Black Parade

by Jack Jones

  BLACK PARADE

  JACK JONES

  ‘I remember when all the decent people in Lichfield got drunk every night, and were not the worse thought of. Ale was cheap…’

  Dr Johnson

  Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  FOREWORD

  CHAPTER 1: A HECTIC WEEKEND – SATURDAY

  CHAPTER 2: A HECTIC WEEKEND – SUNDAY

  CHAPTER 3: A HECTIC WEEKEND – MONDAY

  CHAPTER 4: CHRISTMAS IS HERE AGAIN – AND AGAIN

  CHAPTER 5: A MARRIAGE HAS BEEN ARRANGED

  CHAPTER 6: IN BORROWED PLUMES

  CHAPTER 7: A NICE BROTHER-IN-LAW HE IS

  CHAPTER 8: THE PATAGONIAN PANTHER

  CHAPTER 9: RECONSTRUCTION

  CHAPTER 10: BREAKAWAYS

  CHAPTER 11: ‘ISN’T HE LOVELY, GRANNY?’

  CHAPTER 12: SARAN RENDERS FIRST AID TO A RIOTER

  CHAPTER 13: OH, OH, OH, IT’S A LUV-ER-LY WAR

  CHAPTER 14: ’STREWTH, WHAT A BLOODY GAME THIS IS

  CHAPTER 15: SHOUTING THROUGH

  CHAPTER 16: ALL THE WORLD’S A STAGE

  CHAPTER 17: HOME, SWEET, SWEET HOME

  CHAPTER 18: CARRYING ON

  About the Author

  Copyright

  LIBRARY OF WALES

  FOREWORD

  Merthyr Tydfil for Jack Jones was a stern and forbidding father, a nurturing mother, lover, friend and mortal enemy. His native town, built on its four great ironworks, forged his talent and purged his verbose and cumbersome prose of its impurities. The pressures of reliving his life there – not to mention the heroic efforts of his copy editors – tempered a style of steel-hard simplicity fit for the elemental story of his people pitted against the black cruelty of nature and the red-clawed savagery of Man.

  The town is never the mere backcloth against which the lives of his characters are played out. With its massive heart, its indomitable soul, the Merthyr of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries dominates his best books – the three great novels, Black Parade, Bidden to the Feast (1938) and Off to Philadelphia in the Morning (1947) and the magnificent autobiography, Unfinished Journey (1937). Its dangerous streets provide a public stage for the great battles that conflict his families – the Morgans, the Davieses, the Parrys and the Joneses. There, the life-affirming vitality of its pubs, clubs, fairs, theatres and boxing booths and the bare-knuckled brutality of mountain-top contests howl against the constraint of nonconformity’s careful Christianity.

  In Black Parade the fight, as old as civilisation, divides the Morgan family between father Glyn, the hard-working, hard-drinking miner and his upwardly mobile, fashionably Christian eldest son, Benny and his snobbish wife, Annie. It rages within an individual, hellraising Harry, Glyn’s workshy, violent brother-in-law, a street fighter of considerable skill and reckless courage. When he is knocked down by a works engine on his way home from a night behind the coke ovens with a prostitute, he loses a leg. The judgement on his past life is reinforced when he is swept up in Evan Roberts’ revival of 1905 and ‘gets’ religion. Glyn is no more enamoured of the new Harry, endlessly preaching his gospel, than he was of the violent old.

  The same conflict raged within Jack Jones himself. His imagination was fired by the street fairs, the canvas-topped auctions, the music halls, above all by the penny-dreadful Victorian melodramas and great Shakespearean tragedies which enthralled him as a boy selling snacks to the audience in the newly-opened Theatre Royal. The pages of Black Parade hum with colourful characters like the disgraced headmaster ‘Davies, MA,’ who with his threadbare frock coat, unkempt red beard and fiery eyes busks for a few pennies by declaiming speeches from the great Elizabethan playwrights. Despite, or perhaps because of, his obvious contempt for his audiences they contribute enough to keep him drunk and to pay for his lodgings in Merthyr’s notorious red-light district along the banks of the River Taff.

