Normally stories about mining communities are doom and gloom. I don't remember the one I grew up in being like that and I want to give you a feeling for what it was like growing up in a place like the fictional Cairndhu. My earliest memory is of making my way from my grandparents house where we had been living, to our own house about five minutes walk away. Both were council houses, my grandparents semi detached and had been home to them and their four children. Two rooms and a boxroom upstairs, front room and kitchen downstairs with a coal cellar and bathroom with running water and a flush toilet. Our own was two rooms and a kitchen with a coal cellar and bathroom, also flush toilet. The back room was big enough to take two double beds and still leave space to move around in. The kitchen had a small pantry, the sinks, the hot water tank and a clothes boiler which I think had been fired by coal and the flue connected into the chimney from the big black range in the front room. My mother did everything on that range, cooking, baking, frying, making jam, everything. It was always lit because it heated the water and there were no showers in the small mines around the village until the mines were nationalised. Dad would come in black from underground and bath before he ate, He never ever sat down to eat dirty.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1535417188