Black Parade

by Jack Jones

  ‘I wonder if it will always be like that?’

  ‘It will until they get more men from somewhere, and until they do we shall have to go on working treblers and overtime. But what about your hot milk?’

  ‘I’ll have it when Marged comes. Go on to your supper.’

  ‘I think that’s Marged now.’

  ‘It is,’ said his father, with the certainty of one who has listened long to steps in a room below him. ‘Off you go to your supper.’

  Glyn went downstairs to find old Marged, with her bonnet in her hand, standing near the couch looking down on the sleeping Dai. ‘Humph! As I thought,’ she whispered disgustedly. ‘A fat lot he cares about his dad up there on his bed…’

  ‘Shut up before dad hears you,’ said Glyn in an undertone. ‘You’re a nice one to talk about others, all the same. He might be dead for all you care, too.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Didn’t I tell you not to leave him tonight?’

  ‘And didn’t he make me go all the way to Dowlais Top to see how that sister of yours was?’ Glyn was silenced. ‘Did you give him his milk?’

  ‘No: he’ll have it when I go up. Sit down to your supper.’

  ‘I had a bit to eat up Mary’s: I’ll have a cup of tea, though.’

  ‘How did you find Mary up there?’ whispered Glyn across the table.

  ‘Up to her eyes in trouble as usual,’ Marged whispered back. ‘That bloody monkey of a husband of hers haven’t been anear the house since Wednesday morning, and this is Saturday. And she’s worrying about him, she’s more reason to worry about herself if she only would see it. Lord, didn’t she want her head tied for marrying the good-for-nothing thing as he is – and I told her so. But it’s like talking to the wall, for it’s “my Twm” this, and “my Twm” that. I’ve got no patience with her. To hear her talk you’d think he was an angel sent to her straight from heaven; and to talk like that whilst she and the children are half starving up there at a time when he’s living like a fighting-cock from pub to pub…’

  ‘What this talk about starving? She knows where there’s plenty to be had for the asking, don’t she?’

  ‘Ay, but she won’t ask for fear of giving that Twm of hers away.’

  ‘Well, she wouldn’t take telling, would she?’

  ‘Ah, well, it’s as much your fault as hers.’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about, woman?’

  ‘Who brought him to this house first? You – you and him that’s lying there. With his damned concertina and fine talk…. I remember your poor mother saying that we’d rue the day…’

  ‘We brought him home with us that night to play his concertina for dad to hear him…’

  ‘And he kept coming, but it was Mary he went on playing for; and it’s her that he’s half starved since.’

  ‘Well, that’s her lookout.’

  ‘Ay, God help her, it is,’ said Marged, rising.

  ‘Here, mind you don’t say anything when you take dad’s milk up about Steppwr being away from her all that time.’

  ‘Not likely.’

  ‘I’m going up to have a talk to Mr bloody Steppwr in the morning.’

  ‘And she’s coming down here with the children for the day on Monday.’

  ‘See you stuff ’em well with the best of everything that day. Oh, give us a hand to lug this feller upstairs to bed.’ He took hold of his sleeping brother under the armpits again. ‘You just hold his feet up so as they won’t bump the stairs as I drag him up.’

  They managed to get him up the narrow stairs and on to the bed without waking him or his sick father in the inner room. Downstairs they afterwards went, Marged carrying an old blanket and a shawl with her, her bedclothes, for the couch in the living room was her sleeping place. Glyn lit his pipe for a last smoke before bed as Marged warmed some milk for the sick man upstairs.

  ‘I want you to be sure to give me a shake at half past five in the morning,’ whispered Glyn to Marged’s surprise.

  ‘Why, it’s Sunday morning, whatever do you want up that time on a Sunday morning for?’

  ‘Ask no questions and you’ll hear no lies. I’m going somewhere particular with a chap, and I’ve got to be down on Tom Hall’s corner soon after half past five. If I’m not there he’ll be up here hammering our door and disturbing dad at that time in the morning. So, don’t forget.’