  Ultimately the town’s pagan licentiousness ends, like Davies, in a lonely and meaningless death if it is not tempered by a Christian compassion. When Saran, Glyn’s long-suffering wife, hurries to join the throng gathering to listen to a speech by miners’ leader A. J. Cook during the long lock-out of 1926, his overblown rhetoric is compared to the simple socialism of her Christian brother, Harry, as he talks to the old, the infirm and the simple-minded locked up in the town’s workhouse. The message is reinforced by the cinematic expedient of cutting directly from the union leader’s bombast to Harry’s quiet sincerity.

  Cook struggles to bolster the miners’ confidence:

  ‘… men are now solid again in the areas that looked like letting us down. After a solidarity campaign in which I am pleased to say that I have been supported by all the Labour MPs with the exception of a reactionary handful – and we shall deal with them when the time comes – I am now in a position to report that our men everywhere are as solid as they ever were. And I am pleased to be able to inform you that we are winning the sympathy of the British public….’

  But Harry tells of the hawker he saw selling needles and cotton from door to door in Merthyr’s incessant rain:

  ‘Wet through, he must have been, and still the people who answered the knock slammed the doors in his face.’

  The next day Harry sees men singing for a few pennies as they walk along the gutter. They, too, are ignored.

  ‘No man should have to go from door to door selling needles and cotton in the rain, or sing in the gutter either. But when they are forced to do it, don’t you think, brothers, that people should be kinder to ’em? Of course they should, for we never know…’

  Without the Christian’s compassion, wild Merthyr would end in an orgy of self-destruction. The message is as much the novelist’s as it is Harry’s.

  An earthier love binds the Morgans’ ramshackle family and its many branches. As Jack Jones makes clear in his memoir Unfinished Journey, the novel Black Parade is Saran Morgan’s book. For most of its life before publication the novel was entitled Saran, short for Sarah Ann. She is named for the novelist’s beloved mother and both are the embodiment of maternal love. Like her real-life counterpart, Saran Morgan epitomises fecundity and nurturing commitment. She spends much of Black Parade with breast bared, suckling the latest of her brood. When her fertility ends, her daughter and daughters-in-law take over, a seemingly endless production line.

  Like most working-class mothers in the Merthyr of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, she suffers the most harrowing losses. One brother is killed in South Africa’s Zulu Wars, another disappears, a third, the feisty Harry, is imprisoned, loses a leg and has to be rescued from the workhouse. Two sons die in the horrific explosion that kills four hundred miners at the Universal Colliery Senghenydd in 1913. Two are killed and another is maimed in World War One. Her miner husband and sons suffer through the depredations of the long stoppage of 1926. Through this martyrdom she remains steadfast, loyal, and as crucial to the support and well-being of her loved ones as pit props are to the lives of her men.

  It is one of the pleasures of Jack Jones’ vigorous and subtle characterisation that Saran Morgan is more than a passive Earth Mother. From the moment we meet her as a girl working in the brickyard her blunt honesty, her humour and her spirited independence beguile us. She is the financial mainstay for her ageing parents and her two workshy brothers. She may love Glyn, the handsome young miner a little too fond of his drink but she is not prepared to bend to his will. When he fails to turn up to take her to the theatre, she breaks a taboo by seeking him out in the male-only preserve of the taproom at the Black Cock public house. His outraged drinking companions suggest he should teach her some manners by giving her a pair of black eyes.

  As
a married woman in the early twentieth century she may accept that pride of place in the home goes to the male breadwinners, but long before the book ends she has become the de facto head of the household. She knows Glyn will disapprove if she offers their widowed brother-in-law, the feckless pub entertainer and balladeer Twm Steppwr, a bed in which to die. She does it anyway. And she rescues her brother Harry, a man for whom Glyn feels an intense dislike, from the workhouse in order that he, too, may die under their roof. In her enthusiasm for the theatre and, later, the cinema, this illiterate woman becomes the guardian of the family’s cultural values as well as its spiritual and physical well-being.

  As Saran and her family mature, so does that other great protagonist of Black Parade, Merthyr. With the appearance of its imposing Town Hall, its General Hospital, its sports grounds and great parks, its theatres and cinemas, the town grows into a new sense of civic pride. With strong and resilient families like the Morgans forming its backbone, it looks forward to an uncertain future with optimism.

