Hearts of Gold (17 page)
When she was with Andrew, Bethan was happy – happier than she’d ever been before. When she was alone particularly in the early hours of the morning, she fell prey to ugly fears and insecurities.
What she feared most was that he’d desert her for a prettier girl from his own class. But even that fear receded as days of unbroken courtship turned into weeks. Then one day as she and Laura walked through the female exercise yard on their way to the maternity unit they saw the green spikes of daffodil shoots pushing their way up in the narrow strip of soil beneath A and B ward windows, and she realised that her relationship with Andrew had survived a whole half season.
‘The first signs of spring,’ Bethan observed triumphantly.
‘You know what that means,’ Laura commented significantly.
‘Warm weather, light clothes, outings to the park and the seaside. Trips into the country, lots of fresh air and, if Andrew’s right, the disappearance of Maud’s cough.’
‘Lazy afternoons spent lying next to Trevor on the beach. Warm evening walks up the mountain …’
‘Have you mentioned these thoughts to Ronnie? Bethan teased.
‘Don’t have to, his mind runs like a sewer.’
‘If he suspects that you’re still going out with Trevor he won’t let you out without a chaperon.’
‘Ah – but he thinks I finished with Trevor weeks ago. And he can’t say anything to wholesome outings with my girlfriends, now can he?’ Laura leaned back against the wall of the main dining room and breathed in deeply but all she could smell was the overpowering odour of cabbage water wafting out of the kitchens. Bethan stood next to her, still smiling at the thought of all she had to look forward to.
The Easter Rattle Fair would be held soon, closing the streets of the town to traffic and opening them to stalls and crowds.
Andrew had promised to teach her tennis on the courts in Pontypridd Park and put her up for membership of the tennis club. He’d offered to take her to the beaches at Barry Island and Porthcawl, and even mentioned Swansea. And there was always the hope that things would improve at home. Haydn’s job had worked out well; perhaps it was Eddie’s turn next. There had been a lot of talk about changes coming to the Maritime. The pit might open five days a week and revert to full time working, in which case Maud could stay in school …
The hysterical screams of a woman shattered the peace in the yard and with it went all the castles that Bethan had built in the air.
‘If that’s someone in labour, tough,’ Laura said emphatically. ‘Iʼve got another ten minutes of this tea break to go.’
Glan and Jimmy appeared in the doorway of K ward dragging a girl between them. She was shouting obscenities at the top of her voice, kicking, spitting and scratching at everyone unfortunate enough to be within her reach.
‘Isn’t that Maisie Crockett?’ Laura asked.
Bethan ran across the yard.
‘Stay clear, Nurse Powell,’ Sister Thomas, the nurse in charge of K ward ordered loudly. ‘You could get hurt.’
‘Went berserk when they took her baby from her,’ Glan explained as he struggled to pin Maisie’s arms behind her back. ‘Come on, girl,’ he addressed Maisie irritably, ‘you’re on to a loser. You can’t fight me and win.’
‘Maisie, listen to me. Rules are rules.’ The sister stood in front of Maisie, trying to force the girl to look at her. ‘You’ve done nothing but sit around and look after your baby for six weeks. You can’t expect that to go on. You have to work to support you both. And if you work hard, you’ll see her for an hour on Sunday. It’s not as if they’ve taken her to the ends of the earth,’ she explained gently. ‘J ward’s behind the maternity unit, not in Africa. Now come along, be a good girl, say you’re sorry and we’ll forget about this outburst.’
‘I want my baby,’ Maisie hissed, spitting like a cornered cat.
‘You’re not doing your baby or yourself any good with all this nonsense,’ the sister said in a firmer tone.
‘Bastards!’ Maisie screamed venomously, going wild. ‘Bastards, you’ve no right to take my baby. She’s mine!’ She pulled away and kicked Glan in the shin. He relaxed his hold for an instant and she lashed out at Jimmy, broke free and ran back towards J ward, where the babies and toddies under three were kept.
