Flame and Slag

by Ron Berry

  Contents

  Title Page

  Foreword

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  Glossary

  Biographies

  Library of Wales

  Library of Wales Funded By

  Copyright

  FLAME & SLAG

  RON BERRY

  LIBRARY OF WALES

  Foreword

  You won’t read another novel like Flame and Slag. Unless, of course, you quickly turn to another book by Ron Berry or one of his many short stories. Novels which describe life underground, or life in coal-mining communities in their heyday do exist, of course, and several of them are written by writers from the Rhondda or the South Wales coalfield more generally – though few enough give you as much of the detail of the work. But there is a breathless urgency to this writing – an awareness almost in the richness of its language, the similes piled high on one another and so closely together – that life is short and hard and things need to be said both sharply and evocatively, but concisely too, before the lungs give way. This is a demand heard from within a cacophony of voices.

  Flame and Slag carries two stories – the marriage of Rees and his wife Ellen and the twists and turns of their relationship, often darkly comic, and the journal of Ellen’s father John, recording the development of the Caib colliery from its sinking in the 1920s. The sinking of a colliery in the 1920s seems almost counter-intuitive, since we know the story of the rapid growth of the Rhondda and its population, from barely a thousand in 1851 to 152,000 in 1911, and its population peak at 167,000 or so by 1921. Then the decline sets in, with over 200 mines closing in South Wales in the interwar years. But there was still a brief burst in places in the early 1920s, and the new Glenrhondda Number 2 pit was sunk in Blaencwm. Ron Berry describes this in his defiantly existential autobiography, History is What You Live:

  For two years before I started in Infants’ School, pit sinkers wearing black oilskins like the Skipper sardines advert filed past Upper and Lower Terraces.

  So despite the distancing sentences in Flame and Slag, suggesting the Rhondda is somewhere other (‘Hard times, good hard times which nobody can recapture, every man in Daren completely ignorant about THE MINERS’ NEXT STEP passing from lodge to lodge over in Rhondda’), Daren is in the Rhondda and is probably Blaencwm, or Blaenycwm as Ron would have called it.

  They still remember Ron Berry in Blaencwm. I am writing this foreword at the end of July, 2012, the year of the centenary of The Miners’ Next Step. Five days ago I was in Michaels Rd, Blaencwm, four doors down from Ron Berry’s old house, looking across the Selsig river at the Glenrhondda tip with my constituents Pat and Tom Brunker. ‘As boys, we all looked up to Ron,’ said Tom, ‘marvellous footballer, good boxer.’ Tom’s uncle’s death in the colliery is mentioned in Ron’s autobiography. Pat, former Chair of Welsh Labour, remembers Tom showing off his muscles by the pool – and you can see a photograph of such a pose in History is What You Live.

  I have a soft spot for Blaencwm. My quest for the Rhondda selection began in Pat and Tom’s house, ten years ago. They still remember Ron in Blaencwm, and maybe that’s not surprising for, as he says of his fictitious Blaencwm in Flame and Slag, ‘if there’s any glue in Daren, it’s memory. We remember everything.’

  And here, at the top of the Rhondda Fawr, you have a real sense of the complexity that Raymond Williams wrote about, reviewing the Welsh industrial novel:

  In any Welsh mining valley, there is the profoundly different yet immediately accessible landscape of open hills and the sky above them, of a rising light and of a clear expansion, into which it is possible, both physically and figuratively, to move… it is a shape which manifests not only a consciousness of history but a consciousness of alternatives, and then, in a modern form, a consciousness of aspirations and possibilities.

  Ron’s life was, of course, one that reflected this – contrasted with the working life underground were the active physical leisure pursuits like football, swimming, cycling and a love of the outdoors, someone who could write in detail about peregrine falcons as well as the intricate mechanics of mining. But sometimes the contradiction is spat out as a hatred of the conditions imposed by mining and the consumer capitalism that depends upon it – ‘…you’re a blackened man eating whitened bread under artificial light in a manufactured airsteam.’ Ron himself wrote of his own desire to return to the Valleys’ countryside when he was working in a factory in England during the war: ‘I felt hiraeth for mountains, for space, for green silence.’

