He said, as they walked down the narrow-gauge tracks that led to the sidings below, “How much do those men earn, Mr. Lovell?” Lovell said, “It depends what they’re doing. A boy stableman, a few shillings. An experienced miner, about the same as one of your father's waggoners.”
“Why do they go on doing it, generation after generation?”
“What else could they do? They have no other skills to sell and there are compensations.”
“I haven’t noticed any.”
“Ah, you would have to live here and work with them, shift for shift. Your father realised that but he's been under fire himself.”
He stopped and seemed to consider for a moment. “See here, lad, you plagued me to show you a coal mine and I’ve done it. You seem shocked but, unless I’m mistaken, you’re still very curious. That chap Williams lives close. Suppose we go and enquire after his chances? Would that embarrass a young gentleman like you?”
“Not in the least. I should like it very much, Mr. Lovell. I came here to learn.” He may have been mistaken but it seemed to him that the grim-faced manager of the Mountain Square relented somewhat, and came some way to meet what he probably regarded as an inquisitive boy, who was proving a time-wasting nuisance. “Then we’ll go,” he said, “for I fancy I know that poor chap's father, although the name about here is as common as Evans and Jones.”
It was one of those leaning slate-roofed hutches he had stayed in on his way from the coast, very cramped but spotlessly clean and oddly over-furnished. Owen's father was a used-up little man, himself a surface worker with two other sons, both out working middle shift when they called. Mrs. Williams, a talkative, fresh-faced woman of about fifty, made a great fuss of Lovell, who seemed to be on familiar terms with everyone about here, and Giles wondered if this was because he had been born in the area or because local men still remembered his almost legendary feat of twenty years back, when he had hauled a pump to a flooded mine in time to save the lives of entombed miners.
The house did not strike Giles as being the centre of domestic tragedy. Indeed, the reverse seemed to be true, for Williams Senior, having told them that Owen was at the infirmary and likely to have three toes amputated, added almost gleefully that this would result in the lad getting a job on top. It struck Giles as astonishing that a family could rejoice at such a gruesome slice of luck and he asked, diffidently, “Won’t your son be lame, Mr. Williams?” Williams said cheerfully that he might but that lameness, to that extent, was preferable to an injury that would stop a man doing a full day's work. He did not say what Giles judged to be in his mind, that a job on top meant Owen would be likely to live out his full span of life, and he thought that these men, every one of them, were like soldiers occupying an exposed redoubt, sniped at from all points of the compass and unlikely, in the very nature of things, to survive indefinitely.
Giles asked Mrs. Williams how many children she had and was told five— three boys, all down the pit, and two girls in domestic service at a big house in Breconshire, further north. “It's not often they come home,” she said, “except Christmas and Mothering Sunday, but it's glad I am for them for they’ve a good place up there, and plenty to eat.” She then brought him tea and a piece of home-baked cake and asked him, but not inquisitively, what he was about in the Rhondda. Luckily Lovell heard the question and answered for him. “Mr. Swann is going into his father's business. He's getting the hang of things in the regions before settling in London.”
“Ah, London,” Mrs. Williams said, as though Lovell had mentioned Pekin, “that's a racketty ole place, I’m told. I’ve never been, and not likely to go, although Trevor Jones's boy down the street has gone to work there. Got a job as a clerk in a warehouse, he has. That's what comes of attending to his lessons at the new school. Owen and Huw would have likely gone there if it had been open in time, but it wasn’t, so they have to make do with evening class when they’re on day shift.” She addressed Lovell, directly, “It's making good progress they are, Mr. Lovell, or so the minister tells Gwyn.” She turned to Giles again, smiling. “You’ll have forgotten your schooldays by now, Mr. Swann.”
It occurred to Giles then, more forcibly even than when he was clawing his way along those black galleries, that the contrast between sections of the British was so great that they might be inhabiting different planets. He was eighteen, and less than a month ago he had been a schoolboy. Those children he had seen eating their snap were six years his junior and had probably been at work for a year.
