For most of his working life, seeing the sun was a rare treat for Windang's Allan Johnston.

Born in 1929, he left school after year 6 and, not long afterwards, joined his father in the Scarborough Colliery during World War II.

It was hard and dirty work, often in spaces so small the miners couldn't stand upright. Work that involved endless hours of breathing in coal dust and dealing with rats scampering across your feet.

It was work that sentenced you to a lifetime lived in virtual darkness - both in the pit and above ground.

"We'd go underground when it was six in the morning and, by the time we got out at night again, it was dark," Johnston says.

"So you'd never see daylight until Saturday, we used to get out early on Saturday afternoons.

"You'd see daylight on Sunday afternoon for the last time for a week, then you wouldn't see daylight again 'til the following Saturday afternoon."

The mine was near the three-room bush humpy at Wombarra, where Johnston shared a bedroom with three brothers.

"It was built out of split timber put in the ground and then there was pieces of tin nailed over the cracks and a corrugated iron roof on top," he says.

"My dad lined the walls with bags and then wallpapered in the inside. It had a stone floor - pieces of stone that had been split open and laid down flat."

When he was born, his family was going through a very hard time. The Great Depression had hit the year before and his father had lost his job at the mine.

"There were times there when we didn't know where the next meal was coming from," Johnston remembers.

"One time I remember real well was my mother cooking in the kitchen - we had a fuel stove. My mother was stirring porridge and she was crying.

"I asked her what she was crying for. She said 'Oh, I just got some smoke in my eyes'. That wasn't the trouble at all. She only had about half a cup of oats to make six lots of porridge for us."

The tough times also meant Johnston had to wear patched-up hand-me-downs from his brothers and walk around barefoot because shoes were too expensive. That and his thick Geordie accent meant he was teased relentlessly during his time at Scarborough Primary School.

"They gave me hell, the bastards," he says.

Once he finished at the school, he was done with formal education and joined the workforce.

But his decision wasn't driven by the endless attacks he suffered at the hands of his schoolmates.

"I wanted to get away because of the war effort," he says.

"The Second World War was on and the thing was to leave school and get a job to help out with the war.

"We lived in uncertainty in that time. We didn't know if the Japanese were going to invade us or not. Back in 1942, it looked like they were going to.

"Education wasn't like it is today. Everything's about education these days, back then it wasn't."

After short stint with John Lysaghts, which he hated so much he effectively forced them to sack him, he ended up at Scarborough.

There he worked with his father until the latter left to join the army in 1942.

While he survived the war, Johnston says his father was never the same again.

"He was a broken bloody man," he says.

The experience of battle had so deeply affected him that he had to spend almost a year in what was known as a "war neurosis camp" being treated for what would these days likely be considered as post-traumatic stress disorder.

"They used to bring him home for two hours," Johnston says.

"There was always army personnel with him - an army soldier drove the car, there was one bloke who was a doctor and another soldier.

"They used to bring him home for a couple of hours and then take him back again.

"Gradually, they lengthened the time until they could bring him home for the weekend."

It was about a year before his dad was able to come home and then return to work at the mine.

Johnston remained in the mines until the late 1970s. About seven years before he finished up, a work injury led him to rediscover a long dormant interest in writing.

"I got my right foot smashed in a rock fall and was in the hospital for seven weeks and was off work for 12 months with it," he says.

"The nurse said I should start writing things down so as to occupy my mind. That's how I started writing my short stories.

"When I was at school, I could always write a good composition. I used to write a story, but when the teacher started reading it, as soon as they came to a spelling mistake, they'd put a bloody big cross through it and 'learn to spell!' was written on it.

"So they never read the story and I never got any encouragement at school to write."

With the help of Anno Domini 2000, a small publisher in Helensburgh, Johnston has had two books of poems and short stories published and is working on a third.

When inspiration hits, Johnston writes the story down on a notepad and then his wife, Elsie, rewrites it because her hand is neater and she's a better speller. Then son Gary types them up.

The stories and poems are fiction but are drawn from Australian history - and his own.

One such example is a poem he points out - Soldiers of Despair - which begins with the line: "He humped his bluey from Bulli town across the Great Divide."

Johnston said the poem was about the fate of the unemployed men he saw as a child.

"When a young bloke turned 21, if he didn't have a job his parents couldn't keep him because they couldn't get the dole for him," he remembers.

"So they had to hit the track. What they used to have to do is go to the police station and register for the dole and they'd get a dole ticket, which gave them five shillings a week to live on.

"But they couldn't stay in the town with it. They had to go on the track looking for work. They used to give them a blue blanket and that was called humping the bluey."

To buy a copy of Allan Johnston's books, contact his publisher on 4294 8452.