Black Parade
Page 35
‘Then it’s time you had your golden wedding, isn’t it?’ said Jim.
‘What’s a golden wedding?’ said Saran.
‘What people gets when they’ve been married fifty years, of course,’ said Jane. ‘You ought to know that, our mam,’ she added.
‘Well, I didn’t.’
‘Humph, golden wedding,’ grunted Glyn. ‘I’m lucky to get the price of a half-pint…’
‘Jim, take your father out of my sight before he breaks my heart with his grousing,’ said Saran as the house began to fill with callers. Sam and his wife and their boy from away, and Jane’s two boys from away, and their other children; then Lewis and Charlie ran in for a bite before going off to bet at the dogs, so between everything Saran was pleased when Jim and his father and Ossie and Sam went out to have a few drinks. None of Benny’s people called that day, and Uncle Harry, of course, was upstairs out of the way.
‘If there was another war broke out tomorrow, I’d go to it like a bloody shot,’ Sam surprised all the members of the family by saying towards the end of the little party Saran gave at her house on the evening of her Benny’s fiftieth birthday. Benny was the guest of honour, of course, and it was his son, the one with the honours to his BA, that started Sam off by referring to some resolution never to take part in any war that had been passed at his college. ‘Yes, like a bloody shot I’d go,’ Sam repeated.
‘Well, there’s no need for swearing,’ said Benny’s wife.
‘Nor for shouting,’ said Saran, ‘for your uncle Harry is pretty bad up there tonight.’
Sam lowered his voice to say: ‘You can pass as many resolutions as you like, but if things keep on as they are there’ll be half a million ex-servicemen like myself ready to change into uniform whenever we’re wanted.’
‘More fool them,’ said Saran.
‘How’s that?’ said Sam. ‘Isn’t it better to chance being blown up or bayoneted…?’
‘This is a nice birthday party,’ said Lewis, who hated to hear talk of bayonets.
‘Sorry,’ muttered Ossie as he knocked over the glass of beer he was feeling for.
‘It’s all right,’ said Saran. ‘Fill him another, Glyn.’
‘Certainly,’ said Glyn, who filled another for himself as well.
‘But things will improve now that we’ve had the commissioners’ report on South Wales,’ said Benny.
‘What is he going to do for South Wales?’ asked Saran.
‘It’s the Government that’ll have to do it, but what the commissioner recommends is the transference of all surplus labour of men and boys under forty-five years old to more prosperous districts, and also to…’
‘Where are the districts that wants our men?’ asked Saran.
‘Well, there’s…’
‘Yes, Benny, there’s blasted fools as don’t know what they’re talking about. Send the men away, indeed.’
‘Woman, you’re too handy calling people fools.’
‘What else are they when they say every man under forty-five should be sent away to take a chance ’mongst strangers who’ve got plenty to do to look after their own. Our men and boys’ll go themselves, without being sent, to wherever there’s a dog’s chance of earning enough to live on. Haven’t Tom and Jim, and Jane’s two boys, and Sam’s boy, and thousands more like ’em gone from this district? Of course they have. Let the Government do something for the place as’ll make it possible for those as are left to make a living here. That’s what they want to do and that’s what they’d have to do if everybody was like me; for I’d hang on here until – well, until I had to eat grass – before I’d let them ship me away to where it’s little, if any, better. Transference, did you say he wanted? Well, I’ve transferred all I’m going to transfer. Two in the Senghenydd explosion, two to the war, as good as three when you take into account Benny’s arm and…’
‘Never mind the rest, mam,’ said Lewis.
‘And Tom and Jim gone up England to work. Now I’m going to keep the couple I’ve got left…’
‘Too true you are,’ said Charlie, who had been taking glass for glass with his father and Ossie.
‘Yes, too true I am – that’s if you’ve got sense enough to hang on…’
‘If you can find a better hole…’
‘Shut up, Charlie,’ Saran told him. ‘I’m talking serious. We’ll never go short, for I’ve got enough to see us through, that’s if we die tomorrow,’ she hastened to add jokingly as she noted the way her children and her in-laws looked in her direction.
‘Is there any more beer?’ said Glyn.
‘I think we’d better be off now, for it’s getting on, and Doris and her young man are coming to supper,’ said Benny’s wife, fearing that the party to celebrate her husband’s half-century was on the way to becoming a drunken do, though as a matter of fact it was far from developing into anything of the kind. But she collected Benny and her sons, thanked Saran for having so honoured her husband and off she went.
