When I was a child... Adventures and memories - Kiedy byłem dzieckiem... Przygody i wspomnienia

Yesterday, while cleaning up the house, I found an old photo album. I was a bit tired so I decided to sit down for a while and check if there was anything interesting in it. Mostly there is nothing that may catch my attention – usually I turn pages really quickly since I do not want to waste my time looking at numerous birthday party pictures. However yesterday it turned out that not every photo is so predictable and I found some unusual ones. The ones I came across brought back memories. In those photographs I could see a place which had been very special to me when I’d been a teenager. There was a gold mine. Not a usual one, far from that. It was an abandoned drift mine.

When I was a kid there wasn’t any gold mine still working. Every mine in the city area (there were three of them) had been closed down before I was born since it had run out of gold. However children could still go and play there. Adits were not protected and therefore it soon became the most popular place with local kids and teenagers. I was obviously one of them.

Mostly I visited one of the mines since it took only half an hour to get there from my house. I called the mine 'my favourite haunted house ever' cause I used to make fun of other visitors to the mine and, along with my friend, we scared some other children to death. I suppose this must have been an ultimate experience for them and probably an unpleasant one since most of them never came back.

I used to visit the mine at least twice a week. Sometimes I spent there most of my free time or even went there instead of going to school. One of my best friends, Bartek, accompanied me very often. We knew all the secret passages in the mine. We also found some amazing things in there – like old helmets and torches that once had belonged to miners who had worked in the mine.

As I knew some of them I could listen to their stories from time to time. They told me about the most dangerous moments during their work and about those who had not been as lucky as them and never came back. According to what they told me safety precautions were not followed by their employers and, as a result, a lot of miners died at work.

Maybe other city residents heard those stories as well and this is why so few people visited the mine. I was not scared though. This was the most incredible place I knew and even though I found some human bones somewhere in dark corners I kept on visiting it. It was so different from all the supermarkets and cafes in the city centre. To make a long story short – it was special.