Black Parade

by Jack Jones

  All three of them that day invited the sorrowing brothers in to have all they wanted to drink; and the three preachers, hoping for a couple of converts, offered to give the brothers a lift back to town in the one-horse brake that had been hired, but Glyn and Dai managed to please both saints and sinners by saying that they had to go back with Mr Williams, the undertaker, to settle up for the coffin and things. So they hurried off with him, and when the three of them got to the Lamb and Flag on the Brecon Road the undertaker stopped, looked back the way they had come, and said: ‘I think we’ve shaken ’em off, let’s slip in here for a couple.’ When he and the brothers were comfortably seated with drinks before them he went on to explain: ‘Got to be as cunning as a wagon-load of monkeys in my business – that’s if you take a drink, for some that’s been at this funeral today, if they once saw me turning in for a drink, would rather go to their graves in their shirts than in a coffin of my making. Drink up and have another.’ They did. ‘Well, boys, you gave him a grand funeral, and he deserved it, for if ever there was a good craftsman, it was your father. As good a mason as ever picked up hammer and trowel, best man as ever worked for me.’

  ‘And he used to say that you was the best boss as ever he worked for,’ said Dai.

  ‘That’s neither here nor there, but there can be no two opinions about your dad; and what licks me is that neither of you had sense enough to take to the trade.’

  ‘And work years for next to nothing when we could be earning good money in the pits,’ said Dai.

  ‘As we have done,’ said Glyn.

  ‘Yes, but you haven’t got a trade in your hands, have you?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know…. What do you reckon getting coal is?’ asked Glyn.

  ‘Well, it’s certainly not a trade. Drink up and have another.’ They did. ‘But what’s the use talking, can’t get boys to take to a trade these days, for no sooner are they breeched than down the pits they go. But, you mark my words, these pits and works will have their day, and then you’ll wish you had a trade in your hands.’

  Dai’s third pint was making him argumentative. ‘Nonsense,’ he cried. ‘Why, there’s enough coal in the valleys of South Wales to keep us busy for hundreds of years; and do you think they’d be putting up all that new plant in Cyfarthfa and Dowlais works if they weren’t going to last?’

  ‘They were putting up new plant in the old Penydarren works when that closed down never to start again. Well, I must be off…’

  ‘Not until we settle with you for the coffin,’ said Glyn.

  ‘The coffin’s my present to your father.’

  ‘No, thank you all the same; dad’s not resting in anything but what’s paid for,’ Glyn told him.

  ‘In that case – what about thirty shillings?’

  Glyn paid him.

  ‘What about a last drink? I shan’t have another, but there’s no need for you two boys to hurry off. What is it to be?’

  They told him, and he ordered their drinks as he was passing through the bar on the way out.

  ‘A good old sort,’ said Dai.

  ‘Not bad.’

  ‘Well, and what are we going to do now, Glyn?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Are we going to carry on the house same as before or…’

  ‘Certainly we are. What made you ask that?’

  ‘Well, I thought, now that dad is gone, that you and Saran…’

  ‘Don’t talk to me about her,’ cried Glyn, blinking his still damaged and discoloured eyes. ‘I’m not having anything to do with that lot.’

  ‘Oh, you know your own business, but all the same I don’t reckon you should have it in for Saran because of what Harry…’

  ‘Shut up about them, I tell you, and don’t you ever mention her name again to me. If you only knew how she sticks up for those brothers of hers, you’d… but what are we bothering about her for?’

  ‘I’ve finished bothering; what about another drink?’

  ‘No, we’ve already had more’n I intended we should have this night. Let’s keep tidy this night, anyway. Come on, let’s go home so as I can get into a cap as’ll hide these eyes of mine a bit.’

  Glyn hadn’t spoken to Saran for twelve months, though he had seen her many times since the night Harry blackened his eyes; seen her standing in the crowd waiting for the theatre doors to open, seen her on the street, and once when he was later than usual going to the pit he had seen her on her way to her work in the brickyard. Once or twice, he thought, she had been on the point of speaking. So had he, but he wouldn’t admit it even to himself.

