Flame and Slag

by Ron Berry

  “Be quiet, Ellen; for Christ’s sake shut it. I’ve listened to you getting back at me long enough, so shut up. That’s the message. We’re starting it this way. Stop bitching. Shut up.”

  “I’m not supposed to have any normal social life, just work, work and wait for you to become normal. Calling me by my mother’s name… what about your own mother? She was a slut, cheap Brynywawr slut! It’s coming out more and more, her evil nature. Sometimes I feel like killing you. Two years, Rees, two whole years! You must think I’m made of stone.”

  The streets were deserted, hay-smell wafting from a smallholding below the bomb craters left by Goering’s hit-and-run raiders in 1942. The craters were fern-sided down to stagnant pools, the tadpole ponds of boyhood. A wet quarter-moon, up-tilted to hang your shirt on the lower horn, couched the matt-black remainder as if protecting it from becoming a Patrick Moore space junction. Pigeon senseless, I aligned the North Star to the Plough, a sky-filling dark cloud sheeting over, flatly sombre, its profiled leading edge sucking out stars, layer after layer until misty rain began to fall.

  She tied a yellow chiffon scarf around her head, marching stride for stride, our shoes pressing dry sole prints on the faintly damp pavement.

  “Ellen,” I said, “sometimes I feel like killing you, too.”

  Her tish ended adamantly, grunting scorn.

  “More than wanting to kill Tal Harding,” I said. “He’s hollow, like a cup.”

  “Tal’s a better friend than you’re a husband,” she said, the rubbery swish-swish from her stockings lost inside a night rustle that spumed the fine rain into a razzled maze around the street lights.

  “Don’t wait for me,” I said, turning off towards Caib institute. “Good night, Ellen.”

  “What? Rees, come back, wait! Rees … you swine.”

  The maroon side-gate was locked. I climbed over the low, spiked fence, Llew Hopkins’s wallflowers sickly sweet, then hurried around the bowling-green and Thorpe’s bungalow.

  “Rees!” she called. “Rees, wait!”

  I waited inside the edge of the woods, seeing her paused in along splay of light escaping from the bungalow.

  “Reesy!”

  Reacting for the first time, I felt stupidly murderous, mere intent severed from the doing. Killing Ellen would be like destroying the rest of myself. Annihilation, end of the end. A man can’t hate himself that far, not unless he’s entirely lost, stone mad. Gone lunatic at past midnight in Daren woods, twenty spits and a câm from my deprived wife, a further ten câms to Emily earth goddess, dear Emily, puppeteered by goodness devoid of passion. Affectionate Emily, pansy tender Emily, warm brown across my half-blackened life.

  “Where are you, Rees?”

  “Here,” I said.

  She kept jabbering about the children and Mrs Cynon, and I kept telling her to shut up, blundering along in the wet-grassed darkness, tension sweating, stricken desperate as a wounded rat, my imagination (affliction’s only holy) centred, pledged like the seed that made the Cross. No man escapes his cross.

  Waist-deep in dripping cow parsley, I said, “Take your clothes off,” squawking scrapy-throated like a Garden of Eden rogue. “You hear me, girl, clothes off!”

  “Oh, my God,” she said, and she humphed surprise matter-of-factly as a broody bird.

  It wasn’t paradise regained, but thrown-out pairs make their own particular oases on wasteland. Have to, at whine’s end. Shaky, small enough victory, strolling home hand in hand, drenched as Rio Grande wet-backs. I told her about Emily Thorpe, had to tell her, driven to by resentment, by the fear of feeling inferior. She said, “Only six or seven times with Tal, because, Reesy, it was better that way than with half a dozen. Wasn’t it better? Like you and Emily, wasn’t it?”

  “Something similar, Ellen,” I said.

  “Two years, my love!” — thumping her hip at me, gay, two years sloughed, discarded like wrapping-paper.

  “Be quiet, beaut, I’m not right yet.”

  “You ah-are!”

  “We’ll see,” I said.

  “I love you more than ever now, Reesy.”

  Around the blacked-out bungalow, down alongside the bowling-green, over the low fence, seven red carnation heads crammed inside Ellen’s brassiere (gesture of redemption, gospelly sensual), Llew Hopkin’s ’stute front lawn patch reeking of metaldehyde slug killer, and we hiked the gradient to our house, where Mrs Cynon slept bolt upright in my grandfather’s kitchen armchair, a classical portrait of matriarchal rectitude, of imperishable she-Cymru dignity.

