Flame and Slag

by Ron Berry

  By Monday afternoon eleven men, women and children had lain hidden under blankets on the billiard-hall floor.

  Nobody sang. Neither music nor singing came from Daren all that summer. Looking up at Waunwen, for the first time in living memory you could see the old stone-arched soft coal drift where my grandfather drove hard headings, where silicosis began caking his lungs even before they squared and pegged out the turf for Caib pit-shaft.

  4

  We found them in a Peak Frean’s tin on top of his wardrobe, the sixpenny exercise-books wrapped in brown paper, green passe-partout binding scaling the tin itself.

  “Looks private,” Tal Harding said. “In my opinion you should take them home to Ellen.”

  Percy Cynon rocked around on his heel, fleshiness uglifying his features. “Ellen’s business is his business. See what’s in the bloody books, Rees,” grinning at Tal, “and we’ll mind ours. Right, Tal? Downstairs, c’mon, let’s sweat some of this fat off.”

  “Mrs Vaughan would have first claim, only she’s not here any more,” Tal said.

  Percy shouted, “Oi, Post Office, come and bend your back over this shovel!”

  Thelma Street people were flinging muck out through front doors and parlour windows, a small NCB bulldozer fanning up and down the roadway, filling it into lorries at the intersection. I heard Percy bantering Tal, calling him a bladder of lard-gutted obscenity, Tal sniggering his rare tenor laugh. That laugh belonged to hysterical adolescence. I replaced the exercise-books in the biscuit tin; they were clean as new, maroon, numbered 1 to 10, John Vaughan’s scrupulous signature balanced on each front cover. Private diaries, I thought. Ellen’s now; she’d better have them.

  Much later, June twilight softening the wreckage left by the fallen tip, I remembered the biscuit tin and told her about it, grieving pooled dark in her lovely eyes.

  “They are diaries, sort of,” she said. “My father wrote them before we came home. Year after year, tales and news about Daren from the old days.”

  “Shall I fetch them, Ellen?”

  “You’re not tired, Rees?”

  “Not unless you want to go to bed,” I said, hugging hopefully, bargaining the only living defence against death.

  “Bed, already, this time of day?” her smile impenetrable as music to a deaf mute. “Strikes me you’d like to bathe in it, matey.”

  I said, “What, my love?”

  She breathed, chilling the word in my ear.

  So I brought the tin from Thelma Street.

  “Rees,” she offered, “I’d rather listen to you reading these notebooks.”

  “Okay, here, this is number one; we’ll start here. Anything specially private in these, I mean concerning yourself or your mother?”

  “Doesn’t matter any more. Read,” she said.

  “It’s about the Caib, yeh, seems so. Listen: ACCOUNT RE SINKING OF CAIB PIT & 0THER MATTERS RELATING TO DAREN & LOWER DAREN. By John Vaughan, Treasurer of Number One Lodge 1932–’42. Treasurer of Daren Miners’ Cottage Hospital 1934–’39.

  “It was Twmws Ivor Cynon who cut the actual first sod on April 21st 1923. Mr Joseph Gibby the owner put the shovel into Twm’s hands for him to have a go, make the start of Caib pit & the reason we called it CAIB comes from Twmws’s grandfather who was a blacksmith very clever at making a caib, which is the Welsh name for mattock. Well do I remember Twm & his wife Charlotte Cynon, as smart a pair for looks & good nature as you could wish to meet. She in her sky blue frills promising Twm the world if only he would come straight home instead of calling in the WAUN ARMS. Unless I am badly mistaken Mrs Thelma Gibby befriended Charlotte in the hope of chancing her arm with Twmws, not that he would try anything underhand to upset his Charlotte. As for Mr Gibby I must say he did not seem the kind of husband for Mrs Thelma Gibby, her being so all on edge to join in any social affairs. That is how life is with many partners as I have found to my personal cost. Mrs Gibby was dressed all in white like some gay bride. Gay she was true enough, gayer than any girl in Daren at that time but she & Mr Gibby only stayed about six months in the beginning. I am referring to 1923, exactly 23 years after they drove the railway tunnel under Waunwen but long before the senior school & the Earl Haig & Daren Cooperative on Harding’s Square, actually Daren was only quarter as big with gas lamps no farther than Dicko Harding’s stables. It was like another kingdom in those days as compared to these days, any honest man would say there are vast differences. For instance until Caib raised steam coal we were still working house coal seams half-way up the mountains & every summer you would see brown squirrels in the Avenue trees. What I can claim without fear of contradiction is that we were happier. Much happier all round as regards being neighbours sharing & sharing alike. Nothing resembling what came after, for instance the Schiller Award in 1933 made even brothers enemies to each other.”

