Black Parade

by Jack Jones

  ‘Damned if I know,’ Glyn heard Will Tavern reply.

  ‘The police might have pinched Harry for something or other last night,’ said Shenk.

  Slasher Evans was wild. ‘And Flannery here ready stripped,’ he was saying to Will Tavern, ‘and these bloody Micks having the laugh on us. Hasn’t anyone gone to fetch Harry?’

  ‘Not as I know. He knows where to come to; shouldn’t want fetching.’

  ‘No,’ muttered the Slasher, making his way up to where one-eyed Ned James was anxiously scanning the road along which Harry should have long before travelled to his corner; and as the Slasher was ascending to the rim of the hollow Flannery attracted everyone’s attention by stepping out from the midst of his supporters on to the level piece of sward on which he was to fight, where he stood exhibiting his beautiful body to the crowd. Raising both hands he several times smoothed back his long sandy moustache, and in so doing revealed his muscles in play under the skin of his arms and back.

  ‘Bounce, that’s all it is,’ muttered Will Tavern. ‘But wait until Harry comes; he’ll knock all that out of him.’

  ‘Hwat’s keepin’ tha champeein of yours?’ Flannery shouted up to the anxious-looking Slasher who was pacing the rim. ‘Has he been overtaken with the shites, or hwat? Hadn’t ye better be goin’ to help the poor feller along, for we can’t be stayin’ here all day waitin’ to lick the likes of him.’

  Then with the pace of a stallion he paraded the ring to the accompaniment of his supporters’ laughter and encouraging remarks. He and his supporters looked upwards when Slasher shouted down: ‘You needn’t worry, Tim, he’ll be here all right; the longer he is coming, the longer you’re allowed to live.’

  Flannery replied to this by turning a number of cartwheels, which delighted his supporters, who roared their encouragement.

  ‘Looks a holy terror, don’t he?’ said Shenk.

  ‘Yes, Harry looks like having his work cut out this day,’ said Glyn.

  Will Tavern was standing near and heard what they said. ‘Not he, Harry’ll eat the bastard and ask for a second helping,’ he told them. ‘These Irish, the damned lot of ’em, are like the barber’s cat, all wind and piss. Big and useless, that’s what they are. Haven’t I seen a priest whipping hell’s-bells out of ’em for not turning up to church.’

  ‘I’d like to see the priest as would use a whip on Flannery,’ said Shenk.

  ‘Here, are you trying to make me out a liar?’ snarled Will Tavern, advancing menacingly on Shenk with fists clenched. Lucky for Shenk was the cry from the rim to the effect that Harry was at last in sight. Those in the Welsh section of the crowd grunted their relief as their champion appeared, and a few cheered and others cried ‘Good old Harry’ as he bounded down the slope to his corner.

  ‘Where the hell do you reckon you’ve been?’ Slasher wanted to know, pulling off Harry’s shirt.

  ‘That Shoni of ours stole eight shilling out of my pocket, so I had to deal with him before…’

  ‘All right, you can tell us about that after you’ve dealt with Flannery, who’s been bouncing quite a bit; reckoned you wasn’t going to turn up, and that you was afraid of him, had the shites and…’

  ‘Afraid of a bloody Irishman.’ He spat out the mixture of vinegar and water, ‘a rinser’, which Slasher, on whose knee he was now seated, had given him to clean his mouth out. ‘I could beat a boat-load of the bastards.’

  ‘Don’t we know it,’ said Slasher, who called out: ‘Well, are you Micks ready?’

  ‘Sure, haven’t we been ready this hour an’ more,’ joyfully cried Flannery, springing into the middle of the ring.

  ‘So are we,’ grunted Slasher, easing his man up and forward towards his opponent. There was no better second in the district than Slasher. Having himself been a principal in a score of hard-fought battles, none knew better than he the value of caution and restraint in the early stages of a fight; and he also knew the value of a second who knew the ropes as he did. Yes, Slasher knew all there was to know about the handling and nursing of a man through a fight. Flannery was by no means as well served as was Harry.

  The number of spectators had grown until the bowl-shaped hollow was filled to overflowing by the time the men were sent up for the first round. What a contrast. Flannery tall, upright, fair, smiling, well proportioned. Harry nearly a head shorter than his opponent, dark, bulky, scowling. They at once got to work, watched by the large and silently excited crowd; but as the two men warmed to their work many in the crowd started grunting, squealing, cursing and fighting empty air. A few there were who yapped like dogs.

