Black Parade

by Jack Jones

  ‘I did,’ lied Saran, succeeding in bringing the collar and stud together.

  ‘Then you had no business to; ten chances to one he’ll be wanting to fight us all before…’

  ‘Hadn’t you better go before they have to send up for you?’

  He snatched the bowler hat she was holding out to him and rushed away to the chapel; as soon as he had gone Saran got herself and the babies ready to go up to where Glyn had lived up to the time he had married her, for this was where the wedding feast was laid out. And, in fairness to old Thomas Thomas, it must be admitted that the feast which he provided on the day his daughter was married was something like a feast. Plenty of everything for everyone present. There was – let’s see, now. First there were two nine-gallon casks of Harrap’s XXX and two pint-and-half bottles of rum for the men; and there was a bottle of whisky and a bottle of gin for those of the women who liked their drop of drink, and lashings of tea for those who didn’t, and as much food as you could want, and good food at that.

  Old Marged, who was in charge at the feast, for the bride had lost her mother years previous, warmly welcomed Saran, but the welcome she extended to Harry when he hurried in shortly after his sister, was icy, though that didn’t worry him in the least. As soon as he arrived he at once took charge of what he called ‘the drinkables’, and he had one of the casks running freely before the bride and bridegroom got back to the house from the chapel; and he had pocketed one of the bottles of rum, but Thomas Thomas, who had paid for it and who was not blind, made him put it back on the table to be consumed by everyone. After all had eaten well – some too well – and oiled their throats, Steppwr was called upon to liven things up when they began to drag, as they usually do after people have stuffed themselves. Steppwr livened them up, and kept them very much alive until all the drink had been lapped up. Then Harry, after he had up-ended the cask to get the last drop out of it, sighed and said: ‘Well, it’s no use us staying here any longer, is it?’ All the men present agreed that it certainly was not. ‘Then what if we go as a body across to the Lord Nelson?’ said Harry, who hadn’t the price of a pint to his name. But there were others who had, and Harry knew it. So across to the Lord Nelson all the men went as a most friendly body to finish up the day properly, and again old Thomas Thomas had to pay for most of what the male members of the wedding party drank whilst standing in line breasting the bar. Then Harry went over to play Dai Genteel dominoes on the table in the corner, and when Dai Genteel had beaten him for a quart which Harry had no money to pay for it looked as though a row was brewing, but Thomas Thomas, determined that there should be no display of bad feeling on this day and night at least, stepped in between Harry and Dai Genteel as they were squaring up to each other and said: ‘Now, now, what are you having, the pair of you?’ and so restored peace, which was maintained up to chucking-out time. The women, the bride included, who had been left to do what they liked with the evening, all went to the theatre to cry through East Lynne, and as the theatre closed before the Lord Nelson did, they were all back in their homes in time to get everything ready for the homecoming of their lords and masters.

  Up to the time the hauliers struck work throughout the district Saran had had, all things considered, a fairly comfortable seven years of married life. Then things began to happen which made life difficult. The hauliers, always the storm section of the South Wales army of miners, brought the coalfield to a standstill by striking again. Thousands of coal-hewers were idle in consequence, for hewers cannot go on hewing coal unless there are hauliers to drive the horses which take the trams filled with coal away from the hewers’ working-places.

  And so Saran’s Glyn was idle and cantankerous, and soon there wasn’t a penny to get anything with. Glyn was away from the house most of the time except mealtimes and bedtime, and Saran was left alone with her babies and her thoughts. She would sit giving the baby the breast and time after time ask herself what was the use of strikes which put her and her like in the fix they were. Still, she thought, it wasn’t fair to expect hauliers to go on driving horses, whose greasy heels stank enough to knock a man down, through the dark, the sludge and the water, for twelve hours a day, and for a wage of about a pound a week at most. No, Saran readily admitted to herself, the hauliers were not altogether to blame. If only the bosses… but there, it was none of her business, as Glyn sharply reminded her when she had pressed to know the reason why it was that he would not want calling to go to the pit in the morning following the night the hauliers decided to strike at their meeting in the skittle alley of the Morlais Castle. ‘Nothing to do with you women,’ Glyn had told her. Wasn’t it, indeed, she often thought. If she had nothing for him when he came home ravenous after a long walk into the country with the other chaps he might think differently.

