Flame and Slag

by Ron Berry

  Rain came on the sixth afternoon, scuds drumming our caravan, Ellen sluicing off yesterday’s brine and sand, posed like a caryatid at the wash-basin, laughing through splutters. ‘I’m not ticklish! Stop! Stop it… ugh, you greedy pig. Pig,” she said, “pig, pig, pig!” her breasts heaving, dun nipples glowing shiny, and I thought, good God Almighty, my wife. Rees Stevens’s beaut, her pretending whimpers, whooping, yowling temptation. “Don’t! Let me finish washing!”

  Warm-wet, biting, loving.

  Rainy evening in Horton, drowsy Ellen smelling of Lifebuoy, yellow skinned under the creaking, tinted lampshades, cows lowing, gulls screaming, the beach deserted as prehistory, and next day we came home to Daren, to the house below Caib railway siding, where limp John Vaughan marooned himself on the settee.

  Sickness helps to cripple the healthy, but that first year brought maiming and mort in too many shapes.

  First shift down under, swarming August rain feeding the young evergreens on Waunwen, and straightway a walk-out from Number 2 face, Andrew Booth the manager waiting for us at pit-bottom, angrier than he could afford to be against four dozen men who had the “working agreement” ready behind their tongues.

  Percy Cynon said, “You know it as well as we do, Mr Booth. We won’t fill enough coal to cook chips. The face isn’t water bombed.”

  “You’ll have coal by nine o’clock. I’m warning the lot of you. Now get back in there! This is one case you’re going to lose.”

  “What about the two hours, then, Mr Booth?”

  “Iesu Grist, you’ll make it up before the end of the shift. Now bugger off back in there. Some tired wasters in this pit want coddling — well, they won’t get it from me, not while I’m in charge. Useless bloody shower … men, by the Jesus, men they call themselves.” Squirting small spits to right and left, the brave little Caib autocrat rapped his steel toecap with his safety stick.

  Percy said, “That kind of talk won’t do, Mr Booth. See, we can nail you for abuse as they call it. Question is, these two hours from seven till nine. We’ll go back to the face all right, only there’ll have to be some allowance for the stoppage, as in the agreement.”

  “Day-work, and consider yourselves bloody lucky. Listen” — choking on temper — “I want this pit-bottom clear! So move, get in, move!”

  “Cheeky old sod you are, Mr Booth,” one of the colliers said, another undersized little tiger, shorter than old Booth himself, swaggering gimp-shouldered from the weight of the water jack in his coat pocket.

  Percy wheeled around, doing a pacifying shepherd act with his big arms. “Come on, boys, it’s a fair arrangement. We can’t argue against two hours’ day-work for sitting on our arses.”

  A couple of borers were already in our Number 2 face, water infusion busting out the coal, front slips anyhow, but towards the end of the shift we were using punchers on the hard stuff, the pace fallen off by now, beer steam rising from the regular club-men boozers, all of us waiting for the shout to pack it in. And then at five past two (and he’d done this a thousand times before) Percy Cynon rode the scraper chains out to the gate road, but he stayed on a second too long, one of the cross-bars taking his left leg over the cog at the gate road, the slack under-chain mashing his ankle, calf, knee, finishing him for good in the Caib. Finishing the Cynons as well — their family name in Daren, I mean — Percy’s one leg dooming him lifetime bachelor, no longer sworn, the tetchy brag of a sex-shy young man.

  Every evening until Christmas we visited him in hospital. After the year turned they transferred Percy to Talygarn, the miners’ hospital for rehabilitation. The big hard collier took life’s chopper early; he was only twenty-three.

  By February Ellen was six months pregnant on Lydia. Batched snowdrops whimpled outside Percy’s ward in Talygarn, and back home in Daren we were four feet under snow, borough council workmen earning their double pay keeping the roadways salted for local bus services.

  I said, “Perce, it must feel good to move around. You seem to walk fine.”

  “Aye, I’ll master it,” he said, smiling, hiding his mind from himself, Ellen sitting composed as a summer dove, Percy standing sloped away from his artificial leg, his bomper-round liquid eye-balls staring confused isolation. He belonged underground with grafting men, team workers, quarrelsome, brotherly, sullen, insular as monks. Among miners Percy had tact, courage, sympathy, the strength to be and do, but Talygarn, the official goodness of Talygarn, aseptically cranking minds to fit broken bodies, the place desolated his spirit.

