Flame and Slag

by Ron Berry

  “My hair’s grey,” I said.

  “It isn’t, boy, not on your chest, and you know, down…”

  Her hand resting on my head, walking alongside composed as a policewoman guiding a child. “The accident made this grey.”

  “Thanks, beaut.”

  “Certainly it was the accident. Even before you left hospital I noticed grey hairs coming.”

  “Thanks, beaut,” I said.

  “Oh, dammit! Don’t be cranky; it’s such a glorious day. We’re all right now, we’re fine. The Caib is dead, but we’re loving great,” — her finger-tips probing my head like a bump reader.

  I saw Mrs Cynon rubbing spittle over nettle stings on Elizabeth’s leg. Song-birds were ringing the woods and big thrusting lambs were lifting their mother’s hind legs off the ground. Mrs Cynon waited for us at the stile crossing the forestry fence.

  I said, “Why should Tal Harding buy our house, except for the obvious reason?”

  “Rees Stevens, you evil waster!”

  “I mean for old time’s sake, Ellen. He’s marrying this girl from Lower Daren post office.”

  “Some day they’ll put up a new factory on Caib colliery, once they clear the old buildings away. The house will be valuable then.”

  Factory, I thought: imagine a Mayfair politician canvassing votes by promising factories. “Beaut,” I said, “when will they build a factory on the site of Caib colliery, my love?”

  Mrs Cynon answered, “Nineteen-seventy! Not before, as God’s my maker. They won’t tell us straight from the council chamber, but truth will stand!”

  We crossed the stile and climbed the hillside along a forestry haulage road which ran diagonally upwards inside a long, waved slash of bulldozed clay. Underfoot, the loose ballast chippings glared white, the geometrized landscape above and below stirring a peculiar boredom. Man-made mood.

  Mrs Cynon moved on ahead again with the children.

  “Tal won’t buy our house,” I said.

  “He will if I ask him.”

  “Threaten him, ah?”

  Her smile was power-loaded, the guarantee of an abbess right-armed by the Almighty. “I saved Tal from drinking his money away,” she said.

  “Saved anyone else, beaut?”

  “Yes, matey, back there in the woods with everything soaking wet and you blazing like a box of matches on fire.”

  “Aye, desperation,” I said. “Okay, let’s offer him the house. Granny Stevens will turn over in her grave.”

  “Me, Rees, I’ll ask him.”

  “Right, girl, right.”

  “Come on, put your arm around me. You’d quarrel with the Virgin Mary.”

  I said, “Aye.”

  We were high above the bowling-green, two rinks dotted with bunched woods and leg-shortened, tweedy-looking players. Caib institute lay squat as the offices of a Victorian insurance company. The deserted ’stute, doors and windows locked. Old Llew had retreated to the last of his butcher-trading family; he delivered meat for Manny Hopkins in a green three-wheeler van.

  Mrs Cynon waited, left forearm across her midriff, right hand on her hip, like a model for a grannies’ boutique. “The council is taking over the institute,” she said. “Old-age pensioners are having it, mini-bus service picking us up three evenings a week.”

  I said, “There are two pensioners’ halls in Daren already. Anyhow, they’ve always held meetings in Caib ’stute.”

  “The worst is yet to come. I warned you to go away last Christmas.”

  “We’re moving to Lower Daren,” Ellen said.

  The old lady was shocked. “Ell-len…”

  “You can stay with us on weekends, Selina. Can’t she, Rees?”

  Lydia frowned against the glare and adult reasoning. “But Nana Cynon looks after us every, every day for daddy to shut himself in the back room.”

  “We haven’t sold the house yet,” I said.

  Mrs Cynon folded her arms. “Not likely to either! Another five years and the whole street will be knocked down. Yes, Ellen, true. Ask Alderman Griff Thomas.”

  “That buggers everything. We’re knackered,” I said.

  I saw the old lady’s nostrils twitching revulsion. “Come with Nana,” she warned, prodding the children forward.

  “Must you use underground language in front of Lydia and Elizabeth?”

  I said, “Slip of the tongue, beaut.”

  She pulled free. “Rees, sometimes I hate you,” — her new-born scheme already shambled by secret ordinance from Daren council offices.

  “I know,” I said.

  “You know nothing! You think you’re Holy Jesus himself!”

  “He isn’t on twenty-five-per-cent compo, my sulky love.”

  “Oh, shut your mouth!”

