Story, Volume I

by Dai Smith

  I turned and trotted back towards the works, prancing, knees high, shaking my arms as they hung limply at my side, as if to loosen the muscles. Behind my neck I thought I could feel the policemen mustering for a brief charge, and I could stand it no longer. I exploded into a frenzied sprint, all thought of ‘The Last Round-up’ forgotten.

  ‘Police! Police!’ I hissed, whipping past the cavern like a short, white Jesse Owens. ‘Move, for Christ’s sake!’

  I kept on running until I was two hundred yards down the track, and then slowed gently to a walk, hands on hips, getting my breath. Then I turned and trotted back, breaking into fast sprints of twenty yards or so, straight out of the trot. I’d read about this in an old book by Jack Donaldson, who had been World Professional Champion in the days when shorts were worn below the knee. That book was a mine of information. It also had details of a high-protein diet which was guaranteed to take a yard off your time, but I knew I’d never have the money for it. I raced past the empty arch. A policeman was bending down, collecting a scatter of cards that had fallen to the ground. The other four were looking up at the hillside. I could see the dark figures of the gamblers bucking like stags up the steep. Decorously, I slowed.

  ‘Do you know them, boy?’ said the policeman. ‘Do you know any of them?’

  ‘Who do you mean?’ I answered.

  I shaded my eyes with my hand so that I could look more easily up the hill into the sunset. My friends were satisfactorily away.

  The policeman sighed gently.

  ‘Never mind,’ he said.

  He stood looking at the cards in his hands.

  ‘At least we gave them a fright,’ he said.

  It was then that Mr Everson appeared, stepping delicately over a bundle of stones at the fallen edge of a wall. Mr Everson was a middle-aged gambler who sometimes sat in with my friends. He held in one hand a small bundle of plants and leaves and under his arm was a thick book with a respectable black cover.

  ‘Good evening, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘And a very lovely evening too.’

  The policemen watched him as he came mildly down the track. They didn’t answer;

  ‘Look at these,’ said Mr Everson, detaching a few dark green leaves from his miscellaneous bouquet. ‘The leaves of the wild violet, gentlemen, and here, a little late and therefore faded, the flower itself. A marvel, gentlemen, a marvel.’

  Mr Everson chuckled with satisfaction over the fistful of flowers.

  ‘It’s astonishing’, he said. ‘Don’t you find it astonishing, to think that a mere fifty years ago the glare from these furnaces lit up the sky for miles around and nothing would grow on these hills because of the stench and fume of burning sulphur? And now, see, the violets are growing. Quite astonishing.’

  Mr Everson held out his violets. Every time he said ‘astonishing’, he opened wide his guileless eyes. It was quite a performance. A pair of ravens which lived high in the walls came out and croaked derisively, but the policemen said nothing. Mr Everson walked through their silent suspicion.

  ‘Come along, boy,’ he said. ‘You’ve done enough for one night. We don’t want you to get stale.’

  I picked up my sweater and, side by side, we walked away. All the time I expected the policemen to call us back, but they didn’t. Mr Everson was perfectly calm, treating me with courtesy, as an equal. He was not only old, he was lame. He couldn’t have run away with the others. When he was young he had injured his right knee playing football and the leg was permanently bent. Yet he walked strongly, taking a very short step off the right foot and gliding down in an immense long stride on his good leg. More excitingly, while he walked he grew tall and short in turn. On his injured leg his face was level with mine, but his left leg turned him into a tall man, a foot above me. So his voice soared and fell, too, as we walked into the town. He spoke to me about the wild flowers mainly. He knew all about them. He could outwit the police. He was a very clever man.

  As I grew older my admiration for Laurence Everson grew too. We became friends, in spite of the difference in our ages. He was both intelligent and amusing and in another place and at another time he could have done great things. But in the waste and wilderness of our town he was able to cultivate only his individuality. He was well read, scholarly even, and he belonged to several libraries. His interest in politics was informed and cynical, but he loved all kinds of sport. Whenever I’d call on him, I’d find him reading, his head resting on one hand, bent over his book. He always read at a table, sitting on a hard chair, the book fairly close to his face because he refused to wear glasses. It was a big face, large-featured, and he had flat lemon hair on top of his head, shading to grey around his ears. I didn’t know he wore a wig until after his death, when one of his brothers told me.