  ‘If she won’t bend, then neither will I,’ he used to mutter.

  He was working harder than ever, not only in order to try and forget about her, but in order to keep his end up and hold his own with other chaps in one of the stiffest places he had struck during the years he had worked in the mines. He and Dai, do what they would, weren’t earning their salt in the place, and their pride and pocket were suffering. ‘It’s like the hobs of hell,’ Dai remarked to old Joby the roadman one day when the latter came into their roadway to eat his bit of snap in company with the brothers.

  Joby, now a roadman, had hewed coal before the brothers were born, and long before that: had hewed many a ton of the first cargo of Welsh coal to leave Cardiff, coal that had been sold at the pithead at four shillings a ton, and which he had had to hew for eightpence-ha’penny a ton. Now, nearing eighty, he crept about the Gethin Pit doing pretty much as he liked for the low wage he was paid to do what road-repairing he could.

  ‘Yes, I expect it is, Dai bach,’ he said in reply to Dai’s description of the coal in that particular working-place, ‘yet there’s many as burns our coal that thinks we shovel it in like they have it shovelled into their coalhouses. Little they know about it, Dai bach.’

  ‘If they only had to…’

  ‘But they haven’t, so what’s the use bothering? Now, I worked coal like you’ve got in front of you on the pillar system sixty years ago, and I can tell you two boys how to make this place go. I admit that you’ve got a stiff place, and that you’re doing your best, but for all that you can’t get the place to go. It sticks like glue to the roof, and worse to the bottom, and as you said, Dai, it’s like the hobs of hell. Well, what are you to do? You go on beating at it for hours and all you’ve got is a capful, it’s breaking your hearts and you’re thinking of chucking the damned place up. And still it might be made to go. Now, here are the two of you hammering side by side on the day shift, from morning till night you’re slogging away, and on towards the end of the shift – when it’s time to put the tools away and go home – you find that it’s beginning to move a bit better. Isn’t that so?’

  ‘Ay, so it do, Joby,’ the brothers said together.

  ‘Don’t I know it; and when you come back to it next morning it’s…’

  ‘Like the hobs of hell again,’ said Dai.

  ‘Ay, and I know that too, hasn’t it had twelve hours to settle down, to get stoon again. Of course it has; you’ve got to keep the damned thing goin’ once you’ve got it goin’, keep at it round the clock. One of you worry it through the day, and the other through the night, that’s the only way you’ll get this place to go, boys.’

  ‘Might be worth trying,’ said Glyn.

  ‘Don’t I know it is,’ said old Joby.

  ‘But there’s Sunday,’ Dai reminded him. ‘Suppose we do keep it going all the week bar Sunday, won’t it stiffen up again over Sunday?’

  ‘No, the devil jumps out of it on Sundays,’ said the old man cryptically. ‘Keep its arse warm every day and night ’cept Sunday and you’ll get this place to go. I remember when…’

  ‘Hoy, Joby,’ called a haulier from the parting about twenty yards away.

  ‘What do you want again?’

  ‘There’s a rail out of place on the heading; better come and fix it before it throws me off the road all-fours.’

  ‘Some of these hauliers want carrying about,’ grumbled the old
man as he went out to fix the rail.

  After he had gone the brothers considered his suggestion.

  ‘What if we try it?’ said Glyn.

  ‘I’m game,’ said Dai. ‘Which of us works tonight?’

  Glyn put the palm of his right hand to his mouth, then held it out palm downwards. ‘Wet or dry?’ he asked.

  ‘Wet,’ said Dai, and wet it was.

  ‘So it’s me for the doubler,’ said Glyn. ‘You’d better leave me what food and drink you’ve got left.’

  So Glyn hammered away through the twenty-four-hour stretch; and wasn’t he glad to be relieved by Dai at six o’clock the following morning.

  ‘How’s it been going, Glyn?’ shouted Dai as he entered the working-place.

  ‘I think old Joby’s right; it’s pouncing a bit already.’

