by Jack Jones
‘I shall have my work cut out to do for them as is coming from away,’ she went on to tell her Jane and Sam’s wife. ‘And so will you both.’
‘You talk as though we had a dozen apiece coming home for Christmas from away,’ said Jane. ‘We’ve only one each coming home.’
‘Well, it’s good to have one coming home,’ said Saran. ‘Then all our Benny’s boys’ll be home, I expect.’
Jane sniffed. ‘Will that one who got his BA, him with the Ronald Colman moustache that went teaching to London, be home, I wonder? I hate the sight of that boy.’
‘You’ve no cause to,’ said Saran, ‘for the boy’s a good boy; and so’s the other boy Annie got in the college. He got his BA too, so Annie told me, but he’s staying on in the college till he can win more honours to it, she said; for it’s easier for him to get a job when he gets the honours put to the BA. And her other boy is going to college soon.’
‘I wonder will she send that high and mighty girl of hers to college as well?’ sneered Jane.
Saran changed the subject. ‘Our Tom and his wife and our Jim are going to have a long and cold ride through the night to get here,’ said Saran as some sleet began to fall and to be blown by the wind into their faces.
‘And so will my boy, for he’s coming by bus, too; and he’s got farther than Tom and Jim to come,’ said Sam’s wife.
‘My boy’s coming by train,’ said Jane, ‘and I’m glad he is in this weather, for he’s farther away from home than any of the family.’
‘He’s no farther away than my boy,’ said Sam’s wife, ‘for my boy’s right away the other side of London.’
‘What odds where they are, as long as they get home safe and in time for Christmas?’ said Saran.
‘I shall want you all to come up and see me after dinner, remember,’ said Saran. ‘Benny and Annie are coming up for a bit, and I expect the boys will be with ’em…’
‘Won’t she be too busy entertaining her la-di-da friends up at number eleven The Walk to spare time to come and see you?’ said Jane.
‘She never has been too busy on a Christmas Day up to now to come and see me, anyway,’ said Saran.
‘And Mrs Owen’s boys are coming home on the same bus as my boy,’ said Sam’s wife.
And they climbed slowly, with the wind blowing the sleet into their faces, up the hilly road to where they lived not far from each other in the district situated on an eminence above the town; and with what little breath they had to spare they talked of the families which, like themselves, were preparing for the reception of the exiles who had been forced to seek their living in places far away from their native home. And by the hundred they were being speeded home to spend Christmas with their own people in what they affectionately spoke of as ‘good old Merthyr’. In chilly and smelly buses, in crowded trains, and a few unlucky – and yet lucky – ones having a lift in a lorry back to good old Merthyr.
‘Your uncle Harry is worrying his guts out up there because the doctor won’t give him leave to get out of bed and out of the house as far as the workhouse to be at the inmates’ party,’ Saran was saying as they arrived at the door of Jane’s house, where they were met by five of Jane’s seven children, who were anxious to know what their mother and granny had brought them from town. Having handed over to them that household’s share of the load she had helped to carry up from the town, Saran wished her Jane good night and continued on her way with her Sam’s wife as far as her door, at which she was relieved of all she was carrying by her Sam’s children, and then she went on her way home alone and empty-handed, yet very thankful in the knowledge that two of her children and their children were provided for in a way that enabled them to look forward with pleasure and thanksgiving to the day on which their Saviour was born.
‘Yes, God is good,’ Saran murmured as she turned into her own house about the time that the bus which was bringing her sons back from exile was passing through Chepstow.
She had arranged the sleeping accommodation as on the previous Christmas. Tom and his wife were to have her room and her bed, and she didn’t begrudge her feather bed to Tom’s English wife, for if ever there was a decent woman, then it was she, Saran thought. And it would only be for a few nights, anyway. Then Jim could sleep with his father in one of the beds in the double-bedded room, and her two more homely sons, Lewis and Charlie, in the other bed. Then there was Uncle Harry in the little room, and she’d shift very well for a few nights on the old couch in the living room. Lewis went on something awful about her giving up her bed, but she soon shut him up. So she had put a new bedspread on her bed, and with Jane’s help had made it look lovely for Tom and his wife. And now she was waiting for them, and for her Jim.