  Laurence was a fine snooker player and twice a week for years we played together. He taught me everything, from the basic grasp of the cue up. He taught me how to let the weight, the lead in the heavy base of the graduated wood, do the work, to bend low over the table so that the forward stroke would brush the knot of my tie, to use side and stop. From him I learned the correct bridge for every shot and to recognise a situation so clearly that I could carry in my mind not only the shot in hand but the next five or six shots. And we bet on every game we played during all that time, sometimes straightforward wagers based on a handicap which decreased as I improved, sometimes on some wild, surrealistic series of events which he improvised as he went along. Laurence Everson would bet on anything.

  ‘Beautiful day,’ he’d say. ‘Bet you it will rain before two thirty-three.’

  And we’d sit there, watching the second hands of our watches. Once we spent a whole afternoon betting in even pennies on his canary, a cinnamon-yellow Border that lived in the kitchen. First we bet on the precise second when it would sing and when that palled, we bet on the pitch of its first note, checking the result on Laurence’s piano. This was the time he’d been ill and I’d gone in to see him. Mrs Everson looked pale and anxious, but Laurence looked fine. He sat in an armchair, a rug about his knees, remarkably strong and imposing. He was sixty then.

  After he recovered we went to Cardiff to see Glamorgan play Essex in the county Cricket Championship. We went by train and I won a few coppers on the journey, betting on the colour of the shirt worn by the next man to enter our carriage. We were in plenty of time, found good seats and prepared to have a day of it. We couldn’t have chosen better weather, hot enough to give the whole game a dreamlike clarity and yet comfortable enough for those of us who sat in our shirtsleeves. In those days Glamorgan had an opening batsman named Smart, and he was very good. He played that day as if inspired and he’d scored fifty before lunch. Laurence and I ate our sandwiches and opened our bottles of beer. A couple of white pigeons fluttered on the grass in front of us, strutting for crumbs. We were perfectly contented. After the interval, Smart continued where he left off, playing shots of perfect timing and invention. Soon he was punching the ball all over the field. The Essex fast bowler, a youngster who never made the grade, suddenly dug one in so fiercely that it bounced head high and viciously, but Smart, leaning elegantly back, hooked it off his eyebrows. It was perfect. The ball came right at us and Laurence, holding up a nonchalant hand, held it easily and tossed it back, laughing. A few people near us called and clapped and he turned around to say something. I could see his face, his amused eyes, and then it seemed to go to pieces, as if every muscle had suddenly snapped. He keeled right over and I held him as he was falling. God, he was a weight. People were helpful and competent. A doctor arrived within minutes and we got Laurence away to the hospital. He was quite unconscious and I stood around helplessly as they worked on him. It was his heart.

  After a while he came to. He looked appalling. His skin, always sallow, was blue, and it seemed he could open only one eye.

  ‘Did Smart get his hundred?’ he whispered.

  I could scarcely hear him.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I had no idea if it were true.


  There was a long pause. I thought he’d lost consciousness again.

  ‘Thank God for that,’ he said.

  The doctor looked at me. He was a young man, perhaps a year or two older than I was. His white coat seemed a size too large for him and he looked cautious and sad.

  ‘Your father?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘A friend. I’ve known him a long time, though.’

  ‘He’s not good,’ said the doctor. ‘He’s not at all well. I don’t think he’ll make it.’

  We were talking very quietly away from the bed, near the door. Laurence said something and I moved back to him.

  ‘What time is it?’ he asked.

  I looked at my watch. It was four-thirty.

  ‘Bet you,’ he said. ‘I’m still going at five o’clock.’

  He could barely speak.

  ‘Done,’ I said. ‘Ten shillings.’

