The Black Diamond:Complete series(annotated)

ABNER FELLOWS was born in the front bedroom of Number Eleven Hackett’s Cottages, a four-roomed
house of old brickwork that stood in the middle of a row of twenty-one, set diagonally across a patch
of waste land on the outskirts of Halesby. The terrace was fifty years old, and looked older, for the
smoke and coal dust of the neighbouring pits had corroded the surface of the bricks, while the
‘crowning in’ of the earth’s crust above the gigantic burrowings of the Great Mawne Colliery had
loosened the mortar between them and even produced a series of long cracks that clove the house-
walls from top to bottom like conventional forked lightning. One of these lines of cleavage split the
face of Number Eleven and ran through the middle of a plaster plaque on which the pious owner of
the cottages had carved the words:—

ISAIAH HACKETT:
GLORY BE TO GOD.

This plaque, together with the metal medallion of a fire insurance corporation and two iron bosses
connected with the system of stays by which Mr Hackett’s descendants had tried to save their
property from collapsing, made the Fellows’s house the most decorative feature of the row, and gave
Abner a feeling of enviable distinction in his childhood long before he knew what they meant.

His father, John Fellows, like the rest of the tenants, was a miner. He had chosen to live in Hackett’s
Cottages because they lay nearer to the colliery than any other buildings in Halesby and were within a
reasonable distance of the cross-roads where stood his favourite public-house, the Lyttleton Arms.
Hackett’s Cottages, in fact, hung poised, as it were, between two magnetic poles: the pit where the
money was earned and the pub where it was spent. To remain there contented would have implied a
nice equilibrium, had it not been that eastward of the cross-roads and the Lyttleton Arms ran the
Stourton Road, with houses on both sides of it, and amongst them the Lord Nelson, the Greyhound,
and the Royal Oak. Next to the Royal Oak came the entrance of the Mawne United football ground,
and since John Fellows’s passion for football was only exceeded by his devotion to ‘four-penny,’ the
pull of the colliery was hopelessly overbalanced by these delights.
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