Flame and Slag (11 page)

“Elizabeth Stevens,” I said shakily, unable to put my grimed hands and blackened finger-nails near that fresh raw, wrinkled face, trembling at the stark gulf between us, man and six-hour-old infant, Ellen smiling her drained lips, but her violet eyes shone dark, dark, sombre, surrendering to trust.

“Love me?” she said calmly.

I said, “More than ever. More now than before we got married.”

8

Charlie Page lost his place on the coal in April, a couple of weeks after Yuri Gagarin circled the earth, cheerful as a bus driver, in a hundred and eight minutes. In April a mobile X-ray unit spent three days in Caib ambulance centre; every man and boy had his frontal shot, medical science forward marching over dead bones. Twenty-six men were sent to Cardiff for NCB X-rays. Five of these were later taken to Llandough Pneumoconiosis Research Unit, real old-timers they were, too afraid, stubborn or ignorant to apply for X-rays in Daren hospital through their family doctors. Charlie had fifty per cent, the knowledge ageing him, lining animal despair in his leathery face. He stopped smoking, drank less and took to rambling the hillsides. Regular pathways through and around Daren woods, where other pneumo and silicotic cases eked out their careful days. Favourite open-air route, the old parish road over Waunwen. You’d see them on sunny afternoons (mornings were spent coughing, warming up blood and tissues, preparing heart and lungs), dotted groups and singles up to the Forestry Commission fence and no farther, slow moving as Klondike survivors against the broad green track.

Soon, true to his spirit, Charlie Page found himself a hobby: archaeology. He bought a pocket compass, magnifying-glass and trowel. His finds were carried in Franklyn’s Mild tobacco tins. After the first tattling paragraph appeared in
Daren & District Clarion
, Charlie walked alone. He became unobtrusive, secretive as if taken over by the doppelganger of a Hunter and Fisher Folk shaman. Moreover, Charlie had another twenty years to cultivate this metamorphosis.

In late June he began sleeping out.

We were walking alongside Daren river, the path wide enough for Elizabeth’s pram, Lydia trotting on her own between rides straddled across my shoulders. White-bibbed dippers whistled, panicking short flights upstream, pipits rose from the warm turf, jigging, trilling, caracoled down again like minuscule glides. Small dark trout hung in the sparkling shallows, inbred sensitives, flickering up into deep water blued by the sky. We were half a mile from home, winding below the new muck-tip, pressure already rippling the mountain slope, shearing the turf crosswise. Kneeling at the foot of the tip, Charlie Page in his faded pepper-and-salt tweed suit. He came down to us, abstracted, hands pressing and patting his pockets.

“
Shwmae
there, Charlie,” I said. “Find anything?”

He said, “Howbe, Ellen. Nothin’ much today, boy. See, it’s better after rain, heavy rain, heavy, y’know,” — fumbling a tobacco tin from his pocket: “Last week I found these” — his stiff fingers peeling cotton wool off a clutch of small, fossilized mussels.

“Good gracious,” applauded Ellen — my ever cordial wife — Charlie watching her as if she might suddenly become dangerous.

“I’m not sure yet, two hundred million years old, more p’rhaps,” he said. “Must call in the library agen. Find out, see? Hey, just think, salt water everywhere over Daren. No mountains, no woods, no coal.
Duw, Duw
, there’s changes, ah, Rees?” — scrupulously tucking his finds in the cotton wool and
snick-snick
, the elastic band off his wrist twice snapped around the tin.

“We’re on a picnic,” Ellen said. “Would you like some sandwiches, Charlie?”

“Not between meals, thanks all the same,” — vagueness widening his sunken, light grey eyes. He rolled his head. “You’ll see my
cwtch
up by there. Spring lock on the door. Very handy in bad weather like we get so often.”

Charmingly inoffensive, Ellen strolled away, wheeling the pram, her and Lydia singing
Old Macdonald had a farm
.