Lovell said, rising, “I’ll look in next time I’m round, Williams, to enquire after Owen. He's a good strapping lad, and I’ve no doubt he’ll be at work again in a month.”
“I hope so indeed,” Williams said, gravely, “for he's getting top rate and Mam’ll miss the money.”
Giles said, as soon as they were clear of the house, “Won’t Owen get compensation for an injury like that?” Lovell said that the miners did operate some sort of mutual provident scheme that would possibly yield a temporary sickness benefit of three or four shillings a week, but there was no official provision for injuries.
“But that's monstrous! Can’t the employers work out some kind of scheme for contingencies of this sort?” Lovell stopped and looked at him quizzically. “The owners? About here? Good God, no lad. That wouldn’t occur to the best of them. A man is no good to them lying on his back, is he?” He smiled then, a wry and wintry smile, that seemed to hurt a little. “You’re a budding radical, I perceive. I can see you and John Catesby getting along if you get so far as the Polygon. But let me give you a grain of comfort, concerning our business at least. Your father has the right ideas about the relationship between capital and labour. He's a good gaffer as I said, even though he's a hard man in some ways, or hard to those who don’t attend to their business to his satisfaction. Catesby's ways and his ways are different, however. Catesby has been trying to turn the world upside down ever since I’ve known him, and can’t understand why me and the other regional gaffers won’t help him.”
“Why won’t you? You have to admit that life bears pretty heavily on people like the Williamses. I’ve seen very little so far but what I have makes me wonder if a thumping good revolution isn’t needed here, as it was in France in 1789.”
“Ah, that's for the young to dream about,” Lovell said, tolerantly. “Dreamed something like it myself when I was your age, but I’ve learned since. By reading and by observation. I believe in slow pressures, applied through Parliamentary processes, of the kind Gladstone applied in the early seventies. Change things too quickly and what happens? You invite reaction, of the kind that spread clear across Europe in ’forty-eight. A few months of freedom and then snap, the collar's notched a hole tighter. The art of government isn’t to be found in a revolutionary tract but stodgier reading. It's a slow, toilsome process, take it from me. One Ewart Gladstone is worth twenty Dantons and any amount of Wat Tylers.”
It was in Giles's mind to admit that he had heard Gladstone, and been spellbound by him, but he said, instead, “I’m greatly obliged to you wasting a whole day on me, Mr. Lovell. I’ll write and tell my father how kind and helpful you were and that you may have thought me a great nuisance but didn’t show it.”
“Aye, I did think that, up to the moment you agreed to pay a call on the Williams, but I don’t think it now. I’m thinking something different and I’ll tell you what it is. I’d be right content to work under a young gaffer like you, if your father ever took it into his head to retire. Years at a gentlemen's school hasn’t spoiled you the way it does most young men o’ good family. You could think like one of us when you’ve seen more and read more and had time to digest it. If ever you’re this way again, I’d take it kindly if you called in at Abergavenny and met my missis an’ boys. Will you do that?”
“ To be sure I will, and gladly,” Giles said, and they shook hands again, this time less formally.
2
Over the battlemented, tip-scarred hills enclosing the valley and north
into the green, unravished country of Brecknock, Radnor, and Montgomery, where hardly anyone he met spoke English, and the smell of the sea reached him when the wind was in the west.
Mile after mile across sheep pasture and woodland valley, where rivers dashed over boulder-strewn beds and the landscape, he would say, had remained unchanged since Edward Longshanks’ French-speaking cavalry had ridden this far to kill Llewelyn and build their ring of fortresses in the north. Into the higher, wilder country about Dolgelley and through the frowning Llanberis Pass, where he spent one day looking over the quarries and another climbing Snowdon, but saw little for his pains on account of the dense trailers of mist. Fifteen and twenty miles a day on average, sometimes sleeping in remote little inns, where old stone bridges spanned rushing mountain torrents, more often, as a dry spell followed a week of clouded skies, camping under the edge of a wood, and sleeping in his sack until dawn put a razor edge on his appetite and he was glad to restore circulation by a tramp to the nearest village, where he would wolf down bacon and eggs and a pint of the local ale that would sustain him over the next stretch of rough walking. In this way he progressed within a day's walk of Caernarvon, having half-decided to visit the castle and then head for Chester through the lovely Conway Valley, and afterwards perhaps, take a look at the engine sheds at Crewe before moving into the Polygon to renew his acquaintance with Catesby.
