Hearts of Gold (3 page)

The boiler and fires in the hospital were banked low with second-grade coal that smouldered rather than burned, barely warming the radiators and covering the yards with smut-laden black smog.

She cut her bread and jam into small squares and began to eat. Elizabeth sat opposite her, sipping her tea with no apparent enjoyment. Bethan didn’t attempt to talk. She’d never been close to her mother and didn’t miss intimate conversations with her because they’d never had one. Her father had always tried to help with her problems.

He’d given her all the childhood hugs, kisses and treats that she’d received at home, and if she needed a woman to talk to now, she went to Laura or her Aunt Megan.

A month after Evan and Elizabeth’s marriage, Evan’s younger brother William began courting Megan Davies. Megan was the antithesis of Elizabeth. To use Caterina Powell’s terms she was “a nice, warm-hearted Welsh girl, who knew where she came from”. (A reference to Elizabeth’s refusal to acknowledge her own mother’s working-class roots). The daughter and sister of policemen, Megan Davies was smaller, prettier and stronger willed than Elizabeth, and she point-blank refused to move into the Graig Avenue household.

She wouldn’t have minded sharing a home with Caterina, in fact she probably would have welcomed the opportunity, as her own mother had died when she was twelve, leaving her with a father and six brothers to look after, but as she put it baldly to William, ‘I would as soon move into the workhouse as into the same house as Elizabeth.’

It was left to Evan to solve the problem. Unbeknown to Elizabeth, he took a morning off work, saw the bank manager, and extended the mortgage on the house so he could buy out his brother’s share. Elizabeth was furious when she discovered what he’d done and, martyr to the last, took every penny of her hitherto untouched savings and paid off as much of the debt as she could.

A lot more than Evan’s pride was damaged by her gesture, but tight-lipped he said nothing and complained to no one.

Blissfully ignorant of Evan’s pain, Megan and William were ecstatic. They put down a payment on a small, flat-fronted, terraced house in Leyshon Street. Its front door opened directly on to the pavement. A long thin passage (when she saw it Megan cried, “God help if you’re fat”) led past the tiny, square front parlour to the back kitchen. A lean to washhouse, two skimpy bedrooms, a box room and a back garden big enough to accommodate the coalhouse, outside WC, washing line, and precious little else comprised the rest of the house. But Megan and William were over the moon. Three streets down the hill from Graig Avenue, they were close enough to visit William’s mother and brother when they wished, and far enough away to avoid

Elizabeth – most of the time.

Elizabeth disliked Megan from the first, and not just because she had rich brown hair and eyes, a clear, glowing complexion and a slim petite figure that looked well in the discounted clothes that she bought from the shop where she worked.

Pregnancy took a heavy toll on Elizabeth’s health and looks and by the time William and Megan fixed a date for their wedding she was on her second. Stubbornly refusing Evan’s offer of a Provident cheque to buy a new outfit on the grounds that they couldn’t afford the shilling in the pound a week repayment, she went to the wedding in a baggy old maternity dress that she knew full well he hated.

Elizabeth’s uncle John Joseph, who did the honours for William and Megan as he’d done for her and Evan, publicly pitied Elizabeth, telling her how ill she looked in a booming voice that carried to every corner of the chapel. Satisfied with her sacrificial gesture, she refused to enter the Graig Hotel where the reception was being held, and returned to the house with her baby, secure in the knowledge that she had ruined the day for Evan and upset Caterina. But the wedding was only the first of many irritants that Megan introduced into Elizabeth’s life.

Although Megan had come from Bonvilston Road, which was across town and as alien to the people of the Graig as distant places like Cardiff, she was instantly accepted into the community. Elizabeth felt the slight keenly. Despite the fact that she’d lived most of her life in and around Pontypridd, everyone on the Graig referred to her as “the young Mrs Powell” to differentiate between her and Caterina. In a village where first name terms were the rule rather than the exception the title was an insult, particularly when Megan was “Megan” from the outset. As popular, well-liked and accepted as Caterina, Evan and William.

Elizabeth burned at the injustice of it all. In the early days of her marriage she’d desperately tried to please her neighbours. She’d joined several of the committees of her uncle’s chapel. She’d visited the sick, cleaned the vestry, organised Sunday school outings and even offered to coach backward children with their school work. But in doing all of that she’d failed to realise the potency of her neighbours’ pride.