“Man,” I said, “you’re enjoying life since leaving the Caib. How are the wife and family?”

“Truth to tell, Reesy, I stay out of their way. Thirty-four years underground, me; now I’m making up for lost time like the old Chinks do when they retire from activity.”

“But you’re keeping busy, searching the tips up there, tramping the forestry roads over the top. Aye, word gets around, Charlie. You’ve been seen; people are on the watch-out since that article in the
Clarion
.”

Serious, pucker-faced, he said, “We all make mistakes. I was fuckin’ daft when that youngster came to our house. Look, some other clever bugger told him,” — glancing after Ellen — “about my stuff in the museum.
Duw
, mun, I’m nothin’ when you consider those experts. Professors and doctors they are.” Then abruptly, “So long, Rees, I’m away now. Don’t mention down in the Caib about my little
cwtch
.”

His
cwtch
was a patchwork of slag-stone walling, old tram-planks and mildewed timbers once carefully notched, hatcheted by men who were probably dead. Discarded pieces of corrugated sheeting made up the forward-sloping roof, the sheets camouflaged with turf and rubble. Housed into the hillside, Charlie’s
cwtch
looked like a mountain fighter’s derelict observation post. A damp, unhealthy den. All the materials came from Caib tip.

Ellen said, stating, “Isn’t it ridiculous. He’s uneducated, lived happy as a
mochyn
all his life, and now he spends his days searching for Stone Age relics. It’s quite mad.”

The sandwiches were all eaten and we’d finished off a flagon of home-brewed ginger pop. Lydia slept on a rug. The baby was beginning to lose her temper.

“Snobbish attitude, beaut,” I said. “Old Charlie has found flint scrapers and arrow-heads up on the forestry roads. He’s proving that Hunter and Fisher Folk travelled this far inland from the coast. What have we proved? Nothing. Nothing yesterday, nothing today, nothing tomorrow.”

“You clever man,” she said, winking affected admiration.

The baby howled.

“Throw out thy marvellous left tit and feed the child,” I said.

“Write it all down about Charlie Page,” — deliberately squirting a fine spray at my face, her rebuffing elbow swinging swiftly at my throat: “Stop it, that’s enough, Reesy!”

We dozed in the sunshine, Elizabeth sprawled replete, wailing lapwings and bleating sheep on the other side of Daren river, rough pastureland and peat bogs rolling away to the horizon. Between waking and sleeping I felt like a dwarf waiting to become gargantuan. Then came a vivid, sliding dream of pre-industrial Daren, two five-mile-apart feudal mansions, clusters of white-washed cottages, wolves prowling Daren woods (wolves were extinct, but dreams dislocate chronology), hump-backed salmon running the river aggressive as dingo dogs, packhorse trains and cattle drovers travelling down the parish road, feuds and fraternizing between the serfs of Daren and Brynywawr, pitchforks and arson, true hurt-love and hate-rape. A bastard-sourced dream, remnants of oral heritage and mish-mashed education. Then the dream dissolved, intensified again: a white-maned, nanny-goat-bearded patriach stood alone on the green tump above our house. Some Iberian chieftain, Celtic gauleiter, Brythonic jugular slitter, Romanized arse-hole scraper, court favourite, poet … John Vaughan chanting in Cymraeg! He shrank visibly, collapsing to one knee, pleading, stiffening into the death mask he wore when borne neck deep in slurry out through the back door of 9 Thelma Street.

“Rees,” she said, “wake up; you’re grunting!”

I dunked my head in the cold river water, wriggling nymphs instantly cutting out, lying doggo, speckle-disguised, or slithering under pebbles. Hunkered over the pool, I watched a pair of magpies plummet down the new tip, then swoop off laterally like wire-operated pantomime artifacts, landing on Charlie Page’s hide-out. Ellen blew a piercing whistle, two fingers vee-ed in her mouth, but we were too far away from the birds. They planed down off the roof, squawking conversationally.

“Where did you learn that trick?” I said.

