by Jack Jones
‘Bloody scamp,’ muttered Glyn.
‘Yes?’ said Saran, putting her coat on.
‘Wat Morris came out and said: “I don’t want to bother with you, Harry,” and he was going away when Uncle Harry called him dirty names. Then Wat Morris turned back to where Uncle Harry was standing against the wall, and told him that it was lucky for him that he only had one leg, and with that Uncle Harry up fist and hit him. Then they started fighting like anything, with the men all round ’em, and some men was telling Wat Morris to leave our uncle Harry alone; and Mrs Lewis of the Tanyard Inn gave a boy a penny to fetch a policeman. And soon our uncle Harry was down and his face was bleeding, and some of the men took that Wat Morris away. Then I went up close to see, and Uncle Steppwr was trying to do something with uncle Harry’s peg leg, but he couldn’t, for half of it was sticking on uncle Harry’s leg and half of it sticking up out of the ground, and Uncle Steppwr when he seen me told me…’
‘Here, mind you don’t bring that bloody scamp back here,’ shouted Glyn as Saran got the old crutch from where it had lain for years in the lumber cupboard under the stairs. But she was off like the wind, with the crutch at the trail, and young Mervyn running alongside her. She fixed Harry up with the crutch and in decent lodgings with a widow woman until she could get him fitted with another peg leg and in less than a month after she had bought him the new peg leg she managed to persuade one of the under-managers at the Dowlais steelworks to work Harry into the vacancy caused by the death of the old gatekeeper of the upper level crossing. She had less trouble persuading the manager to get Harry the job than she had to get Harry to take it. ‘Just the job for you Harry. Don’t be a fool now; take it.’ He did. All he had to do was sit in the shanty near the gates until the engines from the steelworks blew their whistles to let him know that they wanted to travel along where the line crossed the main road. Then he was expected to get up and stump out of the shanty to man the wheel which, when turned to the right, would send the two long gates right across the road and stop all traffic until the engine and whatever it had behind it were safely by. Then he would turn the wheel to the left so that traffic along the road could continue flowing… then he could go back to the shanty to sit down and smoke his pipe. ‘A bobby’s job,’ Steppwr said it was. Not a big wage, it’s true. Still…
Anyway, he stuck it, and Saran was much relieved to know that he was working at something, for she had her hands pretty full with one thing and another, so she didn’t want him on her hands as well.
She was beginning to find that it wasn’t all honey having her Glyn and five of her boys working, though there were only three of them at home with her after Hugh had married and had gone to live with his wife at Senghenydd, and after Meurig had gone to live and work at Tonypandy in the Rhondda. And now her eldest, Benny, was talking about getting married to the girl who was a servant at Colonel Lewis’. And the other two working in the pit and still at home were getting to be a bit of a handful as well. Wanting this, and wanting that. Off somewhere or other every night of the week, though never to the pubs. To dances, boxing matches, the theatre or the Temperance Hall, which was the district’s leading variety house; to one of the new billiard saloons that were being rushed up. Spending far more money than ever their dad had on drink.
And they dressed up to the nines to go spending it. And neither of her boys at work in the pit would hesitate to tell the gaffer to keep his work if they thought they were being exploited more than they thought they should be. And the way they talked about this, that and the other. It was from their talk that Saran learnt that the first socialist member that Wales had ever had, had been elected by them and their sort in that district. A socialist representative, and the Miners’ Federation daily growing stronger in readiness to fight the owners; not the old-style individual owners that their dad had even called by their Christian names, for all those had been wiped out by the companies which had been formed, even as the companies were also in their turn being wiped out by the combines which were coming into being. Saran couldn’t make head nor tail of it all. It was a restless and fairly prosperous time. Liberalism was conceding to the workers many things that they had long clamoured for, and the new socialist movement was promising more than it would ever be able to give. The sad-faced socialist member and his young colleague, Ramsay MacDonald, were predicting the collapse of Capitalism, and the rising out of its ruins of the glorious Socialist Commonwealth; and there was much besides that Saran heard at second hand, without comprehending, from her boys and her husband’s talk in the home.
