Hot air balloon and rose sleeve on upper arm

It was striped, red and cream like a stick of Blackpool rock, and it had no business hanging over the slag heaps. Nobody in Hebburn Clough owned a balloon. The man who came with it was a travelling showman called Ezra Quaile, who'd lost a wager at the Whit fair and was sleeping off the forfeit in the field behind the chapel. He had a rose tucked in his coat, and when he woke he gave it to Maggie Dunn at the lych gate and said the sun had been poking at his canvas since dawn, so he'd followed it up the valley.

On the third morning the balloon drifted over the headgear, low enough to cast its shadow across the pit wheels. Down in the dark, the men of the Pelham seam said later that they saw a glow come down the shaft, the colour of a sunrise, and they followed it toward the sound of the picks. Ezra had thrown his ballast over to rise, and the last thing he let fall down that shaft, so the story goes, was a sack of candles and the rose, wrapped in oilcloth.

Nobody could prove it, and Ezra was gone by the Monday with his tonics and his striped silk. But every lamp that came up that shaft afterwards was lit from a candle with a red wax seal, and Maggie kept the rose pressed in her Bible until the damp finally took it. So when you go down tomorrow, Jack, keep one eye on the dark above you. Watch for stripes.