Rough, untutored self-educated, they earned their weekly wage the hard way, and held their heads high. Taught from birth to scorn charity, they mistrusted the motives that lay behind her overtures. And she, schooled by her father and uncle in “charitable deeds”, was incapable of helping people from a sense of fellowship or kindness simply because she’d never possessed either of those qualities.

It never crossed her mind to blame her own short comings for her isolation from the community. Uncultured and uneducated as her neighbours were, they could sniff out those who condescended and patronised a mile off, and she continued to condescend and patronize without even realising she was doing so.

Outwardly she and Evan were no different from anyone else. They had no money to spare or “swank” with. In fact between the demands of her children, the mortgage, and what Evan gave his mother most weeks she was hard put to stretch Evan’s wages until his next pay day. But close acquaintance with poverty did nothing to diminish her sense of superiority. If anything it entrenched it, along with her long suffering air of martyrdom.

A year or two passed and she gave up trying to make friends of her neighbours. She decided she didn’t need them. After all, they were hardly the type of person she’d associated with in Training College or during her teaching days. Instead she concentrated on domestic chores, filling her days with the drudgery of washing, cooking, cleaning, mending and scrubbing. Making herself a slave to the physical needs of her family, and keeping herself and them strictly within the bounds of what she termed “decency”. But in the daily struggle whatever warmth had once existed between her and Evan was irretrievably lost.

When war broke out and flamed across Europe in 1914 it affected even Pontypridd. In the early days before conscription, some men, including miners, volunteered, sincerely believing they were marching to glorious battle and an heroic personal future that would return them to their locals by Christmas. (With luck, covered with enough medals to earn them a few free pints)

Evan knew better. So did William – when he was sober. William and Megan celebrated their fourth wedding anniversary in 1915. Caterina looked after baby William, and William, excited by his and Megan’s’ first night out together in a long time, went to town. They started the evening at six o’clock in the Graig Hotel then gradually worked their way down the Graig hill, via every pub, until they reached the Half Moon opposite Pontypridd Junction station, and just the other side of the railway bridge that marked the border between the Graig hill and town.

Concerned about the state William was getting himself into, Megan stuck to shandy, and even then she sat out a couple of rounds. There were over a dozen pubs either on or just off the Graig hill, and William had a pint in every one. Before he’d married Megan he’d been capable of drinking almost any man in Pontypridd under the table and walking a straight line home afterwards.

What he hadn’t taken into account was his lack of practice at sinking pints since his marriage. When money was tight, the man’s beer was generally the first thing to go, and Evan had warned him, ‘The price of getting a woman into your bed is every coin in your pocket.’

William was an inch or two shorter than Evan, but he was still a big man, and worried about getting him home Megan suggested that they catch the second house in the New Theatre – there at least he wouldn’t be able to drink any more.

As it turned out, William didn’t need much persuading. He was having difficulty standing upright, let alone walking, and he loved the music hall. In his genial, euphoric state he treated himself and Megan to one shilling and three penny seats in the stalls. It was an unprecedented extravagance that changed his life.

If he’d bought his usual sixpenny gallery seats he wouldn’t have been able to reach the stage as easily as he did.

The musical acts were good - very good. There was a ventriloquist, an American Jazz band, and an extremely attractive blonde soprano who burst into rousing choruses of patriotic songs.

Unfortunately for William, and a good ten per cent of the men in the audience, she was joined on stage by a recruiting sergeant, who beckoned them forward. Mesmerised by the blonde, and singing at the top of his voice, William took up the invitation. Happy, drunk and on stage for the first time in his life, he signed the paper that the recruiting sergeant thrust under his nose and found himself an unwilling conscript in Kitchener’s New Army.

Megan cried, but her tears softened nothing but her cheeks. William was shipped out that same night. She received a couple of abject, apologetic letters then a postcard emblazoned with a beautiful embroidered bluebird, holding an improbably coloured flower in its beak and a banner proclaiming “A Kiss from France”.

A week later an official War Office telegram was delivered to her door in Leyshon Street.

Regret to Inform you
· Pte William Powell killed in action.

His commanding officer wrote to her, a nice enough note that told her little about William’s life in the army or the manner of his death. Six lonely, miserable months later she gave birth to William’s daughter. She named her Diana after a character in one of Marie Corelli’s novels that she’d borrowed from Pontypridd Lending Library. Megan wasn’t one to break under grief. She had two children and a war widow’s pension that wouldn’t even cover the cost of the mortgage. Ever practical, she asked for, and got, a job scrubbing out the local pub in the early morning. But even that wasn’t enough, so she put two beds in the front parlour, and took in lodgers.

