by Jack Jones
‘Lord, isn’t he fat, Jane?’ said Saran. ‘No wonder he’s sweating,’ she remarked as the Chief Inspirer, now seated on the chairman’s right, mopped his brow as his belly, which rested in his lap, strained the buttons of his trousers and the lower buttons of his waistcoat as he went on breathing heavily whilst the chairman introduced him as:
‘… one whose name future generations will revere – I wish the friends outside would restrain themselves long enough to enable us…’
The double line of policemen at the entrance were swept forward as the crowd from outside, in its desire to hear the man who was rousing Britain as it had never before been roused, stormed its way in as far as was possible, which wasn’t far. Women screamed and children cried, men shouted, and the recruiting officer left the platform to aid the police in restoring order near the entrance, where the crush was critical.
‘Now that order is restored – and I do hope that our friends who are unfortunately unable for obvious reasons to get in to enjoy with us the privilege… it may be possible for Mr Bottomley to address an overflow – to address our friends outside after…’ The Chief Inspirer shook his head and grunted a negative. ‘Well, when next he honours our borough with a visit. And now, ladies and gentlemen, it gives me the greatest pleasure to call upon…’ Loud and prolonged cheers as the Chief Inspirer hoisted himself up into the standing position. Inside the huge rink there was silence as he went on to tell the audience that was eating out of his hand, as the saying is, of the magnificent response to the call for service and self-sacrifice he was making throughout the length and breadth of the land; but outside the disappointed crowd kept roaring for a sight of him, for a word from him, roared in vain as the Chief Inspirer went on to tell the audience, the privileged audience within, of how the treacherous Germans had done this, that and the other, and he shot his hands high above his head, and as he did so his hanging belly was hoisted up a few inches, and he called upon his God, our God, the God of Britain and her allies, to avenge the bayoneted babies, the raped women and the old men with long whiskers who had been made to dig their own graves before being shot down into them by the devilish – and so on – Germans. And when he sat down, and his belly was once more in his lap, the audience rose and cheered him again and again, and the staff captain of the Salvation Army rose from where he was sitting behind Mr Bottomley on the platform and thanked his God, our God, the God of Britain and her allies, for having given us such a man as Mr Bottomley in our hour of need; and after the staff captain of the Salvation Army had thanked God for Mr Bottomley, others of those who were seated on the platform rose also to thank God and Mr Bottomley for the magnificent response the call for service and self-sacrifice was meeting with throughout the length and breadth of the land. Then one of the ladies on the platform stood up and said that it was all very well to cheer and thank God, but God helped them who helped themselves; and there were many present who might well have interviewed Captain Ellis or Sergeant Knight in the recruiting office long before.
‘I see before me many young men,’ she shrieked. ‘Young men whose presence here this evening is nothing less than an insult to Mr Bottomley and the brave ones who in France and Belgium have defended, and still are defending, all that we hold dear….’ And a lot more she said. Then the recruiting officer for the borough made an appeal for recruits, and he caused a sensation and aroused great enthusiasm when he called on to the platform a brave fellow who had been wounded during the retreat from Mons, one who ‘had done his bit’. And no doubt there would have been even more enthusiasm and more recruits roped in after the meeting were it not that the brave fellow who had ‘done his bit’ was three parts slewed when exhibited, and therefore was not as impressive or as helpful as he otherwise might have been. But it was a wonderful meeting, all the same, and it would have been better still had Mr Bottomley been able to address the thousands outside who hadn’t been able to get inside to hear him. ‘Speech, speech,’ they kept shouting as he was being escorted away from the building while those within went on cheering. But he wouldn’t, perhaps the poor man couldn’t after all the meetings he had addressed earlier in the week, and those he had addressed that very day; anyway, he didn’t speak in the open air. No, he got into his car and told the driver, well, the recruiting officer told the driver, to drive away to the Castle Hotel, where Mr Bottomley had the few double whiskies which he felt badly in need of, and which no man can say he wasn’t entitled to after all he had done for Britain that day.
