Flame and Slag

by Ron Berry

  Ike, I thought, his bow-legged wife mowing the lawn in a halter-neck polka-dotted summer frock, if Twmws Ivor Cynon was alive he’d curse you black. You pox-true functionary.

  Ellen called, “Rees, what are you doing in there!”

  “Your old man’s Account, I’m back on it!”

  She said, “Huh.”

  Aye, I thought, Shon crap-gatherer Vaughan, cont:

  There is no replacing a man like Twmws Cynon. Pray God his name will stand for as long as coal is lifted from the cruel bowels of this earth of ours. One hundred & ninety workmates sang the wonderful O FRYNIA CAERSALEM over his grave, little suspecting eight hundred of us would be singing it for the seven men burnt to death in Caib before the leaves fell off the trees in 1930, smoke pouring down Caib tip coming from Waun Level the old airway return. As I say it made people wonder about Christianity despite sermons to make your hair stand up on end. Sermons, what a famous time for sermons. The hwyl came every Sunday night from Baptists, Methodists, Wesleyans & Pentecostals singing & shouting & nobody about anywhere on the streets till the chapels emptied. Card schools in the dingles & in Daren woods of course, playing Nap & Brag with a lookout for any policeman. Police had nothing better to do. Men such as Seymour Lloyd making names for themselves. Devil’s cards. What a mockery. All gone now. Two wholesale wars saw to that, killed off religion better than any spear in His holy side. Often I wished to possess religious faith. Frankly it never came. Any kind of faith I used to beg for in later years without success, so it must be the way I was made in the first instance. From strict Catholic to easy-come-easy-go Pentecostal after we moved into Thelma Street, that was Kate’s progress until eventually her true nature found outlet as it was bound to, starting when I broke my instep bones up in the Tylwth Teg district where the explosion look place. She said she wanted to visit her relations in Ireland. Being her husband I naturally contended, “Let me start back in work first to save some money.” She said, “Sell our Pearl Insurance Premiums to Dicko Harding.” “Not those please, Kate,” I said. As if that would stop her. Ireland? She never did go to Ireland, it was Queen Street, Portsmouth, leaving me grass widower for two years. Two years torture with no one in the world to turn to excepting Charlotte Cynon for a cooked dinner on my way home from Caib pit. No fire warming the house & how can a man wash his own back in a wooden tub? Dicko Harding made fifty pounds clear profit on those Premiums which were intended as savings for our old age. A man without genuine conscience for all his charity & tangerine oranges for children on New Year’s Eve & various backhanders to the parish council. Money his god that Dicko Harding. Money, money. If there is a heaven he belongs to that parable about the camel passing through the eye of a needle. When elected treasurer of Caib institute my proposal was to stop Dicko Harding from entering the building unless he paid non-affiliate contributions as certain shopkeepers were obliged to if they wished to enjoy our facilities. Instead they made him vice-president of Daren Bowls Club & therefore he bought membership in a roundabout way although Lodge Number One & a Welfare grant actually kept the rink going. Bowls did not appeal to me in the slightest. Things such as games take up time that deserves to be better occupied. Our main concern was to get organized to counteract low wages & bad conditions. The basic evils. We provided billiards, bowls, football equipment, dominoes & draughts in the library with Llew Hopkins institute caretaker, us committee-men taking turns in the library itself until Dai Stevens left school. But he was too wild in many ways. Pity he was killed however as he had a good head on him as regards selecting books. Matter of fact he put his own Left Book Club books on our shelves to make members realize we were being robbed right, left & centre by the coal-owners, Joseph Gibby & Sons included. To think young Dai was still under 21, but he knew the rough road we were on. He knew. The committee wanted to send him to Ruskin Labour College only he preferred courting. Dai preferred galivanting over to Brynywawr every whipstich, always missing from the Library, Llew Hopkins threatening to hand his notice in unless one of us took charge of the books. Only stamp the date and watch out for SILENCE he had to, nothing more. Ned Tremain was appointed librarian eventually, doing his best of course but badly handicapped by nystagmus. Those safety oil-lamps gave Ned nystagmus & cruel blinding headaches to the extent he did not know where to put himself. He signed on the panel permanent just before Kate came home to Daren. We were together in Doctor Stanton’s surgery when she marched in as if it was merely a case of jaunting back from Lower Daren. ‘The key,’ she said. ‘How do you expect me to get in the house?’ God in heaven I must have drunk hundreds of bottles of medicine for my bronchitis & chest complaints. Actually it was myself that had the first X Ray when we bought the machine for Daren Cottage Hospital & Doctor Claude Stanton said, “Clear as a bell, John. Climb Waunwen every Sunday, fill you lungs with fresh air.” To my mind it is not so much conditions as worry, worry. Fuming & fretting damages human health. My chest felt better disregarding hard times to come until 1940. The beauty of it was Kate seemed to settle down again which is what a wage slave wants most when he is doing his level best to provide food, shelter & clothing for his dependants. But she interfered concerning my responsibilities as treasurer. There was no persuading Kate in the light of reasonable argument, craving for more whist drives in the institute for instance. Always whist, her & one of the Miskin girls off night after night. Luckily for safe keeping I placed my treasurer’s account books with Charlotte Cynon. You could trust your life’s blood with Charlotte. I have seen her facing up to trials guaranteed to burn human feelings to a coke. For example lodgers. Lodgers on the dole during slack time & never a bad word spoken against her. Lodgers coming home drunk while she was rearing Hayden Percival & the girl Martha. Also anti-aircraft soldiers when they brought two pom-pom guns to protect Caib in 1941, one of these soldier lodgers trying to take advantage of young Martha, a ginger headed scally-wag from Newcastle who got exactly and precisely what he deserved in the end, him & Chris Jones standing toe to toe behind the institute boiler house for ninety-seven minutes on a Sunday morning. Everything arranged to legal rules. But still there it was, young Chris could beat any man in Daren before the overhead rope caught him in Caib. It had to be Cefn Coed Asylum for his own self protection after that. His sense of responsibility went scattered beyond control. Chrisy’s father & mother decided to live in Sketty to be near him. To all intents & purposes they were deprived of their only son. Chris lost control as many men do for lesser reasons. To my mind a true account of coal-mining is impossible to relate without foul language & red raging temper coming in their proper places. Same applies to cowboys I should imagine although never an eff appears in all the western books that I have read to kill boredom. Romance. It must be all romance. When you see a man out of his wits so that he does not care what he says, weeping & cursing as many, many times I have witnessed colliers, firemen, labourers, conveyor shifters & on one occasion a haulier praying to his horse when the horse failed coming up the deep from Number 3 district, praying on his bended knees until madness overpowered him & he punched the horse down with his bare fists. I am referring to Billo Cassam. Where is Billo now? Six feet under as a consequence of double rupture. Billo Cassam from Saerbren Street. Savage behaviour. Spain has got nothing on coal-mining. With regard to poverty as shown in adverts begging for charity, we have seen pot bellied kiddies in Daren without shoes to wear on their feet & it is no use saying the past is dead, let bygones be bygones. Not when you consider how a sincere man like Ramsey Macdonald stabbed Labour in the back. They have all done their share of stabbing the working class quite apart from victimization by employers. Prime outstanding example re miners: Arthur Horner. Some of the finest Federation fighters left Daren forever after being victimized. Men beyond blame. They had to earn a living. The minutes of Caib Lodge and Brynywawr Lodge would make modern trade union shop stewards believe we were fighting a lost CAUSE. Untrue. There are no lost causes only different ones.

