Journey

By Grant White - Our group's writing prompt was 'Journey'

Earnest King took his shovel, pickaxe & the clothes he stood up in & moved his family to the other side of the country.

In those days if you were bankrupt all you could keep were the clothes you stood up in, a change of underwear, a mac, an overcoat & the tools of your trade, which in Ernest Kings case as a former miner were a shovel & a pickaxe. He even had to buy his cat for one shilling, from their administrator, about £20 pounds today,. A cat then could be got for nothing.

His wife had got him out of the coal mine several years before & into her grocery business witch she started by selling vegetables from a horse & cart.

By the time of the depression They had three shops.

They gave food on tick to his former work mates & who couldn’t or wouldn’t pay them back.

One shop burnt down & wasn’t insured. The other two couldn’t survive.

The family of six moved.

When they arrived at the seaside there was no work the only option was beachcombing, collecting coal from the beach & bagging it up to sell & make not quite enough to live on.

It was a booming holiday town though & it needed tunnels for drains & cellars & government bunkers.
So eventually Earnest became a council foreman with a team of diggers.

When War was declared nothing happened – the phony war.

The coast was a prime target for shelling across the channel.

Earnest King his sons & son in law decided that if the council weren’t going to build air raid shelters they would build one themselves.

So they dug a tunnel & excavated a communal shelter on a spare plot of land at the end of the street. 

The council were humiliated & furious & tryed to stop the work but were frightened of by the streets residents. 

A man from the council & a photographer appeared while digging was going on.

The man posed in shirt sleeves all smiles in front of the excavation holding a jackhammer .& took all the credit for the public spirited initiative.

Behind the council official in the back of the tunnel shrouded in darkness avoiding publicity is Ernest King.

…The photo still exists as does his shovel & pickaxe.