‘Ain’t they here yet?’ said Glyn when he arrived home shortly after chucking-out time.
‘No.’ So after he had had a bit of supper he went to his bed.
‘Haven’t they come yet?’ asked Uncle Harry when she took up his nightly hot milk well peppered.
‘Not yet.’ So he supped his hot milk up and was soon asleep.
‘What, Tom and Jim not here yet?’ cried young Charlie – though he wasn’t so young, either, but being her youngest he was still being referred to as ‘young Charlie’ – when he rolled in about midnight with a couple of bottles in his overcoat pockets; and he’d already had far more than was good for him.
‘Not yet,’ said Saran. ‘You’d better get to bed before they see you in that state. So if you want something to eat…’
‘Why, I’m all right, mam. A few drinks, that’s all. And I brought these couple of bottles so as Tom and Jim could have a belly-warmer after the ride…’
‘You leave me to warm their bellies for ’em. Do you want anything to eat?’
‘No, had some chips as I…’
‘Then off to bed you go.’
‘But I…’
‘Shut up, and take those shoes off. Off with ’em. Now get upstairs quietly, for I expect your uncle Harry’s sleeping.’
‘All right; but don’t forget to tell Tom and Jim when they come that I remembered to bring a drink home for ’em.’
It was half past one when Lewis came home in an unusually good humour from a party where he had won the best part of a tenner from three Jew-boys with whom he had played solo.
‘Jim and Tom gone to bed?’ he asked his mother.
‘They’re not here yet. Shall I put you something to eat?’
‘No, thanks. I ate more than I should at the party. Oh, mam, you’d have laughed. I was playing solo – one, two, three shillings and a kitty – with Max Bernstein, Aby Freedman, and the Kosher butcher’s red-headed son…’
‘How is it you always play cards with Jews?’
‘Because I like playing with ’em. Do you remember the Jew-boy that I used to play cards with when we were lying next bed to each other in hospital? Mam, couldn’t he play crib! But tonight, single calls we were playing, and the kitty kept mounting up. The red-headed kid had to double it once when he got beat for solo, Max had to double it twice when caught on a misere and beat on a bundle, and Aby had to double it twice for shouting with nothing in his hand just to stop me lifting it with a couple of stone-wall solos. The three of ’em were determined that I, the Gentile, shouldn’t lift the kitty; but I got it all the same. I was dealer this hand, mam – oh, and what a misere I had; we all had good hands. Aby, it was his first shout, called solo; then Max goes misere, and me with as fine a misere as ever you seen in your life – and then the red-headed kid calls a bundle. Now it was my last shout, so I shouts an open misere – and I got there. Ha, ha, ha, you should have seen their faces as I was picking up that kitty…’
‘I hope nothing’s happened to the old bus,’ said Saran after another look at the clock.
‘Oh, and the way they squealed when I said I was packing up with a tenner of theirs in my sky…’
‘There they are,’ cried Saran as she ran out into the passage to meet her two sons and her English daughter-in-law. All
over them, she was, and talking good Welsh and so-so English alternately. ‘You’ll ’scuse me talking Welsh to the boys, my gel,’ she said to her English daughter-in-law, ‘for I can’t help it – and I’m not saying anything wrong about you.’
‘I know you’re not, mother,’ said her daughter-in-law from England.
‘Ah, but you don’t know,’ she said jokingly.
‘Let them take their things off and then come and have a warm,’ shouted Lewis, who rather liked his English sister-in-law.
‘Certainly,’ said Saran. ‘Come on, give me your things, and I’ll put them in the front room out of the way. I thought you were never coming. How are the children, my gel?’
‘Fine,’ said her daughter-in-law from England. ‘They’re worrying mother this Christmas again.’
‘You must bring ’em down to me next Christmas,’ said Saran as she poured boiling water on the tea in the teapot.