  “Percy’s been here,” she murmured, “and Taliesin Harding called in for half a minute. Not a sound from Lydia and Lizzie-fach. I’ll sleep on the couch in the back room. Don’t mind, do you?”

  Ellen blanketed her warmly on the couch, whispering, her and the old lady whispering together like excited chambermaids.

  Two o’clock next afternoon I waited outside the office on top pit for Ike Pomeroy.

  15

  Luther Howard, more persuasive than his father Watt, heeled slowly around like a witch-doctor inside a circle of clean-faced colliers.

  “Now, men, let’s have it perfectly clear, shall we? We’re all agreed our original price list became null and void when we ran into this jump. Since then we’ve been on allowance, working just as hard, harder some of us in really bad conditions. My contention is this, due to conditions in the Seven Feet, due to Ike Pomeroy sticking by the old price list, it’s time we had a new working agreement. In other words it’s time for us to have a share of the cream. We’ve sent deputations, we’ve tried reason, but so far we’re up against a stone wall.” Luther’s chopping right hand stood quite still on the open palm of his left hand.

  One of the men said, “Put it to the vote.”

  Luther said, “Either thirty bob on top of present wages or a chance at the coal in another face, either that or arbitration. It’s up to us to make Pomeroy see things our way. Most of the blokes are married. I’m single, but as you know when it comes to victimisation by circumstances beyond our control, then by Christ it’s enough to put any man’s back up. This jump could go on for six months. We might still be on the muck next Christmas.”

  “Put it to the vote,” they said.

  Luther counted hands, plus his own, declaring, “Unanimous. Right, men, we’re as a body, so they can’t touch us. I’ll see Ike Pomeroy. Listen, here are the three alternatives: thirty bob extra, a chance at the coal, or arbitration. Any questions?”

  There weren’t any. They were all victims in their own eyes. All identical.

  Ten minutes later forty afternoon shift men returned to the baths for their day clothes.

  Then I went in to ask Ike for a job, his healthily bony face moustached for caballero extravagance. Maybe he could prove it with his slightly bow-legged wife.

  “Rees Stevens! Where have you been keeping yourself? Sure we can fix you up,” — his bright utility eyes glinting the vacuity of concentrating two ways. “It’s our pleasure to do what we can for a collier with your record under the NCB. Pumps-man by night. Look at those silly sods going home. Luther Howard, that fella would cut off his nose to spite his face. Start Monday night, Rees. Monday night. See old Seward Tremain at pit-bottom, he’s over-man by night. What’s your disability, Rees, what percentage?”

  “Twenty-five,” I said.

  “Have you been down-graded since the accident?”

  I said, “Not since I had my first Board medical.”

  “It wouldn’t do for me to sign you on if you couldn’t cope with the job; common sense, Rees, you understand. You’ll have to walk about four miles a shift.”

  “Nights regular?” I said.

  “Nothing else available for a compo case like yourself. Ted Mayhew is on days, Ianto Pugh by afternoon. They’re both compo cases.” Ike grinned, gay spirited in devised chaos. “Old Ianto’s on his last legs; he might ask for his cards any day, then you’ll take his place on afternoons. Seniority rule; you know the principle, Rees.�
��

  “Yeh, seniority,” I said, feeling trapped the way her beaten father moaned out his Winchester years.

  Seward Tremain was a back-slider. He lost his Baptist shanty chapel where he ‘saw the light’, his eldest son went to Borstal for breaking and entering, and Mrs Tremain took to her bed with angina. Seward back-slid negatively, his sobersides hwyling and hymning succumbed to durable moroseness. He belonged to the second generation of firemen officials in Caib Four Feet, resigning to work a coal stent again when production was concentrated in Brynywawr Seven Feet. Then, after losing his chapel, his son and virtually his wife, Seward rejoined the official’s union, off-shift fireman graduating to overman because he was loyal, responsible, no man’s fool underground, despite the humdrum shambles of his faith and fatherhood.

  “Reesy,” he said, “I remember the very day you had your bump. Haven’t seen much of you since either. See your missis now and again, wheeling the kids down Regent Street. There’s Dai Stevens stamped on your kids all right, no mistaking.”

