Dream On

by Dai Smith

  And that is why we are here today, is it not? Able at last to speak out truthfully because of the ark of this stunning project which we are able to float amidst the deluge, even in our wreckage. You have seen the plans. You have seen the scale models. You have noted how the architects of this spaceship of hope explain and illustrate their vision. Let me remind you of it. Only the landscape can be our salvation now, and only if it is returned from the depredation of industry and restored with care and expert attention. At the tops of all our valleys. Attention paid to that detail of waterfall, rock screes, copses with real trees, not the suffocating blanket of pine trees sown for profit. Only then will we truly attract new blood, new energy, new money, new owners. Friends, the fantasy of a cultural tourist trade, buoyed up by industrial museums and heritage trails, is the chimera of a 1980s dream that was always fantasy. A jerky reaction to a History vanished. Instead they tell us now, our expert carers, that at the mouths of our fabled gulches, near cities and motorways, we can indeed gather and commute to work but that, here, we must see that landscape is all. Not mean streets. Not meaner people. But a beauty of natural shape or form that can entice others, provided we ensure that entry in and exit from the mothership, is pleasurable and painless. The Valleys, our valleys, to find their final destiny as … a national park. The newest. The latest. The best.

  The Vision, this new dream, by-passes the detritus of our past, by shutting it out. At last a future that is made afresh, clean and whole, not one regenerated piecemeal and messily. This future will open up, properly, at veritable gates – gates through whose portals we will funnel the work done for the spaceship – the cooks and chefs, the cleaners, the gardeners, the drivers, the bar staff and waitresses, the electricians and plumbers and carpenters, the brickies, security men and receptionists and telephonists, to all who will ensure that the new, and perhaps, why not passing-through inhabitants? are protected to think, secured to relax and gated to be special. That army of workers will, naturally, come and go every day, their pockets clinking with the gold with which their labour has been bought.”

  * * * * *

  He paused to let a burst of clapping punctuate his speech. He had moved effortlessly to the shore I did not have in mind. Then he continued, his tone imperceptibly sharper, his blend of demotic speech and oratory mixed for the occasion as ever. Ceri had not lost it. I had underestimated him.

  “You’re right to applaud! What else have we been trained now to do? How else can we think? What, after all, can be wrong with turning our people into peons? What’s amiss with losing the haphazard hits of cultural tourism by replacing it with colonial settlements? We once made an art out of our very selves – in politics and in our common culture – why not become the artefacts necessary for the greater lives of others? I have, my friends, been giving this a great deal of thought. My conclusions are neither comfortable nor easy for me to state in front of the partners with whom I have worked on this enterprise, an enterprise that could, of course, work. But I have concluded, only at the cost of being an even greater betrayal than any we have yet experienced.

  It would betray the one thing we still uniquely possess – our collective DNA, our sense of ourselves – and that is: our own history. We can never re-live it. We shouldn’t want to, but we cannot be ourselves without it. It cradles the essence of what once gave us purpose. And you know what? That isn’t heart and soul and sentiment. It isn’t nostalgia. It’s intellect. We thought once not just of what would improve some lives, but how to make it happen for all. In education, in and out of school, in the ambitions of our parents and the aspirations we had for each other at work and play. We created institutions that were indeed collective and voluntary, from trades unions to brass bands, from choirs to rugby teams, a committee not as a tired joke but as a director of purposefulness. Our people came together initially for the purpose of work and wages, but out of mere aggregations of people they created – one way or the other – communities of purpose. Are we to let all that achievement drift? Are we to spurn our potential to make our heritage a creative one again?

  We must, even at this late stage, think with our imaginations not our slide rules. I propose in place of this gated commune for visitors, a new city on the hill for ourselves. On this land, in this place, let us create galleries to show our art, and wipe away the cataract of clichés that make us blind and others myopic. All landscape and no mindscape, my friends, makes Dai a dull boy. Let us create here space for studios and performance where our young musicians and film-makers and writers and dancers can come, on generous bursaries for residence, mentored by the best international talents we can muster. Let us remember that the miners’ institutes and welfare halls were, with their book-crammed libraries and lecture halls, once the brains of the coalfield, and let us find space here for Institutes of Learning that can envision, not just administer or tinker with, a future. Let there be conferences, and debates, seminars and festivals, of music and theatre and science and sport and video and film, a sculpture park and a garden setting for the best of contemporary public art. Let it be open, let it be young, and let it be ours. A centre that both radiates out and connects inwards.

  You know we have the tools and the means for it. But what we must have, here today, now in this place at this time, is the will. We must resist the cry that there is no alternative. You know who said that first, don’t you? If we resist its lie we can create a future that comes from us and for us. Will you help me?

  I am formally proposing this morning that we establish a new charitable trust, endowed by the funds hitherto received by Tir Werin who will, I know, freely give up prior claim to all the land they own, and the cash flow. The new trust – the Haf Trust, for this will be our summer of content – will elect members from communities across the Valleys to serve with elected and nominated members of the arts and sports community, backed by university expertise, even supplemented, perhaps, by a politician or two! I will be happy, if asked, to serve as an interim founding chair and drive this idea into a shape that makes it an international beacon of excellence. Have no fear that Europe will not support us on this. They will welcome the initiative. They will applaud a brave experiment. Will you? Will we? We must.