  “We’re having a baby in May” — placid Ellen communicating with him as if he were the ear of the world.

  Percy said, “I bet my old lady’ll be there, performing,” and he grinned over his fattening shoulder. “Us two, Reesy, we’ll have a drink that day, right?”

  We never did though. Daren lives ended like trees falling, leaving spaced filled in with essential duties, with exact compulsions cultivated against havoc.

  Before the great spring thaw Grancha Stevens died in his armchair while my grandmother scraped clean the pigeon loft and chipped ice out of the drinking bowls. Returning indoors, she banked up the fire, threw Old Moore’s Almanack on to his lap and demanded to hear what the stars foretold for February 1960. Three hours later Ellen found her nursing old Glyndwr to her vast dropped bosom, rocking him to and fro, keening like a vent, the clump sole of her broad shoe slapping tap-tap-tap on the fallen Almanack.

  The day before his funeral Gran wrung every pigeon in the loft, harrying the frenzied birds, trampling corpses and cursing all the living world in Welsh. Her wits regressed fifty years, sending her trudging up Waunwen to the abandoned drift above Caib tip, Waun Level, where my grandfather contracted silicosis in hard headings, climbing up through the snow like a Khirgiz peasant woman, cheese sandwiches and a pop bottle of cold tea clutched beneath her cardigan, screeching at the mouth of the drift, “Glyndwr! Dere mâs o fyna!” stale warmish air fan-driven from Caib pit dripping the snow around the mossy, stone-arched mountainside hole.

  Lashed prone on a seven-foot corrugated sheet, we sledged her downhill, skirting the bulging north side of Caib tip, wallowing chest deep in snow and hidden bogs, the old lady unperturbed, stretched out motionless as a log, singing quavery, “Beth sydd i mi yn y byd, Ond gorthrymder mawr o hyd” (What is there for me in this world, But great tribulation all the while) as we carried her into the house, repeating this old Welsh hymn for two days, the coma pressing, lifting behind little tots of whisky, only Gran’s heart and the thin, broken tassel of lament staying alive.

  Glyndwr and Margaret May Stevens, herself resting above him in Daren cemetery before rust blemished the nameplate on his coffin. After each burial, Tal Harding merely glanced at his father’s snowbound grave, Percy following behind Tal to the car rocking purposefully on his bright alloy stick — Percy’s car, new, paid for out of his compensation money, and nothing else, only softer living to which he never adapted himself. His leg for the car.

  Andrew Booth sent wreaths, and Mrs Cynon graciously overseered Ellen at both funeral dinners. Watching Ellen, unable to feel grief-stricken, simply sadness, dull sorrow like illness, I saw her sociable ease, everyone at level with my timeless wife, dispensing not tolerable, necessary authority vide Mrs Selina Cynon, but calm, naturally serious equality.

  3

  We moved into my grandparents’ house early in March, shortly before Ellen’s absent mother appeared. Kate Vaughan taxi-ing from Daren Halt one mild slushy evening, a strange blue-rinsed woman, urbanely un-Welsh, yet determined to retrieve her deserted past, pecking a formal kiss at Ellen’s cheek, announcing like purified echo, “It’s marvellous to find you married and settled down, Ellie, it really is, darling,” turning on three-inch stilleto heels, meaninglessly familiar, “Rees Stevens, how do you do,” her grasp limply loose as the wearied hand of royalty. She had Ellen’s violet eyes, but searching blind, glittering, dervished from within.

  John Vaughan wept, taking his wife’s chiding like thanksgivi
ng. So we left the house in Thelma Street for the neglected, smaller house where my grandfather was born and died. Blissfully alone, erringly green, we planned together, Caib pit-wheels visible from our bedroom window, Grancha’s pigeon-loft site destined for a rockery, clean turf instead of the dirt backyard, a bathroom extension beyond our kitchen, built-in cupboards, new doors, plastering, painting. Even a goldfish pond expertly constructed by Rees-jack-of-all-trades. Meanwhile Ellen served her notice in Daren post office and bought herself a second-hand treadle sewing-machine. Eight months showed on her like six, said the clinic nurse, Mrs Cynon guaranteeing all’s well, too, on account of Ellen’s shape: “Just right, merch. I’ve never seen a mis coming from that sort of behind. Keep going till the very day; start laying-by and you’ll bring a lazy baby.”