  Lydia came into the back room for her good-n
ight kiss, Ellen following her. “Listen to this,” I said. “There are no lost causes only different ones.”

  Ellen remarked, “He learned the hard way — say nos da to daddy, cariad.”

  “Nos da” — Lydia piping obediently, and my heart crowded pure sensation, a leaping crackle of the blood, seeing wild, sandy-haired Dai Stevens in Lydia, and myself triangulating both, her pappy lips innocent as Horlick’s flavoured petals.

  “There, dere nawr,” Ellen said. My wife Ellen, Mrs Selina Cynon’s willing pupil for every Shwmae and familiarizing idiom that binds tight the work-, bread-, bed- and pavement- bonded people of this bloody Wales of ours.

  9

  Private contractors dismantled the flocculation plant, stripped the interior machinery, the empty building echoing rat squeaks, downpouring rain and the melancholic sibilance of draughts whistling in through broken windows. The long, empty stables, stenched pulse of the Caib before my time, echoed loose sheets creaking and flapping on the roof. Hundreds of red-rusted horseshoes, bent nails still clenching ragged strips and shrunken fragments of chitin hung over man-high rails along the mildewed, whitewashed flaked walls, and dozens of red-rusted “shafts” and “guns” lay bogged in weeds and rushes behind the stables like the shucks of armoured reptiles. Not a house door in Daren carries a lucky horseshoe. That trustful rustic past is destroyed, forgotten, buried.

  Caib colliery dam was blown down and back-filled with muck from the Seven Feet, and when the neglected smoke stack collapsed one gale-storm September night it obliterated a stray sheep-killer dog almost over the spot where they shot the black runaway bull in 1924. Again pilferers scrounged the soot-grimed ochre bricks to build garden walls, lean-to scullery extensions, garages. The colliery watchman (ex-professional wrestler, exile recently come home to a cushy number on the strength of his reputation) made deals in Daren Social and Welfare Club, even borrowing a Coal Board lorry to make deliveries. History rebounds on the NCB. Looting from collieries carries the hallmark of principle, privilege of the underprivileged. Exploitation by faceless coal-owners matched by equally faceless, certainly depersonalized, NCB top-dogs making decisions affecting rent, food and pleasure. Ultimately, historically sanctioned to boot, the Board executives will brainwash, maim, harass and kill more colliery workers than all the private coal-owners combined. The times deliver men indifferently as tides leave wrack, jetsam and trove, debouching a Kosygin there, a George and Harold here, a Sukarno elsewhere, and always wherever needed, or even wastefully, people, men like my father, John Vaughan, the Miskins and Howards, Fred Fransceska, the Tremains and Pages, Llew Hopkins, men like ‘Caib’ Cynon, whose grave has disappeared from the cemetery — Daren’s ten 6 in 1 gradient hillside acres brought from Joseph Gibby’s father (his ownership not to be investigated) for £17 an acre, the business arranged and settled fifty years before Mike Minty tramped over Waunwen parish road with a pocketful of golden sovereigns. Seventy-nine redeployed day wage-men and surface workers travelled twenty-eight miles a shift to long-life pits outside Daren. Caib old tip was ringed around the carved, flattened base with sapling silver birch trees, the new tip finally abandoned in June 1964, when all the waste muck went out through Brynywawr Drift, trammed from there conveniently downhill to marshland, where merely frogs, newts, beetles, sticklebacks and winter feed for infrequent flights of mallard were destroyed.

  Now we worked the Seven Feet seam, Caib colliers adjusting themselves to Meco cutter loaders roaring, snarling, whining up and down the faces. A new agreement gave us three shillings a day dust allowance and goggles to wear in the face. We lost the three shillings a shift after they rigged water sprays on the Meco loaders, but the dust still rained: … particles of less than 5 microns (1 micron= 1/1000 of a millimetre) have the greater pathological significance. The relative pathological significance of various dust components is not fully established, but it is known that particles of free silica have an important influence on the causation of fibrosis of the lungs.

  Aye, sure. Black-mouthry, for the use of. Aye indeed.

  Science coming in, craft and brute strength petering out.

  Better fitted to adjustment than most, Ike Pomeroy flourished under the new regime, swanning along the new roadway in a mine-car like a bogus emperor to his office on Brynywawr pit-head.

  Conscientious Ike, assiduous at all times, innocuously macabre, the writing gradually appearing on the wall: the Seven Feet was losing money. Absenteeism, accused the Coal Board — gob you, jack, you’re not grafting in the face, half-thought the men without saying it outright, their wives and daughters travelling besides, forty, fifty, sixty miles a day for easier money than working in coal dust that smothered your cap lamp every half-hour. Caib belonged to Brynywawr and we were in the red. We had to produce more coal to pay for the new machinery and pit-head development on Brynywawr. Pay for the losses in Caib, too, and the only currency is coal.

  The German firm’s men lived in caravans behind the concrete and glass administration block on Brynywawr, thirty-seven identical caravans plugged in to the colliery generator. They were driving another roadway, opening up the Seven Feet for development: press-button mining by 1967. By 1967 the furnacite plant would be ready, processed coal avalanching on the market. All we had to do was make the pit pay until the machines took over. We were notified accordingly, copy-signed handbills quoting out-put required per man-shift stapled to every employee’s wage packet.