  In his life as well as his writing Jack Jones epitomised Merthyr’s restless, often wasteful, creativity. He travelled with bewildering speed from near-illiterate pit boy to soldier, woodsman, salesman for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, internationally-known public speaker, late-flowering novelist, playwright, broadcaster and scriptwriter. During his years as a professional politician he moved from party to party searching in vain for a philosophy that satisfied him. And there were long periods of threadbare poverty on the dole worrying where the next meal for his long-suffering wife, Laura, and their children would come from.

  In Black Parade Jack Jones lays strong claim, despite stiff opposition, to being the best fiction writer Merthyr has produced and one of the best to emerge in modern Wales. His neglect in recent decades shames us. His books are out of print, consigned to dusty, forgotten corners of the stacks stores of public libraries. This much-needed Library of Wales edition will help restore to him the reputation he deserves.

  Mario Basini

  BLACK PARADE

  CHAPTER 1

  A HECTIC WEEKEND – SATURDAY

  Two stark-naked young men in the living room of the cottage singing a duet from one of Dr Parry’s operas as a middle-aged woman picked up and hung away the pit clothes they had shed. They had both washed white the upper halves of their coal-blackened bodies, and the elder of the two was standing in the tub half filled with warm water washing his lower part, using the washing flannel with one hand, the other hand he used to screen his secret parts from the woman.

  The duet ended, and the young man standing near the fireplace cried impatiently: ‘Come on, Glyn, hurry up out of that tub so as I can finish washing. There’s good beer waiting for me in a dozen places…’

  ‘How many times have I told you to leave your talk about the beer until you get outside this house?’ said his brother in an undertone. ‘The end of it’ll be that dad’ll hear you and then… and how many times have I told you about standing about naked and showing all you’ve got in front of Marged. Cover up, for shame’s sake.’

  ‘Oh, Marged don’t mind, ’tisn’t as if she was a slip of a girl. You’re not particular, are you, Marged?’

  ‘If I said I was it’d make no difference. Do you want me to wash your back, Glyn?’

  ‘If you please,’ said Glyn, kneeling down in the tub to enable her to do so.

  ‘Damned particular, ain’t you?’ grumbled the impatient Dai. ‘Every night you wash his back for him. If you only knew how weakening it is; once a week’s often enough to have the back washed.’

  ‘If you had it washed as often as Glyn, then I wouldn’t have to wash two of your shirts for every one of his,’ said the woman as she bent over the kneeling man and started washing the coal-dust from off his back.

  ‘Oh, so that’s why you’re always asking him to wash his back, is it? I thought there was something behind it.’ He rubbed his week’s growth of beard. ‘Well, if there’s many waiting in Humpy’s this’ll have to stay on till some time next week. I don’t believe in wasting time – and holiday time in particular – hanging about barbers’ shops.’

  ‘If you leave it much longer the barber will be able to play music on it,’ said Marged.

  ‘Ay, Annie Laurie with variations,’ laughed Glyn as he rose to his feet, his back clean and wiped dry. He swilled his soapy legs and stepped out of the tub on to the piece of sacking spread out near the fireplace. ‘Though I was nearly as bad until I went out for a scrape last night, for I knew it would mean waiting in Humpy’s a couple of hours if I left it until today.’

  ‘I’m not waiting any two hours,’ said Dai as he stepped into the tub.

  ‘I was going to get you clean water,’ said Marged.

  ‘Never mind, this’ll do. I’m not so particular as some people. You attend to Glyn, and turn him out smart, for he’s going to meet his wench, his lovely Saran, today.’

  ‘Shut up. No, not that shirt, Marged. My best flannel.’

  ‘And his best blue pilot suit, remember, Marged; and his best silk muffler and new ’lastic-sides. Yes, turn him out smart, for he got to make up for last Saturday when he got drunk and left her waiting…’

  Glyn stopped his mouth with a slap from the rough towel.

  ‘You look after yourself, and leave me look after myself, Dai lad.’