  And she had been hoping soon to move to a bigger house, with the key-money of which she had up to the time the hauliers struck been saving sixpence a week, and which she had been forced to spend the first weekend that Glyn had no wages to draw. Now, when he started work again, she would have to start saving key-money again. Not that she herself had anything against the little house in which she had spent her married life up to then, and where she had lived with her parents and brothers before her marriage. But now that she had a houseful of children, for she realised by now that six children were more than enough in such a house, she must start saving as soon as possible….

  No back, that was the worst thing about the house, the back wall of which was serving as the foundation wall for the house above, one of ‘the Top Houses’, as the row of cottages built on the bottom row in which she lived was called. Then – pouf, smelling as strong as ever, she thought – running by her doorstep, was the stinking Morlais Brook, the near left bank of which was surfaced with human and animal excrement for about a foot above the original bank. Ashes and other refuse had for years been emptied over the bowel refuse and had hardened it into layers of dung cakes which were by now capable of bearing the weight of all who hurried to the left bank to ease themselves when the three earth closets which the twelve families living in the twelve houses in the ‘Bottom Row’ shared, were found to be engaged, as they usually were from morning to night. Men would sit in them at their leisure, and with the doors open, smoking, and continuing the conversation with those in the house, which the call of nature had interrupted. So Saran and her little ones often, and sometimes in broad daylight, had to go and ‘do their business’ on the left bank owing to the closets being unavailable when nature called. And Saran often, in the night especially, had to accompany her children, who feared the rats, to the left bank.

  Oh, the rats, as big as they were brazen. In broad daylight, hundreds of ’em, playing about and sometimes feeding off the high – very – and dry bodies of the drowned cats and dogs which during dry seasons stood high out of the little water dribbling along towards the River Taff and the sea. Why, if it hadn’t been for the chaps who liked a bit of ratting on a Sunday those rats would have done goodness only knows what. The left bank, the bank nearest and within a dozen feet of the doorsteps of the houses, was the rats’ playground; there was no right bank they could play on, for on the right rose the high wall of the back yards of the houses, pubs and shops of the main street, and in this wall the rats had their sleeping apartments. There was no need for them to work through the wall and up to the backs of the houses in the main street, because why trouble to do so when the tradespeople in the main street threw over their back wall into the brook every mortal thing a rat could possibly want. Butchers and fishmongers, once anything began to niff a bit, would fling it over the back wall into the brook. Splosh, and out the rats would rush to investigate. A long drop it was, and the children of the Bottom Row delighted to watch things fall – splosh – into the brook; and they also used to stand and wonder at the way the chemicals from the works changed the colour of the water of the brook. One day the rats after they had swam from their sleeping apartments in the right wall to the playing grounds on the left
bank, would come out of the water brick red, and maybe the next day a shiny green – all the colours of the rainbow in turn.

  And there were other drawbacks such as periodical fever and smallpox epidemics. But living there, Saran thought, had its compensations; for less than a hundred yards from her doorstep there was a good stretch of the main street open to view, to her an unending source of interest and entertainment. There was something worth seeing to be seen there all the time from morn to midnight, and she could see it all from her doorstep. People and traffic – she always watched for the passing of the new Merthyr-Dowlais bus which was drawn by four of the finest horses she had ever seen. And she laughed as men were seen falling off their high penny-farthing bicycles. As good as a play, she thought it was, as she rested from her work to watch the stretch of main street over the head of one or other of the babies which was drawing life from her bounteous breast.