  “I’ll see you back in the house,” I said. “Make some excuse to the kiddies.”

  “That’s right, go home and mope in the back room. You’re as bad as my father.”

  Then I had to slap her face, twice, her fingernails gouging thin scalding furrows down my nose. We turned away from each other like de-polarized magnets.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  Five men left on Caib pit-head in June. Regular surface workers: banksman, three traffic men and the overman. The cages were tipped over sideways on massive baulks of timber laid across the shaft. Sheep slept in the workshops, eight smithy fires dead since March, buckets of rust-filmed water, tongs, formers, rusted mauls, wedges, chains, jig-plates, bits and pieces scattered in hundreds. Old Derby winners were chalked on the walls. Horses’ names, obsolete reminders, alien jargon (BELT CLIPS FOR WEST 12. SEE MWCIN HOWARD RE CUTTER PICKS. BARHOOK PIN FOR RIMMER’S HEADING), film actresses, breasts and thighs, Ike Pomeroy caricatured with his dago moustache among confident illustrations of angle irons, brackets, drilling formulas, pulley ratios. Behind the smithy door, the World’s Cup winners named in their respective positions.

  Trampled sheep droppings everywhere and thieving beyond precedent in Daren. Street-corner gangs moved in as the five dismantlers came down the tump. Every Monday a storeman from Brynywawr accepted orders for corrugated sheets off the screens, washery and pit-head buildings. Archie Booth’s sons brought a lorry fifty miles for two hundred sheets: they ordered two dozen. Schoolboys smashed what their fathers and elder brothers failed to carry away. Every window in the colliery, washery, baths, canteen and flocculation plant was broken; the main winding-house fortressed with breeze-blocks inside the panes, but these, too, were hammered down, further sledge and chisel work removing the engine’s brass bearings. A smaller engine house on the surface disappeared entirely, asbestos sheets, windows and doors assiduously stripped to the concrete base which held the engine.

  Mrs Cynon privately protested to Seymour Lloyd, the retired Police Superintendent advising her against sending a letter to Daren & District Clarion. He assumed the Coal Board wasn’t interested in petty prosecutions — everybody knew about the electric motors and haulage equipment abandoned underground. Afterwards Mrs Cynon demanded a vote of bad conscience in the Women’s Guild, but too many members were the wives or relatives of looters.

  Red painted to last a decade, the steel door of the never-used powder magazine still lay flat on the grass behind the carpenter’s shop. Sodden log-books were scattered on the site of the original old stone-and-mortar-built magazine, soiled records of every shot fired in Caib since 1958. Log-books, powder tins and ripped-open leather satchels for carrying detonators. Trodden sheep droppings from the threshold to the four demolished walls.

  A weight-training enthusiast named Claude Prosser rolled a pair of tram-wheels through the length of Upper Daren. Next day he fell forty feet off the flocculation-plant tower — Claude the only scavenger who attempted stripping the steeply pitched tower roof. He and his widower father were unemployed, earning a few extra quid doing a song and patter act around the clubs.

  Finally on 1st July (black Friday tailing Caib’s history) the five surface worken
came down the tump for the last time. Bunched in a chatty group, they reached our house without a backward glance, Mrs Cynon standing out on the unmowed lawn, calling each man by name, wishing him good luck.

  I thought, the old lady’s sad. Her Hayden died in Caib. It’s part of her life, Selina’s scar, big Percy hobbling on his stick, always there to remind her.

  She returned to the kitchen. “That’s that, boy, mae wedi cwpla. I am now going off down to the infants’ school to fetch Lizzie-fach.”

  “I’ll start the dinner,” I said.

  “Does dim yn aros, mae wedi cwpla.”

  Nothing to belong to any more, I thought. Change or die. The wheel has turned full circle. Our black and white days are over. Twelve thousand buried in Daren cemetery. Whole families of children from times of diphtheria, tuberculosis, typhoid and smallpox. Daren men killed in the pit, in the soft-coal levels. Men and women who gave up the ghost. Preachers, teachers, miners, aldermen, shopkeepers. Daren’s map of the dead. Life is cheap. Change or die. Change direction.

