Black Parade

by Jack Jones

  ‘Chapels won’t save your town from the devil; neither will this place ever be a rich and abiding city, young man. Once the earth is raped the people of substance will depart, leaving you and your sort to rot…’

  ‘It’s you are talking rot, Davies. But, there, what do you know about the place. Better you stick to your reciting.’

  ‘Perhaps you are right, young man. Will you come across the way to have a drink with me?’

  ‘No, not to the Lord Nelson, thank you all the same. I wouldn’t wash my feet in what they sell there at the best of times, let alone the beer they get in for holiday-time.’

  ‘Yes, I know, but I never drink beer during holiday periods,’ explained Davies as he started across to the Lord Nelson, leaving Glyn to do what he pleased.

  Having seen Davies disappear into the pub, Glyn again pushed his way along the crowded street. He muttered angrily when he saw his brother Dai, who appeared to be at least three-parts drunk, tossing for drinks near one of the cockle stalls with a man even drunker than himself.

  What a day, Glyn was thinking during his slow progress down the street. First Saran had made him look simple as hell in front of all those chaps in the Black Cock. It would be some time before he heard the last of that. And now Dai, drunk and throwing his hard-earned bit of money all over the place before the holiday was properly started.

  In anything but holiday mood he continued along the street until he reached the Eagle Hotel, the first of the huge, new-style drinking places the brewers had erected to meet the rapidly increasing demand for drinking room. Glyn thought it a fine place, so did all the finer type of young miners, that small minority able to read and fond of music. Yes, the Eagle was the place for them, for the Eagle had a large and well-conducted singing room, a bar parlour, and instead of the sand which grated so under one’s feet in most of the other drinking places of the district, there was clean sawdust nearly an inch above all floors and in the bronze spittoons, into which it was a pleasure to spit. Then again, the Eagle had glass pint measures of two shapes – one could see the colour of what one was drinking.

  On entering the Eagle, Glyn was annoyed to find that the ground floor of his favourite pub was almost as rough and noisy as any of the many pubs he had passed on his way there. ‘Humph; the damned place is heaving,’ he muttered after a peep into the long bar from the passageway, then he climbed the stairs to the singing room, before the entrance to which there were at least a score of men and youths waiting to be admitted, for nobody was allowed to enter the Eagle singing room whilst singers were on their feet. So Glyn had to wait with the others until Ike James and Shenkin Fraser had completed their rendering of ‘The Moon hath raised her Lamp Above’ before he could enter. From where he stood with the others near the door, Glyn helped to swell the applause before entering – for Shenkin was his only pal, and they often sang duets together.

  Glyn found the singing room as crowded, and, now that the singers completed another of the items in the continuous programme, almost as noisy as the rooms below.

  Shenkin Fraser crossed over to Glyn and growled: ‘Come on, let’s get out of this and down into the bar parlour before they call upon you or I or both of us to sing. I’ve sworn more than once never to sing again to a holiday crowd, and yet, damned fool that I am… come on, let’s get down out of it.’

  For the next two hours or so Glyn and Shenkin drank first beer, and later rum, seated on one of the broad, well-upholstered settees in the bar parlour. Glyn was sipping his third or fourth rum and wondering how Saran was getting on in the theatre when sounds of a row in the bar broke upon the refined atmosphere of the parlour. Glyn went on indifferently sipping his rum, but Shenk went out to see what the row was about.

  ‘That was your wench’s brother, Harry,’ said Shenk to Glyn when he returned from the bar to the bar parlour.

  ‘What was the matter with him again?’

  ‘Trying to bounce beer on strap, as usual; but Mrs Morris stood up to him for once, threatened to brain him with a gallon jar if he didn’t go.’

  ‘And did he?’

  ‘Too true he did, no doubt remembering what Mrs Morris did to Will Bevan that time. Lord, you should have seen his face.’

  ‘What was the matter with his face?’

  ‘Oh, knocked about a bit; had a bit of a set-to with Tim Flannery in the bar of the Anchor this afternoon, so Meurig Lloyd just told me. But they were stopped before they got going properly, he said, so they’re to finish it up on the mountain in the morning; Meurig reckons it’s for five pound a side.’

