IT’S OVER. The harsh streaks of an uneasy dawn brings the news that they have found the last of them. He is dead. We are told he is Peter Alcock. More we do not know.

Faces sunk from lack of sleep take in the information and turn away. There is no emotion left. The price of coal!

I look around what is for me an unfamiliar landscape. The head-gears over the shafts look like giant, grey steel Meccano constructions. Their halogen lights are always on for shift workers, making the whole place look somewhat like the Nottingham Forest football ground under floodlights. A yellow bulldozer goes back and forth up a black mountain, stockpiling coal. There are 400,000 tonnes in these mountain stocks – enough to fuel 100,000 homes for a year. You’d need climbing gear to tackle one of these man-made mountains.

They should be selling it – but they are over-producing. The killer around here, says one policeman without irony, is the dash for gas. They have 14 million tonnes of coal on the ground in Bilsthorpe. We are in Robin Hood country, the region near Sherwood Forest. But this is the land not of merrie men but dejected ones.

There is frost on the road and there are patches of fog. You can make out industrial estates, quarries and flesh-coloured buildings – miners’ houses on the fringe of the pit.

It is a busy and bustling community during the day but it is no place to be standing and stamping one’s feet during the night; especially this night.

Around 4am it really hits me. Two orange-suited miners with lamps on their heads and in their hands walk past. The air is chilly and it may be only that which set off the shivers.

We are waiting for two men still 2,000 feet beneath the ground on which I stand.

Now we know they were dead already. Then, we still had hope. Even so, I couldn’t stop thinking of the wife of David Shelton, 31, from Bingham, who was visited by a personnel manager earlier in the evening. She is eight months pregnant and has an 18-month old child – and he had to tell her that her husband had been found dead.

Despite all the technological advances in recent years the fear that their man might not return from their shift lurks in the subconscious of every miner’s wife from the day they marry to the day he retires. It is that which makes miners wives special people and miners’ communities special: The price of coal.

In St Margaret’s Church they lit five candles for the missing. Forty people turned up for the service of mourning for the dead and exaltation for the living.

It started at 11am yesterday when the collapse occurred. The flying squad emergency team from Mansfield Hospital and the pit’s emergency team were immediately in operation.

They brought out Paul Smith with facial injuries, in deep shock but conscious, with a sore back.

Then they found Bill McCulloch, a 26-year-old bachelor who lived with his parents. Bill was dead.

It is different at pitheads these days in times of disaster. Mourning is done in private. Technology detracts somehow from the great drama of the rescue. Yet it is human still. Throughout the night colliery workers brought us tea and coffee.

‘There were one or two doomwatchers at Toppa Pit Lane,’ said a security man, ‘but now it’s quiet.’

Earlier he was given flowers – white and yellow roses and pink hydrangeas picked by an ex-miner from Clipstone pit and a former miner from Bilsthorpe.

‘They wanted them put inside pit shafts,’ he said. ‘If he’s taken t’trouble to pick them, I must get them down there when I’m allowed.’ The flowers lay on a plastic chair in his office dying – while the teams of tired men, working ‘20-minute snaps’ pursued a rescue operation in which hope was fading.

And then, suddenly, it was over and the miners and their families returned to get on with the rest of their lives, while we who came to report upon this night got into our cars and drove away weary past a gamut of safety instructions: ‘Wear gloves’ dictated one sign on the road; ‘Think before you act’ said another; ‘Remove dangers yourself’; ‘Wear eye protection’; ‘Know your support rules’.

For us the morning brought another story in another part of the country.