Flame and Slag (24 page)

Daren allegiances were stretching before breaking, pride found its price in clubs, pubs, chapels, football teams, among dog fanciers, cricketers, pigeon fanciers, gardeners, motorists, social pride, competitive pride, pride of place. The Women’s Guild shrank, dwindled to pensioners and the size of its committee. Old age throve, flourishing isolated from Daren’s diminishing youth population. Both cinemas closed in March, resorting to bingo one night a week. Our MP opened a plastic bag in the House of Commons to show the members a lump of steam coal. He evoked bumblings worse than cat-calls. Daren’s advance factories remained a mirage bubbling comically off the lips of councillors. Two young doctors emigrated; they were replaced by poker-faced Indian doctors. Daren Miner’s Cottage Hospital became an old folk’s convalescent home. In April old Watt Howard had the sack from the housing site. Afraid of losing their jobs, craftsmen and labourers accepted tighter bonus targets.

Stormy April, Rollo & Sons’ filter beds overspilling, the river flooding black for days on end while rumour hardened to reality and one morning the firm’s lorries ceased running through Daren. Mr Rollo’s crew moved away to more profitable tips.

Meanwhile the Minister of Labour lowered his eyes, entwined his fingers and preached mobility of labour for the sake of Britain, our production, our balance of payments — that modern myth strewn with the fangs and gore of Democracy, Communism, Capitalism, Socialism, Science, Theology, Utopia. But Ministers do not collect their cap lamps at six-thirty a.m. five days a week, fill shuttering with concrete, or bolt up steel girders on power stations, and neither do their wives de-gut cod in Grimsby nor disembowel capons in a chicken-packing station.

The purgatorial kiss upon civilization: They and Us, since the first man trod over his father. Whatsoever any ministerial pundit was isn’t what he is.
They and Us
remain inescapably the proof of whatever one happens to
be
.

Very nice of course. Nice balance between destiny and dearth.

Long lines of tiny fir trees sprouted uphill, crosswise to the ancient plough-marks above Daren woods. We came through the gnarled, towering old hardwood trees this warm May morning, Mrs Cynon sauntering ahead with the youngsters, Ellen glancing at the cow-parsley spot where we greened the drought of two barren years.

“Emily Thorpe ran into the bungalow,” she said. “Did you see her?”

It was better to say, “She seems to be very handy in the garden.”

“Rees, why don’t we move to Lower Daren? There are plenty of empty houses and it’s much nearer the factory.”

I said, “Three hundred and seventy-four empty houses according to the
D and D Clarion
.”

“Shall we move?”

“I can’t imagine anyone wanting to buy our house, Ellen.”

“Tal Harding might. I’ll ask him.”

“When old Dicko bought houses people were still moving into Daren. The market’s turned arse-about. Tal won’t buy unless he can sell or rent at a profit.”

“Let me ask him, Reesy? We’ll find a larger house in Lower Daren, away from Caib. It’s depressing since all the life has gone. Our street alone — why, it’s full of old people. You can hear them coughing at night. Grey, mean old men; they remind me of my father.”

“My hair’s grey,” I said.

“It isn’t, boy, not on your chest, and you know, down…”

Her hand resting on my head, walking alongside composed as a policewoman guiding a child. “The accident made this grey.”

“Thanks, beaut.”

“Certainly it was the accident. Even before you left hospital I noticed grey hairs coming.”

“Thanks, beaut,” I said.

“Oh, dammit! Don’t be cranky; it’s such a glorious day. We’re all right now, we’re fine. The Caib is dead, but we’re loving great,”
—
her finger-tips probing my head like a bump reader.

I saw Mrs Cynon rubbing spittle over nettle stings on Elizabeth’s leg. Song-birds were ringing the woods and big thrusting lambs were lifting their mother’s hind legs off the ground. Mrs Cynon waited for us at the stile crossing the forestry fence.

I said, “Why should Tal Harding buy our house, except for the obvious reason?”

“Rees Stevens, you evil waster!”

“I mean for old time’s sake, Ellen. He’s marrying this girl from Lower Daren post office.”

“Some day they’ll put up a new factory on Caib colliery, once they clear the old buildings away. The house will be valuable then.”

Factory, I thought: imagine a Mayfair politician canvassing votes by promising factories. “Beaut,” I said, “
when
will they build a factory on the site of Caib colliery, my love?”