  It is time, my friends, to become comrades once again, if only in an endeavour of this kind. The only gate to the present we ever need is that symbolised by Janus, who looks both backward and forwards in order to progress. I expect to be accused of idealism. I have been accused of worse. I expect to be pilloried for impracticality. I have learned little in a long life of anything that benefits us at all by following the narrow lines of rigid practice. I only wonder that we have not done this before. We have been atrophied, as I have been, by the shrivelling social veins of the culturally timid. If I seem, here today, to return to the political roots some claim I have spurned, think again! I am re-freshed not restrained by that past. Political life, we once understood, was what made us, together, free, because it made us, individually, engage with what we had in common. Our very humanity. Then, we did not hide away in the fearful corners of our spluttering, individual lives. We had so little we made the sacred flame of our values immense. We possessed nothing so we owned everything. And the chosen life of a man or woman in public life was the valued gift of a people which wished to make its voice heard wherever the silence of submission still held sway. Those voices were from the chorus, and it is time to hear that chorus sing out their music again, so that, together, we may drown out the siren calls of despair and helplessness.

  I read academic papers that tell me that we have been cursed by the twinned poverty of deprivation and the poverty of aspiration. But I know now that these were mere descriptions of the despond into which we sank, buoyed up by occasional sweetmeats and fair promises. I know now, with all the fibre of my being, that we have misplaced our proper weapons and must pick them up again if we are to end our poverty of intellect through fresh imagination, and replace our poverty of purpose with the dream of a city on the hill, one wh
ose name and spreading presence will become legion.”

  * * * * *

  I’d like to say that when he finally sat down next to an ashen Maldwyn and a bewildered Gwilym that the ripple of applause near the platform turned into the bravos and cheers I felt in my heart. Instead there was an uneasy silence. The hacks, who had no handouts for this, could scarcely have kept up with the outpouring, and the rhetoric was as unexpected as it was strictly retro. I caught Ceri’s ever-alert eye. He winked. He actually winked. He was off the hook, at least with me, and he knew it. If the thing he outlined lived, then all praise was his. If it stumbled and fell at any hurdle, then he was blameless for the failing of others. The money had passed hands, sure, but that would not be a story to reveal now. Gwilym would play the broker role that had always suited him. The business plan would be re-written, and Maldwyn would seek revenge. Sometime, somewhere. Bran would shrug and turn it into a PR triumph which, she’d claim, she’d been hatching all along. A committee would indeed form. But it would need Haf as well as Ceri to drive it. They would make, maybe, a suitable kind of father and daughter. Perhaps they were already. I saw Haf applauding and smiling. Ceri smiled warmly back. I felt a deep sadness. It was all starting again. All wrong. Nothing had changed. Nothing would alter. Energy would gravitate to the darkness we could not escape.

  * * * * *

  I left Haf to find her way through the press huddle to Ceri. They would have lots to do together. And lots to learn about each other. Outside I found Bran waiting for me.

  “Did you think I’d disappear, slink off with my tail between my legs?”

  “Or whatever,” I said.

  “That’s cheap, even for you.”

  I agreed. “So what now?” I asked.

  “The truth, of course.”

  “I know too much of that.”

  “Not all, you don’t.”

  I had had a bellyful of her poised ambiguities. It was over. I wanted it dead. I wanted to hurt. So I just said it as it was for me.

  “Look, Bran, I know you – not even you would try to arrange it so that Maldwyn, for whatever sick purpose, would sleep with Haf, not even you would do that. But I also know you told him he wasn’t the father to hurt and humiliate.And telling Haf it was, perhaps, me, to make for confusion and longing, and what you did fucked her up more than was bearable, didn’t it? And I think she still is. I’m assuming it really wasn’t me. You’d have used that if it had been. I hope to God, for your sake as much as hers, that it really isn’t Mal. So who? Home comforts for Tommy, a bit of rough? Or, and my best guess, if Ceri later why not then?”

  She surprised me one last time.

  “You poor bloody fool,” she said. “Is that what you think? Really think?”

  “Could be, couldn’t it?”

  “Could have been but wasn’t. And as I told you it wasn’t you. By a whisper, but not.”

  “Then who?”

  “Your old man,” she said.

  I flinched. I wanted to hit her. I nearly did.

  “You’re a bloody liar,” I said, but I knew it was not a lie. She would not have said it as a lie. Not like that. So she told me the truth. In detail. How when I had left, after the exhibition, she had gone to see him, not with anything in mind, just to talk, about me and her and how so many things beyond both of us had gone wrong. How he’d cried. I’d never seen him cry. How she’d held him and stroked his hands. I hadn’t held him close since I was a boy. How a hug had led to an embrace, that she kissed him, and he sighed. That they’d made love, and it had been only once but she’d timed it back after Haf was born, and she was certain. It could have been me. It happened to be him. Haf was my half-sister. Bran said she never saw my old man after that. He had died within a couple of months. Pneumonia and his wrecked lungs killed him. She’d gone, with Ceri, to the funeral. Mal had moved in before then. When Haf was born, he thought it was just a slightly premature birth. She looked to see if I was shaken. I was.