  Pilferers softly banged and rapped on Caib colliery while I scraped new potatoes in the kitchen. I remembered ambulance sirens, ambulances since childhood, whining up to the pit-head. Miners tramping the streets in the middle of the night, bringing bad news to wives and mothers. Now, from this 1st July, quietness. Clean, quiet, residential Daren, with twenty per cent of the men on hardship allowance and school-leavers taught to appreciate dereliction as a way of life by fathers and uncles with damaged limbs or lungs. Privilege of the underprivileged.

  I thought, we can’t change. If change doesn’t come from outside, we’ll gradually die off. Fade like a horse-and-cart ghost town. Our compo cases will meagrely survive on street corners or hide, mouldering in bedrooms, despair conquered because despair requires energy. We’ll fade, responsibility diminishing to queueing once a week at the labour exchange, to grey mornings in doctors’ waiting-rooms. Daren’s councillors are feuding via letters to the Clarion, and Cledwyn Hughes is engaged in the finesse of double-think diplomacy, lucidly bland as a secular bishop on BBC Wales and TWW. Numbing phrases relating to footage, skills, manpower, a plethora of talk and paper campaigns for generations who have lived by weekly wage packets. In the national press, Coal Board and N U M last words, edited regrets about the closure of Brynywawr colliery: that’s where they spent the big money. Unpublicized millions at the command of unknown men. Virtually unknown. Those mining experts with clean lungs, nostrils, toe-nails and finger-nails.

  My face lifted unaware in the mirror above the kitchen sink: wooden mouth, inward eyes, greying hair. Mr Rees Stevens, house-man, scratched from the bread-and-butter stakes, scraping spuds for his wife and family.

  What kind of a bastard life was I born for? I thought — the simplest curse, damnation against fate swaddling like a winding-sheet.

  19

  My longings are flowing to an end. Although our man & wife years are cut in my mind like a quarry, Kate remains silent in Portsmouth. Why ever did I come to Winchester in the first instance? Only because she sent Ellen a picture postcard of the cathedral. Jumping to the wrong conclusion I brought the child away from Daren but Kate had already flitted to her second home in Queen’s Street. For her Winchester was no more than a bit of a change. She created mysteries around herself. I arrived with hopes that have since become withered, longings that turned to dust. A man can stand so much before he steadies in his tracks. For this reason I feel the end is in sight & the end for me means the way I began under the peaceful ranges of Waunwen. Once more I shall have true friends & neighbours unlike in this cathedral city where I have never made a positive friend in 14 years. When a Welshman loses his hiraeth he is lost for life. The rest of him is a masquerade. Wife finally gone, hope disappeared like the one-way letters I posted off to her every Saturday. I consider myself a sham here in Winchester. Daren calls. Memories of summer evenings come racing full stretch as I walk down Water Lane. Summer evenings with ukelele & mouth organ music in the field by Caib dam where we used to swim. Happy gangs of all ages. Standing on the bridge below the old Mill I see Daren river not the weedy Itchen. I stare at English faces and remember great old Daren characters. All the hiraeth is coming back now. So I give in. Give in to losing Kate. Our daughter definitely does not need a mother any more. From now on the future is plain as an open book. At first Ellen was against the idea of going home. She has her own mind to please. It would not do for me to criticize. She has witnessed our poor example. Now last Monday she marched home from the office & into the flat with that white face of hers guaranteed to remind me of Kate. ‘Dad, we shall be ready to leave in a month’s time. Why don’t you write to some of your friends in Daren? We must find a house & I must find another position.’ No disputing Ellen is a girl blessed with a mind of her own but I ventured to ask, ‘Are you sure?’ ‘Why not, dad? I have nothing to lose. After you are settled in perhaps I will come back to Winchester.’ I said, ‘Daren is a lovely old place.’ She said, ‘Will you let my mother know we are leaving?’ I replied, ‘Yes, Ellen, just a few words to explain although frankly I have lost hope as Daren was too small to hold your mother years ago,’ & then this amazing daughter of ours placed a £1 note on the table & recommended something completely foreign to her nature & my own, ‘Dad, go out & get drunk until you can’t stand on your feet. At least have something to remember before leaving Winchester.’ I actually tried but after three & a half pints instead of feeling light hearted I went right down to bottom ebb unable to breathe & when some strangers brought me back to the flat they had to abandon me in the lavatory. It was my stomach & legs then. In the morning I read an appeal in the MIRROR asking miners to work on Saturdays due to the coal shortage. What a chance for the N.U.M. If every lodge in the country took advantage they had the industry over a barrel. Unfortunately as I know from experience the average collier like any other worker only turns to politics at the demand of necessity when his personal economic existence is all rags & tatters as a consequence of the major curse upon human nature, namely exploitation. Not one but two deadly curses working hand in glove, namely privilege & exploitation. As this last month of separation from home peters out I feel a sense of renewed purpose, good thoughts of joining in again with the salt of the earth. My own society back there in Daren. This Winchester city is riddled with class distinction brought down through the ages where as the discovery of coal delivered Daren into being out of a long blank of time with only weak signs of old agriculture above Daren woods & the tumbledown remains of three farmhouses left as symbols of civilization. Food & fuel. Fundamentals of Human Existence. A man has to get down to fundamentals & it seems to me the Account should wind up on this principle. So therefore I am content to state