‘Well, what do you think of him?’ Jane asked her mother on the way home.
‘The man’s all right, no doubt, and p’raps he’s doing good,’ was all Saran was prepared to say just then. ‘But isn’t he fat?’ she added after they had walked a little farther towards home.
What Saran called ‘’cruiting meetings’ were, if nothing else, the favourite form of entertainment as far as the women were concerned during the first year of the war. She herself had no more boys available for service, though her Jim would before it was over be old enough to serve, that is if it lasts as long as some people are now beginning to say it will. So she went on attending recruiting meetings with her daughter Jane and her daughters-in-law, ‘ring-paper women’ all. Saran took two ring-papers to the post office every Monday morning when she went to draw the twelve shillings per week dependants’ allowance Meurig had signed for her to get, and the twelve shillings a week Lewis had signed his hand for his father to get, but unlike Jane and her daughters-in-law, she never carried a penny of the allowances out of the post office, just drew it and immediately deposited the full amount each week in the post office savings bank, into which she also deposited a pound or two of her own money fairly often, for she could well manage it with Glyn and the three youngest boys working and earning fairly good money in the pit. Things were getting dearer, it’s true, but she managed to put a good bit away in the post office, all the same. ‘It’ll come in handy for the boys when they come home,’ she told Jane, whom she also helped, as she did her daughters-in-law, whose separation allowances were little enough for them and the children to live on. But Saran saw to it that they didn’t go short of much.
So she went on saving and working and attending recruiting meetings and going to the pictures and the theatre. The last recruiting meeting she attended was held at the Drill Hall on a night when there was a host of speakers; chief among whom were a Mrs Flora Drummond and a Mrs Pankhurst. Flora was fiery in the extreme; Mrs Pankhurst spoke quietly and sadly. We were in it. No time to discuss the why and wherefore. She hoped and prayed for an early, satisfactory and lasting peace, of which she saw little sign. So force of arms seemed to be necessary to bring the Germans down to where they would be glad to sue for peace. If that was the case, then everyone should do everything possible to shorten the terrible struggle. So she appealed to all present to…
‘I liked that woman…. What was her name, now?’ Saran asked on the way home with Jane and her daughters-in-law.
‘Do you mean the fat one?’ asked Sam’s wife.
‘No, not her…. What was her name?’
‘Mrs Drummond,’ supplied Annie, Benny’s wife.
‘H’m. Why is it that all fat people are so bloodthirsty?’
‘You can’t say that I’m bloodthirsty,’ said Jane.
‘No, that’s true,’ admitted Saran, ‘though you’re fat enough, goodness knows. But what was the other woman’s name, the one with the grey hair and nice face?’
‘Do you mean Mrs Pankhurst?’ said Annie.
‘That’s the name; I liked her. She talked sense, or as near to sense as anybody can talk these days. Well, I don’t think I’ll go to any more ’cruiting meetings. Politics is bad enough, but some of the stuff as is turned out at ’cruiting meetings is…’
‘What do you know about politics?’ asked Sam’s wife.
‘Not much, though I went a couple of times to hear that Keir Hardie. They say he’s awful bad these days, poor fellow.’
‘They say this w
ar has broken his heart,’ said Annie, one of whose brothers was a worshipper of Hardie, and who had sworn that if ever conscription came he would be a conscientious objector.
‘They say there’s a lovely picture in the ’Lectric,’ said Jane.
‘Then we’ll go tomorrow night,’ Saran decided for all, knowing full well that she would have to fork out for all four and those of the children that they would fail to get by without payment.
