Flame and Slag

by Ron Berry

  I thought, dead right old Sioni-boy, right down the line they’re sapping the life out of Daren. Down through the Coal Board’s sixty-two grade classified hierarchy, with Christ knows how many yes-men and yes-please-women in each department. The time has come for Andrew Booth’s daughters-in-law to promote the cause of the Free Wales Army. Choose between the F.W.A. and Ike Pomeroy. Offer Ike a pair of electrodes, Ilya Kuryakin’s gat, plus Whitehall sanction to purge and he’ll exterminate every redundant miner in Daren. Any man who loses a shift to paddle with his kids in Mumbles, or prematurely hunt relics like Charlie Page, report to Ike Pomeroy for androgen drainage. If the NCB can’t have a full complement of brain-washed Stakhanovites, they’ll run the industry with unkillable compo cases. Their woe-men.

  Christmas morning 1966, ten weeks to Caib’s dead-line, Ellen shivering out of my Chunky sweater and into her clothes, my eyelids coming down like night skies and Treasurer Vaughan’s Account fallen off the bed.

  17

  Llew Hopkins touched his peak to him as he climbed out of his car. “This way, mister. Full ’ouse waiting for you upstairs there. Listen, mun, will the Coal Board take this place over? See, I been in authority here goin’ on forty years.”

  The area industrial relations officer smiled cheese, shaking his head in mimicry of a doleful marionette.

  “Straight up them stairs, mister,” Llew said. ‘Oi, you, Reesy Stevens, show him the way.”

  He was an egg-bodied man with long-fingered hands and the powerful neckless head of a take-over mogul, late middle age iron greying his stubbed hair and spreading his feet. His dark wine-red knitted tie matched his thin silk socks.

  “You’re in at the kill, mate,” I said.

  He grinned saliva-toothed, dead-eyed as a china spaniel. “Wait, friend! Surely you received an offer when I came here a few weeks ago?”

  “You were only considering face workers then, butty.”

  “Ah, of course, but today I’ve come to finalize an agreement with your lodge regarding grades two and three.”

  I said, “Our compo sec lives over in Brynywawr.”

  “He’s been notified, friend, I assure you he’s been notified.”

  Luther Howard jumped down off the stage, hand out to usher the Coal Board officer, quiet clamour from all the Caib men in the hall cutting to a polite drone.

  “Luther,” I said, “ask him if he can find Llew Hopkins a job in a long-life ’stute. Old Llew’s sweating cobs down in the billiards room.”

  “The man isn’t our responsibility…”

  “Certainly not, Mr Vivian. It’s up to the NUM, Mr Vivian. We’ll look after the caretaker. Come and take a seat, Mr Vivian.”

  “Wipe the yellow off, Luther,” I said. “When the Caib closes the ’stute closes and Llew’s finished.”

  Luther rushed back from the side steps leading up to the stage. “For Christ’s sake, man, face up to the facts. We haven’t got a leg to stand on. The Caib’s had it, right, but we can’t afford to antagonize the Board. We tried that last November. Look, Rees, they’re buying our houses, they’re giving us fifty quid removal expenses and another fifty quid to settle in. To my mind that’s organization. What more can we ask?”

  “How many men are they going to down-grade?” I said.

  “We’re sorting that out today, negotiating… ah, Christ, what’s old Shink on about now?”

  Before Mr Vivian reached his chair on the stage Luther’s uncle, old shellback Shink Patch stepped forward from the front row. “’Scuse me, didn’t you work in the Pen-Mawr round about nineteen-twenty-one, after the big strike, I think it was? Let’s see now, there was a Jacob Vivian driving that heading up to the low coal, aye-aye, that was him, Jacob Vivian.”

  “My brother,” said the Coal Board officer, slack palm held up for peace, unction damaging his empty smile.

  “Bit of a pudding he was,” Shink said, “taking him all in all. Ta very much.” Shink sank to his chair slow as an old lion sitting in cold water.

  I said, “Your father was a better NUM man than you are, Luther.”

  “Matter of opinion, Rees. From what I hear your opinion don’t count for fuck all since you packed in on the coal.”

  “We can’t trust you, Luther.”

  He went up on the stage. The lodge chairman from Brynywawr called upon the Coal Board officer and we heard the tale from him until St Mark’s church bell clanged, coaxing in the faithful handful to evening service.

  I was redundant, along with a third of the men belonging to Caib, men over sixty, near sixty, men disabled, the ailing, the worn-out and the half-broken.

  Ellen said, “Don’t worry, we’ll survive so long as we don’t have any more children.”

  “Beaut,” I said, “I won’t get enough redundancy pay to buy a birth certificate.”

  “Never mind, I love you,” she said.

  I thought, thank the Christ — here in Wales it has to be Him by way of exemplar, of acme, zenith, ne plus ultra.

  Shifts rode down, came up again, trailed off to the baths as if Caib was destined to last indefinitely. We stopped talking about the closure. It was ordained, settled like inheriting Rhesus negative. Colliers trickled away from Daren to long-life pits. New NCB houses, new furnishings, new lives in the old mould. Families vanished: the coal-face Howards, the Miskins, Seward Tremain and two brothers, five from Charlie Page’s family, Jesse and Islwyn Morgans, young Dicko Harding, Fred Fransceska, Archie Booth (retired) and two NCB electrician sons, single men and whole families went away. Repeat of the dirty Thirties. Upper Daren gentled into puzzling decay as winter dragged on. Lower Daren buzzed falsely feverish Saturday and Sunday nights. The Social Club cut two bingo sessions. Work slowed on the new council house estate — seasonal, explained the Clarion. Bandwagon newspapers splashed appeals: Factories for Daren. Social economics, logical as wetness and dryness. We had vague promises from the Home Office, carrot smells, the radio and television factory working four days a week until April, TO LET notices on Noddfa, Tabernacle and Rama, their stained-glass windows boarded up after schoolboys had used the coloured saints, crosses and bearded shepherds for cock-shies.