She also heard from the chapel people that it was a sinful age, that the people were puffed up, work-proud, wage-proud, and that they had turned away from God, Who would soon punish them, and so on.
And then, suddenly, out of the west, came the Welsh John the Baptist of the twentieth century, and like wildfire the great revival spread through Wales. A pale-faced young collier armed with power from God started on his task of saving Wales from the wrath to come. Baptisms in brooks, prayers in pits, sermons in streets. Singing. Pregnant silences, during which the young collier whom God had chosen as the bearer of His message of warning stood in pulpits looking accusingly at and through his congregations, the members of which broke down and confessed aloud their sins over and over again. Pandemonium. Lo, he speaks. Hush. Listen. Strange, moving, stirring are his utterances. Time passes. He falls silent again, and remains silent for long, his hands clasped, his soul pouring upwards – and outwards.
He, his work, his helpers, the numerous conversions, all are reported at great length in all the leading papers of Great Britain, and across the Atlantic the Welsh community at Scranton, PA, USA are inspired by the news from the old country. For months the newspapers sent out to them from the old country featured the revival, and Welshmen the world over rejoiced to think that Wales was leading the peoples of the earth back to God.
Then, just as suddenly as they had flared and spread, the cleansing fires died down, though not quite out. The young collier-revivalist broke down under the strain, and many of his converts returned to their vomits. But not Harry.
Whilst sitting in his little shanty on the right of the level crossing, smoking his pipe, Harry was several times tackled by one of the most enthusiastic of the revival workers, who earned his living as a fireman on the biggest of the steelworks’ engines which Harry opened the gates for. Spent the major portion of his mealtimes wrestling with the devil which had for so long lodged in Harry’s soul. Called Harry ‘brother’, did this earnest young man. ‘Listen, brother.’ The first time or two he called Harry ‘brother’, the devil in Harry’s soul prompted him to tell the young man to ‘get to hell out of here’. But the young man stayed until the hooter blew him back to his work, and all the time he was with Harry in the little shanty he went on revealing to Harry the horrors of the Hell he, Harry, was bound for. He read to him passages from the Book; knelt down and prayed for Harry’s salvation; and each time as he was going after the hooter blew, he would invite Harry to come with him to hear the revivalist who was doing such wonderful work in the district.
‘Please come,’ he begged one evening after he had been fighting the devil in Harry for about a fortnight. ‘He’s leaving the district for the Rhondda tomorrow, and you may never have the chance of hearing him again. So do come with me tonight, brother.’
‘Oh, all right,’ said Harry, now curious to see the man about whom there was such a lot of talk, and who, Harry made no bones in saying, was ‘driving people off their bloody heads’. So he went to Calfaria Chapel with the earnest young fireman just to see what the man was like.
It happened to be one of the revivalist’s silent evenings; had he preached the chances are that Harry would never have been moved in the least. But by standing silent and anguished before Harry for hours whilst the huge congregation sang, prayed, confessed, gave thanks, wept, and rejoiced, he somehow did something to Harry. Harry wept, and as he wept cleansing tears he thought of his mother, his fa
ther, his brothers Shoni and Ike, his sister Saran, of Steppwr, of men he had stood up to, of women he had laid down with, and he wished them all there so as he could beg their forgiveness. He couldn’t kneel down because of his peg leg, so he sat on the floor of the aisle between the seats, where he wept and mumbled spasmodic prayers. The only tears he had shed up to then were the bitter tears, but now his tears were sweet, and healing. ‘O God, help me. Help an old blackguard, please, God.’
Saran, though she hated the thought of handing over her wage-earners to other women, was relieved when her firstborn, Benny, informed her that he and Annie had decided to get married on the Saturday before Whitsun Monday. And she was glad, for after that terrible fight which he and Meurig… made her feel faint when she thought of it. One as bad as the other…. Meurig had come up from the Rhondda to spend a weekend at home, where he had become notorious, even as his uncle Harry was before him, for fighting and all sorts of rough-housing. On the Sunday he went playing pitch-and-toss and lost all the money he had come home from the Rhondda with, and after he had lost it he tried to borrow money from his mother to go on playing.