‘Sister Thomas, what’s the meaning of this?’
‘Oh Christ, the Master, that’s all we need.’ Glan stopped rubbing his leg and grabbed Jimmy’s arm. Together they ran past the dispensary after Maisie. Sister Thomas was in the middle of her explanations to the Master when Glan and Jimmy returned, frogmarching the still defiant Maisie between them.
‘I’ve heard enough, Sister Thomas.’ The Master glared at Maisie. ‘There’s only one way to deal with recalcitrant paupers, my girl, and you’re going to find out what that is.’ He turned to Glan and Jimmy. ‘C ward,’ he commanded.
‘The men’s ward?’ Glan countered in amazement.
‘Padded cell, and don’t release your hold on her until she’s safely inside. Sister Thomas, don’t expect her back, I’m telephoning the police. Maisie’ll be spending the night in the cells down the station. Where she goes after that will be up to the magistrate.’
Bethan went to Sister Thomas and picked up her hand, which was bleeding badly.
‘Maisie bit it,’ the sister explained.
ʻIʼll clean it up if you like,’ Bethan offered.
‘That would be good of you.’
Maisie screamed just one more time before Glan and Jimmy, with the assistance of the Master, heaved her round the corner out of sight.
Feeling faint, the sister sank down on the steps of K ward. Bethan rubbed her temples.
‘Sometimes,’ Sister Thomas said weakly, ‘just sometimes I hate this job.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ Laura said feelingly. ‘I’d better be getting back. Don’t worry, Bethan, I’ll tell Squeers where you are.’
‘Thanks.’
Bethan sat alongside Sister Thomas and looked up at the square of clear blue sky framed by the rooftops of the workhouse buildings.
It seemed paler, more washed out than it had earlier. The air held an uncomfortable damp chill. She glanced down the yard towards the daffodil shoots. They were very small, no more than buds. Spring was far away as ever. She’d been a fool to think otherwise.
On Easter Sunday the sun beamed down on Graig Avenue, softening the harsh grey outlines of the buildings and the drab brown and black tones of the pressed dirt streets. It directed brilliant spotlights on to the few daffodil buds brave enough to poke their heads out of the dry, barren mountain soil that filled the handkerchief-sized gardens, and it shone warmly on Bethan as she stepped out on to her well-scrubbed doorstep.
‘You going to chapel, Bethan or high church now you’re keeping company with a doctor,’ Glan enquired snidely.
She looked over the low wall that separated the front of her house from next door, and saw Glan togged out in his best navy blue rayon suit, sitting cap in hand in front of the bay window closest to her.
‘None of your damned business where I go, Glan Richards,’ she replied briskly, pulling on the white gloves she’d taken out of mothballs to wear with the long sleeved blue and mauve floral cotton frock she’d bought from Megan the day before.
‘Swearing and on Easter day too. Well I’m a forgiving sort of a chap, and seeing as how we’re both dolled-up in our Sunday best, how about some company to walk down the hill with?’ He took a comb out of the top pocket of his jacket and ran it through his heavily creamed hair.
‘I have enough company,’ Bethan answered sharply.
‘I wish you didn’t,’ Eddie observed glumly as he, Maud and Haydn came out of the house.
‘Didn’t the Easter bunny bring you any chocolate eggs to sweeten your temper?’ Glan jumped down his steps and followed them on to the avenue.
‘Maud made us some beauties,’ Haydn gloated, hooking his arm around his sister’s shoulders. ‘Little chocolate ones in sponge cake nests.’
‘Lucky you,’ Glan grumbled. ‘Mam thinks chocolate eggs are a lot of nonsense. All I managed to scrounge was one of the hard boiled eggs left over from those our Pat and Jean painted for their kids. And being Pat and Jean they used red paint that went through the shell and dyed the whites pink.’
‘Different,’ Haydn said pleasantly. ‘Talking about your Mam, where is she?’