  By this time she could tell by listening alone what was going on there. It started about five each morning, when the ‘early birds’ of the thousands of miners and steelworkers and brickyard girls commenced the overture to toil which is played by heavy boots on metal roads. It began quietly, and Saran would note the way it worked up until it sounded like an army corps hurriedly retreating, and then die down and away when at seven o’clock a mocking chorus of hooters would hoot their ‘Too-oo-ooo-oooo late now’ into the ears of those who had been too fond of their beds to get up in time to get to the pit before it started winding coal or to the works before the gates were closed, or had stayed too long in the pub into which they had turned for a livener. ‘Too-oo-ooo-oooo late now.’

  Then peace until eight o’clock, at which hour the chorus of hooters that had hurried men to work was repeated to hurry the growing army of children through breakfast and away to school. And if there was anything Saran hated, then it was the eight o’clock hooter. She didn’t mind it at five or any time up to seven, for those early hootings had to do with sending men to work. But to have to get up at eight again, just when she was enjoying the carefree sleep which came with the consciousness that she had not overslept, and that her man was at the pit, just to send children to school – she’d had no schooling, and was none the worse for that, she insisted savagely in reply to the hooters. It was true she could neither read nor write, but what time did the likes of her have for reading and writing, anyway. She could work, had a good pair of hands, could put a bit of food when it was there to put, could knit and sew, and was well able to see to it that none of the other women living in the Row, bouncers though some of them were, should in any way ‘put upon’ her or her children. And though she couldn’t read she was able to follow the plays put on in the ‘threeatre’ as well as them that could. School, why, if she had her way…

  But the man she called ‘that blasted Bobby Greencoat’ saw to it that she did not have her way. He saw to it that she and the other women in the Row sent their children to school, and because of that was regarded, and even told to his face that he was nothing short of a ‘damned nuisance’. Morning, noon and night he was around telling them that they had to send their children to school, and, said Marged Jones, ‘unless we do, he says we’ll be summoned and God knows what all. And him an old Englishman who makes us get up in the morning to send the children to school where they don’t hear a word of Welsh, and where the teachers beat them for the least thing. Didn’t Mary Jane Hughes go… I don’t know. I’m up half the night drying Jim’s clothes and watching the time; and no sooner than I’ve got him off to work and am in bed to rest my bones in peace, I’m up again to send the children to school.’

  So they grumbled when meeting each other at the one water tap that served the Row, and many of them wondered at Saran sending her two eldest of six to St David’s School, which they said was ‘an old Church school’, but Saran said, ‘Let ’em go to the nearest place.’ Nothing but schools, she thought. The British School, and then that Higher Grade school where people who intended making preachers or lawyers out of their children sent them – but not her boys. As soon as they were twelve she’d have them out of the old school and down the pit with their father, have them where they would do something to help to keep the others. And she would look forward to the day when her boys would be earning good money in the pit.

  Meantime, there were the sights to be seen out on the main road. Like watching the myriorama in the Temperance Hall, she used to think, as she sat and looked, sometimes forgetful of the fact that the baby in her arms had ceased to draw at her breast, and that it was exposed to view outside her bodice. Traffic, and people passing on their way to do their shopping, on their way to get a drink, on their way to buy, sell, beg, borrow, steal, on their way… well, to do all the things that human beings have done and will go on doing to the end of time.

  And occasionally an evening on the threepenny benches at the back of the wooden theatre where John Lawson and his company were by this time playing. Four of her six children with her, the two eldest waiting their dad home from the pub. ‘If he’s home before I’m back, here’s his supper in the oven.’

