by Dai Smith
And Dan roared on. He said be believed nothing and believed everything. That he knew nothing and knew everything. He said that be was the Voltaire of Aberavon. He wept once or twice, and the silent miners chewed and stared uneasily. Crying was for women, or for preachers when talking of God’s magnanimity, his mercy, his love. Miners did not weep – not even gabby miners like Mad Dan, who evaded work whenever he could. Mad Dan, with passionate eloquence, had long been an advocate of frequent and lasting strikes. Life was too rough to cry about.
I tried to sneak out of the circle around the bonfire and make my way home, but one of the miners caught me by the ear and brought me painfully back. ‘You’ll go home when we go home,’ he said.
Dan didn’t speak any more – he chuntered on – that is to say he would have been mumbling into his beard, had he had a beard. There came out of the grey embers of his dying oratory occasional flashes of coherence.
‘Who sent the slave back to his master?’
‘Was St Paul a Christian?’
And, with snarling sarcasm, ‘There was an Israelite indeed in whom there was much guile.’
‘“Give me liberty or give me death.”’
‘“Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath.”’
The wind, tigerish, now crouched, now circled, now menaced the bonfire. And the bonfire, now rearing back from, now roaring back at the wind, would send showers of sparks and smoke and coloured flame up the endless open chimney of the night. I was bored and bewildered. I pondered on some of the half-baked things that Uncle Mad Dan bad been saying – he talked like a book, they said of him. What did Mad Dan mean about cries being lies? Anyway, his cries didn’t sound much like cries to me. They sounded like sentences. Cries were screams and things like that when somebody twisted your arm or busted your nose. How could ‘Turn the other cheek’ be a cry? Or ‘God is love’ or ‘The wages of sin is death’? I dimly guessed what time in mist confounds. Why was the Twenty-third Psalm a poem of incomparable beauty? The teacher in school had said it was. I puzzled about this, too. It didn’t rhyme. How could it be a poem if it didn’t rhyme?
What were cries? How could something be a half-truth? Why were cries lies? Why couldn’t I go home? Why was I kept out so late on Christmas Eve, when Holy Santa was due any time after midnight? I dimly guessed what time in mist confounds.
Why had my sister been upstairs all this night on Christmas Eve when I was home? Why wasn’t she peeling potatoes, or something? Why were two of my aunties sitting in the parlour, and with them Mrs Tabor TB – she who wore her husband’s cap on back to front? Why did they talk low? I dimly guessed. Was my sister dead? Dying? I loved my sister – sometimes with an unbearable passion.
I suddenly knew that she was dying.
‘Is my sister dying, Mad Dan?’ I said.
‘We are all dying, Nebuchadnezzar,’ he said.
‘Even your growing pains are reaching into oblivion.
‘She’ll last the night, Dyfrig,’ he said. ‘She’ll last the night.’
Now my sister was no ordinary woman – no woman ever is, but to me, my sister less than any. When my mother had died, she, my sister, had become my mother, and more mother to me than any mother could ever have been. I was immensely proud of her. I shone in the reflection of her green-eyed, black-haired, gypsy beauty. She sang at her work in a voice so pure that the local men said she had a bell in every tooth, and was gifted by God. And these pundits who revelled in music of any kind and who had agreed many times, with much self-congratulations, that of all instruments devised by man, crwth, violin, pibcorn, dulcimer, viola, church organ, zither, harp, brass band, woodwind, or symphony orchestra – they had smugly agreed that there was no noise as beautiful at its best as the sound of the human voice.
She had a throat that should have been coloured with down like a small bird, and eyes so hazel-green and open that, to preserve them from too much knowledge of evil, should have been hooded and vultured and not, as they were, terrible in their vulnerability. She was innocent and guileless and infinitely protectable. She was naive to the point of saintliness, and wept a lot at the misery of others. She felt all tragedies except her own. I had read of the Knights of Chivalry and I knew that I had a bounden duty to protect her above all other creatures. It wasn’t until thirty years later, when I saw her in another woman, that I realised I had been searching for her all my life.
Why had I been sent out? When would they let me go home? Why were my aunties there, and Mrs Tabor TB? (She was called Mrs Tabor TB because she’d had eight children, all of whom had died in their teens of tuberculosis. She was slightly mad, I think, and would mutter to herself, ‘It wasn’t Jack or me. TB was in the walls. The Council should have had that house fumigated. The TB was in the walls.’)