‘Well, they won’t come by bus if they do come,’ said Tom. ‘Oh, mam, what a journey. The draught perished our feet, the smell of petrol and the stink from the lav…’
‘Oh, never mind now that we’re here,’ said Jim. ‘Where’s dad? And how is he?’
‘Oh, he’s all right,’ said his mother. ‘Same old pain in his side, though. You know, the one he forgets all about as soon as I give him enough to raise the latch.’
They all laughed as they sat down to what Saran had prepared for them, and as they went on eating they asked their mother about this, that and the other person as though they were hungrier for news than for food. Jim and Tom talked to Lewis, whilst Saran conversed in her best English to her daughter-in-law from England until the clock struck four. Then she sent them all to bed.
The old house was like a football ground all day Christmas Day, from the time Jane’s children and Sam’s children and Benny’s children ran up first thing in the morning to pay their respects, right up to the last thing at night. Talking and eating and drinking and smoking, for there was plenty of everything, thank God. Oh, and what a crowd was there during the hours between dinner and tea. They crowded the front room, the living room, the scullery, and Glyn and Ossie drank standing up in the passage what they had brought back with them from the Salutation, where they had spent the first of Christmas Day’s two short drinking sessions.
Benny and his wife came in Benny’s new car to pay their respects; their boys whom Lewis and Jane couldn’t stand had paid their respects to granny with their cousins earlier in the day.
‘I’ve no doubt that you had an exciting time up your way during the recent general election,’ Benny’s wife was saying to her English sister-in-law.
‘No; it was quiet enough around our way.’
‘Oh, we had a lot of fun here,’ said Saran as she went on pouring ‘just a cup of tea, that’s all’ for the tea-drinkers present, ‘for we had a new lot standing here this time.’
‘A New Party candidate,’ explained Benny’s wife.
‘One of Mosley’s lot,’ explained Jane.
‘He said parliament was no good,’ said Sam’s wife.
‘Talking-shop, he said it was,’ Saran said. ‘Me, Jane and Kate went to hear the man. Looked a tidy man…’
‘Here, that woman didn’t come all the way from Oxford to talk blasted politics,’ shouted Glyn on his way to where he thought Saran had hidden a flagon behind the earthenware bread-pan in the pantry.
‘Where are you going, Lewis?’ asked Saran as her son, with a bored expression on his face, rose from where he had been sitting and threaded his way through the crowd in the living room.
‘I’m going up to sit with Uncle Harry for a while.’
‘Ask him if he’d like a cup of tea…. Oh, lord, let’s send some of these children off to the pitchers out of the way; then p’raps we’ll be able to move about and hear ourselves talk.’
The children were glad of the chance to go.
‘What about you coming with us to the pictures tonight, mam?’ said Tom.
‘Yes, what about it?’ said Tom’s English wife.
‘I’ve never been to the pitchers on a Christmas Day yet, and I’m not going to start. But you go – I’m going to have a quiet evening with Harry up in his room.’
‘Well, it won’t do you any harm to have one night away from the pictures,’ said Glyn as he returned to the living room after a fruitless search of the pantry and other hiding-places for the flagons he was sure Saran had hidden somewhere. ‘You very near live in the pictures.’
‘Yes, you’re fond of the pictures, aren’t you?’ said Benny’s wife.
‘I like ’em well enough to go to ’em about three times every week,’ said Saran.
‘What do you think of that? – three times a week,’ Glyn growled.
‘Yes, my week’s pitchers costs me tenpence all told; two pints in one night costs you a shilling,’ Saran told him.
‘There was a very fine picture in the Palace last week; were you there last week?’ asked Benny’s wife.
‘I expect I was,’ said Saran, ‘for I mostly goes to ’em all.’
‘Then you must have seen it; I’m referring to the picture Pauline Frederick was starred in.’
‘I may have seen it,’ said Saran. ‘Another cup of tea, Annie?’
‘No, thank you. It’s about time…’
‘What do you think of that for a woman?’ Glyn asked them all. ‘She “may have seen it”. She goes to pictures, and she don’t know for sure what she’s seen after she’s been there. If that isn’t…’
‘Well, Glyn, you’re right for once. I goes to the pitchers, and if you asked me next day what was there I couldn’t tell you. That’s funny, when you come to think of it, though, isn’t it?’
