American Clancy Sigal spends two weekends with his Yorkshire miner&painter friend Davie in his mining hometown of Dinlock in 1959/1960.
We get an outsider's documentary view into what life's like in a northern pit village, or at least a view into the life of the miners themselves. We're taken round the homes, union hall, 3 pubs, and eventually the pit itself that make up Dinlock. Along the way we learn about Davie, torn between the self-contained total community of the pit village and his desire to escape it for the wider world (London) to make it (or break it) there as a painter.
What sticks out about this account over most looks at pit life is Sigal is both truly foreign to this world, and is not trying to convince us of some heroic ideal of the proletarian , as so much writing on working class communities does. Embracing his aloof, outsider status as a visiting foreigner in his writing, he avoids the patronising eye that you'd expect with a book like this. In fact, the opening of Dinlock gave the impression Sigal was giving up his sunny California for a descent into the third world.