  ‘Not Harry’s money, I know; he couldn’t put up fivepence.’

  ‘P’raps not; but he can find plenty to put the money up for him.’

  ‘Well, if he’s wise he’ll push off home and have a good sleep, for he’ll have something on his plate when he meets that Flannery, who’s as big as a house, and as strong as a horse. I seen him…’

  ‘Ay, and I’ve seen Harry wallop bigger men than Flannery, and I’d back him…. What say if we go to see them fight in the morning?’

  Glyn finished his rum, and then sat looking into his empty glass for guidance. Presently he said: ‘I don’t know; the last mountain fight I saw sickened me. Besides, the police might get to know about it and…’

  ‘Not they; if they did it’ll be easy to throw them off the scent. Meurig wants me to meet him on Tom Hall’s corner at half past five, so I’ll meet you there.’

  ‘But why so early?’

  ‘Because they’re due to strip at six. Flannery’s bouncing about going to Mass after licking Harry. Well, will you be there?’

  Again Glyn stared down into his empty glass, wondering whether Shenk would think him chicken-hearted if he said no, and whether he would voice that opinion to other chaps. Perhaps he had better go.

  ‘Right-o, I’ll be there.’

  ‘Good. What about another?’

  ‘No more for me.’

  ‘Good God, so soon. Why, there’s more than an hour before stop-tap. Sure you won’t have another?’

  ‘No more, I said.’

  ‘Then I’ll go back up to the singing room. Mind you’re on time in the morning.’

  ‘I’ll be there. S’long.’

  When Glyn got out into the open air he found himself giddy in the head and a little unsteady on his feet. ‘That’s through mixing drinks, that is. Damn that rum and Shenk for making me have it,’ he muttered, exerting his willpower in order to maintain a dignified perpendicularity as he pushed along the now densely crowded and almost streaming narrow main street. By this time all the sober, chapel-going people were safe at home, and the town was in the hands of those who were determined to make the most of what little time they had to spend before returning to homes little more than hovels, the pits and the fiery furnaces of the steelworks. So, eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow…. Men carrying gallon jars filled with beer which was bought as a livener for the following morning met friends who cried: ‘To hell with the morning, let’s drink it now.’ And it was drunk by the groups who seated themselves on the pavement, in the middle of the road, anywhere; and when the jar was empty one would rise and stagger off to have it refilled at the nearest pub, he and his companions rejoicing in the fact that there was another hour to go before stop-tap. They sat in the gutter and sang whilst waiting for the return of the one with the gallon jar. At the end of a song one would cry: ‘What about something to eat?’ To the cookshops, the butchers’ shops. Pease-pudding, a loaf of bread, black-skinned blood-pudding, cold faggots, pigs’ feet and hocks, chitterlings. ‘And if you can’t get chitterlings,’ they shouted after the messenger, ‘then bring – bring – any damned thing you can get to eat.’ ‘Shops sold out? Then get some more bloody beer.’

  Groups of women swaying above the seated groups of men, sipping ‘short’ out of little bottles, which were kept supplied with fresh liquid by the women with good legs but no money. Every now and then one of the women would go out of sight around the corner to make water,
but the men made water sitting in the gutters, didn’t trouble to stand up; and whilst one was making water his companions would amuse the women swaying over them with pointed references to the man’s codpiece then on view. Laughter loud and continuous.

  Glyn received many invitations to ‘take a swig’ out of this, that and the other jar and bottle as he slowly won his way home through the crowded street; he refused every time, for he was crunching the extra strong peppermints he had bought in the hope of disguising his drink-laden breath from his father, whom he was soon to meet.

  Outside their favourite pub, the Anchor, the Irish steelworkers and their womenfolk held up everything whilst they enjoyed a free fight, in the course of which gallon jars, bottles, fists, feet and fingernails were brought into play. Glyn stood to watch and listen from where he had managed to perch himself a little above the rest of the watching crowd on the hub of the right-hand front wheel of the Merthyr-Dowlais horse-drawn bus which, as was the case with several other lesser vehicles, was unable to proceed on its way owing to the fight then in progress, which looked like lasting some time.

