Black Parade

by Jack Jones

  Someone had shouted ‘Vote, vote’, and the vote was taken. Fight on, and they fought on day after day, week after week, Saran begging her way through, though daily having to go farther for less, for there was a limit to charity, it seemed. One Sunday evening she went to chapel, taking with her the four youngest, for the four eldest had nothing in which to go out on a Sunday. And she heard the preacher say: ‘This dreadful struggle has now been going on for four months, and the suffering, particularly of the women and children, is increasing as the days go by. And still, as far as we are able to see, no signs of an early settlement. Today, throughout South Wales, nonconformists are everywhere praying for the coming of the Spirit of Peace, praying that He will be able at last to influence the contending forces in this costly and terrible industrial struggle. And may the settlement, when it is arrived at, be a lasting one, that is what we hope and pray for. As announced last Sunday, today’s collections are for the fund out of which the soup kitchens, which have been the means of lessening the suffering of the many necessitous children of this area, are maintained. So please…’

  Saran’s baby started crying, so she had to take him out.

  CHAPTER 9

  RECONSTRUCTION

  Twenty-five wageless weeks is a lot to make up for, as Saran was to find out during the two years following the six months’ mining stoppage of ’98. But with the help of two more of her boys in the pit, making three in all, she managed it, and also managed to move house again, and this time to one of the new houses in which there was a bath, which the old-fashioned Glyn referred to as ‘the swimming-bath’, and which he for long refused to avail himself of, preferring to cleanse himself of pit dirt in the tub as he had from his boyhood days. But his boys were delighted with the bath.

  And there was also a water closet, the first that Saran had in her life been privileged to have the say and use of, at the back of the house. And the new conveniences, three bedrooms, front room, kitchen and back kitchen, transformed Saran from an illiterate, rough-tongued woman into a quiet-spoken and remarkably self-possessed – almost ladylike person. True, she was still unable to read, but she no longer went out of the house and to town to do her shopping dressed in a flannel skirt and a shawl covering her upper part. No, as soon as she moved into the house with a bath she was a hat-and-coat woman, and a tailor-made coat at that. She had five beds in the three bedrooms, two, two and one; the room with one bed in was her room. The three boys working in the pit had a new Rover cycle apiece, latest model, paid for ‘money down’ by Saran, who hated the instalment way of getting things. Her children attending school were dressed as well as they were fed, for now, as she was fond of saying, ‘I’m able to see to their backs as well as their bellies.’ ‘And well she can, with her man and three boys working regular and earning good money,’ envious neighbours sometimes said.

  Yes, she was getting on, as the town was. Such changes, she was thinking as Benny, who worked with his father as butty, hurried in from work, late as usual, with a discontented expression on his face.

  ‘Look here,’ he shouted as he tossed his drinking-jack and food-box on to the kitchen table, ‘if the old man thinks he can work me from six in the morning until after seven every night, then he’s mistaken. Let our Sam or Hugh go and work with him for a change, and see how they’ll like it. They’re washed and out every night before I get home, but if I want to get out early to go anywhere I’m…’

  ‘I’ll talk to him about it again. You see, he’s used to working…’

  ‘I don’t care what he’s been used to, he’s not going to make a blasted slave of me; I’ll go to the war first.’

  ‘Don’t talk so soft, boy. Remember, your uncle Ike, my brother, was killed out there in Zululand.’

  ‘Might as well get killed there as be worked to death…. Clean towels in the bathroom?’

  ‘Yes; and your clean shirt’s behind the bathroom door. Where did you leave your father?’

  ‘Where did he leave me, you mean. At the door of the Express, same as usual. And that’s where I expect he’ll stay gutsing beer until chucking-out time. Beer and work, that’s all he thinks about.’

  With that he went upstairs to the bathroom, and Saran told Jane to shine his shoes ready by the time he came down. Fancy him talking about going to the war, she thought, as she prepared a meal for him. And him not eighteen until November. Still, he was nearly as good a man as ever he’d be, one of the new men, one of the scores of thousands in the district who had had their seven years of schooling up to the age of twelve before starting in the pits or steelworks, and who were now almost, if not quite, as good workmen as their fathers. But they thought differently, and talked differently, in the English tongue. And they read books and papers – couldn’t live without the Merthyr Express and the Echo – and shouting themselves hoarse and in English at the football matches on Saturday afternoons, and running about the country on their bikes on Sundays and summer evenings. Not so keen as they might be about going to chapel, yet that was balanced by the fact that they seldom were to be found in a pub. Glyn had smoked his pipe and drunk his beer long before he was as old as Benny.

  And the town… electric trams travelling like lightning, all these bikes, and those new motor things. New houses, shops, huge new public offices with a clock tower, all being rushed up, and people flocking into the district from everywhere. Then the new Theatre Royal and Opera House, as big – well, the biggest she had ever been in.

  Benny hurried down and sat in his underwear at the table to eat, but he hadn’t been eating long before he pushed the plate away, saying: ‘My suit, mam.’

  ‘Finish your supper, boy,’ said Saran.