  As I said there is richness in the language, a vivacity and a grasp for an appropriate local simile – ‘Ike himself governed by mining economics like a truant officer is ruled by the miching boys who justify his job’. There is a natural occasional use of the colloquial domestic Welsh that has remained strong amongst many families in the Upper Rhondda Fawr. Sometimes language is used to sardonic effect like a more engaged Under Milk Wood: ‘My wife Ellen, Mrs Selina Cynon’s willing pupil for every Shwmae and familarising idiom that binds tight the work-, bread-, bed- and pavement-bonded people of this bloody Wales of ours.’

  A foreword, of course, is not a review. My task is to encourage you to read Flame and Slag – and so you should, for the story, for the quality of the writing, and for the history it contains. This is the Wales when coal was still powerful, when mobile chest X-rays could trigger referrals to the Pneumoconiosis Unit in Llandough hospital, where the trains until the early 1960s still ran through the tunnel linking Blaencwm and Blaengwynfi, and where Remploy and countless other factories had just started up in the post-war wave of reconstruction.

  But above all, this is a perspective from a Rhondda after the closure of the Glenrhondda colliery in 1966 – and a Wales after the Aberfan disaster the same year. You will find in the book the bitterness directed at the National Coal Board and its Chairman, Lord Robens, a strong target of criticism for that tragedy – and for his delay in visiting the community of Aberfan:

  ‘I got four brothers working over in Brynywawr, doin’ as much for the country as Lord Alf in his little white aeroplane.’

  (One of the trappings of power enjoyed by the Chairman of the NCB was a corporate aeroplane.) The political agenda, if there is one, is a simple assertion of the battle between ‘Us’ – the workers, the members of that Rhondda community – and ‘Them’, not only the owners of private capitalist enterprise, but the state bureaucrats and their apologists. The stance is one entirely in line, arguably, with the Ron Berry who in the war-years read anarchist newsletters ‘over sausages and mash, mesmeric articles under the editorship of George Woodcock, sermons on penultimate values from Bakunin, extracts from Peter Kropotkin, Proudhon and Emma Goldman’.

  So there is cynicism about politics. This picks its targets, and hits them – the municipal councillors who control jobs for teachers, the MP who ‘piped up in the House, was duly recorded in Hansard and committed to limbo’ and the ‘lucidly bland’ Minister, in this case Cledwyn Hughes. But in this novel, published in the era of the Caerphilly and Rhondda West by-elections when Plaid ran Labour close seriously for the first times in the Valleys, Ron’s narrator Rees is caustic not just about Labour and its ‘deck of cardboard Nye Bevans remembering old Tredegar in the plushness of Berkshire’ – but also of Plaid:

  ‘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 i
n Cardiff like the one in Whitehall?’

  It is also a book of its era. Some of the attitudes recorded, on race, for example, reflect a language which might have been accepted as neutral in its day but would be seen to be questionable now. And in terms of the sexual politics of the novel, while Ellen is allowed her own space and establishes herself in her own realm, (‘women are always short of the right men’) the attitude occasionally displayed by some male characters towards violence against women will strike many today as being as casual as a chorus of Delilah.

  At times, then, this is a raw account. Certainly an angry account of what is happening to the Valleys in the 1960s. But there is humour in it, and passion, and hope in the people and what they make of the conditions in which they live. Earlier I called Ron’s autobiography existential. Read that after you have read this novel, for the background to the place and its historical context. What endures, at the end of Flame and Slag, is love. Ron Berry’s fierce clarity –remembered today, unprompted, in Blaencwm – is tempered in this book by the possibility of human love and the hope that future generations could learn and move forward.

  Leighton Andrews

  1

  Then, between the heyday and ultimate dissolution of Caib colliery, Ellen came. Remote Ellen Vaughan, my seventy-five per cent silicotic grandfather urging her up the steep backyard where he harboured racing pigeons in a blue and white loft perched on a ramp of railway sleepers.