‘You’ll have no money of mine to throw away after your own,’ Saran told him. ‘I’ll see you all right to go back to the Rhondda tomorrow…’
‘Only five shillings; and if I get my own back…’
Then Mister Benny had to interfere. ‘Don’t you be a fool, mam, to give hard-earned money to a waster who hasn’t sent you home a penny all the time’s he been in the Rhondda.’
‘Shut your mouth, Benny,’ said his mother.
‘He’d better, before I shut it for him,’ said Meurig.
One word led to another, and on they went from words to blows. Then they went at it hammer and tongs, fighting their way out of the living room into the scullery, and from there out into the backyard, where Meurig gave his eldest brother the finest pasting a man ever had before Saran and Jane managed to part them. ‘You damned little blackguard,’ said Saran to Meurig. And that was only one of many rows and fights, so no wonder Saran was not sorry to hear of Benny’s marriage.
It was a classy wedding, in the chapel, with a best man and two of the girls who were in service with Annie at Colonel Lewis’ acting as bridesmaids. Annie had a veil and all, and Benny had on a new double-breasted blue suit, a high choker collar, and a buttonhole in his coat. And the young couple hurried away from the feast Saran had prepared to enjoy their honeymoon, which was ‘something’, said Saran in reply to a question Steppwr had asked, ‘as I never had – or wanted’.
‘But I thought you said there was going to be a wedding,’ said the mystified Steppwr, who had turned up with his concertina under his arm.
‘God only knows what a bloody nuisance he was when he was boozing, but he’s ten times more of a nuisance now that he’s “saved”, as he reckons he is,’ grumbled the landlord of the New Inn as he and his c-out came back into the bar from the front after having seen Harry off the premises in a rather forcible manner. ‘Damn it all,’ he continued as he ducked under the bar-flap to resume duty behind the bar, ‘he’s worse than them Salvation Army chaps as walks in every now and then. Give them a copper, or buy a War Cry off ’em, and they’ll bugger off tidy; but this Harry… two quarts, did you say? Certainly.’ He soon forgot all about Harry as he went on serving the Saturday night crowd.
Harry, muttering: ‘Forgive them, God,’ was picking himself out of the gutter into which he had been deposited by the landlord and his chucker-out. Passers-by laughed at the old man that but few of them knew as he struggled up on to his one foot and the peg, for Harry had altered in appearance so much that he was unrecognisable to all but the few still interested in him sufficiently to have noted the alteration taking place. He had allowed a circular rim of grey whiskers to grow around his swarthy, battle-scarred face, and this alone was enough to prevent him from being recognised by those who had known him but slightly in the days before he was ‘saved’. And now he bore himself meekly, his one-time swaggering manner and gait had vanished.
By this time he was getting used to being forcibly ejected from pubs; two ejections a night bar Sundays was about his average. And still he persisted in the hope of ‘saving’ some of those who, in his opinion, were hell-bound. When on his nightly visits to the pubs, he carried in his hand a little Bible of which he could not read a word, but he had memorised certain passages which he had made the fireman who had turned him to God repeat until he knew them off by heart. He also got the fireman to turn down the pages on which the selected and memorised passages could be read by all who wanted to read them, though it was seldom that he was allowed to remain on licensed premises long enough to recite one of the selected passages, for the landlords and their chuckers-out gave him but little time to recite before they scruffed him out through the nearest exit. ‘Come, on, out you go.’
Having brushed a little of the mud off his clothes with his hands, he stood leaning against one of the windows of the premises he had so recently been ejected from, trying to make up his mind where he should go next. The sound of the organ as it was borne to him on the wind from the Iron Bridge fairground decided him. Yes, he’d go across to one of the pubs in the Iron Bridge district, where he thought he was most needed. So off he stumped through Victoria Street. As he stumped along he thought with shame of the years he had spent as pimp, bully, bouncer, gambler, c and so on in the Iron Bridge district. Thought of the navvies and flats he had rooked and beaten, of the women… how was Gypsy Nell these days he wondered? Was she in prison? The workhouse? Or was she still carrying on with other men as she had once with him? Poor Nell. His first duty was to find her and warn her… though not until he had begged her forgiveness.