  ‘No time. This suit’s beginning to go, too, mam. When am I getting another so as I can take to wearing my best in the evenings?’

  ‘When I can afford to get you one.’

  ‘Afford it… when did I have a suit last?’

  ‘I thought you was in a hurry to get to the threeatre?’

  ‘So I am, and I’m in a hurry for a suit as well.’

  That was another thing, she thought after he had rushed out to get to the theatre in time to see the last two acts of the play he had so badly wanted to see, the play of Shakespeare’s which Saran thought least of. Macbeth was not in her opinion a good play. The suit he said he wanted. May as well get it him first as last, for Benny would give her no rest until she did. Particular about clothes, he was, as all the young chaps were getting. Glyn had never been so particular about his clothes as Benny was, but there, anything would do to wear sitting in a pub. Glyn stuck it in the pub most nights until chucking-out time in his pit clothes, a thing she could never see the fastidious Benny doing.

  ‘Come on, Jane, give these children what they want to eat so as we can get them upstairs to bed before your father rolls in. Come on, all of you.’

  In the Express Glyn was getting well on when the conversation worked round to politics. Reynolds the baker’s son was also getting well on, and it was he switched the conversation from the way the trams were making people too lazy to walk to politics.

  ‘Yes, it’s come to something at last,’ he shouted so that all in the bar should hear him. ‘And who is this feller, this socialist? I think it’s an insult to ask us to as much as listen to a socialist, and a Scotch one at that…’

  ‘A Johnny-fortnight, is he?’ asked someone.

  ‘I don’t know what he was when he was working, if he ever did work,’ replied Reynolds. ‘But what I do know is that it’s come to something when we as Welsh people are asked to send a Scotchman, and a socialist at that, to represent us up in St Stephen’s.’

  ‘An atheist, isn’t he?’ said the landlord as he drew more beer.

  ‘Of course he is, and the funny thing about it is that a bunch of young chaps as are members of Tabernacle are mainly responsible for getting him down here. And members of Tabernacle, of all places, to bring a man of that sort… when I first heard that it was they who were getting him down here, why,
you could have knocked me down with a feather. I said to the wife… fill me a pint, please, Mr Harris. I said to the wife…’

  ‘It’s bound to lead to trouble, such as strikes,’ said the landlord as he placed the pint of beer asked for before Reynolds, who drank most of it before going on to say: ‘Of course it’ll mean strikes, ay, and revolution. For that’s what the feller is, a revolutionist, one of them as is against everything. Now most of you know what I am. I’ve been a conservative all my life, and there’s not a man in this town as worked harder for Pritchard Morgan than I did. Most of you are liberals – all but Mr Harris and myself. We’ve fought, but we fought clean, and we’re none the worse friends. But when it comes to these people sending up to Scotland for a red-hot revolutionary and an atheist to come down here to ruin our town, then I think we should unite to fight these socialists…. What the hell’s up in the taproom?’

  Several of those in the bar rushed out into the passage to see what was up in the taproom on the other side of the passage from the bar, to find when they got there that Billy Walters, who used to drive the Merthyr-Dowlais bus which had been driven off the road by the trams, was having a fight with a navvy chap whom no one knew. They fought their way out of the taproom and into the passage, where the landlord and a couple of willing hands got hold of the pair of them and rushed them out through the back way into the Castle Lane, where they left them to fight it out.

  Glyn left and went home after that, for a fight always upset him; but it was time he went home, anyway, for he had had enough, more than enough, in fact.

  Whenever Saran heard people talking about the war, or saw beefy, long-moustached soldiers wearing slouch hats swaggering along the main street when she was out shopping, and also during the mainly drunken celebrations for which the news of the relief of one place or another was the excuse, she hugged the thought that ‘none of mine are old enough to go to the old war, anyway’. Not that she had anything against ‘the old war’ that she could think of, or speak about in the way her live-wire countryman, Lloyd George, was engaged in doing at the risk of his life and limb, as some said. She heard in the home the boys saying something about Lloyd George having to run for his life from places, and about him having to dodge away in disguise in bobby’s clothes. Well, let him. As long as my boys, now that they’re beginning to earn good money and help the way they are….

  But she spoke too soon, after all, for one of her boys went to the ‘old war’ at the tail end, and she blamed the man who recited on the stage of the theatre for his going. She was there herself that night and heard the man; in the gallery, as usual, she was, but Benny was with some of his pals in the stalls, for he was earning as much as his dad by this time, and as he got a half-sovereign a week pocket money he could swank in the stalls, where a seat cost two shillings, as well as the shop assistants who filled the stalls on Thursday evenings could. The house was packed that night, for it was the end of the week during which somewhere or other in Africa had been relieved, and one of the members of the company playing the theatre that week was reciting each night Kipling’s ‘Absent-Minded Beggar’ in honour of the event.