  That was an impossibly large bet for us.

  ‘He’s game,’ said the doctor. ‘By God, he’s game.’

  We sat there for a long time listening to Laurence breathing. It seemed fainter and shallower. At last he spoke. He had no voice at all, but there was expression, somehow, in his terrible halting whisper. You could hear his amusement.

  ‘Pay the wife,’ he said, ‘if I win.’

  He opened his eyes for the last time and I think he would have grinned had it been possible.

  ‘Think of it,’ he said. ‘At last. At last one of us is on a dead cert.’

  I told all the boys that, and they all liked it, all those truthful and gallant gamblers. It was difficult to get Mrs Everson to take the money, until I explained that it was a debt of honour, Laurence’s last wager. She was a small, hard woman, very proud of Laurence.

  ‘Gambling,’ she said tremulously. ‘It was his life.’

  ON THE TIP

  Rhys Davies

  The ‘tip,’ as it is called, fringes the colliery like a cliff, falling away precipitately from the plateau on the hillside where the shafts of the pit rise. It is a gigantic cape of black, stony waste stuff, the rubble unearthed with the coal and thrown aside, dumped uglily and sombrely on the landscape, to remain there for ever. Each year it grows larger, encroaches further down the vale, a loose sombre little hill. In prosperous times no one takes any notice of it: a dirty, ugly dump.

  Now, however, with more than half the men out of work, those who have the patience and determination to force something out of the idle day, make their way to the tip and spend long, arid hours of searching among the waste. For here and there, shyly hidden among the dull slate and broken black rock, pieces of coal glitter, treasure escaped among the wagonloads of rubbish emptied daily over the tip. The right to search is a concession granted by the pit owners to those men they have thrown out of work.

  That cold afternoon only a dozen or so men combed the tip thus, dragging their canvas sacks laboriously up the steep cliff. The sky was shifty with uneasy clouds, there was a shrill bite in the wintry air. Most of the men had been on the tip since the morning: some were luckier than others and had already gleaned a half-sack of small silver-blue pieces. A full sack, weighing about eighty pounds and worth about a shilling, was considered a good day’s work: lifted to the shoulders, it was borne off triumphantly to feed a starved hearth.

  ‘How is it going, Walt?’ bawled a swart but cheerful-looking young chap, pausing for a minute to munch a wad of bread. ‘I just got a lovely piece – look!’ Wad of bread held between his teeth, he held up an unusually large segment of blue-shimmering coal in his black hand, exultingly.

  ‘No luck I’m having today,’ Walt, also a youngish man, called gloomily. ‘You give us a few pieces, Mog,’ he appealed, ‘you got more than you’ve a right to. A clout there’ll be from my missus if I go home like this tonight.’

  Mog grinned and refused to be charitable. Walt was an indolent searcher: he spent a lot of time vacantly squatting on his heels and smoking bits of fags. He was an amateur boxer, but out of the ring he seemed bemused and bedraggled amid his bulgy, overdeveloped muscles. And he was for ever complaining of assaults from his wife, who had married him just before the slump arrived.

  Mog popped his lucky find into his already fat bag and contentedly finished the rest of the bread and a thin slice of Caerphilly cheese. He would have a good fire tonight, red and gold, as in the old days when he was working. A leaping big fire on a winter night and a bowl of broth, feet in the fender – it would make life seem as it used to be, a thing to be enjoyed and believed in. He had been out of work for two years.

  Higher and higher they climbed, their feet sinking in the loose hill. Hands were bruised, backs were aching. A quarter of a mile away, down the vale, the rows of dwellings began their straggling lengths of grey concrete or black stone: homes! But attenuated homes now, with no hams hanging under the ceiling, no silks for the women, no ale for the men. All down the narrow vale there was an odd quiet and a queer shrunken look, that it had never possessed in the old days, when stomachs were full and people out among shops with pound notes in their pockets. Pound notes!

