children's book, mine and "knockers"

[oregonjade]

I think the main character was a girl, in a mining area. Perhaps lived with a grandmother. At least one cave-in during the time of the story, perhaps one just before the story starts and one during, or one may have been 10 or 20 years or something in the past. I remember the mine spirits... I believe the girl was afraid of them. Someone used a different word to describe the knockers, but I haven't been able to find the word online... and I believe it was italicized when used in the book. The girl's father may have been a miner. I seem to remember description in the book about pies, or meat pies, that a foreign word was used for, also. May have been Cornish or Irish or something, though I think the book was set in the states.

I seem to think the houses were on a hill that led up toward the mine, and that near the end of the book, parts of the mines were collapsing and the houses in danger.

Book would have been in print in the early to mid eighties. Publisher probably Scholastic, but possibly Apple. In that size/format, regardless.

 

[WickedWitch]

Perhaps, one of the English translations of Les Indes Noires, by Jules Verne?
This book has been published under the titles The Child of the Cavern, The Underground City, and Black Diamonds. There are two English translations available free on the Jules Verne website http://JV.Gilead.org.il/works.html.

"Covering a time span of over ten years, this novel follows the fortunes of the mining community of Aberfoyle near Stirling, Scotland. Receiving a letter from an old colleague, mining engineer, James Starr sets off for the old Aberfoyle mine. Thought to have been mined out ten years earlier, Starr finds mine overman, Simon Ford, and his family living in a cottage deep inside the mine and is astonished to find that Ford has made a discovery of the presence of a large vein of coal. Accompanying Simon Ford is his wife, Madge, and adult son, Harry.

From the outset, mysterious and unexplained happenings start to occur around the main characters, attributed initially to goblins and firemaidens.

Soon after the discovery of the new vein of coal, the community is revitalised with a whole town growing up around the underground lake called Loch Malcolm.

Suspicious of a malevolent force at work, Harry continues his explorations of the cavern system, where down a deep shaft, he discovers a young orphan girl named Nell. Over the course of the next few years Nell is adopted by Simon and Madge but reveals nothing of where she came from, only that she had never been out of the mine.

Eventually, when Harry and Nell announce their marriage the mysterious occurrences come to a head."

 

[oregonjade]

No... not it.

This book spanned a fairly short time period... probably weeks or months. There were definitely people employed in the caves, and some sort of cave-in... odd thing is, the descriptions I find online of knockers/knackers make them sound friendly, while in this book, they were at minimum dangerously mischevious, if not outright malevolent.

 

[Peronel]

All I can think of, which you've probably already tried, is the word 'tommyknockers'.

In the prefix to his book of the same name, Stephen King mentions that this was the name for the spirits of miners trapped in cave-ins, as they could be heard knocking on the walls of the mines.

 

[oregonjade]

I'm absolutely certain it didn't use the phrase "tommy" as part of it at all. I read SK's Tommyknockers a few years later and spent quite a while wondering why on earth he'd added the "tommy" to it... didn't realize til some time after that that it's used often here in the U.S., but not where it originated.