He looked into two of the pubs in the district, looked in the bars and in all the rooms, without being able to find her. Then he tried the Patriot, which was crowded, for in addition to ‘the usuals’ there were scores of navvies in for the weekend from the big waterworks job which was in progress about seven miles out of town. The navvies who worked double time on this job lived in huts on the job, miles from anywhere the place was. Bed to work, work to bed, that’s what it was, they said. So after a few weeks they’d draw their back time and make for the delights of the Iron Bridge district of Merthyr, where they would soak themselves in drink, get a woman – and some got themselves a dose of the pox into the bargain.
And the navvies were there in force on the night Harry went down there to look for his old flame, Gypsy Nell, whom he found in the Patriot, seated between two drunken navvies who had their arms around her neck as they sang ‘Sweet Rosie O’Grady’. And there were other navvies sitting with other willing women of the district. Unnoticed in the crowd which packed the smoke-filled bar, Harry made his way from the outer door across to where Gypsy Nell was seated between the two navvies. As he drew near to them he heard one of the navvies say: ‘I’m going to get a bottle of rum to take with us up the coke ovens. Won’t be a minute.’ As he rose to move up to the bar to get the bottle of rum the other navvy also rose and said: ‘And I’ll get a couple of quart bottles of beer. Rum an’ beer – can’t beat it.’ He winked at Gypsy Nell. ‘Best horn mixture going.’ And he moved up to the bar, where his mates were then lined up two-deep calling for drink. Harry went and sat at Nell’s side.
‘Here, what the hell…?’
‘Hush, Nell. Don’t swear, please.’
She looked at him closely, and after she had scanned his face, looked down at the peg leg. ‘Good God, Harry,’ she gasped.
‘Yes; I came down tonight… what are you laughing at?’
‘Those bloody whiskers of yours. Ha, ha, ha, they make you look like… but I go to hell if I know what they make you look like. Ha, ha.’
‘Be quiet, Nell, and listen to me, please. Listen, before those two chaps…’
‘Half a minute, Harry. Tell me one thing. Why didn’t you bring my shawl back that time?’
‘Shawl?’
‘Now, don’t act strange. You pawned
it, I expect.’
‘Indeed, I didn’t. What shawl are you talking about?’
‘The same shawl as I told you about when you was down this way last, before you grew them whiskers, that was. The shawl I put under your napper when they put you on that cart of Jack Gray’s to take you to hospital. Now do you remember?’
‘I think I do; it must be at my sister’s house. I’ll… oh, here they are coming. Nell, don’t go up to the coke ovens with these two chaps, I beg you. Think what you’re doing, Nell. Listen to what it says here, Nell.’ Hurriedly he recited: ‘Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wan…’
‘Here, who the hell is this?’ cried the navvy with the two quart bottles of beer, one in each hand.
‘For if you lie in sin with these men…’
‘Here, you bug-whiskered old bastard,’ cried the one with a pint-and-a-half bottle of rum in his left hand, ‘get to hell out of this before I wipe the floor with you.’ Then he palmed Harry’s face from his chin to his eyebrows with the palm of a hand as rough as sandpaper through working in cement and mixing concrete, and as he palmed Harry he pushed him backwards towards the door.
Harry had, so to speak, been turning the other cheek for the two years which had elapsed since his conversion, though on many occasions he had found it most difficult to do so when he was suffering indignities and being roughly handled. But not once had he been ‘palmed’ by anyone, let alone such a rough-handed chap as this navvy. So, on this occasion, before he could force him back, the old Harry escaped from his prison and used the new Harry’s right fist with terrible effect on the navvy who had the pint-and-a-half bottle of rum in his left hand. He went down with a crash, for as he fell he brought a nearby table and glasses and pints down with him.