  Ellen went, “Eh?”

  “Schiller Award, never heard of it I said. “I’ve heard about Mabon’s Sliding Scale, the Minimum Wage and the Sankey Award. I’ll find out, though, make inquiries in the pit tomorrow.”

  “It’s too far in the past. My father loved gossip, didn’t he?”

  “This is news for us, Ellen, that white woman chasing after Percy’s grandfather.”

  “Tempted to, you mean. Silly Mr Gibby, whoever he was.”

  “Silly? Him? He was one of the bastards who lived in country mansions anywhere except near the pits they owned. Right, all right, we’ll get back to your old man.”

  “Yes, read,” she said.

  “Another thing,” I had to say, “our output per man in the Caib is higher than any bloody colliery in the area, so this Gibby bloke started a gold-mine not a coal-pit. Him or his bloody descendants are still coining off our backs.”

  She said, “Don’t expect justice given to you. It’s taken, Rees, taken. That’s right, my love, read.”

  “ … even brothers enemies to each other. After Mr Gibby left Daren seven new men came from Merthyr Tydfil followed by some Irishmen & about a dozen sinkers came tramping from Gloucester & Forest of Dean way. More than two dozen all told with Twmws Ivor as overman. Smallest among them in size & the cleverest. The rest were big men, strong as bulls. Once a full grown black bull escaped from Hopkins’ slaughterhouse, dogs & boys chasing it right up through Daren into a bog where they built the colliery dam in 1927, the year Mr & Mrs Gibby arrived to officially open Caib institute. They shot the bull’s head almost off in that bog & borrowed horses from Watkins Main Level to drag him down to where Harding’s Square now is this present day. Crude as anything you will see in places like Spain. Another time the sinkers chased a fox through Upper Row, farm dogs as well & killed it on the doorstep of Number 4. I think Sarah Price Widow lived in Number 4. A hard life but food & beer were cheap. My own mother took in three Forest of Dean sinkers as lodgers, named Sid Lawrence, Jake Rimmer, & Bert Burgess. They could live on bread & Caerphilly, no manners or etiquette as we learned at home & at school. The Irish Paddies were worst for drunkenness. They upset Daren. There was a lot of Band of Hope here eventually. Five new chapels, Band of Hope & Siloh Male Voice in training for eisteddfods. Rain or fine the sinkers never stopped working. One main reason why I am making this Account is the hope that it will be handed down, perhaps show future colliers that we have not always had cutting machines to do the donkey work. Memorizing back, it is a mystery & a miracle how we survived. Winters in particular, everything transported to Daren by horse & cart & no roads worth calling, only parish roads like the famous one over Waunwen. Many new arrivals came over Waunwen with nothing more than the clothes on their backs. Well do I remember Mike Minty coming down Waunwen with Mrs Minty & Kate …”

  “My mother,” Ellen said.

  I said, “Irish?”

  “My father was. Didn’t you know I’m half Irish? Go on, Rees.”

  “ …Mrs Minty & Kate a hundred yards behind him. Hot summer weather it was & Mike came off the parish road & straight across to Twmws Cynon. Being myself thirteen years old
then, miching from school top class, I set eyes on Kate Minty for the first time. Twmws says to Mike Minty, ‘Aye indeed, there’s a start here for any man who can do a fair day’s work. Five & fourpence a shift. You will have to buy oilskins from Harding’s Stores. On tick, is it? Never mind, butty, meet me in the WAUN ARMS tonight.’ The shock Twmws had when Mike held out a fistful of sovereigns. ‘Goodness me, bachgen, richest man in Daren you are. Pleased to meet you, Missis Minty. Come to the right place you have. See down by there? Mr Gibby is going to build twenty houses for his Caib colliers. Only too glad to put in a good word for you to Mr Gibby. You will have a brand new little home to call your own. Settle down here in Daren.Very nice it is in the summer.’ Afterwards I never miched school, Kate saw to that. We were boy & girl sweethearts, which is not a good sign for later on in life, therefore I hope & pray the same thing does not happen to our daughter Ellen.”