Mad Dan was silent now. His stoned eyes stared into the fire. A little spittle guttered quietly from the corner of his mouth.
‘Let’s have a song, boys,’ he said slowly. ‘Stay me with minims, comfort me with crotchets.’
The crag-faced miners sang with astonishing sweetness a song about a little engine.
Crawshaw Bailey had an engine;
It was full of mighty power.
He was pull a little lever;
It was go five miles an hour.
Was you ever see,
Was you ever see,
Was you ever see
Such a funny thing before?
They sang a hymn about what you could see from the hills of Jerusalem; they sang a song about a saucepan; of a green hill far away, without a city wall; of a black pig and how necessary and how dreadful it was to kill it; of the Shepherds and the Magi. Mad Dan stared, and I sang soprano.
There was a disturbance outside the fire’s night wall and my auntie Jinnie came suddenly into the tight. Mad Dan stood up.
‘All right?’ he said.
‘Lovely,’ she said. ‘Nine pounds – a wench.’
‘Come, Joseph of Arimathea,’ he said to me.
‘Santa called early tonight. Home we go.’
We walked a few steps.
‘Oh!’ he said. ‘Any of you boys got a piece of silver? A tanner would do, but half a crown or a florin would be tidier.’
One of the men threw him a florin. ‘Tell her it’s a happy Christmas from Nat Williams, and all that,’ he said.
We went home. Mrs Tabor TB was downstairs in the kitchen, husband’s cap on back to front. My brother-in-law was whistling at the hearth, with the flat iron and the nuts, working steadily. My auntie Jinnie and my auntie Cassie, spinsters both, were arch and coy, and spoke to me as if I were demented and slightly deaf.
‘Santy Clausie has brought Richie-Pitchie a prezzy-wezzy for Christmas. Go upstairs and see what Santy has brought you.’
I went upstairs with Mad Dan. As I went, Mrs Tabor TB said to my breath-whistling, nut-cracking brother-in-law, ‘Talk to the Council, Elfed,’ she said, ‘get them to fumigate the whole house.’
I dimly guessed, of course, but there was still a chance that there would be a fire engine, loud-red and big enough for an eight-year-old to ride in. The prezzy-wezzy was a furious, red-faced, bald, wrinkled old woman, sixty minutes’ old.
‘Try this for size,’ said Mad Dan, and pressed the florin into the baby’s left hand. She held the money tightly. ‘You’ve got a good grip,’ said Mad Dan to the baby. ‘She’ll never be poor,’ he said to my sister.
My sister looked washed-out and weak. She smiled at me, and I gave her a kiss.
‘Well, what do you think of your Christmas present?’ she said.
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Is this all I get?’
‘No, there’ll be more in the morning.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Goodnight, then.’
We went downstairs together, and the baby screamed.
‘There,’ said Mad Dan, ‘is the only cry that is true and immortal and eternal and from the heart. Screaming we come into the world and screaming we go out.’
&n
bsp; ‘Well, what do you think of your new sister?’ they asked in the kitchen.
‘New niece,’ I said. ‘Fine.’
I went to my bedroom in the box room. The bed was old, and the springs had long ago given up, and sleeping in it was like sleeping in a hammock.
My brother-in-law blew out the candle. ‘Sleep now,’ he said. ‘No lighting the candle and reading.’ He closed the door and went downstairs.
I pulled the clothes over my head and made a tent, felt for my Woolworths torch, and with John Halifax, Gentleman, propped against my knees, began to read. The Atlantic wind, wild from America, whooped and whistled around the house. The baby choked with sobs on the other side of the bedroom wall. I listened. Well, at least, I thought, it isn’t Tommy Elliot’s farm.
NATIVES
Ron Berry
Levi Jones swung away from the bar, a mindful slew on his stiff right leg. He returned to the table. ‘Referring back,’ he said, holding out the tray, Martin and Felix taking their drinks, ‘it’s my opinion we have been discussing the modern disease mobility of labour, royal commissions examining this and that, it’s a disease of the soul.’
Felix said, ‘I’ve had politics up to here.’
Martin said, ‘The rot set in when they closed Fawr and Fach colleries.’