  My grandmother stamped life into her splayed feet. “What’s he doing now? The girl’s not int’rested in his old pigeons. Nefoedd, nefoedd, there’s no rest for the wicked”, and she slip-slopped out after them, rotundly shapeless, dratting under her tongue the way of pure grandmothers all the working world over. I had a Sunday mood to warrant the passive June morning, fuzzy anticyclonic mist spread motionless below the mountain skyline and greenfly crinkling our postmaster’s roses — he came complaining, borrowed my grandfather’s brass spray pump, sucked lips prowing his Graeco-Roman nose at the ammoniac pong of pigeon droppings.

  “This is Rees, my nephew,” Grancha said. “Don’t remember Ellen Vaughan, do you, boy?”

  “I remember him, Mr Stevens,” she said.

  “Course, o’ course she does” — old Gran, distrusting frankness, barging possessively into the kitchen. “Now come back inside, merch; make yourself at home.”

  They talked about Winchester, about Daren names, family pedigrees, the pigeons droning crop-happy in the loft; Grancha’s beloved homers. But Ellen and I were strangers, formal in the silliness of Sunday morning, Caib screens hanging low, silent over the railway sidings. Another Daren Sabbath. From inside the open kitchen door I watched Grancha’s droopy old ex-Bordeaux, ex-Nantes winner squatting puffy feathered as a squab behind the loft window, saw him cuffed by a young mealy cock chasing a red hen, the hen’s bill nibbling the worn-out old champion’s frayed primary feathers while the mealy trod her vagrantly fast, inevitable as electricity.

  “Is Winchester nice, though?” asked my Gran, pinning down the ancient city once and for all.

  “Beautiful walks,” approved Ellen, “up along the river banks. And, of course, the cathedral. Everyone wants to see Winchester Cathedral.”

  Granch said, “But Shon Vaughan has come home, and I don’t blame him. Born and bred in Daren your dad was. Come home, Duw-aye, I should say. Me, I wouldn’t leave here, not after the misery…”

  “Glyndwr Stevens, mind your own business,” my grandmother said, old Granch sensibly hacking the little death cough he’d lived with for twenty years.

  I thought, hup, sweet gossip, sweeter salacity, dirty bedclothes somewhere in Ellen’s family. Past tense dirt. Mystery Ellen Vaughan, tranquil. She out of the past. I couldn’t remember her in Daren infants’ school. Four hundred bleating nonentities, the village swarm, singing, There’s a young lad up the hill there, with his white coat and his bright hair, he comes to court me. Infants in our rickety land of song, the time my father used to tramp into the house from Caib pit, nigger-minstrel black, rising half-white out of the zinc bath in front of the kitchen fire, soiled suds wrinkling, left drying below his navel before he kneeled cooped as a devout oriental in the bath to wash his lower half. Couldn’t remember this jet-haired Ellen, dream-laid girl, woman, violet-eyed for sorcery, for illusion more than for beauty and grief, her white hands like unused blessings in her lap.

  “Where will you work, gel?” said my grandmother, pitching that inbred, trustless Welshy wheedling, servility cored with unbreakable arrogance.

  Ellen smiled complaisantly saccharose, responding to Gran. “Mr Harding has offered me a job.”

  “Nice,” said Gran. “Stamps and savings, is it?”

  “Book-keeping, Mrs Stevens, and serving behind the counter.”

  “Indeed, isn’t that ever so nice. You’ll do good with Dicko Harding. Influence, see; merch.”

  “Our cadging old postmaster,” I said. “The creep makes a man’s stomach heave.”

  “Reesy, I’ll give you!”

  I said, “You know him better than I do, Gran.”

  “Well, there’s no need, outright in front of visitors and all. More tea, Ellen bach?”

  “I really must go now, Mrs Stevens. My father is rather weak these days. He’ll be pleased I’ve called to see you and Mr Stevens.”

  “Any time!” Grancha yelping, gasping; he’d taken enough excitement, stillness coming on him, his shrunken grey head stilted stiffly on his scragged neck, reaching for air.

  “Show the gel out, Rees. Sitting there like an ignorant thing” — Gran creaking a regardless smile at Ellen before bundling across to comfort the old man. “Leave the door open! You hear, Reesy, wide open!”