‘Well, now that they’re gone, what about some more beer, and a song from Ossie?’ said Glyn.
‘No beer and certainly no songs here,’ Saran told him. ‘Harry is not going to be disturbed by any of your row. Here’s a shilling, go and make beasts of yourselves down at the Anchor whilst me and Jane and Kate clear up here.’
‘But woman, there’s three of us, and a shilling…’
‘What three of you?’
‘Well, here’s Sam…’
‘Here you are, here’s a tosh,’ said Lewis, handing his father a half-crown as he passed on his way to his room to dress to go out for the night and part of next morning.
‘Ah, that’s something like, that is,’ said his father as he looked at the shining half-crown. ‘Now we shall be able to have something like a drink. Come on, Ossie boy. Fall in, Sam.’
‘Don’t be late, Sam,’ said Sam’s wife. Sam said ‘right-o’ as he followed his dad out of the house, with Ossie’s hand on his right shoulder.
Harry was worse, and Saran hardly ever left him now, and when she had to, to attend to her household duties or to get a little sleep, she was relieved by Lewis, who was a most dependable and efficient male nurse, she was surprised to find. It was obvious to all that the end was near, and the family without a single exception rallied around Saran. Benny’s wife was the only one who brought flowers every morning for Harry’s little room, all the others came love-laden. Harry was not conscious of anyone’s presence for about a week before he died, but at the last hour he did open his eyes and say: ‘Saran.’
‘Yes, here I am, Harry,’ she said in the Welsh tongue.
His hand tremblingly moved across the top quilt of his bed until hers met it halfway and held it. And they held hands for a long time before he at last said: ‘You do – believe, Saran bach – don’t you?’
‘Certainly I do,’ she assured him. ‘I always have. God is good, that’s what I’ve always said.’
His grip on her hand tightened and he sighed contentedly. ‘Yes – God is – good,’ he murmured. He began to breathe in faint gasps, as a blown puppy does, and the only word she caught before he breathed his last was the word ‘Mam’. He had gone. She sat for long with the body that had housed his turbulent spirit before she rose and put the hand she had been holding back under the quilt. Then she went down and into the living room, where Lewis was sitting alone. His familiar and hellish pain was giving him gyp, yet he forgot it as soon as he saw his mother’s face, on which he saw for the first time the expression of utter helplessness.
‘Mam,’ he cried, springing to her side and helping her across to the armchair.
‘He’s – he’s gone, Lewis,’ she murmured.
Lewis smoothed her hair.
Benny saw to everything, though it was Lewis that paid for the taxis and the motor-hearse in which his uncle Harry’s remains were conveyed to the cemetery, where they were buried in the same grave as his mother’s. ‘Gentlemen only’, and only the gentlemen of the family at that, were at the fune
ral. Saran didn’t let Benny write to tell the boys working up Oxford way for fear they would go to the expense of journeying down to the funeral. ‘Write to tell ’em afterwards,’ she said.
As the funeral was about to start off from before the house Saran was standing looking out of the front window with Benny’s wife and Jane and Sam’s wife and some of the children standing respectfully behind her. Saran was smiling sadly as the motor-hearse and the cars filled with her men following slowly started off.
‘S’long, Harry bach,’ she murmured as she stood and watched the funeral out of sight around the corner. Then she swallowed hard and led the way back into the living room.
Foreword by Mario Basini
Born in Merthyr Tydfil and educated at Aberystwyth University, Mario Basini worked as reporter, feature writer and columnist for the Western Mail. He is a former Welsh Feature Writer of the Year and a Honorary Fellow of Aberystwyth University. He broadcasts frequently on BBC Wales and is the author of Real Merthyr.
Cover image by Archie Rees Griffiths
Archie Rees Griffiths (1902–1971) was born in Aberdare but brought up in Gorseinon on the outskirts of Swansea. He worked in the Mountain Colliery and the tinplate works at Gorseinon before attending Swansea School of Art (1919–1924) and the Royal College of Art (1924–1927). His paintings are a record of industrial life in Wales during the first half of the twentieth century, foreshadowing the literary reaction to the period, and formed part of a group that included Evan Walters and Vincent Evans who made a committed attempt to portray Welsh rural and industrial life in realist terms. Griffiths was a Marxist and a Christian, themes that are often reflected in his work and choice of subject matter. He continued to work throughout his life but received very little public recognition after the 1930s and found it increasingly difficult to make a living from his art. He died in London in 1971.