  * * * * *

  In the car park a taxi from the city was waiting for me. I walked towards it. From behind a hand touched my shoulder. Haf.

  “Are you going? Don’t go. Stay,” she said.

  “It’s done. You can turn this around,” I said, not truly believing it, but hoping for her sake. “Use the trust. Use the money. Use Ceri. You don’t need me, Haf.”

  She grasped my hand and spoke softly to me, as if to a child.

  “Do you think I really believe him? It has to be done differently. Slowly. With no let-up. You need to be here.”

  I looked closely at her. Not quite able to trust myself to take in what she was saying.

  “You need us, Billy,” she said.

  * * * * *

  The dream through which he had been drifting had ended, even if the tangle within it had not been resolved. He would have to tell his sister who she was. That would define who he was as well. A camera would still be as hard to pick up and use to any purpose, as would untangling those threads. He knew the two acts would be connected. He knew that he would need to try again to look at faces, with and without a viewfinder, and with a perception more raw than his skills had once allowed him. He would settle for less if it meant more than just being an observer, a recorder, a cheerleader, an exile. There were some dreams which stayed with us. If only we could recall them. If only we could see. If only we made their reality integral to life. At least, he thought, his old man, in homage and echo, would have said that it was pretty to think so.

  “FOR IN THE LAST ANALYSIS IT IS HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS WHICH IS THE SUBJECT MATTER OF HISTORY.”

  MARC BLOCH THE HISTORIAN’S CRAFT (1949)

  Birth Certificate(s)

  He didn’t have one. As he told the boy, this had occasionally made for problems in his life, but mostly with whichever authorities he was confronting at the time. So the Army had been one such, and the worst as such. Mostly he had just managed, uncertified so to speak, he’d say, to live, and then love, without one. He had been born, that was clear but not, for whatever reason and by whichever sleight of a powerful hand, ever registered. This made him, and he grinned whenever he said it, a real, legitimate bastard.

  By extension, he claimed that the world, his very particular and specific part of it, was a mongrel one. Which suited him, he said. Gave him a kind of natural-born ease of entry into such a haphazard breeding ground. The boy, intermittently bombarded with all this, was never sure, not then at least, how much he was meant to understand, or even believe.

  What mattered more to the boy, at least then, was the man more than his words. He would wait after school until a summery dusk dropped, at the bottom of the steep hill at whose top they lived, until he heard the distinct light tenor of the BSA’s engine thrum in the air before the bike, with its stocky and darkened driver hunched over its jet black frame, came into sight. His father would cut back the engine to an idling putter so that he could reach out with his one free, muscled arm to hoist his son, wordlessly and instinctively, onto the pillion seat behind him. The boy would clutch his father around the stomach as they took off, in a rough perpendicular hurry, up the hill to home.

  He had never learned to drive. In these years, twenty or more after the war had ended, cars had finally proliferated and had begun to crowd onto the space once used for games and talk in narrow streets. He kept to his motorbike, and rode it, as he’d done in the Army, as if he was fleeing something, never arriving, always leaving. So the boy would hold him as tight as he could, his hands clasped together, with fingers intertwined to a whitened pressure, feeling his father’s body tense beneath a billowing shirt, and they would scramble up and across the intercutting ledges of streets until they turned into the top street beneath the mountain’s edge. The boy only wanted to grasp at his father’s fleeting presence. Neither exits nor entrances interested him in those hold-fast days.

  Yet, they obsessed his father even as, all around him, a kind of settling was being accepted by others. Sometimes he’d say to the boy, and it would be more
in exasperation than resentment, you’d think that with all we, they, us, have been through – and a sweep of a cigarette-wielding hand would take in the life histories of a generation more scarred than cosseted – that memory would never dwindle, that brains would remain fluid for action, not scrunch up like dessicated walnuts only fit for someone else’s nutcracker of indifference. For a time, he’d insist, there had been a chance, just a chance, for quivering change. Now, he’d say, to capture again the textured moment of that you had to admit, and it was a defeated confession, that you had to be able to feel it, there and then, as it was. To express it you would need to show it, all of it, so that its restless shapes could be understood to have once mattered even as they flattened and subsided. Later, in his view, when those pregnant, few post-war years had been dismissed as a false, ectopic issue, he’d say the time for showing was over, that it would only be a nostalgia trip of social cowardice designed so that the willingly immobile could stay mired in the sweet shit that dribbled down their legs, and stuck them fast. To tell was to be conscious, he said; just to show was to sleepwalk through a life deprived of dreams. Yet, once, he had lived in both ways and he refused to let its pastness be inert. So, he would try to tell the boy by showing him, too.

  * * * * *