‘We’re leftovers from the regime of King Steam Coal,’ said Levi. ‘But listen, the best human stuff comes from roots, from inheritance. Put bluntly, a man can’t, he can’t renege on the way he’s made, his birth-given packet. Where people don’t belong, that’s where they go doolally. Therefore, boys, culture, civilisation, these are ours until Upper Coed-coch becomes totally extinct.’
Martin spoke to Felix. ‘He’s still librarian in the Institute, knocked down about eight years ago.’
‘Time has reduced this village,’ conceded Levi. ‘The old cramp of time, in conjunction with economics, the great falsehood, the gospel of men who worship privilege. We are governed by twenty-four carat fakes disguised as civil servants.’
‘Rubbish,’ said Felix.
‘Profitability,’ argued Levi, ‘comes before people. Whole families have left, drifted away from Wales forever. Every time a house falls empty, the council start demolishing.’
Martin said, ‘Train service killed by Beecham, bus service every three hours, our doctor emigrated to Australia, my grandchildren travelling eight miles each way to school…’
‘We are living in a ghetto,’ pronounced Levi.
‘One pub, used to be five,’ said Felix.
Levi grimaced, firming his false teeth. ‘Boys, truth is we’re on shifting ground, similar in miniature to the biblical Jews except there’s no redeemer, no flesh and blood God’s-son guaranteed to unite the masses. We need a big name figure, a kind of phoenix ready to spurt up from our ashes.’
‘Politically powerless we are,’ said Martin.
‘Cultured decadents,’ explained Levi, ‘short of a prescribed saviour.’
‘We’re well past middle age, we’re on compo and hardship allowance,’ said Martin.
Felix added, ‘Knocking back scrumpy five nights a week, beer on Fridays and Saturdays.’
Levi raised his glass. ‘We are the immovables, financially deprived, dauntless, capable of social sweetness, murder by degrees, slow suicide, humility, even visions. Anything at all on the graph of human behaviour.’
‘Bar earning a living wage,’ grumbled Felix.
Martin said, ‘Being disabled, the three of us on the books in Hobart House, London SW1.’
‘Sacrificial victims to the old black diamonds!’ crowed Levi. His friends nodded.
‘King Coal, the rotten waster,’ said Felix.
Levi rolled three cigarettes and fingered a single match from the ticket pocket of his jacket. ‘Aye, Upper Coed-coch has been renamed Isolated Area by our country planning experts. Consequently the Forestry Commission has taken over. Surface pillage succeeding subterranean rape.’
‘Mountains around here,’ said Martin, ‘they’ll be like the Western Front when these trees are cropped.’
Felix went into a controlled bout of coughing. Then he apologised, ‘My sixty per cent dust from hard headings down the old Fawr Nine Deep.’
‘Me, I’m seventy-five per cent pneumo,’ said Martin.
‘We shan’t witness the millennium,’ promised Levi.
Martin looked angry. ‘Nor roam the mountains on Sunday mornings. You need a can-lamp and knee-pads to crawl under the bloody Christmas trees.’
Levi dipped a finger in his beer, swam it humming around the rim of his glass. ‘Economics, the name of the game.’
Martin coughed, paused, steadied his breath to mutter, ‘The daft sods.’
Felix suggested, ‘Let’s shift from this corner. Sing-song out there in the back room.’
Levi launched into chicane prophecy. ‘By the year two thousand and eight, every infant will slot-fit instant social service before he’s off the breast, his poop conduited to manufacture manna, his water piped to produce energy from the earth’s magma, and at the end, at the very end his processed corpse will magic blossoms from gravel!’
‘Talking like the Bible again,’ said Felix.
Levi lowered his head, presenting tanned baldness, whispy eyebrows and the blue-scarred ridge of his heavily boned nose.
‘My prerogative, Felix. I’m one of your stall and heading examiners who filled out coal on a diet of Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, Nietzsche, Voltaire and Charles Darwin, with Walter Whitman and Johnny Keats for after.’
‘Some fuckin’ collier,’ vowed Felix. ‘C’mon, let’s see what’s doing in the back room.’
‘He dropped in clover after his kneecap was busted,’ said Martin.
Levi sniggered like a schoolboy. ‘Twenty years in the Institute library, franking the date on Westerns, Thrillers, Ethel M. Dell, and Charles bloody Dickens. Righto then, we’ll join the entertainers. As from tonight universal literacy is a curse, a cancer spread by Fleet Street.’