  ‘And where can you say the police are?’ grumbled the driver of the bus from his high seat, where he sat with reins in one hand and long whip in the other. ‘Not a damned policeman to be seen when they’re wanted, but when they’re not wanted…’

  A man perched on the hub of the left-hand front wheel of the bus said he expected that most of the police had their work cut out that night down the rough Iron Bridge district and the fairground just over the Iron Bridge. ‘Yes, I expect that’s where most of ’em are,’ he concluded.

  ‘Then why don’t they get more policemen in the district?’ the bus driver wanted to know, spitting contemptuously through his teeth down into the battleground below, from where battle cries and screams came up as men and women went down. ‘God help anybody as would be foolish enough to try to stop that lot,’ he murmured to his nearest outside passenger.

  ‘Why don’t you drive through ’em?’ said the passenger, a sober man who was on the street late because he had a stall in the market which he stayed in charge of until he had sold all he had to sell at scandalous prices to customers made gullible by drink.

  ‘Drive through ’em?’ repeated the bus driver. ‘Now, what the ’ell do you take me for?’ He spat down on to the back of his leading horse. ‘Them three horses of mine’d be cat’s meat and me bus broken up into matchsticks before I’d be halfway through ’em. No, let ’em fight it out, I say…. Oh, lord, look at that chap bleeding.’

  ‘That’s nothing; look at that woman, ah, she’s down underfeet, God help her,’ wailed the passenger. ‘Where, where are the police?’ He went on to tell the bus driver, who was an Englishman, how ‘tidy’ everything in the district had been until ‘the old Irish’ had swarmed into it. ‘Never had anything like this until they came,’ he concluded, pointing down to where the fight was still going strong. The bus driver grunted sceptically as he settled himself in his seat to wait until the police arrived to clear a way for him, which they eventually did, but only to make him go back the way he had come with a cargo of about a dozen of the Irish contestants, including two women, and the seven policemen to the police station.

  ‘You’ll have to settle – and salty, too – with my guv’nor for this,’ he told the police sergeant who ordered the passengers off the bus so that he and his men could load up with the ‘drunk and fighting, your worship’ arrests they had made. ‘And who’s going to clean me bus after ’em, I’d like to know?’ grumbled the driver as the loading proceeded. ‘It’ll be blood and snot from the spokes of the wheels to the…’

  ‘Shut up; turn your horses round and drive like hell to the station if you want to avoid having to spend a night there with this lot,’ said the police sergeant as he swung himself to the top of the bus.

  Glyn lowered himself from where he had been perched on the hub of the wheel to watch the driver accomplishing the feat of turning his three spirited horses and the huge bus, which carried when fully loaded a score of passengers, ten inside and another ten on top, there in the narrow main street between the Anchor and the Express public houses. A wonderful feat it was; when accomplished, the bus drove off down to the police station and Glyn continued in the other direction towards home, having rid himself of the giddy feeling and general unsteadiness with which he left the Eagle by watching the fight, the arrival of the police, the truncheoning, the arrests, the turning of the bus and other sights.

  When he reached home he found his slap-toss brother, Dai, in a drunken sleep on the floor in front of the fire, so he at once got hold of him under the armpits and dragged him across the floor to where the old couch was situated against the wall, and laid him on the couch. The noise he made in shifting his brother from the floor on to the couch must have awakened his dad, who called down from upstairs:

  ‘Who is that?’

  ‘It’s me, dad.’

  ‘Oh, Glyn, is it; and is young Dai with you?’

  ‘Er, yes, he’s here, asleep on the couch. Where’s old Marged?’

  ‘She’s…’ A bad bout of coughing cut him off for a while, after which he gaspingly explained: ‘Sent her up as far as your sister’s to see how she is. But your supper’s on the table isn’t it? I told her…’

  ‘Yes, she put supper all right.’

  ‘Good. Are you coming up for a minute – or p’raps you’ll have supper first?’

  ‘Have supper after,’ said Glyn as he went upstairs to his dad, who was confined to his bed in the little room farthest from the head of the ladder-like stairs, there being no landing worthy of the name. ‘Well,’ he said, smiling down on his dad, ‘how are we feeling tonight?’