  Flannery, who played to the gallery quite a lot for the first quarter of an hour, held himself like a guardsman; Harry crouched and moved – and at times looked – like a gorilla. For the best part of half an hour Flannery rushed Harry off his feet, pasted his face with a nasty left, and threw him several times.

  ‘Isn’t it time you had a drop of this?’ Slasher asked the now rather worse-for-wear Harry, holding his bottle of ‘the right stuff’ up to his man’s lips. Harry took a good swig, blew thick blood out of each nostril of his badly damaged nose. ‘That’s better,’ he said.

  ‘Ay, isn’t it,’ said Slasher, looking across to where the landlord of the Anchor was pushing his way about shouting odds of two to one against Harry. ‘Hear that, Harry?’ said Slasher.

  ‘What’s stopping me? But he won’t be shouting two to one for long.’

  Harry began to steady Flannery with pile-drivers to the body in the next round, and from that round he was relentless – terrible. Flannery couldn’t keep him out, he closed in and delivered blows which left their mark on Flannery’s fair-skinned body, blows that made the receiver gasp. For about twenty minutes Harry punished his opponent’s body before stretching him out with a right under the heart. As Flannery’s people were working on him, Slasher gave Harry another swig of the ‘stuff’ and said: ‘The bastard’s not as tall as he was, Harry, now that he’s trying to protect his body more. So what if you began plastering his mug a bit.’

  ‘I think I will,’ said Harry, and as soon as he was eased up and forward towards his now swaying opponent he went for his mug. And didn’t he plaster it, plastered it until the almost senseless Flannery’s nose, moustache and lips were pounded into one piece of blood-soaked hairy flesh.

  Glyn bowed his head and closed his eyes long before the ‘plastering’ of Flannery’s mug was completed; he had tried to force his way out of the crowd, but he was wedged in, so he closed his eyes, but he left his ears unstopped, and heard Shenk squeal: ‘O, Christ.’ Then it was that he raised his head and opened his eyes just as Flannery was being pushed forward by his second to receive the coup de grâce. Smash. He fell, and the blood-drunk crowd yelled before it broke when the Irish admitted defeat. What he had seen caused Glyn’s innards to turn a somersault; he was suddenly and violently sick. He crawled up the slope and away as fast as he could until he came to a field in which there were some cows; he pushed through a gap in the hedge and sat there in the field watching the cows for a long time before getting up and starting for home. He hadn’t gone far when he remembered that he had promised his father to go up as far as Mary’s house that morning. So he turned again, crossing the slag-tips so as not to pass near where the fight had taken place.

  To get to where his sister lived he took a short cut through the world’s largest steelworks. As he hurried along between mile-long strings of low wagons loaded with steel rails for various distant parts of the world the thought that he was in a way embodied in the rails struck him for the first time. Funny he had never thought of that before. The rail-banks, furnaces – all that greatest of works would be useless but for the coal he and others hewed daily. How much coal have I during the fourteen years turned out? was what he was trying to calculate as he reached the railway line stretching for about eight miles from the steelworks to the ten pits which it served, pits owned by the same company that owned the steelworks which used up the total output of the tw
o most productive pits.

  Thinking more or less idly of coal and steel, Glyn walked for some distance, after he had walked through the works, along the railway line leading to the pits – though it wasn’t a railway line in the ordinary sense. For it was the company’s private line, over which only coal-trains and colliers’ trains, or ‘cwbs’, as the morning and night trains which conveyed the miners to and from the pits were called, ran. Walking this line in an unusually observant mood, Glyn noted with surprise that it ran over the mountains parallel with the old trolley-line he had heard his father refer to many times, and also with the mountain road along which pack ponies had carried coal from the pits to the works and foundries long before the trolley-line was laid. And now the railway line. What next? he wondered.

  He left the line just as a Sunday train of only one carriage was bearing down on him. He knew that train, colliery officials on their way out to inspect the pits.

  ‘Well, I’d rather them be going than me today,’ he murmured.

  He went on his way, and soon he was looking down on the row of cottages threatened by an oncoming slag-tip which towered above them. His sister lived in the second of the six cottages, in front of which he could see his good-for-nothing brother-in-law sitting with a baby in his arms. He was singing joyfully.