  Daren police station was condemned, the massive old stone building demolished and rebuilding started before they cleared away the rubble. The housing estate hung fire throughout February, when our council sacked the watchman for flogging flooring timber and electrical conduit. Rollo & Sons continued washing Caib new tip, narrowing the river gulley, leaving it dead, craterous. Charlie Page’s name appeared in The Times; his courageous wife back-lashed weekend honeymoons with a retired insurance collector.

  Caib’s new powder magazine was almost completed, its pillar-box-red steel door lying on the grass behind the carpenter’s shop. Someone had stolen the lightning conductor off the roof of the neat, new, useless building.

  Ianto Pugh retired before the closure. I fell into his shift on afternoons, a frail bachelor named Amwell Cassam (orphaned since boyhood, only son of an old Daren family) taking my place on night shift. Amwell drank rough cider. He lived with a rheumy black retriever dog in basement rooms below Regent Street. He had high narrow shoulders and the low-slung, tender-looking paunch of an alcoholic. When Libanus chapel sent out a call in 1873, Amwell’s great-grandfather answered from Wiltshire, the chapel’s first minister, who baptized his flock in Daren river. Amwell attended the pumps by night, stepping into the cage like a caricature of depression unless he’d pepped himself with cider before coming to work. Mornings he stepped out of the cage like a culled zombie. After ten years on NAB and national insurance benefit, Daren labour exchange sent Amwell to qualify the death of Caib colliery. He lasted three weeks, deteriorating after collecting his first pay packet to the fourth night of his absence from work. That night his scabby old retriever crashed through the window of the basement dwelling. Amwell was dead beneath a pile of old overcoats, one of his great-grandfather’s wood-wormed poker-work motto placques on the wall above his ex-W.D. camp bed: GOD IS NOT MOCKED.
Two men attended Amwell’s funeral, myself and the Libanus minister — two declining Baptist chapels kept him off the dole. Or a call.

  Walking home from Daren cemetery, I saw Llew Hopkins emptying ashes outside Caib institute boiler-house. Forty years of ashes filling a crescent-shaped hollow, seven feet deep nearest the boiler-house doorway, the extremities of the crescent fortified with winter nettle stalks.

  “Amwell Cassam is dead, Llew,” I said.

  “Aye, so I heard. Fool to hisself, that bloke. Never hurt a soul, only hisself. Listen to me, Reesy, there’s rumour they’ve knocked through the big jump over in Brynywawr. Anythin’ in it?”

  I said, “They hadn’t knocked through yesterday, Llew.”

  “Ent it fuckin’ shameful? Here I been all these years lookin’ after this place, for what, boy, tell me for what?”

  Llew rarely cursed other than complementary damns, bloodies and buggers. Stiffly motionless under the heatless February sun, canted skew-hipped over his black walking-stick, he personified functional crippledom cast aside, rendered socially worthless. Llew’s apotheosis.

  “How old are you then?” I said.

  “Sixty-two. Thass nothin’ to go by, mun! I’m same now as was thirty bloody year ago. Duw, it used to be a man worked on the coal till he was seventy.”

  “He’s slowing down at forty these days, Llew.”

  Hawking from nose and throat, he spat savagely.

  I said, “Will Daren council take over the bowling-green?”

  “More’n likely. Two councillors in the team, besides Mr Thorpe from Barclay’s and Mr Purcell from Houghton’s brewery. They’ll have to ’ave one of them pavil-leon places though when we shut the ’stute.” He joggled into motion, muttering, “By the Jesus, forty years, been here forty years, aye … for what, for bloody what?”

  Up-road from the institute you could see four saloon buses filling with day-shift colliers on Harding’s Square. Five double-deckers crowded the Square when we worked the Four Feet, with as many men travelling by train from Daren Halt to Regent Street station. Llew Hopkins nudged himself through the institute door and I noticed a row of elderly men inside the chest-high reading-room window, leaning impassively like Press box privilegees, gazing up towards Harding’s Square. As the buses pulled away they drifted slow-motion as wafted mobiles back into the reading room. Caib pit-wheels spun soundlessly, a tinkling grind swinging downwind from Rollo & Sons’ tip-washing plant hidden around the curving breast of Waunwen. The old parish cart-track shot Roman-true slantwise up the mountainside, smooth fawny brown, bordered by lichened rock outcrops, beds of sober green moss and great ragged smothers of dark red fern. I couldn’t see the Forestry Commission trees parading the far crown of Waunwen. Failed to see George Thorpe’s car coming out from the bungalow road, too, until he hooted a refined warning and I stepped back to exchange nods as he rolled by.

  Emily, I thought, dear doldrum-bellied Emily — loitering carefully negligent through the maroon-painted side gate, pausing to glance over the bowling-green fence, justifiably curious Daren citizen, natural, hands flat open in my trouser pockets like a confirmed stroller. But she wasn’t in the bungalow garden, neither front nor back. Stiffly gargantuan in the cold sunlight, the winter trees hung like fossilized seaweeds. A quiet mile away up the river the machinery churned out Rollo & Sons’ second million pounds. I stared up at the pale sky, pale blue, pale as Cardiganshire watered milk, and heard myself, “Rees, you’re looking for trouble.”

  So I came out from the woods whistling a ragged tempo Julie Felix L.P. number through Senior Service smoke, feeling easy, proud as a bloke tried and exonerated, relieved and empty-headed, Emily’s girl-romping, “Hullo-hull-ow!” bluntly hooking somewhere inside me like the back-swing of a sickle.