“Winchester. A boy named Jack Fleming. He used to kiss me after school.”

“Anything else?”

“Tickled, once. Feeling better now, matey?”

“Jack Fleming? What else could he do besides whistle?”

She screeched viraginous, “Fancy you! Jealous! Rees
gwenwynllyd
!
Dere ’ma
,
w
ˆ
r bach
.”

“I don’t know so much about your private life, Ellen,” I said.

She lay outstretched with the baby draped across her belly.

Lydia amused herself beneath the pram. Fine kiddies, I thought. Perfectly normal. No trouble whatsoever. I’m, we, Ellen and I, we’re lucky. Twelve tons on the chains tomorrow, but we’re blooming. Ours is a great marriage. Sound as the rock of ages.

“Selina Cynon teaching you Welsh?” I said. “Next thing you’ll be joining
Plaid Cymru
. What’s your ticket, Mrs Stevens, a poop-stirring bureaucracy in Cardiff like the one in Whitehall?”

Ellen stroked up and down the baby’s back. “This
is
Wales. It’s Welsh coal. If you had any pride you’d speak Welsh. I’m going to vote for the National Party next election.”

I said, “Can you prove it’s superior to be born Welsh than, say, Spanish, or Greek, or Hindu? Where’s the goodness in being Welsh? Have we got double navels or bigger brains? Wouldn’t you like to be a Russian for a couple of years? Or an oriental Jewess? Think how nice it would be if the American Kennedys had a negress great-granny.”

“Shut your mouth. Stop ranting at me,” she said.

“You lush Irish mongrel,” I said, dripping over her. “Put Lizzie in the pram, my beauty.”

“We can’t, darling, not here. Somebody might see us.”

“Who? They’re in the clubs or sleeping or watching the Sunday film on telly.”

“Love me, Rees?” — fatalism darkened her eyes again, dark, dark eyes to make a saint feel caged in flux.

“Of course I love you.”

“You never say it unless you want something.”

“For Jesus’ sake, we’re real mates!” I said.

“I love you, too, matey,” — tremulously fervent like a young girl, lifting up the baby, comforting her in the pram, murmuring, “There-there, Lizzie fach, we mustn’t keep your father waiting.”

But our Lydia-child clambered over us.

“Soppy knicks! Never mind,
cariad
, never mind, accident, accident!” sang Ellen, patiently soothing as if the living universe bobbled placidly in a safe ocean of toddler’s piddle.

After tea I went into the back room with John Vaughan’s Account. The window overlooks a low mortar-crumbled wall between ours and the house next door. We each have a few square yards of unglazed cobbles and lavatories squatting back to back, with a crack in the door of ours through which you can see Melyn brook. Way down the street, above sixteen crumbling parting walls, stands Ike Pomeroy’s nine-roomed house, built for Caib colliery managers in 1928, while Number One Lodge members were docked tuppences every Friday to pay for the institute. Ike Pomeroy succeeded Andrew Booth. Tall, slender Ike, thinly moustached, fast-witted, humourless, efficient, executing NCB directives perfect as a bladder blown by the wind. It was impossible to fault him. He delegated authority according to the book, Ike himself happily governed by mining economics like a truant officer is ruled by the miching boys who justify his job. Ike Pomeroy neutralized Self. His rather bow-legged schoolmistress wife somehow dropped into Upper Daren secondary modern school — a traditional backstage tactic, the local educational authority offering salaam sahib to the NCB area manager. A dozen Daren-born teachers are on the waiting list to come home from the black, tan and off-white zones of London and Birmingham. Consequently, what I’m saying is you have to know someone on Daren Borough Council to get a decent berth under the local authority. Hoary Wales, aye, learned in guile. Dry-runs are alien to our body politique.