‘Went down early to help lay out the tables in the hall ready for the chapel tea.’
‘Some people are gluttons for punishment,’ Eddie grumbled mutinously, straightening an old crumpled tie of Evan’s that he wore at the neck of his only collar.
‘You’ll eat the tea this afternoon, same as everyone else,’ Maud rebuked. ‘And if we don’t step on it, we’ll be late for the service.’
‘Mustn’t upset Uncle John Joseph,’ Eddie cautioned.
‘Sooner we get there, sooner we’ll be back.’ Haydn pulled his cap over his face, and offered Bethan his other arm.
‘That doesn’t apply to chapel. Sooner we get there, longer we’ll sit on hard benches, and the number our bums will be,’ Eddie said crudely, trying to wind Maud up.
Maud refused to be wound up. ‘Isn’t it a beautiful day,’ she said as they walked, glancing coquettishly at Glan from under her eyelids.
‘And you’re too young to be doing what you’re doing,’ Haydn admonished, pulling her away from Glan.
‘How am I ever going to learn how to flirt if you get in the way every time I try to practise?’ Maud protested.
‘Practise all you like,’ Glan offered with a sly look at Bethan, ‘I don’t mind little kids.’
‘I’m not a little kid,’ Maud complained furiously.
‘Boxing tomorrow?’ Glan asked Eddie, looking at Maud in a new light.
‘Thought I might visit the booth in the Rattle Fair,’ Eddie murmured.
‘That’s a mug’s game if ever there was one,’ said Haydn, very much the big brother.
‘Uncle Joe’s going to collapse when he sees us all walking in together.’ Maud changed the subject, trying to smile at Glan behind Haydn’s back.
‘He’d only do that if Dad walked into chapel,’ Eddie said.
‘Communists don’t go to chapel,’ Maud commented primly.
‘I think Dad would, if anyone other than Uncle Joe was the minister,’ Eddie observed.
‘What about your father, Glan?’ Haydn asked. ‘He’s not a communist but he doesn’t go to chapel’
‘He’s not much of anything except a drinker.’ Glan glanced over his shoulder in case someone was eavesdropping. ‘He says time’s too precious to waste sitting about in chapel listening to preachers who’ve never got off their arses to do a day’s work in their lives.’
‘Bethan, Maud!’ Diana shouted to them as they rounded the corner by the Graig Hotel. She was wearing a light green and white flower sprigged dress and a white straw hat. William had on a new three piece suit.
‘I wish I had a mother who was an agent for Leslie’s,’ Glan said enviously, thinking, but not daring to voice his mother’s opinion that Megan and her children made more out of her relationship with Harry Griffiths than she did from her agency.
‘Bad case of jealousy?’ Bethan asked.
‘Nice suit,’ Glan conceded to William, staring at the grey and blue wool cloth pinstripe.
‘I’d sell it to you if I thought that taking it in a yard or two at the shoulders and a foot or two on the trouser bottoms wouldn’t spoil the cut.’
‘You’re barely an inch taller than me,’ Glan protested.
‘But what an inch.’
‘You …’
‘Easter. Goodwill to all men,’ Bethan interrupted, sensing a fight brewing.
‘That’s Christmas.’ Eddie halted in front of the chapel. The reedy strains of the organ floated out into the street along with a heady mixture of Evening in Paris, camphor and mothballs. ‘As this was your idea, Beth, after you.’
Aunt Hetty was playing the organ as usual, the music resounding to the arched roof of the fifty year old building. Bethan led the way into the back pew, pushing Maud next to the wall so she could keep an eye on her. Haydn followed, with Eddie next to him and Glan on the end of the bench. The pew in front of the pulpit was packed with sober suited deacons. Her mother had taken her place in the second row, alongside the deacons’ wives, an honorary position granted to her in accordance with her status as John Joseph’s niece, and only living relative after his wife.
A thud followed by a chorus of subdued titters came from the gallery overhead, traditionally the province of the children.