  ‘I’m feeling pretty good tonight, my boy.’

  But his looks and laboured breathing belied his words. ‘Frank, the mason’ – as he was known throughout the district because of the trade he had followed from early boyhood – was one of the many in the district who were in that state referred to as ‘the decline’, which had set in after he had worked slopping about in water for about twelve hours a day on the construction of a culvert to carry the Morlais Brook under a main road to join the River Taff. Yes, that job was the death of him, all right. And such a ‘tidy’ man; never in all his life had he touched the drink, and – up to the time he took to his bed for good – as regular as clockwork did he attend his chapel and his Sunday school. He was one of the very few working men in the district that could read and write both English and Welsh; and but for him his children would have been as illiterate as most others in the district – for it was little their mother thought of learning. ‘Put ’em to work,’ was what she always said. But the father insisted that they should have a little education before starting work, and he made her give them each their penny to hand to the schoolmaster every Monday morning, and when he returned from work in the nights he would for a short while turn schoolmaster, too. Read to them, he would, from the Bible, then make them read in turn to him. And the two boys were getting on famously when the mother put an end to their education by insisting that they should take advantage of the good money for boys that could be got in the pits. So Glyn went to get some of it on his eighth birthday, and had gone on getting it; his brother Dai started at the age of ten; but as for the girl, their sister Mary… well, the mother couldn’t do enough for her girl, spoilt – if ever a girl was. She was still in school when girls of her age were earning good money in the brickyards or by oiling and pushing trams on the pitheads. But she was allowed to continue at school until she was twelve, and after leaving school she was at home with her mother, ‘having a lady’s life’, so the neighbours whose girls were out working said. Then, shortly after her mother’s death, when only just gone seventeen, she went and threw herself away on good-for-nothing young Tom Francis, better known throughout the Principality as ‘Twm Steppwr’. ‘And the bugger’s never done a day’s honest work in his life,’ was what Glyn said when he heard from his sister that she had that mornin
g married Twm Steppwr in the registry office down the bottom of High Street. Said he was going to knock Twm Steppwr’s head off but his father called him upstairs and talked sense. But it was enough to drive a hard-working chap like Glyn mad, say what you like; for Twm Steppwr was, like his father before him, nothing more than a pub poet, musician and dancer who went around pubs, fairs and marketplaces playing on his English concertina and singing his own compositions, thrown off extempore, and more often than not forgotten for ever. Then he danced in a way that pleased some whom his singing was directed against. Some there were who preferred his singing, others his dancing, whilst others would walk a mile to hear him play the English concertina, and no wedding party in the district was considered complete without him. It was a poor enough living he made in this way, for he was paid mostly in kind – liquid kind at that. Glyn felt mad when he thought of his sister tied to such a chap, for whom she had already borne three children.

  ‘Yes, I told Marged to slip up to see how your sister was – she’s been none too well since that last baby – and to ask her to come down and spend the day with me on Monday, her and her babies,’ the father further explained. ‘Why don’t you slip up to see her sometimes, Glyn?’

  ‘I will tomorrow morning.’

  ‘For sure, now?’

  ‘For sure, dad.’

  ‘That’s a good chap.’ He lay for a time with his eyes closed before he asked: ‘How is it Dai doesn’t come up to see me? Having supper, is he?’

  ‘No, he’s sleeping on the couch, this last trebler took it out of him more than ever I’ve known it to,’ lied Glyn.

  ‘Then let him sleep; you must be tired too. Ah, well, there’s something wrong when men have to work like you have. Three shifts without a break for a bit of rest, and that twice a week. It’s not worth it, Glyn boy.’

  ‘Well, whether it is or not, we got to do it, dad, or be in the bosses’ black books. They say the orders for our coal are pouring in from all over the world, and there isn’t men enough. Now, take the heading where me and Dai works. Nine working-places in it, and they’ve had to stop the heading now because there’s no men to work the places it goes on opening up. And this is what we’ve got to do. Work our own place until we’re fastened by the empty place above, then move to that place so as to work off the coal as is fastening us. Back and fore like that all the time, for there’s as good as two places for every man in our pit.’