  ‘Yes, well you can sing, you lazy swine,’ muttered Glyn, looking down on them.

  Twm Steppwr was a red-headed, merry-looking chap, undersized, though. But he was a good-looker when seated. He looked up and stopped singing when Glyn began slithering down the slope towards him.

  ‘Hullo, Glyn,’ he cried heartily. ‘See untle dyn?’ he then went on to ask the baby he was holding. ‘Dere ’im is tumin down de tip.’ Next a loud shout: ‘Mary, Mary, here’s your Glyn. You’re an early bird, ain’t you, Glyn? But I can tell where you’ve been. You’ve been to see the fight.’

  ‘What if I have?’ said Glyn sourly. ‘How was it that you wasn’t there to encourage your drinking-chum?’ he asked sneeringly.

  ‘There’s a difference between drinking and fighting that’s next door to murder,’ replied Twm. ‘I knock about with Harry, I know, but when he puts his fists up I’m missing. Oh, here’s Mary.’

  She came out of the house smiling. ‘Hullo, stranger,’ she said.

  ‘Hullo, you,’ said Glyn. ‘God, what a wreck,’ he thought.

  Though only twenty she looked at least ten years older. Waxen; hanging breasts. And in the family way again.

  ‘How’s dad down there?’ she asked.

  ‘’Bout the same.’

  ‘Oh. Won’t you come in a minute to see the other two children, I’m washing them all over in the tub. You won’t know ’em, for they’ve grown…’

  ‘No, I won’t come in, I’ll stay out here and have a smoke and a talk with Twm.’

  ‘Then I’ll finish washing the children.’ Into the house she went.

  ‘Twm, I’ve got a bone to pick with you,’ said Glyn.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Ay; about – about Mary.’

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘What about her, indeed. Well, in the first place, she’s not looking up to scratch, is she?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ indifferently replied Twm, dandling the baby. ‘I haven’t noticed anything wrong with her, neither have I heard her complain…’

  ‘Stop playing with the damned baby whilst I’m talking to you, can’t you. She complain? Not her, but it’s to be seen with half an eye that she’s going all to pieces; anybody can see that, and anyone that can’t see it must be blind.’

  ‘You mean me?’

  ‘Ay, you, you that leaves her alone with the children in this hole for the best part of a week at a time…. Oh, I know all about your tricks.’

  ‘Has Mary…?’

  ‘No, you know damn well she wouldn’t tell me; but can you deny that you were away best part of last week?’

  ‘A couple of nights, that’s all, picking up a few shillings in the Rhondda and at Pontypridd. I can’t afford to miss Pontypridd on market-day….’

  ‘Market-day, be damned; you’re enough to drive anybody mad. At a time like this, when there’s any God’s amount of work about, you’re talking about market-days…. You’ll never do any good playing that concertina of yours up and down the country. And you with three little children, an’ all. Why don’t you start work in the pit again?’

  ‘Because the work don’t agree with me, that’s why. Another couple of months of it would about kill me.’

  ‘Don’t talk so damned dull, man. Has it killed me? And I’ve had fourteen years of it.’

  ‘But we’re not all built the same, see, Glyn.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake don’t start…’

  ‘Just a minute, Glyn. No, let me talk.’ He clasped the baby closer to him. ‘This isn’t the first time you’ve got at me this way. All you can think and talk about is work, work, work, and you want me to think and talk the same…’

  ‘Not think and talk, but work.’

  ‘Well, I tried it, didn’t I? And a week of it was all I could stand. On lovely mornings like this morning being flung down Cwm Pit…’ He broke off and shuddered. ‘No, never again. I like the daylight, the sunshine, and a bit of time to make up songs, to practise a new step, a new tune on the concertina…’

  ‘Bloody laziness! But even if you can’t stick the dark in the pit you can get plenty to do in the daylight and the sunshine, can’t you? What’s the matter with Dowlais or Cyfarthfa works? I know a chap as’ll get you a job in either place any day. It’s a wonder to me you’re not ashamed to be seen tramping around with a concertina under your arm, playing tunes and poking your cap into people’s faces like a blasted beggar.’

  ‘Maybe my tunes and songs are worth what little I get for ’em.’