Bethan had happy memories of sitting up there, chewing ends of sweet tobacco and the “sweepings” that Haydn used to bring back from the stalls on the market. Even as small boys he and Eddie had haunted the place, begging for odd jobs, carrying parcels for heavily laden customers, laying out gimcracks on the displays, gathering up the rubbish that accumulated around the traders’ feet. Once the stallholders realised that they could trust the boys, they paid them in halfpennies, sweepings (whatever they could glean from the rubbish) and spoiled and leftover goods.
The halfpennies had been hoarded, the hard goods traded or swapped and the edibles devoured in the chapel on Sunday mornings, out of sight and reach of Elizabeth.
The music became vibrant, the vestry door to the right of the pulpit opened and John Joseph Bull, resplendent in white wing collar, dark suit and black bow tie, entered the chapel and climbed on to the rostrum to the pulpit. He pointed to the board that carried the hymn numbers and the congregation rose to the opening bars of “There Is A Green Hill Far Away.”
The only part of chapel that Bethan really enjoyed was the singing, particularly when it was bolstered, as it was now, by the full choir. Clear waves of pure music echoed down from the rafters, breaking into crescendos that carried with them the swell of absolute emotion. And croaking along with the tide of sweet voices were the discordant, hoarse, gravelly chants of the old men John Joseph’s foremost amongst them.
As a child Bethan had never understood the see saw arrangement of chapel services. The upside of the singing which lightened people’s spirits was invariably followed by a depressing down side, when her uncle began his own particular brand of hell fire sermonising. Today, after the prayers and a second hymn he laid his hand written notes on the pulpit and stared down at the assembled men, women and children, each curled into their seat, desperately trying to appear small and inconspicuous as his powerful voice began to recite a catalogue of dire, red hot torments the devil kept in readiness for those who transgressed from the straight and narrow.
His bony index finger sought and pointed, and even tough hardened miners shuddered, closing their eyes and knotting their hands into fists, as guilt coursed swiftly through their veins.
‘You. Yes, you there, Robert Jones!’ The full force of his wrath descended on a hapless miner sitting in the pew opposite Bethan’s. ‘You know what you’ve done! So does God. And I know.’ He appealed to the deacons’ wives in the second pew. ‘He took his pay. His three day pay. Money which his wife needed to keep his children’s bodies and souls together. And what did he do with it?’
He whirled, a dervish in a flapping black coat. ‘He drank it. Every penny! And while he lay retching in the gutter his wife was forced to beg shopkeepers for food for her crying babies. He drank the devil’s brew, and let his family starve.’
In the shocked and absolute silence Robert stared down at his feet, too mortified to move or attempt to reply. A child tittered out of sheer nervousness and John Joseph’s hawk like eyes scanned the hushed crowd searching out the culprit.
‘Well might you laugh, Freddy Martin,’ he shouted. ‘I know and God knows what you stole from the market last Saturday. He sees into the black and sinful hearts of boys who slide sugar plums from the edge of sweet stalls into their pockets. Crumbs that aren’t theirs to take. And you,’ he turned on two unemployed boys who’d been fined for playing cards in the street, moved on to a wife who’d quarrelled publicly with her neighbours – no one in the congregation was safe from his prying, self-righteous condemnation.
Anniversary of the Resurrection it might be, but for all that, John Joseph’s anger remained harsh and unabated. He’d never made any allowances for the weaknesses of his fellow man, and he wasn’t about to begin now. His voice rose to a fever pitch of indignation as he shouted out the names of those who had sinned, followed by details of their transgressions. Bethan stared down at her gloved hands. She found it difficult to meet her uncle’s eyes over the tea table in the back kitchen of Graig Avenue, let alone when he was preaching.
She glanced surreptitiously around the pews, lowering her lashes whenever anyone caught her eye. The deacons’ wives had decorated the chapel with vases of daffodils and catkins, but the clothes of the congregation alone would have testified to the season.
