They've tried to hold us back too long'

GWEN HEAL'S heart sinks every time she goes to the shops in Blaenavon and finds the price-tags have been changed again.

On pay nights her husband takes home about £13 and after the rent has been paid there's less than £10 to keep a family of five.

Mr Heal's plight is typical of that of 26,000 day-wage miners forced to strike to keep their families above the bread-line. Many would have fallen below it long ago but for the fact that some of the wives were able to get work in local factories.

Blaenavon began in the 18th century as a company town-locked in isolation by wild rainswept mountains.

The Blaenavon Co sunk pit its own engineering fac built iron furnaces and tory. Today 100-year-old houses cluster round longdead pits and silent ironworks.

Apart from one pit and four small factories-one of them linked to Rolls-Royce and already sacking labourthe chances of work are nonexistent.

TROOPS CALLED It has always been a solid Labour town and before now troops have been called in to keep order.

None of this is exceptional on the S Wales coalfield. And all of it lies behind Mrs Heal's immediate response 'However long this strike lasts - if it goes on two months-we'll back the men.

•Personally, I think the longer it goes on the more backing the husbands will get.' Blaenavon is the only pit in the SE division of the coalfield to call out its safety men. 400 miners stand to lose their jobs if the strike goes on more than a month.

'But,' said Mrs Heal, 'the men wouldn't strike for the fun of it.

It's very dangerous down there; my husband lost his right arm. I wouldn't like to work in the pij. But if a man's got to go underground he's entitled to a living wage.

When you've got three children, as I have, it's very awkward managing on the money, with prices what they are and clothes to buy.

"The government are going to clamp down on the miners, but I don't think they'll give in.

BAD ENOUGH

I voted for the Tories last time. It was bad enough under Labour so I thought "Let's give the others a chance". I wouldn't vote for them again -they've not done what they promised.' Widow Mrs Betty Cullimore has never voted Tory in her life and she's not thinking of it.

'I think they look after the moneyed people,' she told me as she went in to play bingo at the Coliseum. 'I'd like see Heath go down the pit, tr A lot of women wish he'd go down and not come up. Like their husbands, they say the Tories are not for the working man.

"This strike is going to be people' seCond miner it get will get Mrs Audrey Lewis A deserted ironworks at Blaenavon reminds ininers they too face closure threats security except for their wives — if they're not working— and their dependants.

Bitterness has already replaced the early anxiety many housewives felt they've totted up what they'l have to live on in the next few weeks.

As coal runs out many will use electric heaters and • be faced with soaring electricity bills. Many women know the real reckoning will not come until after the strike, when creditors send in their bills.

Said Mrs Audrey Lewis, 'they've always tried to keep the miners down.

"The wives will certainly back them. If we don't, how are we going to live?

'Even if the strike goes on and we get nothing I'd back my husband, and I think all the wives would.

'Of course our living standards will be reduced and I don't know how we'll manage. It'll be very hard.

'But they've tried to hold back the miners for too long. Th a hate homest dangerous Mrs Lewis, whose husband has been below ground 40 years, saw Coal Board chief Derek Ezra on television saying he was withdrawing his pay offers to the strikers.

I'd like to see him down the pit,' she says with feeling.

Miners and their wives entered this strike with caution.

Everyone knows what a long strike costs. Many can Mrs Gwen Heal 'Drivers must b:

THE MEN of the South Staffordshire coalfield are not particularly known as militant, but this is one still remember the long months 1926 - and the betrayal which followed.

They are determined not be betrayed this time.

Mrs Betty Cullimore STAFFORD ack us' fight they are out to win.

At Littleton colliery near Cannock, where the No 601 shaft has the steepest rising face in Europe, night-shift pickets talked to us about the WINERS-STE COAL BOARD threats of pit closures are greeted with scorn and derision by men who have been under the shadow of the jobs axe before.

Pickets at Thoresby colliery include many men who went there after their pits closed in Durham.

Do the warnings of NCB chairman Derek Ezra frighten them? "Tell him we are laughing,' said Tommy Christer, who worked at New Herrington colliery, Durham, before it closed.

Dave Jackson and Norman Watson came here after the Rising Sun colliery in World's End was closed.

'Let Ezra shut them,' they told me. "They might as well be closed for the money we are getting.' Sid Foster, who worked at Green Side colliery, Durham, has been at Thoresby more than ten years.

'Our wages have gone down and down, he said. 'Since the end of piecework they are getting more coal for less money. Closure talks don't worry anybody' Keith Collin, who used to work at Brandom colliery, Durham, told Workers Press: DAY SIX NOT ANGHAI JACK GALE 'We came down here for security and we are getting slapped in the face.

'Ezra doesn't frighten any of us.' George Banks, from Sherburn Hill colliery, had heard it all before.

"They tell us not to strike or they'll close the pits, so we don't strike and they close thy pitoranyway. It won't work 'This closure?' said James Armstrong, of former' GatesRavensworth colliery, head. 'It's the same every time. It's the first thing they say.' Nothing has gone through the gates of Thoresby colliery since Wednesday afternoon.

Before then a few lorries went through, but now the only drivers who can cross the pickets are those who Poad is evidench spitals ther is for hospitals or schools.

Attempts to transport smokeless fuel to Scumford steel works have failed. The Thoresby men reject Coal Board pleas to allow work to take place so that hydraulic chocks can be moved.

They are determined to stick it out.

'We will eat grass before we go back, said picket Bob Clarke.