  Glyn rose from where he had been sitting. ‘I can see it’s no use trying to talk sense into you. If Mary had any damned sense she’d leave you before you land her deeper in the mire than you have already. She’s welcome to come back home any time – and she can bring the children with her.’

  ‘Why don’t you tell her that?’

  ‘Because I know it’s no use, for you’ve mesmerised her with that fine talk of yours. But she’ll get to know you some day.’

  ‘Some day,’ repeated Twm. ‘Yes, we’ll all be known some day; me and my concertina; you and your work, work, work. No doubt you’ll be a model husband.’

  ‘I’ll work to keep a wife when I take one; she won’t have to depend on pennies begged in pubs.’

  ‘Let’s hope not,’ said Twm pleasantly. ‘Mary,’ he called. ‘Your Glyn’s going.’

  ‘Not so soon, surely,’ cried Mary as she came out of the house with her second in her arms and the first holding on to her skirt. ‘I was hoping you’d stay to dinner; we’ve got a lovely bullock’s heart for dinner that Twm brought home last night.’

  ‘Well, he can do with some heart, your Twm can,’ muttered Glyn as he started up the slope. ‘S’long, Mary.’

  ‘S’long. Tell dad that I’ll be down for the day tomorrow.’

  ‘He’s expecting you.’

  ‘Oh; and tell him that these houses have been condemned and that we’ve got to be out by Christmas.’

  ‘All right.’

  From the top of the slope Glyn looked down at Twm and his sister, now in laughing dispute for possession of the baby, Benny.

  ‘As though I’d never been anear ’em,’ he murmured. ‘What a place to live in; time they were condemned. Oh, what’s the use.’

  He walked fast back the way he had come to his sister’s place, and was soon back on the road leading into the old, derelict Penydarren works, from where Trevithick had started off the first locomotive way back at the beginning of the century which was nearing its end. And Trevithick, Glyn reflected, now long dead, and the little works in which his once most revolutionary ideas on locomotion had been fostered now crumbling ruins which harboured each and every Sunday a score or more gambling school
s. From early morning up to the time the pubs opened for the midday session, and during the hours between the midday and evening drinking sessions, hundreds congregated in and around the old works to try their luck at banker, all-fours, nap and pitch-and-toss, the latter being the favourite game of chance.

  That morning Glyn walked past all the card schools, but he stopped near the largest of the pitch-and-toss schools in amazement at the sight of Saran’s fair and firmly fat, cunning and dangerous brother Shoni, standing in the centre of a double circle of men who were betting on the toss of the coins which lay flat on the palm of Shoni’s upturned right hand.

  ‘I’ll head for another sovereign,’ he was shouting. He was soon accommodated.

  ‘Where in the name of God did he, of all people, get sovereigns from?’ Glyn asked himself as Shoni tossed the two pennies into the air. Down they came – two tails. Shoni had lost, and apparently his reason as well as his money, for he did a mad stamping dance on the innocent faces of the two pennies, swearing horribly as he danced. Never in the history of the game could a Queen’s or King’s image and superscription have been so vilely treated.

  Glyn hurried away and left the gamblers to it, still wondering where the usually penniless Shoni had got the gold he had just lost.

  The ‘lost ones’ were gathering near the pubs in readiness for opening-time and those who claimed that they had been ‘saved’ were on their way to church and chapel as Glyn turned out of the old Penydarren works on to the main street. This was the hour of church parade, though perhaps it would be more correct to call it chapel parade, for the chapel people were dominant in the district. True, there were a few Church of England buildings in which the upper ten of the district gathered to listen and take part in what the chapel people regarded as lifeless services; and there were also a couple of places where ‘them old Irish’ and a handful of Italian icecream barmen gathered to hear from their priests what the Pope wanted them to do whilst sojourning in what was a nonconformist stronghold; and it was also strongly rumoured that the growing Jewish community of the district were soon going to build a place in which to worship the God of their fathers. However, counting the Jewish intentions as a synagogue, for it eventually materialised, there were only six places of worship which Church of England, Catholics and Jews could boast of between them, and what were they against the scores of nonconformist chapels at a time when nonconformity was go-ahead and aggressive in the extreme. Having as good as won the battle for Sunday closing, and planning their campaign for Disestablishment of the Church in Wales, the nonconformists regarded with contempt all creeds and denominations which had no victories worth speaking of to their credit.