It wasn’t easy to work even part-time with little ones to care for and Caterina used Megan’s plight as an excuse to leave Graig Avenue and move into Leyshon Street.

Evan paid another visit to the bank manager. He took out a third mortgage on the house, this time for the maximum that the manager wood allow, and insisted on giving his mother every pound that he’d raised.

Elizabeth was devastated and not only financially. Not realising how much she’d come to rely on her mother-in-law’s assistance with her children, she’d barely tolerated Caterina’s presence whilst they’d lived together, but after Caterina left, she felt her loss keenly. That, coupled with the crippling increase in the mortgage repayments, gave her yet another reason to feel rejected and ill used by Evan’s family.

Bethan was six, Haydn five, Eddie two and Maud a baby when their grandmother moved into their Aunt Megan’s house. They missed her warmth, her love and her cuddles, but fortunately Megan’s house was within easy walking distance even for small legs, and for once in his life Evan stood up to Elizabeth, overrode all her objections and actively encouraged his children to visit his mother and sister-in-law.

Much to Elizabeth’s chagrin Evan also developed the habit of dropping into Megan’s whenever he walked the Graig hill. The neighbours began to fall silent when Elizabeth passed. She sensed fingers pointing at her behind her back, whispers following her when she left the local shops. She didn’t need her Uncle John Joseph to tell her that, in Graig terms,

“Evan had pushed his feet under Megan’s table”.

As jealousy took its insidious hold, Elizabeth reacted in typical martyred fashion. She became colder and at the same time, a more efficient housewife. Whatever else was being said she made certain that no one could cast a critical eye at her house or her children. Everything and everyone within the confines of her terraced walls shone and sparkled as only daily rubbing and scrubbing could make them.

In time the inevitable happened, the gossip mongers tired of talking about Megan and Evan, and turned their attention to other things. But Megan, young, attractive, footloose and fancy free, was never out of the limelight for long. Interest in Evan was

superseded by interest in Megan’s lodgers particularity one Sam Brown, an American sailor turned collier who’d made his way to Pontypridd via Bute Street, Cardiff, and the first black man to live on the Graig.

Caterina’s presence in Leyshon Street kept Megan just the right side of respectability – just – because other gentlemen callers beside Evan and Megan’s brother Huw found their way to her door.

The most frequent visitor was Harry Griffiths, a corner shop keeper. By Pontypridd standards Harry was comfortably off; by Graig standards he was a millionaire. Popular and well-loved by his customers because he and his father had almost bankrupted themselves by financing the grocery credit accounts of the miners during the crippling hungry strikes of the twenties. He could do no wrong in the eyes of his neighbours. Megan couldn’t have picked a better, “gentleman friend” if she’d tried. He was married, but the gossip had long since discovered that it was a marriage in name only as his wife refused to give him “his rights”.

They lived above his shop which was housed in a large square building that dominated the corner of the Graig hill and Factory Lane.

Old Mrs Evans, who lived in rooms above the fish and chip shop opposite, saw him pulling the curtains of the box room less than a week after his wedding, and it wasn’t long before everyone on the Graig became acquainted with the Griffiths’ sleeping habits.

Mrs Evans continued her reports at regular intervals. The old iron single bedstead in the box room acquired a fresh coat of paint and a blue spread. Harry’s clothes were hung on hooks behind the door, and a rag rug laid over the bare floorboards.

Mrs Evans was obliged to adjust her hours, and change to a later bedtime when Harry took to eating supper every evening with Megan in Leyshon Street, but then, as she whispered to Annie Jones who worked in the fish shop, “A man’s entitled to a bit of comfort, and if he can’t get it at home, who can blame him for straying”.

Certainly not the women whose credit was stretched by Harry when their husbands fell sick or were put on “short time” by the pit owners.

Megan had steeled herself to face worse.

Fingers were pointed, but not unkindly. Only Elizabeth gave her the cold shoulder, but the relationship between her and Elizabeth was already so strained, Megan barely noticed the difference.

The war widows on the Graig generally fell into one of two categories. There were those who became embittered, afraid to love anyone, man, woman or child, lest they suffer loss again, and there were those like Megan who were prepared to reach out to anyone who needed them, hoping that in so doing so they would, in some small way assuage their grief.

Megan found enough love and understanding for everyone she came into contact with. Her children, her mother-and brother-in-law, her nieces and nephews, her lodgers, her friends, her neighbours – her generosity became a byword on the Graig and an object of Elizabeth’s scorn.