  She tongued her lips, cool disgust ill-matching the rife post-natal laxity of her body. “My poor sick father,” she said. “He couldn’t forgive himself for falling in love.”

  “Nothing can spoil ours,” I said.

  “The years he spent waiting for my mother to come back to him. He grew to relish the pain of waiting.”

  I said, “Not the way I love you, Ellen.”

  “I shan’t ever hurt you, Rees. Read some more.”

  “Kate’s father was a decent man sober. Dangerous in drink. Mrs Minty used to lock him out of the house, letting him sleep it off in Caib cabin. We always found sinkers sleeping in the cabin on Sunday mornings. There & laid out on the grass behind WAUN ARMS. They were greedy drinkers & fighters & always friends afterwards. Us Daren people could not understand this attitude, it was in contradiction to our long Federation struggles against the coal owners. Thank God they never stayed on as colliers in 1926 because those sinkers lacked discipline amongst themselves to negotiate for wages & conditions. Mike Minty stayed, one of the few. Colliers are generally primitive to start off but pit sinkers are lots more savage. Uncontrollable individuals. Tramping men dressed like the Skipper’s Sardines advertisement. Rough diamonds as my mother used to say when we walked past them fighting outside the pubs. Thirty-six love children were born in Daren in 1924. Everyone blamed the Caib sinkers although of course it was not all their fault. One of the seven wonders is why Charlotte Cynon allowed her Twmws to spend night after night in their company. We had some negro men from Cardiff & Barry Docks come to Daren in 1924 & ’25. They did not stay long. You felt sorry for them in the cold & rain. There was an elder sister to Dicko Harding who had a big say in Calvaria Chapel. I remember she died single, her contention being that negro men brought the pox to Daren. Trefor Wilkins caught the pox before he was killed under a journey on the main coming out from Waun Level. Mrs Wilkins had to wash him & lay him out herself for his parish burial. 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. The 1926 strike was on before our Number One Lodge came to understand SOCIALIST ways & means of fighting for the CAUSE. As it affected Caib itself the strike finished in November, just in time for Mr Gibby to prove the Four Feet seam. One day I watched Mr Gibby & his surveyor riding up in a bowk. Soaked to the skin they were. Water in the Caib. Twm Cynon & his sinkers had struck water, but when you see Nant Melyn gutter running down the tump into Daren river what else should they expect but water. Common sense tells in the end. Pumps came up on the railway line to Daren Halt, Archie Booth in charge. He soon settled himself in Daren, married one of the Miskin daughters, Nathan Miskin Level-Crossing not his brother who sloped off with Mrs Pegler from the RED COW. When they struck the Caib Four Feet seam Archie Booth was pumpsman, those pumps of his banging around the twenty-four hours but nobody complained due to they had to get the Caib sinking finished & unless men keep going they will not succeed. That is the secret of life itself …”

  Ellen said, “Dad, dad, dad, damn you,” lullabying it soft voiced, the bitterness drawn fine, belonging to her pulse.

  “Don’t get upset, my beaut,” I said.

  “The horrible way he died.”

  “I know.”

  “Rees, why do we stay in Daren? The grief will always be here, even if they remove the tip and close the colliery.”

  “Hey,” I said, “close the Caib? We’re driving down to the Seven Feet seam, my love. There’s enough coal there for a hundred years, and know what the next move is? They’re bringing in a German firm to drive on the main roadways, mining engineers from Germany under contract to the NCB. We’ll have Germans living here in Daren next January, Germans, Poles, maybe coloured men. They’re opening headings in plenty of other pits all over the country.”

  Ellen wasn’t listening, her murmur fumbling tentative as the beginning of thought. “Yes, Rees, it doesn’t matter. We’ll have sons, more daughters” — rancour kindling, suddenly rasping raw, ferocious, too savage for reason, feline, a threshold surge, comingling of womb and mind: “Listen to me, you, you … when Lydia was born I felt sorry for her! Do you understand? Sorry for her sake. They were all crying, crying and groaning in the next room. My father was dead! Lydia was alive! He was spying down at us from that old photograph, my daughter squealing like a rabbit, alive. Lydia, our baby, Rees, ours! Do you hear, ours!”

