Mine

Stanley Cornish sat at his table and waited for his wife to deliver the breakfast he had been smelling for half an hour; bacon, cornbread, eggs, coffee, enough of everything to hold him for the nine hours he would be working the coal face. It was going to be a good day. That fullness, that's what he was thinking about laying on his side two miles deep into Coalman Mine on a summer's Sunday morning, a day when no one was expected to work. A great breakfast. His wife was so good at...
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Stanley Cornish sat at his table and waited for his wife to deliver the breakfast he had been smelling for half an hour; bacon, cornbread, eggs, coffee, enough of everything to hold him for the nine hours he would be working the coal face. It was going to be a good day. That fullness, that's what he was thinking about laying on his side two miles deep into Coalman Mine on a summer's Sunday morning, a day when no one was expected to work.
A great breakfast. His wife was so good at that and always had been. She said if he was going to dig coal on a day when everyone else was off, he was going to work with a belly full of good food and a thermos of hot coffee with cream and a little sugar in it. He and a couple of his pals always worked this way. Among a group of perhaps 90 men who spread out around Coalman on off days, generally, Sundays, when the 1,200 men who usually dug coal were off..