  We were at pit-bottom, Seward booking in the last of the night-shift men as they stepped forward to the mine-car.

  “What’s it like on the faces?” I said. “The other afternoon I heard Luther Howard charming his mouth off about this big jump in the Seven Feet. Are they driving through it, Seward?”

  “S’all we can do, and hope for the best. Anyhow, Luther’s happy now.”

  “How much allowance are they getting?” I said.

  Seward grunted satisfaction as the mine-car pulled away. “Twenty-three bob a shift. If the contract foreigners were still here, they’d have knocked through to clean coal weeks ago.”

  “You’ve changed your mind about them since you were on piece-work,” I said.

  “Rees, you been out a couple of years; you’ve lost touch. There’s too much niggling among our boys. They’re too fussy, always picking on the wrongs before the rights. C’mon, let’s look at the pumps.”

  I said, “Maybe our Daren men are after their tanner’s worth of justice today instead of waiting for it to come with their pensions or dust compo. From what I saw of the German contract blokes they had no bloody tradition at all. They didn’t know good conditions from bad. Only the unprincipled sods from our union ever went to work for that firm.”

  “Everything’s changing, butty. These days it’s number one comes first. I got fifteen per cent dust myself. Doesn’t bother me much.”

  I said, “My wife wanted me to take a shift off the time I copped my lot.”

  Seward’s face mellowed beneath his helmet. “Mentioning that, Rees, there was my old lady. She had a touch of the second sight. Good old woman she was, aye indeed, heart as big as heaven. Truth now, she never let us kids want for anything if she could afford it.”

  “You know what my mother was like,” I said.

  “Aye, poor gel.”

  I thought, gone, gone, dead and gone. Thank God I found Ellen. Thank Jesus we found each other.

  There were three water pumps working non-stop around the clock. One at Caib pit-bottom, the second along Caib’s original main airway return road linking to the steep upcast to Waun Level, the third pump at pit-bottom in Brynywawr. I had to round the pumps twice a shift, oiling and packing grease boxes, travelling the old main airway return on a pump-handle bogie, with a mine-car lift back from Brynywawr at the end of each shift. A girl wearing boots, boilersuit and gloves could do the job. Any twig-limbed slip of a girl.

  Pacing the route, I usually reached one of the supply or gate roads for company at snack-time. Middle-aged repairers working in couples — Lewsin Whistler had fallen back nights, repairing with another one-time face collier, Jenkin Howard, brother to Watt, uncle to Luther. Jenkin (Shink Patch on account of his one eye) was sixty-three, bowed to shellback from fifty years pick and shovelling. He nurtured homers, like my grandfather. After Watt quit the industry there were still seventeen Howards working underground, all grades from labourers to craftsmen. At weddings and funerals the whole tribe foregathered, men, women and children tied by blood and marriage, filling the huge barrack-bare room above the Earl of Haig Club. Daren primaries, these Howards, older than the Cynons, with a relish for argument, quarrelling, banter, vituperation in dialect Welsh. Daughters who bore occasional bastards held their offspring in warrant, irreducible from, committed to the clan, the family name. These indestructible Howards, never a one of them seceding, exiles arriving home on holidays from London, Slough, Coventry, Birmingham or wherever, and the family pattern extended wholesale, as if they were not prodigals, rejecting even news letters, but maybe a trifle late home from pub, club, shopping spree or seaside outing. Great Howard people, to make Coal Board executives appear transiently homuncular, which they must be, in truth, estimating themselves superior to the base of the pyramid upon which they shrewdly totter, directing and obligatorily throat-cutting without wit or passion. As if faultless SUCCESS runs the grain of human hearts tighter than the reach of grass to sun-fire.

  As if Rees Stevens, twenty-five per cent compo pumps-man, was predestined to obedience until the doomsday of clocking in and out.

  At the end of my first shift I walked down the tump, Ellen standing outside our backyard door the way my grandmother used to stump out to look for my grandfather. Half past seven, quietness over Upper Daren, the day shift gone down, two local buses standing on Harding’s Square, waiting for stragglers to come off night shift. Nant Melyn bounced white foam and vinegar-coloured flood water. Too early yet for Rollo & Sons grinding into Caib new tip way up the river gulley.

  “Hush,” she said, “I don’t want the children to wake until eight o’clock.”

