The Bonny Pit Laddie

I first read this book when I was eleven, and now I'm reading it with fresh eyes, decades later. Sound and fury, it has not. The main protagonist, young Dick Ullathorne, does NOT in fact eventually become the Supreme Ruler of the World. No wizard rocks up to anoint him with mysterious magical powers. He doesn't even time travel. He's a product of a simpler time where children roam free and grow up fast, and where children get some concessions because of their youth, but not as many as more contemporary readers may have come to expect.

This book is a gently sympathetic yet dispassionate portrayal of a boy born and brought up in the world of the coal mines. It is not a window into desperately gritty mining life that we get in Cronin's Citadel or Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley. Dick and his parents and his older brother are overtaken by events larger than themselves, yet through a combination of luck and pluck, there is hope at the end of the day. You finish the book wondering how much of it is autobiographical.

For best results, pair with:
Hot sausage rolls and a blanket.

Author: Frederick Grice (who dedicates it to all the people of the colliery in which he was born)
Illustrated by Brian Wildsmith
Oxford University Press
First published 1960 (my edition hardback, 1966)