopped at a door I ran ahead, opened it, and stood by it, like my lady's page, while she and her load passed through. Then I closed the door and had another ride behind.

Dinner-time came, and I sat with the other boys on the ground, in soft, black dust which was very comfortable. Under a timbered roof, we opened our food boxes. my bread and cheese, and the tea from my 'jack', had a sweeter taste that day than any food or drink I hid ever taken. Rats were running impatiently down the dark roadside. anxious to get the crumbs.. We could see the rat’s eyes sometimes. They were like sparks of fire in the blackness.

We did not recommence work for a quarter of an hour after dinner. We took a ‘spell’. I stretched myself at full length in the dust as the others did, and we talked on some interesting subjects. A rat ran over my face, and the touch of its smooth, cold, little feet on my cheeks made me shiver with fright, and I sat up. The other boys laughed. I soon got used to the rats.

I wanted to be seen ,going home with the men from the pit, black, vividly black, so black as to be nearly invisible.

My wish was granted. I was seen by most of my friends in my black clothes, with my face black, my hands black, and pit-lamp and 'box-and 'back' black, as I came home. My another smiled at my comical appearance as I went into the house. But there was a sigh in her smile.