  Ellen’s callisthenics, the inescapable euphoria, stallion pride from witnessing her deep breathing, whoofing and panting at the open window. Her tip-toes, her rotations, Ellen’s intense confidence, and outside the window Caib’s wanly greening tump foreground. Behind her, myself in bed on Saturday and Sunday mornings.

  “Rees, go downstairs and — ahh-hwp — light the fire.”

  “I’m doing all right at the moment, my love.”

  “Most mornings I’m sick — ahh-hwp — but it’s wearing off now.”

  “Well done, my love,” I said.

  “Light the fire, Rees, please.”

  “In a few minutes.”

  “Yesterday I bought some — ohh-ohh-ohh, ahh-hwp — some material for a dress. Think I’ll get back to size by next summer?”

  “Sure to, Ellen.”

  “Light the fire, boy.”

  “I’d sooner burn something else, my beaut. What I mean is you’re shining like a Christmas lantern through that nightie.”

  “Easter egg more like.”

  “Lovely egg.”

  “Eggy, that’s what you are. Light the fire — ahh-hwp — you loafer.”

  Pretending one of those old pulpit threateners, I said, “Five days a week shalt thou labour under the NCB, leaving Saturday and Sunday for playing the white man, for soldiering on, for ding-dong, for cultivating the mind…”

  “For sloth,” Ellen said. “Are there dry sticks in the oven? You can stay there, I’ll light the fire,” swaying herself elegantly to the dressing-table, where she shed her nightdress casually fast as an eel and brought her blue-traced belly back to the foot of the bed for her day clothes. I felt like Abram plus his bequeathed extra ha, leaping downstairs, lighting the fire, slick as a metropolitan chef preparing two British bacon-and-egg breakfasts while Ellen projected into next summer, cutting out the new pale primrose material to her maiden measurements, committing herself: the complete wife.

  “After breakfast,” I said, “I’ll start barrowing stones from Daren river. Build up the rockery in three tiers. Won’t take long to bash down the old loft, timber’s all rotten. Once the weather comes warmer I’ll do the digging and scatter the grass seed.”

  “I want a path from the back door right around the house,”she said. “For the baby’s pram.”

  “All in good time, my love. Seen your mother lately?”

  “My father does the shopping. He looks ghastly.”

  “He always has,” I said.

  The downpipes gurgled melting snow, snow four weeks dirtied, and thick mist came drifting over Waunwen as I hauled river stones into the backyard, Ellen sitting inside the living-room window, cutting a pattern out of a long-forgotten, unread newspaper, scissoring through a calculated song of praise to Welsh miners from the Duke of Edinburgh, some moribund charter speech: It is hard to compute the contribution which this mining community has made to the power and prosperity of the United Kingdom. Since then, there has been much hardship and distress, enough to break the spirit of lesser men, but your people, to the admiration of their countrymen, have triumphed over it… building a new life … looking forward with confidence to an age of peaceful industry and steady employment — this stupefying extract helping to light the fire on Monday morning, the remainder in EIlen’s dress pattern.

  “Take care of yourself,” she said. “Meat pie and veg for dinner when you come home.”

  Climbing the red ash pathway up Caib tump, I looked back at old Grancha’s blue and white loft, thinking, next weekend I’ll have all that lot scrapped for firewood. Save me humping blocks out from the pit for a month. But the loft stood rotting quietly all summer, dock-weeds nourished on acid pigeon droppings bursting up through the broken floor boards, burgeoning inside the windows like greenhouse plants. Our plans and the loft stood still, because six days after Ellen designed her dress, five after Andrew Booth successfully modernized Caib, running a conveyor belt right back to pit-bottom (the first of its kind in Wales), nature undid a century’s work, Caib tip breaking away, erupting from the steep breast of Waunwen, hitting Thelma Street like a black tidal wave.

  One inch of our annual eighty-one average rainfall poured over-night; first to cop on that drenching Saturday morning, the silent shunting yard jigsawed around Caib washery and screens. Niched into the base of Waunwen, three small culverts trapped half a dozen spate stream feeders to Daren river. These culverts were blocked simultaneously, greasing the tip already fallen a hundred yards, the black eagre bearing trucks across the siding, deep-riding and rolling dinosaurian in the softly roaring crushed shale, the undertow bulking heaviest, faster than the surface prow of the tip, carrying it clunking and chittering, unbroken almost like scum, a joggling froth of fresh-tipped muck, stones, bass coal, ancient tram ribs, derelict timbers. The over-all effect was of gargantuan stripping: green Waunwen flayed down to the clay and all the granite ballast chippings gulped off the railway sidings.