  “Propaganda, it’s like Russia,” Ellen said. “If the worst comes to the worst, I’ll get a job in the television factory. You can look after the nippers,” — a snigger of ridicule metaphorically offering kiss my behind to the future, sufficient unto the day is the evil. Perhaps she was a better, truer miner’s wife than myself a miner.

  “If they close Brynywawr we’ll have to move from Daren,” I said.

  “Why should they, after spending millions on this advanced mining scheme?”

  “They closed the Four Feet seam, brand-new bunkers at pit-bottom scarcely used. Practically new washery, screens, flocculation plant. We don’t know how these people think,” I said. “Young colliers on the coal faces, we’re losing confidence in the industry.”

  “People never know what other people think,” Ellen said.

  “Clues then,” I said. “Clues for the men who are doing the graft.”

  She said, “Planners can’t be doers. You’ll have to wait until you’re told.”

  More centralized plan-thinking closed Daren railway tunnel; we were cut off, Western Welsh buses slashed to run every two hours from Harding’s Square, and Caib N.U.M. lodge muffled because we were now amalgamated with Brynywawr lodge under a different regional area. A deputation from Lower Daren radio and television factory met our M.P. in the Commons. He piped up in the House, was duly recorded in Hansard and committed to limbo.

  “Let’s buy a second-hand car,” Ellen said — second-hand from necessity, as we were paying for the old Coal Board house where my grandparents lived and died.

  I said, “What for? We don’t bloody well go anywhere.”

  “All right, mate, all right, we won’t buy a car. You’re working too hard. Take a shift off tomorrow.”

  “It’s faster work,” I said. “Three cuts a shift and you can’t see straight for the racket. Know old Lewsin Whistler? They brought him out yesterday, lump of coal broke his ankle. Lewsin’s gone past it for face work; he should be on a button job out on the gate road. Five of us, Ellen, and it’s all we can do to keep ahead of the machine, just fixing up props and bars. Ah Christ, it’s getting crazier every week. Minutes, love, seconds, minutes, they panic over minutes like prima donnas. Minutes, lost minutes. Spending millions of pounds and panicking over minutes. If my father was alive he wouldn’t have time to leave the face for a piss let alone the other thing.”

  “I don’t mind, Rees. It’s better to talk about it.” She said.

  “Bloody Coal News, the daft, glamorizing bastards. Anyone who writes for Coal News deserves a pill of powde
r rammed down his gullet. They must think we’re stupid — maybe we are, most of us. It’s like cheering on a football team for these propaganda merchants. Sporty, see? All muck in together, boys, heads down, arses up and out with the coal. Never mind a fuck about my grandfather, my old man, all the compo cases standing like ghosts on the street corners. Space age, by the loving Christ. When we’re not heroes we’re out-and-out wasters. Carrion-headed bastards blah-blahing about absenteeism in the newspapers, they can only see miners in terms of black and white. I’d like to watch those Fleet Street tigers, watch ’em in action with a twenty-four-pound puncher, that’s all, simply breaking up big stuff to keep the chains moving. Five shifts a week, fifty weeks a year, on the puncher and dust coming back so thick you can feel it clogging in your teeth. We’re all wearing goggles in Brynywawr Seven Feet. Some of our blokes are attending the outpatients for eye treatment. Rash around the eyes. Sweat rash. Aye. The bloody ventilation blows through like the wrong end of a Hoover; if it didn’t, the fucking pit would go up like a volcano. And our union, it’s gone to pieces since we’ve been under the Brynywawr area. Old Watt Howard packed in altogether when Number One finished. Lodge sec. for ten years; now he’s labouring on the council house estate. He threw away about three hundred quid redundancy pay. Why, Ellen? Because there’s no guts left in the men to fight. Jesus Christ, they’re working all kinds of shifts over in Brynywawr. Men who don’t know the meaning of trade unionism, silly-born bastards they are. They come up top pit after a shift, they bath, eat a dinner in the canteen, load their tommy boxes and go straight back down for another shift. They’re sleeping over their meals in the canteen. If my grandfather saw this carry-on, he’d spit blood. Honest to God, there’s no principle left.”