We couldn’t imagine it then, summer of 1961, Ike Pomeroy coming to effect the last coal raised from Caib Four Feet seam. Prompt into action, slender Ike obediently organized a new pit-bottom junction, the main conveyor belt feeding two 200-ton concrete bunkers, the system working precise as a Smith’s watch until the Germans knocked through to Brynywawr. And afterwards no more coal from the Four Feet came up Caib pit-shaft. Only men and supplies went down. Utilitarian Ike, necessary as a lavatory chain between sterile hygiene and fertile corruption.

Ike, I thought, his bow-legged wife mowing the lawn in a halter-neck polka-dotted summer frock, if Twmws Ivor Cynon was alive he’d curse you black. You pox-true functionary.

Ellen called, “Rees, what are you doing in there!”

“Your old man’s Account, I’m back on it!”

She said, “Huh.”

Aye, I thought, Shon crap-gatherer Vaughan, cont:

There is no replacing a man like Twmws Cynon. Pray God his name will stand for as long as coal is lifted from the cruel bowels of this earth of ours. One hundred & ninety workmates sang the wonderful O FRYNIA CAERSALEM over his grave, little suspecting eight hundred of us would be singing it for the seven men burnt to death in Caib before the leaves fell off the trees in 1930, smoke pouring down Caib tip coming from Waun Level the old airway return. As I say it made people wonder about Christianity despite sermons to make your hair stand up on end. Sermons, what a famous time for sermons. The
hwyl
came every Sunday night from Baptists, Methodists, Wesleyans & Pentecostals singing & shouting & nobody about anywhere on the streets till the chapels emptied. Card schools in the dingles & in Daren woods of course, playing Nap & Brag with a lookout for any policeman. Police had nothing better to do. Men such as Seymour Lloyd making names for themselves. Devil’s cards. What a mockery. All gone now. Two wholesale wars saw to that, killed off religion better than any spear in His holy side. Often I wished to possess religious faith. Frankly it never came. Any kind of faith I used to beg for in later years without success, so it must be the way I was made in the first instance. From strict Catholic to easy-come-easy-go Pentecostal after we moved into Thelma Street, that was Kate’s progress until eventually her true nature found outlet as it was bound to, starting when I broke my instep bones up in the Tylwth Teg district where the explosion look place. She said she wanted to visit her relations in Ireland. Being her husband I naturally contended, “Let me start back in work first to save some money.” She said, “Sell our Pearl Insurance Premiums to Dicko Harding.” “Not those please, Kate,” I said. As if that would stop her. Ireland? She never did go to Ireland, it was Queen Street, Portsmouth, leaving me grass widower for two years. Two years torture with no one in the world to turn to excepting Charlotte Cynon for a cooked dinner on my way home from Caib pit. No fire warming the house & how can a man wash his own back in a wooden tub? Dicko Harding made fifty pounds clear profit on those Premiums which were intended as savings for our old age. A man without genuine conscience for all his charity & tangerine oranges for children on New Year’s Eve & various backhanders to the parish council. Money his god that Dicko Harding. Money, money. If there is a heaven he belongs to that parable about the camel passing through the eye of a needle. When elected treasurer of Caib institute my proposal was to stop Dicko Harding from entering the building unless he paid non-affiliate contributions as certain shopkeepers were obliged to if they wished to enjoy our facilities. Instead they made him vice-president of Daren Bowls Club & therefore he bought membership in a roundabout way although Lodge Number One & a Welfare grant actually kept the rink going. Bowls did not appeal to me in the slightest. Things such as games take up time that deserves to be better occupied. Our main concern was to get organized to counteract low wages & bad conditions. The basic evils. We provided billiards, bowls, football equipment, dominoes & draughts in the library with Llew Hopkins institute caretaker, us committee-men taking turns in the library itself until Dai Stevens left school. But he was too wild in many ways. Pity he was killed however as he had a good head on him as regards selecting books. Matter of fact he put his own Left Book Club books on our shelves to make members realize we were being robbed right, left & centre by the coal-owners, Joseph Gibby & Sons included. To think young Dai was still under 21, but he knew the rough road