AT THE COALFACE: MY LIFE AS A MINERS WIFE (PB)

A gritty and nostalgic memoir from a Scottish miner's wife. Growing up in a Lanarkshire mining family, Cath's husband Doug promised his father he wouldn't follow in his dangerous footsteps, but after struggling with terrible poverty in 1970's Scotland, Doug decided a pit job would provide his wife and young family much needed security, despite extraordinary risks to life and limb. Every day, Cath kissed her husband goodbye, not knowing if she'd see him again as he went to work at the coalface and while her husband toiled deep below, the mother-of-five put her cooking and cleaning skills to use in the colliery canteen. She then became one of the few female official picketers in 1984 when she joined her husband in the fight to stop the pit closing under Thatcher's Tories.