Writing Together 2003/4

Writing at the Coalface

by Katrina Porteous

Whenever I visit a school, I ask the children to work exactly as I do. My poems are inspired by places I love: their human and natural history. I want children to discover their own roots in landscape and community, and to write their history as poetry.

Enthusiasm is everything. This approach is only possible when I'm sufficiently connected with a place to write about it myself. Faced with 34 Year 3-4s in Kramel First School, Cramlington, an unfamiliar town, I had to do my homework.

Cramlington is Northumberland's 'new town,' created in the 1950s from several former colliery villages. Fortunately, I was already familiar with mining history and culture. Further research, including interviews with older residents, took five days. Before the workshop, I met class teacher Mrs Purvis. The children had studied some local history in Year 1, and many had relatives who were retired miners; but most of what we would discuss would be new to them.

I began by asking the children to tell me all they knew about Cramlington. They buzzed with ideas. I read them two of my own mining poems, inspired by landscape and history. We looked at some rocks, coal, fossils. Everyone was excited. The children had never connected fossils and Cramlington before. We became detectives, sifting for clues.

First we looked at maps to see how the town had grown. I had assembled folders, consisting of pairs of photographs of the same site taken 100 years apart. Together we identified places and discovered how they had changed. The children were interested to hear that I had interviewed older people: I suggested that they ask older relatives about Cramlington's past.

After break, we looked at pictures of hewers working underground, and at lists of fatalities. We discussed the disaster at New Hartley, three miles away, where 204 miners died. The class identified strongly with children their own age who worked in Cramlington's pits 200 years ago. They chose this subject for their group poem.

I explained that we would collect ideas on the board, just as I scribble thoughts in a notebook before beginning to write. This session was noisy and productive. I asked the children to imagine themselves underground with each sense in turn. We selected the best descriptive and comparative words. I asked: What are you doing? 'Pulling a coal tub.' How does it feel? 'Heavy.' Heavy as what? Can you think of a stronger verb than 'pulling'? How do you move underground? What else moves like that? Ideas spilled onto the board.

Soon it was time to construct our poem. Where should we start? The phrase 'feeling trapped like a slave' stood out. I explained that I often end a poem with the line I like best.

Every phrase of this poem originated with a different child. The questions which prompted and structured them, however, were mine. The point of this process is to guide each child to think like a poet. As we described the darkness and physical effort, strong images emerged, so we scrapped our original opening lines. This was an important lesson in drafting. Other lines needed to be rearranged before the poem read smoothly out loud:

I am creeping like a fox
Down a tunnel
Dark as midnight,
Dragging a coal tub
Heavy as a hundred bricks.

I am struggling, sweating.
My heart beats fast as a hammer.
My legs shake like leaves on a tree.

Around me,
Sad faces, dark as nocturnal creatures,
All feeling trapped like slaves.

We began the afternoon with a song; local, 19th century, entitled 'The Blackleg Miner.' This led us to discuss social conditions: housing, coal fires, outside lavatories, tin baths. The children then wrote their own poems; unrhymed, starting a new line for each new thought. I gave them a structure: think of one thing in Cramlington that was different 100 years ago. Give me a snapshot of it in a sentence beginning 'Once...' Then another snapshot, beginning 'Now...'

The children wrote happily, noisily, using photographs as prompts. Mrs Purvis kept order, while I moved around, advising and encouraging. Afterwards, we read the poems out loud. More might have been gained at this point if we had run the workshop over two mornings. Late afternoon was not the time to try to develop the children's writing further. I therefore turned to a fresh exercise, but followed up with another brief visit later that week. In my second visit I worked quietly with small groups, finding picture-language -- images -- to express bald ideas. So: 'Once, they had no electricity' became 'Once, houses were dark as midnight.'

Our main workshop day finished with the children working from photographs. I asked them to imagine that they were part of the picture, and to write one line each about what they could see, hear and feel. Pleased with the results, we read them out loud:

What if the lantern goes out?

It will be pitch black,
Black as the ink in a runny pen,
Black as the wood burned in a fire.

Poetry gives two particular strengths to non-fiction. First, it promotes the best possible writing. Its short lines encourage discipline and economy, and searching for images stretches descriptive powers. Secondly, most importantly, children love it. The engagement of sounds, sights, smells and feelings encourages an imaginative identification rare in prose. Poetry gives each child a personal involvement; it helps children make history their own.

Please note This information was originally provided as part of the 2002 Writing Together programme. Materials for 2004 are currently in preparation and will be available on this web site when they are published.