The rushing, frothing, chattering rivers fascinated him up here, especially in the early mornings when the sky above the jagged mountains was coral streaked with heliotrope, and the soft rush of the water over the stones was like the chorus of an old Welsh battle-song. He would sometimes pause, resting his elbows on the stone parapet of such a stream, looking about him with satisfaction, but telling himself that he was unlikely to learn much about the state of the nation up here, for the purple hills and the wooded slopes clothing the lower parts of the valleys did not look as if they had altered since the earth cooled. Yet curious and unpredictable things did happen, as he discovered for himself one sunny morning in mid-May, whilst taking a breather at Pont Aberglaslyn, a river-crossing a mile below Beddgelert, where the road to the Vale of Conway led through a ten-mile pass of incomparable splendour.
He saw her when she began her hop-skip across the river, two hundred yards upstream, but paid her no special attention. At that distance she looked no more than a leggy, overbold schoolgirl, trying her luck on stepping stones formed by random boulders. Then he heard her squeal and saw a splash, and after that the glimpse of a red bundle spinning slowly in the current, rapidly gathering momentum and moving towards him as fast as a man could run.
The river was no more than shoulder deep, save where it ran in pools under the bank, but a child could easily drown there and, suddenly alarmed, he darted across the bridge and jumped ten feet to the gravel, wading in up to his knees and trying to judge where she would pass as the current swirled her towards the arches.
There was a long forked branch wedged between two rocks and he tore it free, calling to her and holding it out as she swept level with him. He saw then that the red bundle was not a child but a girl about his own age, and also that she had not completely lost her nerve, for she was making strenuous efforts to save herself, striking out for a smoother reach between the boulders but not, so far as he could judge, making enough progress to gain the bank.
He went in deeper, right up to his chest, waving the stick and shouting to her to grab it as she bobbed past, but she did not seem to understand him and ignored the branch. She kicked clear of a smooth rounded boulder and somehow got into an eddy that carried her not only underwater but clean between his legs, so that he was able to grab a handful of her skirt as the impact caused him to lose his footing and they rolled together in the shallows.
He dragged himself ashore and the girl with him, but he was weighed down by the heavy knapsack on his back, so that it was she rather than he who played the more active part in reaching the triangle of shingle below the bridge. Then, dashing the water from his eyes, he saw that she was laughing; instead of feeling a hero he felt a complete idiot, for it occurred to him then that the girl had been in no danger after all and probably knew the course of the river much better than he did.
She said, shaking her head like a spaniel, “There, now! Who rescued who?” and laughed again, so saucily that he was obliged to join in, saying, “I made sure you were a child… What possessed you to cross there? It isn’t a ford, is it?”
No, she told him, it wasn’t, but the river was fordable anywhere at this time of year, unless spring had been late and very wet.
He looked at her more closely then and saw why he had underestimated her age. She had the face of a child, a pretty and rather spoiled child he would say, with blue, slightly upslanting eyes, long, fair lashes, a retrousse nose, and a red, petulant mouth that looked as if it could sulk as well as chuckle. Yet her figure, revealed by her wet clothes, was that of a woman, and even here, dripping wet on a river bank, she flaunted it like a favour at a fair, heaving herself up and resting her weight on the buttress of the bridge, so that she could wring the water from her skirt. Her boyishness, and complete lack of concern over the wetting, reminded him of his younger sisters at home, who would make nothing of a thing like this but would never, he thought, have lifted their skirts above their thighs in front of a strange woman, much less a young man.