  ‘Oh, all right; but still I don’t see what you want trapesing about at that time on a Sunday morning.’

  She poured the hot milk out of the saucepan into a mug and went upstairs, followed by Glyn. After wishing his dad a good night Glyn went to his room, undressed and laid himself down on the bed by the side of his sleeping brother, but not to sleep for a long time, tired though he was. He lay awake thinking of Saran, of all he had seen on the street that night, of the fight he was going to witness in the morning. Then back to Saran again his thoughts returned. Yes, she was lovely. Oh, how he wished… but what was the use of wishing?

  And Saran thought for long ere sleep came to her that night. She thought about all sorts of things, but mainly of the theatre, or what she persisted in calling ‘the threeatre’. Illiterate brickyard girl though she was, she had for years been a regular and enthusiastic patron of the theatre, chiefly of the wooden structures which theatrical families such as the Sinclairs, the Noakeses and the Fentons had had erected on the banks of the stinking and rat-infested Morlais Brook, and in which members of the owning family managed to fill every part in the productions presented. In addition to the wooden theatre threepenny gaff productions of melodrama and farce, Saran had witnessed performances to which, as a rule, only the ‘big people’ of the town went. She had once paid eighteenpence to have the pleasure of being present at the Temperance Hall when Hermann Vezin played Hamlet. How she loved the play she could tell nobody, neither could she tell anyone how she hated the chilly atmosphere of ‘the front of the house’, where she alone wore a shawl and was unable to read. Vezin’s voice she long remembered, as she did the looks directed her way from different parts of the house. Yet after the freezing she had on that occasion, she stood up to the same supercilious crowd when she went to hear an opera performed by the first of the opera companies to visit the town. At the Drill Hall, that was, the place where she afterwards went to see the Christy Minstrels perform. But her main consolation had been the wooden theatre where she had, after having thrown his nuts back into Glyn’s face, that night seen performed The Dumb Man of Manchester, with the great little Cavendish as the Dumb Man. He, the only player who was not a member of the Sinclair family, was the regular villain, but owing to the demand for facial contortion which he alone could meet, he had to take over the Dumb Man’s part, leaving the lesser villainous role to Barry Sinclair.

  Saran and the other women present lapped up every drop of the play and the farce which followed, and when leaving somewhere around eleven o’clock they were all inquiring of the checker at the door the title of the play the management was presenting on the Monday.

  ‘Why, it’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin on Monday,’ he informed them. ‘Got two real bloodhounds from the hound-house an’ all,’ he called after them.

  ‘We’ll be there to see ’em,’ they assured him in chorus.

  After having had some peas and faggots at one of the portable cookhouses, where she stood eating unperturbed, surrounded by drunken men who said things unprintable, Saran walked slowly home, where, as she expected, she found her old father and her two brothers as drunk as she usually found them on Saturday nights. Harry was stretched out asleep on the floor. Her father was in the low armchair mumbling something about the days when ‘puddlers was puddlers’; whilst her brother Shoni was at the table stuffing himself with food. Her old mother was seated on the low three-legged stool near the fire, close to where Harry’s head reposed on the hard flagstone.

  ‘Come to your bed, Harry bach, come to your bed, will you,’ she wailed.

  ‘Leave the swine alone where he is,’ gr
owled Shoni, crunching a large hard pickled onion loudly.

  ‘But if you say he’s going to fight that old Irishman in the morning…’

  ‘He won’t have the trouble of dressing, so leave him there. About time I had that bed to myself.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know what the world is coming to,’ moaned the old man sitting in the armchair. ‘In my time it was…’

  ‘Yes, tell us about it in the morning,’ said Saran as she hoisted him up on to his feet and began pushing him before her up the rickety stairs. ‘Time you was in bed. Come on, up you go.’