  “I know, Ellen, please, I know! Jesus God, my love, as if I don’t realize what you’ve gone through.”

  Swaying in anguish, her mouth and eyes screwed up tight, I felt afraid to touch her. Then patience came over her cold as winter. “We’ll harden to it,” she said.

  I said, “We will, we must harden to it,” confessing my own lost, submerged heartbreak: “We’ve got to stay, my love. As your father says” — waving that sixpenny maroon exercise-book, the old fashioned copperplate rambling without pause from beginning to end — “if we can’t live with it here, find ourselves here, we shan’t be able to anywhere else. Unless we cheat. All right, some families from Thelma Street are leaving Daren; let them run away, let them find comfort in new places, new faces. Let people talk, back-chat and bicker their bastard-born heads off about Daren!” And now it came out, out, out: “My father was killed in Caib pit, smashed, he was smashed, girl! He was smashed to bloody pieces.”

  Ellen’s white face fell awry. “Your father? Why haven’t you told me? Rees, why hasn’t somebody told me?” — pulling my head down, pleading, sympathy dissembling her lovely frozen calm. “We’ll stay, Rees, stay for always. Is it a secret? Why is it a secret about him?”

  “I don’t need to cry my bloody eyes out,” I said. “It’s so long ago, the shame, the stupid guilt. He broke one of the laws. My father climbed over crossed rails into old workings, that’s when the fall caught him, came down on him in this old airway return road. He went there to relieve himself. One chance in a million, true as God, one chance in a million, but the Caib killed him. My mother died then, she soon died, she died in her own way. Granny Stevens brought me to this house, dragged me snivelling all the way. I remember I had hiccups from crying. My clothes were thrown in a washing basket slung over her arm. She dragged me like a lost pup. They never spoke about my parents. Even Saturday nights when Granch had a load on the guilt was there, deep as the bloody Caib. Can you understand the shame, Ellen? Why they put their son out of their minds, because he was killed with his trousers down? See how crazy they were? Ask anybody in Daren how Dai Stevens was killed. They’ll say buried under a fall. Ask them when it happened. They’ll say the day before Vesting Day. I was three years old and all the fucking houses” — Ellen grinned, thank God — “were plastered with flags and union jacks, speeches in the ’stute, on the Square, open tap all day in the pubs, old Granch too drunk to stand, Siloh bloody Male Voice Choir on the BBC, aye, and my father buried, crushed into his own mess. They brought out his remains in a feed sack. There wasn’t a man’s body left to plant up in Daren cemetery; they just went through the motions.”

  Ellen said, “Your m
other suffered.”

  “She did,” I said, failing to sneer, “worse than Granny Stevens. My love, you’re married into a mad family.”

  “But your grandmother was old, feeble.”

  “My mother, Ellen — you won’t hear about her either, not from any respectable woman in Daren. But they know, they know all right. In the snugs and back rooms they’ll still gossip about my mother.”

  “More secrets, Rees,” — two fingers pressed against my lips. “You’re no different, turning cruel with this hate locked inside you. We aren’t supposed to carry the sins of our parents. It’s you and me, Rees, and the baby. Now steady yourself. Tell me about your mother.”

  I couldn’t say the words.

  “You’ve seen me crying, often; why are you ashamed to cry?” — cheerfully aggressive, rolling her fist on my chin. “Big man, is that it? Too tough for tears? Rees-love, my father spilt his heart out in those notebooks. Wait until you come near the end, those years of sickness.”

  “Perhaps we should burn them,” I said.

  “Not yet, no. Tell me about your mother.”

  “She ran away. They say she went first to Cardiff, down the docks, then she went to Tosteg with some old man, living with him, one of those cracked old men who scrounge around ashtips. All I heard from my grandmother was, good riddance after bad rubbish. Just the right answer for a three-year-old kid. It’s easier to understand Caib tip falling on Thelma Street.”

  From here I could tell it all, finish the story.

  “She died in Sully hospital before I went up to junior school. That was the end, that was the very end for me.”