He said, to cover his confusion, “Do you live about here?” and she said offhandedly that she did, a mile or so along the Caernarvon road. But she did not explain what she was doing here by the river at six o’clock in the morning, or indeed, offer any explanation as to how she came to fall in the stream and half drown in front of his eyes.
Then, having dropped her sodden skirt, she peeled off the little hussar jacket she wore over a white silk blouse and began to wring that out, bending forward so that he had to avert his eyes, for the front of her blouse was open and as she was wearing neither corset nor petticoat he could look the length of the cleft between her breasts. She noticed his glance, swift as it was, and laughed again, throwing the jacket over her shoulder and fastening the blouse buttons, but so casually that he thought “She might be well grown but she's obviously weak in the head. Maybe she's an idiot, but the bonniest I ever saw!” and he said, “Let me have the jacket,” and took it, turning his back on her and wringing it almost free of water. When he turned she was still regarding him humorously, one finger pulling at her lip and one bare foot (she had lost her shoes) braced against the cornerstone of the bridge in a way that revealed a dimpled knee.
“I can go home and change,” she said, “but you can’t, can you? And your knapsack is just as wet as my bolero, and probably has all your things in it.”
He had forgotten his own plight and now had to make a new assessment of her. She obviously wasn’t the village idiot but an extraordinarily self-possessed young lady, as he realised the moment she went on, “We’ll go on home, and you can breakfast with us while Maggie is drying you out. It's not far if we cut across there!” and she pointed to a zig-zag track climbing the furze-covered hill on the far bank. Then, without waiting for his assent, she took hold of some stones protruding from the buttress and hauled herself up the ten-foot wall and back on to the road level, moving with the precision of a gymnast. He followed more slowly, having thrown his dripping knapsack up to her, and together they took the hill-track that wound over the shoulder of the hill, leaving the little town of Beddgelert on their right.
“What's your name and what were you doing here this early?” she demanded and he told her, adding that he had slept in the woods and had been making for the town to buy breakfast before tackling the pass to Capel Curig and Conway. For some reason this seemed to impress her and she stopped to take a long, unabashed look at him, saying, “Just how far have you walked, Mr. Swann?”
“About a hundred and fifty miles,” he said. “From North Devon. I left a month ago,” and she gasped, again looking like a child.
“Why, that's
marvellous! Papa will be most interested to learn that! He doesn’t walk much, of course, but he knows all the places you must have passed. All those dreadful coal-mining towns, in the south.”
“Who is your father? Is he a farmer?”
“Good heavens, no!” she said, laughing again. “He's nothing really, but his hobby is geology when he's here. Usually he's in London, or at one or other of his factories. He's got lots of factories in the south.”
“What kind of factories?” Giles asked, for it was very difficult to visualise a factory-owner who lived up here in the very heart of the mountains, had a daughter like this pretty, unchaperoned creature, and studied geology into the bargain.
“Oh, all kinds of factories,” she said, carelessly. “A dye works, a processing plant for coal-tar, a tannery, I believe… oh yes, and a foundry for making chains. Anchor chains, you know, the kind they use on ironclads and liners.”
“You mean his home up here is his country-seat where he comes for holidays?”
“Yes, you’d call it that, I suppose, but I live here most of the time. I can do what I like up here whereas in London I always have to keep finding ways of outwitting Prickle. Prickle is strict and has the stupidest notions about how young ladies should behave once they put their hair up. That's why I had mine cut short,” she added, as though that was what she had been leading up to.
“What's your name?”
“Guess. It begins with ‘R’.”’
“I might guess all morning. Is it Rachel?”
“No, that's Biblical, and Papa is an atheist, like Mr. Bradlaugh. Try again.”
He would have liked to have asked her if she had met Bradlaugh, who had recently been ejected from the House of Commons by ten policemen, but decided to humour her.
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