  ‘Good; off you go to get some sleep. ’Spect you can do with it.’

  Glyn had to admit that he felt whacked as he walked back to the pit bottom, then there was the long walk home from the pithead. It was nearly eight o’clock when he reached the outskirts of the town, and he was much too tired to be interested in the fact that there were more people than usual about, and that they appeared excited over something or other. He turned into the Express and said: ‘Give us a pint, Griffiths, for God’s sake.’

  The landlord filled him a pint and made a mark with the chalk behind the door, for Glyn had no money on him, but his name was good.

  ‘And another,’ he said. ‘I hardly tasted that one.’

  ‘I expect you’ve heard about the explosion?’ said the landlord as he filled the empty pint.

  ‘What explosion?’

  ‘Down the Rhondda Valley, in the Naval colliery. They reckon there’s hundreds killed, though it’ll be a day or two before we know how many for certain.’ He moved to the end of the bar to serve others.

  Glyn lit his pipe and began to notice who was present in the bar, feeling but little shocked by what he had heard. Neither did any of the others in the bar seem to be shocked in the least, the news seemed to be taken as something sensational rather than shocking, for all present were familiar with the varieties of fatalities which were a daily occurrence in the pits.

  ‘Still, it’s high time something was done to prevent these explosions,’ Ned Luke was saying. ‘This is the second we’ve had around here in less than six months.’

  ‘Man alive, it’s more than six months since the Risca explosion,’ said Ike Hughes.

  ‘I know damned well it’s not more than six months.’

  ‘But I know damned well it is, see.’

  ‘You do, do you? Then I’ll bet you a quart it isn’t.’

  ‘Right, I’ll bet you a quart it is. Why, it happened on the very day my sister’s boy…’

  ‘Never mind your sister’s boy, Ike,’ said the landlord, taking a memorial card from between two whisky bottles. ‘This’ll settle it. “Risca Explosion, July 18th.” So fork out, Ike.’

  ‘Ay, fill him a quart,’ said Ike, tossing fourpence on to the bar.

  ‘It isn’t often I make a mistake,’ chortled Ned Luke. ‘And as for this explosion… why, me and five other chaps went down to have a look at the pit the following Sunday in old Jim Hone’s brake. What a spree we had, for the pubs were open on Sunday over in Risca…’

  ‘And here at that time,’ said Ike Hughes.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I’ll bet you a quart they was.’

  Ned considered for a few seconds: ‘I think you’re right, Ike. Anyway, we went over, six of us, and old Jim Hone got too drunk to drive us home, so I had to drive the old horse. Took us about twelve hours to get back, so none of us were in work on the Monday, so we…’

  Glyn felt a powerful desire for sleep, so he shook himself and hurried out of the pub and home to get himself washed and into bed.

  Not until after he had sunk so low as to go down to the notorious Iron Bridge district, where he was saved from making a beast of himself by old Davies, MA, did Glyn bend to speak to Saran again, though he had seen her many times since the night Harry had given him two lovely black eyes. But he often thought about her; he was thinking about her on this Saturday night in the Eagle singing room when Shenk, who had only that minute finished singing ‘When Other Lips’, suddenly said in a whisper: ‘I bet you’re not game, Glyn.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘To go down to the Iron Bridge and get ourselves a Moll apiece.’

  Of course, he would put it that way, Glyn thought. ‘Not game’; always putting the onus on him. Yet why not? Life had been nothing but bed to work, work to bed for nearly two years, with nothing more than a drop of drink now and then to cheer a chap up. ‘I’m game,’ he said.