  Wasteful, the pity spent on old age. Endless pity shredding to cobwebby remorse by the time death wins, guilt and failure yoking the unity of man.

  “Where are you working?” Ellen said.

  “Over the tump, Caib colliery.”

  “I remember you,” she said again. “But I don’t remember your parents.”

  “Both dead. What’s wrong with your father? Is he ill?” Then, crowding the nation’s flaw at her, enjoying myself: “Know what, Ellen, there’s more sickness in South Wales than anywhere else in the country. You name it, we’ve got it. If South Wales was tropical, we’d breed mad dictators faster than gnats.”

  She said, “My father suffers from bronchitis and bad nerves. He’s emotionally disturbed” — calmly dismissing him, the night-thrashed calm of oblivion, of peace, peace acquired, fanned to the quick.

  “Daren might bring him around,” I said. “It’s quiet enough here, and besides, I suppose he knows most of us. That helps.”

  “You don’t have to walk home with me, Rees,” — her pale face wearing evermore scaled inside a harmony of bone, blood and flesh.

  “Do you mind?” I said.

  “I suspect you’re an exaggerator, Rees,” — glossy hair hooding her lowered eyes, then suddenly thrusting exposure, nakedly frank. “Of course, it was my mother; she deserted him a long time ago. My father won’t recover, not fully, not this side of paradise.”

  “Or the other place, Ellen.”

  It came from her like a mask speaking: “What do you know about love?”

  “Nothing. You have no right to ask, either. It’s like whatever grows in stone. There’s no reason for it in the beginning.”

  “Exaggerator and liar,” she accused. “Like him.”

  “Your old man? Hey, girl…”

  “He can’t, won’t take life as it comes, so he’s sick. I’m sick of sickness. I didn’t want to come back to this place,” — her mouth smiling, spurning disgust easier than her doom-quiet eyes. “My father has come home to die; it’s as simple as that.”

  “And I’m the same as him, as John Vaughan? Much obliged,” I said. “Anyway, while we’re on the subject, what do you know about love? Do they call it lurv up in Winchester?”

  “Love can turn poisonous, destroy people; at least, a man like my f
ather.”

  “Hard luck on him,” I said.

  She showed her teeth. “You’re so tough, hm?”

  Caib pit-head banksman buzzed three, the huge side-by-side wheels spinning, their fifty-eight seconds blur crowning the summer-green tump, slowing until the spokes appeared to run backwards, then the final precise joggle, cages landed, the clanging gate echoing all over Daren if you listened for it. “They’re still rising muck,” I said. “Big fall in the face where I work. More than likely we’ll be on the muck again tomorrow, after the argument.”

  She swanned her dark head, gazed immobile, as if she didn’t have to breathe.

  “See, Ellen, they’ll be compelled to pay us,” I said. “It’s a question of coming to some arrangement for loss of wages, abnormal conditions… no matter, you would’t understand.”

  “My father often talks about Caib colliery. He remembers the first days, when they began sinking the pit.”

  “Nineteen-twenty-three,” I said. “We were sparkles in our mothers’ eyes. The storks that brought us weren’t hatched out.”

  “The institute, too,” — heedless again, gesturing. “He talks about the time they built the ’stute”— smiling at her flashback —“over there, in front of Daren woods. Wasn’t he on the committee?”

  I thought, the burden of it, paddying to a wife-wrecked ex-miner. Ellen’s olde Winchester is on another planet. “Correct,” I said. “Your father’s photograph is hanging in the committee room. John Vaughan, lodge treasurer, nineteen-thirty-two. If there’s any glue in Daren, it’s memory. We remember everything, all the bread-and-scrape of bygone years, like a deck of cardboard Nye Bevans remembering scabby old Tredegar in the plushness of Berkshire. With only piffles left to fight for, the next best thing is to remember memories. Quarrel about bloody memories. Tomorrow morning we’ll bring our lodge chairman before the Caib manager; they’ll argue seven kinds of manure out of each other and eventually we’ll win. They’ll agree on maybe two-thirds of what we should be getting for clearing muck instead of filling coal. Arguments are beautiful when you’re not involved right down in the guts.”