  It was a brilliant as well as a full house that night when Saran went to see the play and hear the man recite during one of the intervals. From her place in the front row of the gallery, with four of her youngest, two on either side, with her, Saran looked down on the ‘big people’ of the district in the circle plush seats immediately below, and the few front rows of the stalls nearest the stage. The circle was filled with the professional men of the district and their families, which in some cases included a khaki-clad son who was serving his Queen and country with the Yeomanry, and all in the circle applauded when Dr Wade and his brave son who had been wounded so badly when trying to save the flag were being shown to their places in the front row of the circle. Saran had seen the wounded soldier son in his place in the circle many a score of times before he went to the war with the Yeomanry, he never missed a night during the pantomime season, and there were some who said… but they’re all applauding him now, anyway. Then there was the handsome son of the widow of the man who had kept a pack of hounds until the sinking of pits and the driving of coal-levels into the sides of the mountains made hunting impossible. Well, his son, who had been left all that money, had gone to the old war and was wounded and had been sent home, and here he was, leaning heavily on a stick as he followed his proud widow mother into their reserved seats in the circle. He, too, Saran remembered as she looked down on him and the others who were making way for him and his mother to get to their places, had been a most regular attendant during the pantomime seasons before the war. And there were others present in the circle that night whom Saran had from her point of vantage been able to keep under observation as they moved often from their places to the circle bar, and back to their places again to feast their eyes on the lovely ones who in tights and little more from the stage below…

  Yes, Saran knew most of them by sight, and she had heard… but that was all over now. Duke’s son, cook’s son, son of a hundred kings. What applause. Patriotic songs followed the rendering of Kipling’s poem. Then an appeal to the audience to contribute generously to the comforts fund. Showers of money from all parts of the house on to the stage, the pennies of the galleryites flying through the air above the heads of the richer circle patrons. Pass the hat for your credit’s sake, and pay, pay, pay. All the members of the company busy gathering up the money off the stage. ‘On behalf of those who are at this moment serving Queen and country in our fight against the most treacherous, most…’ But it was little one could hear of what the man was saying as some of those present kept on finding from somewhere more silver coins to throw on to the stage, and the people standing up cheering as the coins landed. So it was much later than usual when the orchestra played ‘God Save Our Gracious Queen’, which was played twice through with all present singing as they stood to attention as best they could in the narrow space between the rows. Wonderful enthusiasm, yet Saran had forgotten most of what she had that night seen and heard in the theatre before she and the children were halfway up the hill road which she had to climb to get from where the theatre was situated on the right bank of the stinking brook to the house in which she now lived with her family.

  But the scene in the theatre evidently deeply impressed her eldest boy, Benny, for instead of going to the pit next morning, as he should have done, he went in his pit clothes down the street to the recruiting office, where he waited for the recruiting-sergeant, to whom he said lies about his age in order to get himself into the Army. Off he was packed in his pit clothes to the depot at Cardiff, from where he wrote to Saran. ‘So he’s gone,’ was all Saran could find to say after having had the letter read to her, first by Glyn, and then by the boy, Sam. ‘For fear your father might have made a mistake in reading,’ she said to Sam. It was the first letter that Saran could remember having from anyone or anywhere, but she had plenty after that, for Benny kept writing, first from Cardiff, and later from Raglan Barracks, Plymouth, from where he came to spend a few days’ leave at home before leaving for the war in Africa. And that was the last Saran saw of him for a long time, for after the war in Africa was over he went with a draft to join the 2nd Battalion of his regiment, which was stationed at some place on the north-west frontier of India, from where he sent his photo home to his mother, who had it framed and hung on the wall in the kitchen on the right of the Roll of Honour which included the name of her brother Ike, who had been killed by the Zulus in Zululand when she was a girl; and when she used to look at the Roll of Honour and her Benny’s photo she was glad that the Boers had not done that to her boy Benny which would have put his name in a Roll of Honour same as his uncle Ike’s was. ‘Well, well, we won’t know Benny when he comes home,’ she murmured as she stood back to view the photo of her boy after it was hung on the wall in its nice frame.

  ‘What the hell’s to stop us knowing him?’ said his father.

  Harry was knocked down and r
un over early one morning when on his way back into town from the coke ovens, where he had spent the night drinking and worse with Gypsy Nell, who people said was the biggest old whore down the Iron Bridge way. Judging by what Steppwr, who was one of the first to arrive on the scene after the accident, said to Saran, Harry must have still been under the influence of all the drink he had necked during the night when the engine ran over him in the morning; for Gypsy Nell told Steppwr when she came to the lodging house to fetch him that Harry had shouted from the top of the coke ovens’ tip: ‘Come on, Nell, I’ll race you down the tip,’ then ran headlong down, and he was near the bottom, along which the Cyfarthfa Company’s line ran, when the little shunting engine, running light to fetch a short train of coal from Gethin Pit to the steelworks, came round the corner at a fair speed, and before Harry could stop himself he was in front of the engine. By the time she got to the bottom of the tip the engine had pulled up, and the driver and his mate, who was shunter and fireman, being as it was only a little engine, were doing what they could for Harry.

  ‘No, it’s his leg that’s the worse,’ said the driver. ‘Here, help me to tie this around it before you run for the doctor.’

  ‘Let him go for the doctor,’ said Gypsy Nell, whipping off her shawl to make some sort of a pillow for the unconscious Harry’s head.