  And off they went to look for a Moll apiece, a thing Glyn had never done before, partly because he was afraid to go into such a rough district by night, and partly because when on the way to work on summer mornings he had met many of the Iron Bridge Molls coming away from the coke ovens where they had spent the night with ‘easy marks’ or with their bullies; and seeing them coming from the coke ovens Glyn didn’t feel he could ever have anything to do with them. A man could have any of them for a drink and the price of her night’s kip. But the district was most dangerous for anyone with money in his pocket. It was the common lodging house district on the banks of the River Taff, and near the terminus of the Glamorgan Canal, over which a considerable amount of the production of the district was still being carried by barge to the port of Cardiff, twenty-four miles away. The Iron Bridge district was the rendezvous for hawkers, travelling tinkers, subbing navvies, prostitutes and those who patronised them; it was also the hiding place of an occasional man of parts such as Davies, MA. When the lodging houses were full the overflow went to sleep at the nearby coke ovens, so did the penniless ones rest their weary and lousy heads there, and many a one who went to sleep there never woke, for they were overcome by the fumes from the ovens and passed away peacefully in their sleep.

  And this was the place where Glyn went on a Saturday night, when it was particularly dangerous for an outsider to be around there. There was only one policeman who dared walk that district alone at night, and, funnily enough, his name was Lamb, Jack Lamb. Yet toughs who boasted that it took at least a dozen bobbies to take them to the lock-up went quietly with PC Lamb, for he was long, tough and bony, and of a most tigerish nature. He was standing on the Square this Saturday night as Glyn and Shenk turned into the Patriot to pick up a Moll apiece.

  As soon as they went in, Glyn was annoyed when he heard his name called by Twm Steppwr, who was sitting with old Davies, MA, in a corner by themselves.

  ‘Why, Glyn; what can you say you’re doing down this part of the world? Surely you’re not…’

  ‘Out for a bit of a stroll, that’s all. How is it, Mr Davies?’

  Davies, who had aged considerably since Glyn had last seen him, peered up at Glyn. ‘Well, young man, I’m alive. How do you come to know my name? Have we…?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve heard you recite many times. On the bank in front of the Lord Nelson; down near… will you have a drink with me?’ invited Glyn, at the same time watching Shenk out of the corner of his eye establishing contact with a couple of Molls who were standing with glasses of spirits in their hands near the door leading out to the passage.

  ‘I don’t mind a drop of whisky, young man,’ said Davies.

  Glyn ordered the whisky, and some beer for himself. ‘And being as you’re here you may as well have a drink,’ he said grudgingly to Steppwr.

  ‘No time,’ said Steppwr, rising. ‘I promised to meet Harry at the Owen Glyndwr – thanks all the same. S’long. S’long, Davies, see you at our hotel when I return later on.’ And off he went.

  ‘It isn’t often he refuses a drink,’ said Glyn, taking Steppwr’s seat.

  ‘Indeed, I’ve never, unfortunately, been in a position to find that out for myself,’ said Davies. ‘Do you come to this place often?’

  ‘Pass here on my way to
the pit, but I’ve never been down here before to – er, to…’

  ‘Quite. Yet, glad though I am of the whisky, I’m sorry you did not pass on tonight. Is that your friend?’ nodding his head in Shenk’s direction.

  ‘Ah, that’s him that I came here with.’

  ‘Really. Well, he appears to be fixing things…. You’ll pardon me asking, I hope; have you ever been with women of that sort before?’

  ‘Never been with a woman in my life,’ Glyn confessed.

  ‘You surprise me. How old are you?’

  ‘I shall be twenty-five next August.’

  ‘And never known a woman. Most remarkable.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know; don’t feel much like women after slogging away in the coalface for twelve hours a day, it’s nourishment a man wants after that. A couple of pints, and a square meal afterwards…’

  ‘But why are you down here tonight?’

  ‘Well, Shenk said I wasn’t game, so…’

  ‘I understand. Young man, I’m going to offer something which you may or may not appreciate. Be advised by me and clear out of this place before that damned fool there links you up with one of those poor trollops he’s speaking to. You’ll get little satisfaction out of them. If you must get a woman, then get married. Haven’t you fancied a girl who…?’

  ‘Yes, for years, but she’s got two brothers that…’

  ‘Never mind her brothers. Marry her and stick to her. I’ve been hanging about this quarter some time now, and I’ve seen respectable married men, as they are called, come here and take those poor trollops up to the coke ovens or down along the canal bank as far as the arches. They seek a change, even as I did once…’