HAVING started late as a fiction writer, I was apprehensive when Ra Page of Comma Press commissioned a historical story from me for their recently published Protest anthology. Early last year, I had no experience outside the comfort zone of science fiction, but I was intrigued and began researching Luddism and the Pentrich Rising.

On the wall of my study is a framed certificate, signed by Sir Ian Kinloch MacGregor. It celebrates, in an adjectival avalanche, my late father’s service to the National Coal Board. I’ve kept it as a cultural memento mori.

MacGregor, described by Arthur Scargill as “the American butcher of British industry,” went on to dismantle the British mining industry. At the end of the 1984-5 miners’ strike, a confluence of economic, political and technological forces obliterated a way of life experienced by several generations of my family. Nottinghamshire pit villages such as Clipstone, Bilsthorpe and Forest Town have never quite recovered.