  Even on Sundays there was plenty to see. The large-scale rat-hunts along the left bank. Men with sticks who arrived with terriers at their heels and ferrets in their pockets. Rats were slaughtered by the score. Great sport, and the chaps enjoyed it until the ‘saved’ came marching by on their way to or from chapel, and then the sporting and damned lowered their voices, and many of them slunk away with their terriers at their heels and the ferrets in their pockets. For the procession of the black-garbed Roundheads of that industrial community was an awe-inspiring sight to all but the most hardened, such as Saran’s brother, Harry. But to most others the sight of the nonconformist legions on the march to where they were to meet their God was a sight which inspired awe even where it failed to compel respect. Saran always went in from the doorstep to watch the chapel parade through the window. Once – but only once – shortly after the birth of her first baby, she had brazenly sat out on the doorstep giving the baby the breast as the ‘saved’ passed on their way to chapel, and the eyes of those who looked as they passed seemed to burn Saran’s breast.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE PATAGONIAN PANTHER

  Saran, as time went on, wondered what had become of her brothers, for she had not heard anything about Shoni from the day he had cleared out after robbing Harry of the three golden sovereigns he had got for licking Flannery. Neither had she seen or heard anything of Harry from his sudden appearance on the day he had come up from the Rhondda with Steppwr to eat and drink at the marriage feast. The following day, without even calling to say goodbye or anything else to Saran, he had disappeared from the town, taking Steppwr with him. Saran was trying to think how long ago that was, when who should walk in just after the children had arrived home from school to their dinners, but Harry and Steppwr. It was the very day the navvies started breaking up the road along the main street, and Saran’s eldest boy was saying as she was putting the dinners: ‘Hundreds of men, our mam. Making room for the tramlines for buses without horses in ’em to run from here up to Dowlais and back…’

  ‘And to Cefn and back,’ cried another. Then all the children were frightened when someone roared: ‘Hullo, Saran.’

  It was Harry, and with him was Steppwr, both looking well but not prosperous.

  ‘Hullo, what’s brought you back home?’ said Saran coolly. ‘Get up so as your uncle can sit there, boy. Sit down, Harry… sit over there in the armchair, Steppwr. So the Rhondda’s got too hot for you, Harry?’

  Harry was looking around at the children incredulously. ‘Good God, whose are all these?’

  ‘Whose do you think they are? They’re mine, of course.’

  ‘Seven – and another on the way,’ he added after a glance at his sister’s pregnant figure. ‘You have been busy. The Rhondda too hot for me, was that what you said? Not it; but there hasn’t been much doing for me and Steppwr down that way lately, so we thought we’d run up here for a spell, and before I’
d been here an hour I’m on a job.’

  ‘What, with the navvies laying the tramlines?’

  ‘Navvies be damned. No, the job I’ve got is in Billy Samuels’ booth tonight; a pound for doing six rounds with a big black feller; I’ve got orders to let him hop about a bit before I give him a fetcher under the ear and put him to sleep. It’ll be easy…’

  ‘Say you don’t know,’ Steppwr said.

  ‘Steppwr, I’ve beaten the best they could find to put before me in the Rhondda, so do you think a bloody nigger…’

  ‘Ay, but this is with them gloves on, remember.’

  ‘I know, but it would be all the same if it was with pillows on, Mr Sambo’ll go down just the same.’

  ‘Never mind Mr Sambo,’ said Saran. ‘Draw up to the table, the pair of you, and have a bit – such as it is.’

  ‘Not before I have a drink,’ said Harry, rising. ‘I came straight across to see you before I’d had a drop. I tell you what you can do, though. Let’s have that small loaf and some of that cheese to take with us to where we can have a drop of drink to wash it down. And if you could lend us a shilling until I draw that pound tonight…’

  ‘Save your breath, Harry, for I’ve no shillings to lend you, but you’re welcome to the bread and cheese.’

  ‘Let’s have it then,’ he growled. And off to the pub he and Steppwr went.

  ‘I seen the notice outside the booth, mam,’ Saran’s eldest bubbled, ‘but I didn’t think it was our uncle Harry. For ten pound a side, it said.’

  ‘Eat your food.’

  She knew that there was no ten pound a side at stake, for having lived with Harry she knew the way proprietors of boxing booths aroused interest as a preliminary to drawing the crowd. She believed as firmly as Harry did that the nigger was an easy mark for him, for Harry was the unbeaten champion at his weight, and stones over his weight, of the five mining valleys.