  They went on washing and dressing and singing. They were a handsome pair of young men, now that they could be seen free of the disguise of the coating of coal-dust. A bit Spanish-looking, of medium height, bodies graceful and slight, yet strong. Dark complexioned, wearing long, drooping, silky moustaches and tiny tufts just below the cleft of the lower lip. The elder wore earrings of gold wire, for his eyes’ sake, he maintained; his eyes having been strained in the darkness of the mine too soon after their first opening, for he had started work in the mines – against his father’s will – at the tender age of eight. The younger had two more years of boyhood, up to the age of ten, before he, too, started work in the mines under his brother’s wing.

  Their father, a stonemason, had wanted them apprenticed to his trade, but the mother could see no sense in her lads working as apprentices for next to nothing during the years they might be earning what was regarded as big money in the mines; and as she was a strong-willed woman, her boys went to work down in the mines after they had had a few years’ schooling. For about five years they had worked from twelve to fourteen hours a shift in the mines, and each Saturday had proudly brought home their wages to her. Then, all of a sudden, she died. Marged, a girlhood friend who had never married, and who was about that time beginning to realise that her job as tram-woman on the bleak Cwm pithead was getting beyond her, came in to take care of the house and the father and two sons after her friend’s death; and ’twas lucky for them she did, for in less than a year after the mother’s death the father took to his bed never to leave it alive.

  ‘He’s in decline, poor fellow,’ Marged told the neighbours; and there he was now lingering on upstairs, cared for by the faithful Marged – loved by his boys and his only daughter, Mary, who had foolishly married… but of her and her feckless husband more later.

  The two boys had been named Glyndwr and David, but it was only their father called them by their full names, to everyone outside the home they were ‘Glyn’ and ‘Dai’.

  ‘Shall I wash your back, Dai?’ Marged asked him.

  ‘Not today, no time today.’

  ‘Plenty of time, and God knows it wants washing with three shifts’ dirt on it; but you’re in a hurry to go out to get drunk, ain’t you? Better if the pair of you went to bed to rest for a few hours after working three shifts without a break, as you two have. Rushing out…’

  ‘Rest, my bottom,’ said Dai, stepping out of the tub on to the sacking, where he stood wiping his legs. ‘Plenty of rest when we’re dead. Today’s the beginning of August Monday for me, the only holiday worth a damn in the year. All…’

  ‘How can Saturday be the beginning of Monday, you foo
l?’ asked Marged.

  ‘It is for me, anyway,’ said Dai. ‘From now until I start back for the pit on Tuesday morning it’ll be August Bank Holiday for me. Too true it will. Only five days a year out of the pit, so make the most of ’em, I say.’

  ‘Yes, but see you don’t make as much of this one as you did of Whit Monday,’ said Glyn warningly as he fixed his high-crowned bowler hat so as to leave a little of his hair ‘quiff’ showing on the right side underneath the brim. ‘You know what I mean….’ He assumed the helpless look and posture of a drunken man. ‘That’s what I mean.’

  ‘You look after your bloody self,’ growled Dai.

  ‘And I can.’ He crossed to the foot of the stairs and called up: ‘I’m off out now, dad. S’long.’

  ‘S’long, Glyndwr.’

  ‘Mind you look after him, Marged,’ whispered Glyn, jerking a thumb upwards as he was going out.

  The sunshine made him blink at first as he stepped outside the house and started walking from the Twyn across the eminence overlooking the second largest town in Wales to where his ‘wench’ lived in the end house of Brick Row. He smiled and nodded his head as the sound of the organ came up to him from the fairground in the town below. ‘They’re at it early,’ he murmured, stopping to look in the direction of the fairground. Immediately below him was the workhouse, the very thought of which made Marged shudder, he remembered, and below that again was spread out the rapidly growing and prosperous town of Merthyr Tydfil, which, he had been informed during his brief period of schooling, was the second largest town in Wales, ‘stands in the centre of the South Wales Coalfield, and manufactures large quantities of steel’. He stood surveying the scene from Troedyrhiw on the left to Dowlais Top on the right until he saw a young and powerful-looking man with a bundle on his shoulder approaching. Then he started to move on again, only to be pulled up by the stranger.