After the meeting in the Drill Hall which was addressed by Mrs Pankhurst, Mrs Drummond and others, the attendances at recruiting meetings became disappointing in the extreme, so the recruiting authorities decided to go out into the open more, and to take the populace by surprise. They arranged with the Electric and Tramway company for the use of a double-decker tram, on the top deck of which they sat a brass band which played martial airs as the tram was driven along from one end of the district to the other from morn to midnight, except for the short breaks for refreshments – which were long enough to enable several of the bandsmen and two recruiting-office orderlies, one of whom was the wounded soldier who was exhibited at Bottomley’s meeting, to get drunk before the night was out. The lower deck of the tram was plastered with the most appealing of the many recruiting posters then available. Lovely little homes worth fighting for; grey-haired mothers worth dying for; gallant little Belgium; your King and Country; Humanity, and ever so much more, all strong appeals to those who with Saran and her daughter Jane and her daughters-in-law and their children lined the main street and cheered as the tram with the band playing on the top deck was driven slowly by; and they placed coppers, some placed silver, in the collecting-boxes held out to them by those who ran alongside the tram collecting towards the fund for providing cigarettes and other comforts for the brave boys ‘out there’. Finding the results of all the display and noise – all right, music – disappointing, the authorities had another conference, at which it was decided to arrange with all theatre and picture-house owners and managers to sandwich a recruiting speaker in the middle of the show, when the audience least expected to hear an appeal for more service and more self-sacrifice made to them. And Saran and the other ‘ring-women’ of her family would be sitting sucking oranges, supping sweets or cracking nuts in theatre or picture house, when all of a sudden the orchestra would give one loud long startling warning, and out would walk from the wings to the centre of the stage a parson, a lady member of the recruiting committee, or sometimes a soldier who had got his ‘blighty’ out in France or Belgium or one of the other places where ‘blightys’ were to be had for the asking and without, and who was now attached for duty as speaker to the recruiting office, where he hoped to stay for the duration. Such would walk from the wings on to the centre of stages and harrow the feelings of those who had paid to be entertained with such talk as: ‘Whilst you are sitting safely and in comfort here, men are crouching in waterlogged trenches facing the enemy. Or in an advanced post, hungry and weak, yet holding on. Or, harder still, lying wounded and helpless out in no-man’s-land, hoping against hope for help. They need help. Listen. As you sit here, over hundreds of miles of our long battle-front, the word is being passed along from left to right. “Keep a sharp lookout on the right.” And men who have had no sleep for nights, men whom it has not been found possible to relieve, are keeping a sharp lookout on the right. Some of them your sons, your brothers, your husbands. And if there are any here…’
Of course he’d start the women off crying, and with their eyes filled with tears they’d look around to see how many young and middle-aged men there were present, and if there were any the women would sniff contemptuously in their direction, unless it happened to be their own men, of course; in that case the women who had serviceable men with them in theatre or picture house would look straight to their front as the other women whose men had gone ‘over there’ looked accusingly in their direction. Some of them blushed and got up and walked out, couldn’t stand the strain.
‘Well, if this goes on, I’ll have to stop going to the threeatre or the pitchers,’ said Saran on leaving the Palace one night after the performance had been interrupted to allow an appeal to be made, first by a lady who had just returned to the borough after serving buns and tea to soldiers from a YMCA handout on the docks at Southampton for a few months, and secondly by the only wounded soldier attached to the recruiting office who was sober enough for duty that night. ‘Let people alone, I say. If my boys hadn’t wanted to go, I’d have seen all the ’cruiting speakers in hell before I’d drive ’em into the Army. It’s high time this nonsense finished, and for ’em to take what they want to finish the damned thing off.’
‘They’ve taken all I had,’ said Jane.
‘Same here,’ said Sam’s wife.
‘They took Benny first,’ said Annie.