  The old puddler was easy to handle; never had been in the least blackguardish. Always a rolling stone who was overfond of drink. He had, pursuing work and wages, dragged his family up and down the country quite a lot. Had worked as a puddler in the north of England and in various places in South Wales, and one of the results of all his rolling about was that none of his children were able to read a word in any language, any more than he could. His eldest boy had joined the good old 24th and had died a hero in Zululand, and as the old man often asked afterwards: ‘What better would our Ike have been if he could read as good as John Thomas, Zoar? Them old Zulus would have killed him just the same.’ His other two boys, men by this time, Harry and Shoni, had picked up all there was to be learnt about pub-crawling, brawling; and the girl Saran had had to learn to look after herself. And well for all that she did, for the old man had been scrapped by new processes and advancing age; the two brothers considered everything other than eating, drinking, fighting and gambling a waste of time, so, all boiled down, Saran was the main support of the home.

  ‘There you are,’ she said, pushing her dad into bed. ‘And you get into bed, too, mam,’ she told her mother, who had come upstairs.

  ‘Then you go back down and keep an eye on Shoni,’ whispered her mother. ‘Harry’s got money – in his waistcoat pocket. Shoni might…’

  Saran went back down to see that Shoni didn’t rob Harry, and stayed down pretending to do one thing and another until Shoni went upstairs, then she went through Harry’s pockets to see what money he had, and took eight of the eleven shillings she found on him, which was the only way to make Harry contribute something towards the upkeep of the home. A risky business, though, for if he woke up and caught her at it, it would have been God help her. Leaving Harry asleep on the floor she went upstairs and undressed and got into her shakedown at the side of her parents’ bed, under which she safely hid the eight shillings she had taken out of Harry’s pocket.

  For long she could not sleep, whether owing to the bolted alfresco meal of peas and faggots, the excitements of the day and night, or the even greater excitement of robbing Harry, are questions she did not trouble to ask herself. She simply lay awake, her wide-open eyes looking towards the room’s one tiny window, through which the moonlight was streaming, moonlight which stirred something within her. Thoughts striving upwards from illiterate deeps began troubling her until she heard Shoni grunt and swing heavily out of bed. He pounded in three strides past his parents’ bed to where the bucket stood at the top of the rickety stairs, where he stood, the moonlight showing up a section of his powerful, hairy legs as he stood scratching his stomach and making water into the bucket for a long, long time, after which he went back to his bed and slept noisily.

  Saran was almost asleep when her mother awoke and asked: ‘Saran, is the dog – is Gyp in?’

  ‘Yes, of course it is.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course I am.’

  ‘That’s all right then; for if the dog happened to be left out them rats would be up from the brook same as before and him dead drunk p’raps it’s him an’ not boots they’d start on this time. If you’re not quite sure I’ll go down myself to see…. Are you sure, now?’

  Saran was fast asleep, so the old woman got out of bed and went downstairs to make sure. The dog was in.

  CHAPTER 2

  A HECTIC WEEKEND – SUNDAY

  ‘Five o’clock,’ whispered Marged as she shook Glyn awake.

  ‘Right-o,’ he whispered in reply.

  But he did not get out of bed as quickly as he did on the mornings when called to go to his work in the pit; for in the peace of the early Sabbath morn he felt far from eager to witness a bare-knuckle mountain fight. Still, he had promised to meet Shenk; couldn’t let him down now. Glyn hated the thought of letting anyone down, had a weakness that way; he’d do a thing, or stick to a course which was against his grain rather than allow anyone to say he had funked it. And supposing he decided not to go, wasn’t it probable that Shenk would hammer the door and disturb his dad. Yes, he’d better go. So he got out of bed, slipped on his clothes and went downstairs, where Marged had breakfast ready for him.

  ‘What did you want to bother putting breakfast?’

  ‘You don’t think I’d let you go out this time in the morning with an empty belly, do you?’ she said, pouring out the tea.

  ‘I don’t want anything to eat.’

  ‘You must eat a little,’ she insisted.

  Just to please her he forced himself to eat a slice of bread and butter and drank two large cups of tea. He was glad of the tea.

  ‘Now, tell me, what’s taking you out so early?’ whispered Marged.