  THE END

  signed

  John Vaughan.

  Ellen came in as I sealed the Peak Frean’s tin.

  “Hullo, the new forestry officer is moving into Ike Pomeroy’s house. That’s definitely the end of the Coal Board in Daren.”

  “It’s a take-over,” I said.

  Mini-skirted like a teenager, she tapped the biscuit tin. “Have you done with these?”

  “As good as. Say, what are you wearing under that imitation of a skirt?”

  She tossed her rump like a can-can filly. “I’m a respectable married woman, matey.”

  “Lovely, too. Lucky waster, whoever he is,” I said.

  Her rump jigged calculated whimsy. “If you want to know, I’m his beaut.”

  “Don’t trust him, missis. The bastard might be using you. Ulterior motive, see, missis, grafting from right inside, like a maggot.”

  She froze, grinning like a catalogue doxy. “Hush your mouth.”

  I said, “The last men came down from Caib this afternoon. As Selina said, oes dim aros, dim aros. Do you think we ought to move away from Daren?”

  “Not unless you want to, Rees.”

  “I don’t know what’s best. Wherever we go I’ll have to train for another job.”

 
; “Well?”

  “I’m unteachable, Ellen.”

  “Once a miner, always a miner?”

  “Aye, something like that.”

  “Not counting your accident?”

  “Only partly. All this crap about miners adapting themselves to other occupations, it’s compulsory bloody sales talk. These big leaders, our administrators, they’d put the same heart into selling ships, mutton, soap powder, anything from rubber goods to radishes. They’re like Jews. Jews remain Jews. Once a miner, always a miner. I mean a good, born and bred miner. The best ex-miners are disabled.”

  “Like yourself?”

  “In a way, aye.”

  “You find some strange ideas, Reesy.”

  “The man who doesn’t carry evidence of his work might as well have stayed inside his mother’s guts.”

  She smiled empty as a yawn. “This back room hasn’t left many tell-tale signs on you, matey. Bit greyer, slower, but exactly the same man. My tough guy full of worries.”

  “It was like dying in the beginning,” I said. “But these are early days, early days yet.”

  She said, “Is that why virgins are valuable?”

  “Any sort of virgin. I was bent into mining. I loved and hated it. Who’s going to bend me towards something else? Who, ah? The kind of mindlessly productive twats who…”

  “Your Caib mouth! Selina and the kiddies are in the kitchen.”

  “…pitch their rehabilitation centres in depressed areas? The same kind of mindless ass’oles who make us believe we’re only suitable for clocking in and out of heavy-industry factories when we finish in the pits?”

  “Don’t nag at me,” she said.

  “Nag, by the Jesus. Where are all the Bevin Boys gone? The way of all flesh, like Bevan and Bevin. Ernest Bevin filched the fascist patent to fight a war against it.”

  She said, “Reesy, for God’s sake…”

  I said, “Our NUM leaders complain about men thrown on the scrap-heap. We’ve been fighting losing battles since the Industrial Revolution. Will Paynter took on a scrapheap when he became sec of the NUM. And listen, some years ago — I had this piece of news from Charlie Page — some years ago Arthur Horner gave his signature to a bloody Coal Board advert begging men with a low percentage of dust to go back underground because they’d beaten the dust problem with modern techniques. Aye, beaten the dust problem. Your father thought Horner was the grand daddy of social justice, but he was just a big quarreller. Miners have always quarrelled, against dictatorial bastards sitting in offices and amongst themselves. We’ve had to quarrel or live like yobs. Now the NUM’s beaten by facts and figures, profit and loss statements flowing like bum fodder from Hobart House. We’re almost on their side now, competing against gas and oil and nuclear power.