Mrs Cynon answered, “Nineteen-seventy! Not before, as God’s my maker. They won’t tell us straight from the council chamber, but truth will stand!”

We crossed the stile and climbed the hillside along a forestry haulage road which ran diagonally upwards inside a long, waved slash of bulldozed clay. Underfoot, the loose ballast chippings glared white, the geometrized landscape above and below stirring a peculiar boredom. Man-made mood.

Mrs Cynon moved on ahead again with the children.

“Tal won’t buy our house,” I said.

“He will if I ask him.”

“Threaten him, ah?”

Her smile was power-loaded, the guarantee of an abbess right-armed by the Almighty. “I saved Tal from drinking his money away,” she said.

“Saved anyone else, beaut?”

“Yes, matey, back there in the woods with everything soaking wet and you blazing like a box of matches on fire.”

“Aye, desperation,” I said. “Okay, let’s offer him the house. Granny Stevens will turn over in her grave.”

“
Me
, Rees, I’ll ask him.”

“Right, girl, right.”

“Come on, put your arm around me. You’d quarrel with the Virgin Mary.”

I said, “Aye.”

We were high above the bowling-green, two rinks dotted with bunched woods and leg-shortened, tweedy-looking players. Caib institute lay squat as the offices of a Victorian insurance company. The deserted ’stute, doors and windows locked. Old Llew had retreated to the last of his butcher-trading family; he delivered meat for Manny Hopkins in a green three-wheeler van.

Mrs Cynon waited, left forearm across her midriff, right hand on her hip, like a model for a grannies’ boutique. “The council is taking over the institute,” she said. “Old-age pensioners are having it, mini-bus service picking us up three evenings a week.”

I said, “There are two pensioners’ halls in Daren already. Anyhow, they’ve always held meetings in Caib ’stute.”

“The worst is yet to come. I warned you to go away last Christmas.”

“We’re moving to Lower Daren,” Ellen said.

The old lady was shocked. “Ell-len…”

“You can stay with us on weekends, Selina. Can’t she, Rees?”

Lydia frowned against the glare and adult reasoning. “But Nana Cynon looks after us every,
every
day for daddy to shut himself in the back room.”

“We haven’t sold the house yet,” I said.

Mrs Cynon folded her arms. “Not likely to either! Another five years and the whole street will be knocked down. Yes, Ellen, true. Ask Alderman Griff Thomas.”

“That buggers everything. We’re knackered,” I said.

I saw the old lady’s nostrils twitching revulsion. “Come with Nana,” she warned, prodding the children forward.

“Must you use underground language in front of Lydia and Elizabeth?”

I said, “Slip of the tongue, beaut.”

She pulled free. “Rees, sometimes I hate you,” — her new-born scheme already shambled by secret ordinance from Daren council offices.

“I know,” I said.

“You know nothing! You think you’re Holy Jesus himself!”

“He isn’t on twenty-five-per-cent compo, my sulky love.”

“Oh, shut your mouth!”

“I’ll see you back in the house,” I said. “Make some excuse to the kiddies.”

“That’s right, go home and mope in the back room. You’re as bad as my father.”

Then I had to slap her face, twice, her fingernails gouging thin scalding furrows down my nose. We turned away from each other like de-polarized magnets.

“Sorry,” she said.

“Sorry,” I said.

Five men left on Caib pit-head in June. Regular surface workers: banksman, three traffic men and the overman. The cages were tipped over sideways on massive baulks of timber laid across the shaft. Sheep slept in the workshops, eight smithy fires dead since March, buckets of rust-filmed water, tongs, formers, rusted mauls, wedges, chains, jig-plates, bits and pieces scattered in hundreds. Old Derby winners were chalked on the walls. Horses’ names, obsolete reminders, alien jargon (BELT CLIPS FOR WEST 12. SEE MWCIN HOWARD RE CUTTER PICKS. BARHOOK PIN FOR RIMMER’S HEADING), film actresses, breasts and thighs, Ike Pomeroy caricatured with his dago moustache among confident illustrations of angle irons, brackets, drilling formulas, pulley ratios. Behind the smithy door, the World’s Cup winners named in their respective positions.