  ‘Nothing as would do you any good to know. If dad wakes and asks about me you can tell him that I’ve gone for a stroll up as far as Pontsarn. S’long.’

  ‘S’long.’ She locked the door and went back to her couch.

  Shenk was waiting for Glyn on the corner.

  ‘Been up all night?’ Glyn asked sourly, for he had been hoping that Shenk would fail to turn up and give him an excuse to return home.

  ‘Damned near it,’ replied Shenk. ‘Come on, let’s hurry up as far as the Musical Hall, from where we can watch Slasher Evans’ house. He’s going to be Harry’s picker-up, so we’ll be right if we follow him to where it’s to come off.’

  At the mention of Slasher Evans’ name Glyn stopped as though something had hit him, feeling less inclined than before to go and witness the fight due to take place that morning as he remembered that it was Slasher Evans he had seen beating a Bristol chap almost to death in a fight which was staged on the Aberdare mountain on a lovely June morning the year previous. The Bristolian died, as a result of the beating Slasher had handed out to him, about six weeks after the date of the fight, and there was some talk about the Slasher and others being tried for manslaughter, but nothing came of it, for the Bristolian died in one of the Iron Bridge common lodging houses, and people who died there were seldom fussed over. And Glyn had witnessed that fight – part of it, anyway. He had forced his way out of the crowd as the Bristolian’s seconds were stopping up the horrible gashes over their man’s eyes with handfuls of shag tobacco before sending him up for some more of the terrible punishment Slasher was waiting to administer. And remembering that morning, Glyn said: ‘Let’s not go, Shenk?’

  ‘What? After taking the trouble to get up and out this time in the morning? Not likely. Come on, you’re talking like a damned baby.’

  Glyn expected he would say something like that and place him on the horns of a dilemma. ‘You’re talking like a damned baby’; what could a chap do but go after being told that, and what Shenk would say to his face he would surely repeat to others and it would go around that he was nothing more than a damned baby who…

  Shenk was legging it for all he was worth in the direction of the Musical Hall, near to which they stood with some other chaps who were there before them and others who came along after them to watch the house of Slasher Evans. At five minutes to six the Slasher came out and walked past those waiting to trail him without a word. In his pockets he carried a bottle of lotion, a small bottle of brandy, some Ringer’s Shag to stop head and face wounds, and other aids. Shoulders hunched up, he walked along with pursed-up lips and eyebrows forced down until he almost made himself sightless. And there were other mannerisms which in the aggregate made him a composite picture of ab
ysmal ignorance and the quintessence of animality. Waiting groups on every corner sprang into life as he appeared and followed at a respectful distance the ‘killer’ who pursued his lonely way to the immense bowl-shaped hollow just beyond where the whippet-racing took place most Saturday afternoons.

  ‘This is the place,’ said Shenk.

  ‘How do you know?’ Glyn asked.

  ‘Well, can’t you see one-eyed Ned James scouting along the top there. He can see better and further with that one eye of his than most of us can see with two, and from there he can see anybody coming a mile away. So if the police do happen to get wind of it, Ned’ll give us the tip in plenty of time to…’

  ‘Hey, you two,’ shouted one-eyed Ned at them, ‘don’t stand there like a pair of bloody galutes, but get down there with the others out of sight.’

  Glyn and Shenk hurried forward to the rim of the bowl-shaped hollow and slithered down to join the huge crowd already seated around its sloping sides. Down there in the hollow the crowd was divided into two sections, the Welsh and Irish sections. Glyn knew most of the Welsh section, bloodthirsty fight-fans all, but he only knew by sight a few of the Irish section. To and fro between the two sections there were a number of men moving along making bets, the sporting landlord of the Anchor being the most active in this. Glyn looked all round without catching sight of Harry, but he could see the redoubtable Tim Flannery standing ready stripped to the waist in the midst of the seemingly ligh-thearted Irish section of the crowd. Then where was Harry?

  ‘Where the hell is he?’ Slasher Evans was asking Will Tavern.