‘No, not funny at all,’ said Glyn, ‘for you go until you don’t know one picture from another.’
‘I do go often, it’s true, but no oftener than I used to go to the threeatre. Yet I’ll remember some of the things I seen in the threeatre if I lived to be a hundred. I’ll never forget – no, not if I live to be as old as Methuselah – that Vezin I seen acting in the Temperance Hall when I was a gel. No more can I forget Louis Calvert, Leonard Boyne, Mrs Bandman-Palmer – nor that man that played The Grip of Iron.’
Benny’s wife laughed before saying: ‘What a thing to remember.’
‘P’raps it is a funny thing to remember, a man strangling ’em two at a time till the froth fell from their mouths down on to the stage. But there it is; I remember him and many more that I seen acting in the threeatre, though I can’t remember the pitcher I seen last week. The people in the threeatre seemed to leave something with me that the pitchers don’t.’
‘Well, shall we go, Benny?’ said his wife. Before receiving an answer she said to Tom’s English wife: ‘So I can expect you to tea with us one day before you go back. Come on, Benny. So glad to have seen you all again. Thank you,’ she said as Benny helped her on with her heavy winter coat with collar and cuffs of fur. Sam’s wife watched her being helped into her coat with wide-open eyes, and Jane sniffed loudly, and said as soon as the woman’s back was turned: ‘Thank God she’s gone. We’ll be able to breathe now.’
‘What about a song, Ossie?’ said Glyn. ‘I expect you’re pretty dry, like myself, but sing something to keep us alive.’
‘Ay, give us a song, Ossie,’ said young Charlie.
‘Don’t make a fool of yourself, Ossie,’ said his Jane.
But he sang for them, all the same. A comic song he sang.
‘What do you think I heard today, mam?’ cried Jane as she ran into her mother’s house the morning of the very day the unemployed were first allowed into the Penydarren Park for twopence to see the greyhounds run.
‘I’m sure I don’t know.’
‘Try and guess,’ said Jane, sitting down to get her breath, for she was very fat, and she had run all the way up to tell her mother the news. ‘But there, you wouldn’t guess in a hundred years. Who do you think is married and the father of a baby?’
; ‘If you tell me I’ll know.’
‘Our Hugh’s boy down at Senghenydd.’
‘Never.’
‘He is, I tell you.’
‘Who told you?’
‘A chap from down there who brings his dogs up to run in the Park told Ossie in the Owen Glyndwr.’
‘Ah, but did that chap know for sure it was our Hugh’s boy?’
‘Of course he did; told Ossie that he used to know Hugh well.’
‘Well, well, Hugh’s boy married. I must be getting on, then.’
‘Yes, bound to be getting on when you’re a great-grandmother.’
‘It’s years since I heard anything from down that way…’
‘Oh, and Ossie told me something else, told me that our Lewis is mad about our Charlie going to stand up on the twopenny bank up at the dogs to bet. Reckons that somebody’s behind Charlie, and talks about getting all the bookies in the shilling enclosure to go on strike to make them as owns the track stop the small-money bookies from working the twopenny bank.’
‘Yes, I know all about it, for I’ve had them at it hammer and tongs here this morning up to about five minutes before you came in. Lewis thinks he’s everybody up the dogs; but if the unemployed on the twopenny bank wants to have a few coppers on a race, and they can’t pay a shilling to get where Lewis and the big bookies are, then they’re as much entitled… hush, here’s Lewis coming in again.’
‘Here, where’s that Ossie of yours?’ he shouted angrily at Jane.
‘Gone down to his pitch, I think,’ she replied.
‘He’d better be unless he wants to find himself back basket-making again. Yesterday, when I was looking for him to unload what I had on me, he was bevvying with the old man in the Owen Glyndwr. If that happens again it’ll be just too bad for him. Always the same when a man gives his blasted relations a break, they…’