Everyone had made an effort, no matter how little they had. Even old Mrs George, who’d worn the same rusty black, cotton dress to chapel for as long as Bethan could remember, had taken the trouble to wash, press and trim it with a two penny lace collar.
All the men’s collars were stiff with starch and gleaming white. In some cases whiter than the shirts they topped. Best shirts generally lay wrapped in tissue paper in drawers between one Sunday and another. Even the hats that the women wore, and the men held in their hands had been brushed until the felt had piled into balls.
Studying her neighbours’ clothes was infinitely more diverting than listening to her uncle. Shutting her ears to the sound of his voice Bethan picked out the women from Leyshon Street. She’d met most of them in Megan’s house. Betty Morgan who had six children, and whose husband was on short time like her father, was wearing a smart, white trimmed navy crepe de chine dress. Her next door neighbour Judith Jones was dressed either in green silk or the best imitation of it that Bethan had seen, and all six
Morgan children were wearing new white socks and sandals.
Little wonder that William and Diana could afford new clothes. Megan’s business must be booming, though heaven only knew how her customers were affording it.
A crash rocked the pulpit and jolted her sharply back to awareness. Her uncle appeared to be staring straight at her although it was difficult to be sure as his eyes were deep set, half hidden beneath bushy grey brows. The blood rushed to her face, burning her skin. The tension in the atmosphere grew bitter, almost tangible, unbearable in its intensity. Slowly, ever so slowly, John Joseph uncurled his fingers from the edge of the wooden lectern.
He lifted his hand, pointed and spoke the one word dreaded above all others by the women in his flock.
‘Harlot.’
Every eye in the chapel focused on the hapless victim. Phyllis Harry, shoulders hunched, head lowered beneath the brim of her cheap straw hat, cowered in the corner of her pew.
‘Scarlet woman, follower of the devil’s ways. She carries the child of sin within her. God knows and it is by His will that we are no longer deceived by a wolf in sheep’s clothing.’
John Joseph’s eyes focused on Phyllis as he stepped backwards out of the pulpit on to the rostrum. ‘We must, all of us,’ his eyes scanned the silent expectant congregation. ‘Follow God’s law.’ His voice echoed booming with a strength that matched that of the organ. ‘If thy right eye offends thee, pluck it out.’ His hand moved up to his eye and a collective gasp rippled through the assembly. ‘If thy right arm offends thee, cut it off,’ he decreed, slashing the flat of his hand towards his shoulder, ‘If thy son or daughter walks hand in hand with the devil, shun them. If thy brother or sister ceases to follow in the steps of the Master then …’ He paused and waited expectantly for his sentence to be finished. He wasn’t disappointed.
‘Cast them out!’
The cry was taken up by those sitting in the front pew, and people further back who wished for a place on the privileged benches.
‘Cast them out.’ John Joseph echoed the words softly, thoughtfully, as he gazed into the mesmerised faces. ‘It is not a step we take lightly. But didn’t the Lord Himself overturn the tables of the Pharisees in the temple? Pharisee!’
He homed in on Phyllis. ‘Neglected, her sin will spread like a cancer.’ He stepped down from the rostrum and moved into the central aisle. ‘We dare not be complacent,’ he thundered. ‘Its seed lies within us all.’ He bore down on to the rows of silent people. ‘You,’ he pointed to Jimmy, the porter from the Homes. ‘And you …’ this time it was a deacon’s wife. ‘But you, good people, fight to suppress your baser instincts. As does every decent man and woman. We must be ever vigilant. We must strive every day, every hour of our lives. We must fight with every inch of strength we possess. Fight though it costs us our last breath. And even as we fight the devil lies in wait. He sits there …’ he stretched out his hand to Phyllis. ‘Fat, complacent, licking his lips as he leads the weak into hell. He sits in God’s House, masquerading as the meek. Shun him. Root him out. Destroy him and all his works. As he bows to no pity, neither shall we.’