LIBRARY OF WALES
The Library of Wales is a Welsh Assembly Government project designed to ensure that all of the rich and extensive literature of Wales which has been written in English will now be made available to readers in and beyond Wales. Sustaining this wider literary heritage is understood by the Welsh Assembly Government to be a key component in creating and disseminating an ongoing sense of modern Welsh culture and history for the future Wales which is now emerging from contemporary society. Through these texts, until now unavailable, out-of-print or merely forgotten, the Library of Wales brings back into play the voices and actions of the human experience that has made us, in all our complexity, a Welsh people.
The Library of Wales includes prose as well as poetry, essays as well as fiction, anthologies as well as memoirs, drama as well as journalism. It will complement the names and texts that are already in the public domain and seek to include the best of Welsh writing in English, as well as to showcase what has been unjustly neglected. No boundaries will limit the ambition of the Library of Wales to open up the borders that have denied some of our best writers a presence in a future Wales. The Library of Wales has been created with that Wales in mind: a young country not afraid to remember what it might yet become.
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Raymond Williams Chair in the Cultural History of Wales,
Swansea University
About the Author
Jack Jones was born in Merthyr Tydfil in 1884, the eldest of nine who survived out of fifteen children. He left school at twelve to work with his father as a miner. Later he became a regular soldier and served in the First World War. His political engagement saw him act for the Miners’ Federation; join the Communist Party, then Labour and then the Liberals, standing as Liberal candidate for Neath in 1929. Married with five children, he earned a living mining, as a platform-speaker, navvy, salesman, assistant cinema-manager and writer.
His first novel, Rhondda Roundabout, was published in 1934. It was followed by two more novels (Black Parade, 1935, and Bidden to the Feast, 1938), a play and the first volume of his autobiography (Unfinished Journey, 1937). He made radio and film appearances and took on several minor acting roles. From 1946 Jones published two further volumes of autobiography, eight novels, including Off to Philadelphia in the Morning (1947), and a play. In 1948 he was made a CBE. In 1968 he was elected first president of the English section of Yr Academi Gymreig. He died in 1970.
Copyright
First published in 2009
by
Parthian
The Old Surgery
Napier Street
Cardigan
SA43 1ED
www.parthianbooks.co.uk
www.libraryofwales.org
This ebook edition first published in 2011
Published with the financial support of the Welsh Books Council.
All rights reserved
© The Estate of Jack Jones, 1935
Foreword © Mario Basini 2009
The right of Jack Jones to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
Cover design: www.theundercard.co.uk
Cover image: On the Coal Tips (c 1930-32) (oil on canvas) by Archie Rees Griffiths
© Estate of Archie Rees Griffiths with kind permission of Peter Lord
Typeset by logodædaly
ISBN 9781906998677
1 Ron Berry So Long, Hector Bebb
2 Raymond Williams Border Country
3 Gwyn Thomas The Dark Philosophers
4 Lewis Jones Cwmardy & We Live
5 Margiad Evans Country Dance
6 Emyr Humphreys A Man’s Estate
7 Alun Richards Home to an Empty House
8 Alun Lewis In the Green Tree
9 Dannie Abse Ash on a Young Man’s Sleeve
10 Ed. Meic Stephens Poetry 1900-2000
11 Ed. Gareth Williams Sport: an anthology
12 Rhys Davies The Withered Root
13 Dorothy Edwards Rhapsody
14 Jeremy Brooks Jampot Smith
15 George Ewart Evans The Voices of the Children
16 Bernice Rubens I Sent a Letter to My Love
17 Howell Davies Congratulate the Devil
18 Geraint Goodwin The Heyday in the Blood
19 Gwyn Thomas The Alone to the Alone
20 Stuart Evans The Caves of Alienation
21 Brenda Chamberlain A Rope of Vines
22 Jack Jones Black Parade
23 Alun Richards Dai Country
24 Glyn Jones The Valley, the City, the Village
25 Arthur Machen The Great God Pan
26 Arthur Machen The Hill of Dreams
27 Hilda Vaughan The Battle to the Weak
28 Margiad Evans Turf or Stone
29 Stead Jones Make Room for the Jester
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