we were on. He knew. The committee wanted to send him to Ruskin Labour College only he preferred courting. Dai preferred galivanting over to Brynywawr every whipstich, always missing from the Library, Llew Hopkins threatening to hand his notice in unless one of us took charge of the books. Only stamp the date and watch out for SILENCE he had to, nothing more. Ned Tremain was appointed librarian eventually, doing his best of course but badly handicapped by nystagmus. Those safety oil-lamps gave Ned nystagmus & cruel blinding headaches to the extent he did not know where to put himself. He signed on the panel permanent just before Kate came home to Daren. We were together in Doctor Stanton’s surgery when she marched in as if it was merely a case of jaunting back from Lower Daren. ‘The key,’ she said. ‘How do you expect me to get in the house?’ God in heaven I must have drunk hundreds of bottles of medicine for my bronchitis & chest complaints. Actually it was myself that had the first X Ray when we bought the machine for Daren Cottage Hospital & Doctor Claude Stanton said, “Clear as a bell, John. Climb Waunwen every Sunday, fill you lungs with fresh air.” To my mind it is not so much conditions as worry, worry. Fuming & fretting damages human health. My chest felt better disregarding hard times to come until 1940. The beauty of it was Kate seemed to settle down again which is what a wage slave wants most when he is doing his level best to provide food, shelter & clothing for his dependants. But she interfered concerning my responsibilities as treasurer. There was no persuading Kate in the light of reasonable argument, craving for more whist drives in the institute for instance. Always whist, her & one of the Miskin girls off night after night. Luckily for safe keeping I placed my treasurer’s account books with Charlotte Cynon. You could trust your life’s blood with Charlotte. I have seen her facing up to trials guaranteed to burn human feelings to a coke. For example lodgers. Lodgers on the dole during slack time & never a bad word spoken against her. Lodgers coming home drunk while she was rearing Hayden Percival & the girl Martha. Also anti-aircraft soldiers when they brought two pom-pom guns to protect Caib in 1941, one of these soldier lodgers trying to take advantage of young Martha, a ginger headed scally-wag from Newcastle who got exactly and precisely what he deserved in the end, him & Chris Jones standing toe to toe behind the institute boiler house for ninety-seven minutes on a Sunday morning. Everything arranged to legal rules. But still there it was, young Chris could beat any man in Daren before the overhead rope caught him in Caib. It had to be Cefn Coed Asylum for his own self protection after that. His sense of responsibility went scattered beyond control. Chrisy’s father & mother decided to live in Sketty to be near him. To all intents & purposes they were deprived of their only son. Chris lost control as many men do for lesser reasons. To my mind a true account of coal-mining is impossible to relate without foul language & red raging temper coming in their proper places. Same applies to cowboys I should imagine although never an eff appears in all the western books that I have read to kill boredom. Romance. It must be all romance. When you see a man out of his wits so that he does not care what he says, weeping & cursing as many, many times I have witnessed colliers, firemen, labourers, conveyor shifters & on one occasion a haulier praying to his horse when the horse failed coming up the deep from Number 3 district, praying on his bended knees until madness overpowered him & he punched the horse down with his bare fists. I am referring to Billo Cassam. Where is Billo now? Six feet under as a consequence of double rupture. Billo Cassam from Saerbren Street. Savage behaviour. Spain has got nothing on coal-mining. With regard to poverty as shown in adverts begging for charity, we have seen pot bellied kiddies in Daren without shoes to wear on their feet & it is no use saying the past is dead, let bygones be bygones. Not when you consider how a sincere man like Ramsey Macdonald stabbed Labour in the back. They have all done their share of stabbing the working class quite apart from victimization by employers. Prime outstanding example re miners: Arthur Horner. Some of the finest Federation fighters left Daren forever after being victimized. Men beyond blame. They had to earn a living. The minutes of Caib Lodge and Brynywawr Lodge would make modern trade union shop stewards believe we were fighting a lost CAUSE. Untrue. There are no lost causes only different ones.