  Ellen’s parents were having breakfast, Mrs Vaughan wearing a pink brocade dressing-gown and chipped glacé silver mules, remnants along with the blue rinse of her emancipated years living common-law in Hampshire. John Vaughan dutifully read the Daily Mirror on his lap, not being allowed to prop it on the table, a clean, tidy, semi-invalid man, adamant only against having his hair cut, shaved neck and temples as in the days when he worked under-ground.

  Kate Vaughan’s scream: “Get up, run!” as daylight cut out of the window behind his bent shoulders, easily racing him to the back of the house as the room filled — a month later we found a century-old powder tin trapped in the firegrate, this Waun Level relic from the belly of the black slurry. Ellen and I were racing across Daren in Percy Cynon’s car, Caib pit hooter blowing S 0 S nonstop, Percy savaging the car up a dirt lane, rounding the left-hand corner towards the intersection, then crashing fast into reverse as the outer spreading muck came at us, inches deep, gently swilling like summer sea-water. We climbed out, Thelma Street forty yards away.

  Ellen moaned, twenty feet of tip muck shifting seething-topped down between the corner houses, leaving dripping tide marks on each gable end, three houses on the upper right-hand side of Thelma Street overwhelmed to their eaves, huge soft black curds dolloping from front windows, screams, madman shouts, squealing, grinding timbers, moans, Ellen moaning, incoherently moaning shock, Percy floundering on his one knee, unable to stand in the thickening slurry. We drove back down the lane to the next lateral road level, the same black tide riding between the uphill houses, and now we could see it pouring through the left-hand row where Ellen’s parents lived, squeezed gouts heaving out from the downstairs windows and doorways, Mrs Vaughan borne thigh-deep at the bottom of their garden, momentarily transfixed in her pink brocade against the chicken wire fence. But she climbed over and waded down the adjoining garden, hands grabbing for her, bundling her safely through the house and into the crowded road-way down below.

  “My father,” moaned Ellen.

  “Upstairs, safe, he’s safe, it’s only the ground floor this side of Thelma Street. We’ll have to wait till it stops moving,” Percy said, rigidly convincing, like a man bred for catastrophe, the roiling tide of soft muck spreading out towards us again. Ourselves, hundreds of
Upper Daren people, all retreating agonized as nightmare victims on both flanks of the fallen tip.

  I said, “Stay here, Ellen. I’m going across the roof-tops.”

  “Best wait till it stops moving,” Percy said.

  They were ape-walking the ridges, men, youths and young women, then sliding the slates sideways on their buttocks down to the guttering, calling for relatives and children inside the bedrooms. Gangly against the washed sky, a solitary youngster crab-walked the roofs of the right-hand row, above the three houses buried to their back-garden caves. Caib hooter lowered to a mooing groan as ambulance and police sirens broke fresh tones and all over Upper Daren you could hear wailing, rise and fall sustained, on and on.

  I left my shoes at the bottom of a ladder in somebody’s garden.

  “One at a time! Let him get up there first!”

  “Have you seen John Vaughan?” I said. “Number nine, this side of Thelma Street.”

  “Nuh. My brother’s living in number six, Josh Evans-North. Anybody seen Josh North?”

  “Climb, man,” I said. “I’ll hold the ladder.”

  There were fourteen of us spaced along the unbroken roof ridge. Counting chimneys, I yelled down number 9. “John! John Vaughan!” the echoes dulling to silence. I side-slid down to the eaves. “John, you all right in there?” — falling ten feet as the guttering pulled away from the rotted fascia board so that I dropped clean, landing safely below the bedroom window-sill. Knee-deep in softish muck. Safe. Empty bedrooms, and as I climbed my legs free the level-stretched shale in the garden forced entry somewhere down below, a sucking gutter falling away beneath my feet where I clung scrabbling to avoid dirt more than danger, number 9 back door suddenly bursting outwards and John Vaughan floated free buried neck-deep, his grey corrugated face aghast, dead, the white hair trailing smudged, matting weedily in the coiling surface muck. Clawing fingers and toes, I tried to reach him, half a dozen other men goat-jumping up alongside the sluggish gutter, waiting for it to stop moving, and as it slowed to standstill the final wet roll of top slurry creamed remorselessly over his white head. While we dug out his body, Ellen gave birth to Lydia on the oak table in Caib institute.