They left the public bar.
There were less than a dozen customers in the large back room. Friendly atmosphere, greetings, the compo and hardship allowance trio settling at a table near the serving hatch.
Martin whewed disgust. ‘This used to be the Singing Room, crammed to the doors every Saturday night.’
‘Blind Goronwy tonking the keys as usual,’ said Felix.
Goronwy played ‘When the blue of the night meets the gold of the day’, with Mrs Charles crying temolo fragments from her small mouth.
‘Fierce, she’s a fierce old bird,’ Levi said, remembering Crad Charles, killed, crushed between fallen rock and timber, circa 1959.
‘Her and Mrs Sen-Sen James, they’ve messed up a few marriages,’ said Felix.
Levi tutted amiably. ‘Mrs Sen-Sen looks fey, a lady born and bred not to lift a finger to help herself. Black hair from a bottled greying out from the crown of her head. She’s well matched with Mrs Charles, they’re close, spur and stirrup since burying their husbands.’
‘Fawr pit widows both,’ said Martin.
‘Queens of deception,’ said Levi.
Felix humphed a noise in his nose. ‘Young Billy Tash could do with a bath.’
‘Scrap merchants make their contribution to the community,’ contended Levi.
‘Glenda put the snaffle on him good and proper,’ said Felix.
Levi supplied details. ‘She’s the brainiest woman in Riverside Terrace. Glenda used to fill in Billy’s income tax forms. One morning last summer he found her what they call en déshabillé. Billy, well, his eyeballs came out like gobstoppers. And then, boys, human nature. Short jump and long hop to their wedding before the end of the taxable year. Glenda’s old enough to be his mam.’
‘True,’ agreed Felix. ‘She’s older than Jesse Mackie’ – Jesse was sitting with Billy and Glenda.
‘Orphan,’ said Martin. ‘Underpaid labourer for Billy Tash since Billy went into collecting scrap.’
Levi hoiked himself uprig
ht in his chair. ‘Jesse never knew adolescence as a time of pomp and arrogance!’
Martin and Felix pretended they were deaf.
Goronwy played ‘Sixteen Tons and What Do You Get, Another Day Older and Deeper in Debt’, encouraging Hopkin Morgan, who cuffed Whitey, his pale grey alsatian. The animal dropped couchant like a dog-faced sphinx. Hopkin sang ‘Sixteen Tons’, stanced in profile, occasionally shovelling imaginary coal.
Felix called, ‘’Core, encore!’
Martin was clapping. ‘Not bad for a man who never filled a dram of coal in his life. Oil-boy and haulier since he was a kid.’
‘Pack of dogs these days and he’s on his third wife,’ said Felix.
‘Sound Coed-coch stock,’ maintained Levi. ‘Head of a druid, muscles bulging below his armpits, chest like a barrel, hands like grappling hooks, and now he’s redundant, probably never work again.’
Felix scowled. ‘Bloody Hopkin, he’ll thrive where the crows’ beaks’ll drop off.’
Pamela Pryor (BA Aber.) came to the serving hatch. She bought a bottle of stout for Blind Goronwy.
Levi said, ‘Evening, Miss Pryor. Visiting Mam and Dad for the weekend? Nice too. If there’s one thing I admire it’s families sticking together.’ He saluted Idris and Maisie Pryor. ‘Shwmae, Id! Hullo there, Maisie!’
The Pryors smiled, tucked at their table by the piano.
‘I’m driving back tomorrow night,’ said Pamela.
‘Smart little car, Fiat,’ said Martin.
Felix winked at the scholarship girl. ‘Ask Goronwy to give us a number.’
She swayed a little, reflective, left knee dipped, her tummy sagging. Pamela taught English and history in a Surrey boarding school.
Felix recommended, ‘“Your Tiny Hand is Frozen”, that’s Goronwy’s favourite.’
Pamela sighed, ‘Goronwy is a lovely old character. Excuse me.’ She walked to the piano, poured Goronwy’s stout, then went to every table, collecting glasses on her tray, and returned to the hatch, innocently imperious, beckoning to Levi, Martin and Felix.
Martin said, ‘Straight beer, please. Ta very much.’