I was put on a drill.

I was put on a drill. Now these weren’t stopers, these were just ordinary air drills the same as if you were breaking up pavement and you got on that and you had to drill in coal that was running down the coal face. You had to drill 80 holes, three men on a drill, 80 holes, blast and load 30 cars of coal and the cars held four tonne of coal and three tonne of rock so if they were wanting to open up a shaft they would put you down there and then you would drill 30 holes but they had to be five feet deep, pack them with dynamite and blast them and clean it up by the time the end of the shift. They had little lanterns with a little small flame in them and they would watch that and when the flame started to get shorter and shorter and lower then the gas would be getting higher and then they would stop all work and just let the air blow through for maybe an hour but you had to make that hour up after and if there had been an explosion down there it would have caved in the whole mountain because the whole mountain was just hollow.