‘Took, took, took,’ cried Saran impatiently. ‘No, they was never took. Them boys of mine would have gone if… they’re same nature as my brother Ike as was killed out in Zululand; Meurig is his uncle Ike to a T. Then Benny, Sam, Lewis and Mervyn, more or less the same. Want to be going to somewhere. Didn’t Benny leave home to join up the time of the Boer War, joined in October, and him not eighteen till the November? That’s the way my boys are, I don’t know why; and I bet you our young Jim goes if it lasts until he’s old enough. You watch now. Let them go as wants to, I say, and let them as don’t want to go…’
‘Well, if we have conscription they’ll have to go whether they want to or not,’ said Sam’s wife.
‘My brother swears that he’ll never go,’ said Annie, Benny’s wife.
‘We’ll see,’ said Saran. In less than a month conscription was in force, and the poor old wounded soldiers attached to the recruiting office were returned to their units, and the recruiting officer too was sent off to some place, and in his stead there came a little man with a pot belly who had been a Lord Mayor of some place and was now an honorary colonel or something of the sort. Anyway, the little man looked a rum ’un with the Sam Browne belt around his pot belly and his spectacles on. Still, he could be as regimental as the next man when he wanted to be regimental.
Saran was surprised when she saw her picture in the paper – well, when she saw them all, though she needn’t have been, for she herself had given the photos to the man when Glyn brought him straight from the Market Tavern up to the house after chucking-out time one night the week previous. He was a hollow-faced, narrow-chested journalist who had just been released from a sanatorium to work as reporter-in-chief of the Merthyr Express, on which there was only a boy of sixteen as cub reporter, for all the other fellers had gone to the war. So this consumptive chap got a job reporting for the Merthyr Express and also doing lineage for one Cardiff and one London paper. So he had a decent job, and he coughed his way around all the pubs of the district in search of stories. He was well-on the night he ran into Glyn in the Market Tavern, and Glyn was well-on, too. Bouncing, he was, about him having more boys in the Army than any other man in town. So the reporter asked him to have one with him. Certainly.
‘Six boys, did you say?’
‘Well, as good as six, for Ossie, the boy as is married to my only daughter, is as good as a son to me – thinks more of me than some of my own boys do.’
‘Quite. I suppose you’ve got photos of them all?’
‘Any God’s amount, for they’re always having their photos took to send home to the old woman.’
‘And photos of yourself and wife as well?’
‘Ay, I think there’s one there as was taken years ago – but there’s some of the children on that, if I’m not mistaken.’
‘It’ll do.’
‘Do for what?’
The reporter explained, and Glyn was delighted, and after chucking-out time he took the reporter along with him to the house. ‘Saran. Saran. Where are you, Saran?’
‘In my bed, of course. Where did you think I’d be at this time of night?’
‘Come on down a minute.’
‘What for? Your supper�
��s on the table.’
‘Yes, but I’ve got a gentleman here as wants the boys’ photos to put ’em in the paper.’
‘Nice time of night for anybody to come to fetch photos or anything else,’ grumbled Saran as she got out of bed and slipped a petticoat on over her nightdress. ‘Now, what is it?’ she asked as she walked into the living room in bare feet.
The journalist was coughing terribly. ‘You’d better watch that cough, young man,’ she said.
‘I have been watching it for years,’ he said; then he went on to explain what he wanted, namely, the particulars and photos that would enable him to work up a most acceptable story under some such heading as ‘Merthyr’s Most Patriotic Family’, or ‘Noble Parents’ Great Contribution’. He soon got all he wanted, and Saran went back to her bed, but Glyn insisted on the journalist staying to share the bottle of beer Saran had got in for him as a livener in the morning.
Oh, and didn’t he make a fine story of it. Really great, it was, and all the photos reproduced, Ossie’s put in as one of six sons. And, above the six sons, Glyn and Saran, as they had appeared when they were photographed over twenty years before with the only three children they had been blessed with up to then.
‘What the hell odds,’ cried Glyn, when Saran pointed out that they both looked as young as their eldest boy, Benny, as shown in the papers which had printed the story and the photographs. ‘There’s only a few around here where we live as’ll notice it, but there’ll be thousands as won’t. And them thousands will be proud of us…’