  “Aren’t you going to work this morning, Ellen?”

  “I might, later. Your breakfast is ready. How was it last night? You look good, Reesy.”

  “The job can last till I’m ninety, beaut, unless I electrocute myself.”

  “But we can’t sleep together for five nights a week. Say when, love.”

  “When,” I said, grieving minutely, Ellen dexterously spread-eagling herself, ladling milk over my porridge, replacing the saucepan on the cooker and reaching spoons from the cutlery box. Watching her, and a puling grief inside my stomach: John Vaughan’s burden.

  “Pork sausages, beans and fried tomatoes ready for you in the oven”, she said.

  I said, “At least you won’t hang a red lamp outside the door while I’m tending the pumps.”

  Her mouth tightened, came smiling rigidly tight, movement fiercely stopped from her whole body. “Better stay at home, matey, look after the fire, dress the children, cook dinner, better for you to stay at home, be my time-keeper.”

  “I wanted a man’s job, Ellen. Any schoolkid can do what I’m doing.”

  “Shall I work nights for you in the Caib? Aren’t you afraid they’ll be queueing up for me in the pit-head baths?”

  I threw the porridge at her and then we rolled from wrestling to angry heat, someone murmuring a weather forecast on the radio, prating softly apologetic as a sensitive humbled by lifelong prejudice, Ellen smearing her porridgy chin at my throat, sucking small love-bite begs, our clock-trained daughters scampering around the bedroom-brain-splitting the moment, the boon suddenly loosed, set free like scorched earth from no met. man ever. And when the children came downstairs we were squatting shoulder to shoulder on the hearth rug in front of the fire, post-tranced as two neophytes.

  Lydia preached exultantly, sing-songing, “Daddy-is-workin’, daddy-is-workin’. Down-the-Caa-haib, down-the-Caa-haib.”

  Elizabeth waddled over our legs, bleating bewilderment, wriggling close to Ellen, Ellen whipping off her blouse to wipe the sticky mess from her chin, cuddling the toddler down to her bare breasts.

  “Where is Nana Cynon?” demanded Lydia, wilful as Lot’s wife, standing straddle-legged in her red pyjamas.

  “She’ll be here soon, cariad. Did Lizzie-fach pee the bed last night?”

  “No, mam, it’s dry all over.”

 
Flatly far-off as a harvesting machine, our cute, chrome ribbed transistor on its shelf next to the Skyline utensils rack, hummed news about eighteen thousand BMC workers on strike, followed by the Metropolitan Police Commissioner’s report of two hundred and fifty-four thousand, two hundred and eleven indictable offences in his area, an increase of eleven per cent over the previous year. Estimated deaths in the Los Angeles race riots, thirty-four. Nothing fresh from Vietnam.

  I said, “Your titties are glory-doves.”

  “Hush, mind your tongue.”

  “I could swing on them like Jack the Giant-killer.”

  “My God,” Ellen said.

  “Not Him, girl, but I love you. We clicked together like two comets that time.”

  “I love you too, Reesy. Do you want more porridge? I can’t eat now. I feel all gooey inside.” She mouthed above Elizabeth’s head, “I’m coming upstairs later on, to be near you, only to be near you. Okay?”

  “Shift off from the factory, beaut?”

  “Everything stops for love,” she whispered.

  “Ach y fi,” accused Lydia, scratching dried porridge out of my throat hollow.

  At the end of August Mrs Cynon decided to sleep five nights a week in our house. She designed and enjoyed this contingency, the youngsters making endless demands upon her, Lydia reading primer-book fairy stories with the bounded lightness, bell-singing articulacy of an actress everywhere beautiful except in her emotions, the old lady listening like the dame in charge of the Last Supper. Lydia had discovered penmanship. She scrawled on all the walls. Each side of the lavatory chain in black crayon and Bic: LYDIA STEVENS. On Elizabeth’s thighs: LIZY STEVENS. Mrs Cynon wore NANA CYNON across her forearm for three days.

  Ellen plumped out like an hour-glass, while I became stringy lean from spending solitary hours tramping my round, foregoing the mine-car ride back to Caib pit-bottom, the extra mileage helping towards a full day’s sleep. Stringy lean, fluid, sloping the roadways to and from Brynywawr underneath the Ice Age hulk of Waunwen like a reliable, decent-quality man-animal.