  A wagon appeared at the top of the tip, sliding on a rail from the pithead. The searchers poised below on the cape moved away from the portion where the emptied rubbish would fall: the wagon was tipped, a thick shower of stone running down the slope. When the movements had ceased, the searchers plunged eagerly to where the shower had fallen, dragging their sacks; there was more promise in a fresh load of rubbish.

  Gomer Lewis, a silent middle-aged man, searched erratically and wearily that day. He had been constantly turning to stare with a worried scrutiny down the vale, his weak blue eyes short of vision. He was cold and miserable and knew he ought to be at home. But what was to be done about a fire! Not a scrap of coal in the house and the kettle that morning having to be boiled next door. And he hated troubling neighbours and accepting pieces of wood and coal from the lucky ones. In his day he had earned four pounds a week and bought half a pound of best tobacco every Saturday, wearing a gold watch and chain in the evenings: Maggie had her fur and shiny shoes and trips to the seaside. And now this. This, and what was to come?

  He began to search feverishly again: he had had a very poor day, the bottom of his sack scarcely covered yet. And there must be a fire in the house the next few days. Dole on Friday, but there were two days to get through yet: Maggie had been craving for grapes and walnuts, yet laughing at herself. Charity: the district nurse: clothes from the depot run by the Quakers – a bundle of small used garments had arrived a week ago.

  The sky thickened, dusky clouds scudding at each other as if in icy dispute. The cold became harsher, and snatches of bitter wind swept down from the winter-dead hills and broke across the tip. None of the searchers wore an overcoat and even Mog, the amiable young man with the almost-full sack, ceased whistling to swear at the cold and thrust his black hands under his armpits, though he comforted himself with the thought of the flaring and buxom fire he would sit before that night.

  ‘How goes it, Gomer?’ he asked, having scrambled near the short-sighted collier, peering and scraping among the dull rubble.

  ‘Bad,’ Gomer muttered briefly. ‘I can’t see anything at all.’

  ‘You ought to have specs here indeed,’ said Mog sympathetically.

  ‘Can’t afford them, and I see all right for ordinary purposes,’ Gomer added gruffly. ‘Sometimes too much I see, nowadays.’

  ‘Aye,’ sighed Mog, ‘a blessing it would be to have no sight at all sometimes.’ Then he grinned. ‘Know what four of the women did in our street yesterday?’

  ‘What?’ Gomer said, still bent and delving into the tip.

  ‘Clubbed together and bought a scrag of mutton between ’em. A saucepan of broth each had out of it. The scrag dipped in for half an hour in turn, passing from house to house. A bit thin was the broth, but with plenty of leeks and swedes it went over the tongue pretty fair.’

  Gomer was startled. Such depths as using a communal piece of mutton Maggie
had not reached yet. Yet! But if things went on as they were going… And he who used to carve the juicy sirloin of beef on Sunday, ceremoniously, a good family joint, best home-killed. Now they managed a frozen chop or two, Maggie somehow achieving tastiness out of them.

  Mog went on talking. How much longer, O Lord, were the bad times going to last! Had Gomer any news of pits reopening up the valley? Yesterday there was a rumour of one and Mog had tramped eight miles and found it false. Mog alternately grunted and grinned, chatting to the unresponsive Gomer. He blew his nose and examined Gomer for a while. Getting on in years, thin, and a bit grumpy. A lot of chaps seemed to hide themselves in themselves now, get quiet and dark-looking. No use worrying, Mog thought tenaciously. He had been two years out, but wasn’t on his knees yet, though married. True, he had no kids, thank the Lord. No kids to stare and ask for toys and cakes for tea.

  The afternoon light shifted into a dark stony-grey, the clouds still clashed dangerously and there was a mutter of thunder. Gomer tore into the tip desperately: he must at least find enough for a small fire in the morning. Things would be needed, a piece of steamed fish, perhaps, for Maggie, a custard. He’d have to try and sell the pair of brass candlesticks on the mantelshelf. But would anybody buy, in the starving town, with the pawnshop overloaded and hostile… He felt himself cold and futile and helpless as he chucked the black rock and stone aside.