Trampled sheep droppings everywhere and thieving beyond precedent in Daren. Street-corner gangs moved in as the five dismantlers came down the tump. Every Monday a storeman from Brynywawr accepted orders for corrugated sheets off the screens, washery and pit-head buildings. Archie Booth’s sons brought a lorry fifty miles for two hundred sheets: they ordered two dozen. Schoolboys smashed what their fathers and elder brothers failed to carry away. Every window in the colliery, washery, baths, canteen and flocculation plant was broken; the main winding-house fortressed with breeze-blocks inside the panes, but these, too, were hammered down, further sledge and chisel work removing the engine’s brass bearings. A smaller engine house on the surface disappeared entirely, asbestos sheets, windows and doors assiduously stripped to the concrete base which held the engine.

Mrs Cynon privately protested to Seymour Lloyd, the retired Police Superintendent advising her against sending a letter to
Daren & District Clarion
. He assumed the Coal Board wasn’t interested in petty prosecutions — everybody knew about the electric motors and haulage equipment abandoned underground. Afterwards Mrs Cynon demanded a vote of bad conscience in the Women’s Guild, but too many members were the wives or relatives of looters.

Red painted to last a decade, the steel door of the never-used powder magazine still lay flat on the grass behind the carpenter’s shop. Sodden log-books were scattered on the site of the original old stone-and-mortar-built magazine, soiled records of every shot fired in Caib since 1958. Log-books, powder tins and ripped-open leather satchels for carrying detonators. Trodden sheep droppings from the threshold to the four demolished walls.

A weight-training enthusiast named Claude Prosser rolled a pair of tram-wheels through the length of Upper Daren. Next day he fell forty feet off the flocculation-plant tower — Claude the only scavenger who attempted stripping the steeply pitched tower roof. He and his widower father were unemployed, earning a few extra quid doing a song and patter act around the clubs.

Finally on 1st July (black Friday tailing Caib’s history) the five surface worken came down the tump for the last time. Bunched in a chatty group, they reached our house without a backward glance, Mrs Cynon standing out on the unmowed lawn, calling each man by name, wishing him good luck.

I thought, the old lady’s sad. Her Hayden died in Caib. It’s part of her life, Selina’s scar, big Percy hobbling on his stick, always there to remind her.

She returned to the kitchen. “That’s that, boy,
mae wedi cwpla
. I am now going off down to the infants’ school to fetch Lizzie-fach.”

“I’ll start the dinner,” I said.

“
Do
es dim yn aros, mae wedi cwpla
.”

Nothing to belong to any more, I thought. Change or die. The wheel has turned full circle. Our black and white days are over. Twelve thousand buried in Daren cemetery. Whole families of children from times of diphtheria, tuberculosis, typhoid and smallpox. Daren men killed in the pit, in the soft-coal levels. Men and women who gave up the ghost. Preachers, teachers, miners, aldermen, shopkeepers. Daren’s map of the dead. Life is cheap. Change or die. Change direction.

Pilferers softly banged and rapped on Caib colliery while I scraped new potatoes in the kitchen. I remembered ambulance sirens, ambulances since childhood, whining up to the pit-head. Miners tramping the streets in the middle of the night, bringing bad news to wives and mothers. Now, from this 1st July, quietness. Clean, quiet, residential Daren, with twenty per cent of the men on hardship allowance and school-leavers taught to appreciate dereliction as a way of life by fathers and uncles with damaged limbs or lungs. Privilege of the underprivileged.

I thought,
we
can’t change. If change doesn’t come from outside, we’ll gradually die off. Fade like a horse-and-cart ghost town. Our compo cases will meagrely survive on street corners or hide, mouldering in bedrooms, despair conquered because despair requires energy. We’ll fade, responsibility diminishing to queueing once a week at the labour exchange, to grey mornings in doctors’ waiting-rooms. Daren’s councillors are feuding via letters to the
Clarion
, and Cledwyn Hughes is engaged in the finesse of double-think diplomacy, lucidly bland as a secular bishop on BBC Wales and TWW. Numbing phrases relating to footage, skills, manpower, a plethora of talk and paper campaigns for generations who have lived by weekly wage packets. In the national press, Coal Board and N U M last words, edited regrets about the closure of Brynywawr colliery: that’s where they spent the big money. Unpublicized millions at the command of unknown men. Virtually unknown. Those mining experts with clean lungs, nostrils, toe-nails and finger-nails.