Black Parade E-Book

Jack Jones

• Herausgeber: Parthian Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 587

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

One of Merthyr's Victorian brickyard girls, Saran watches the world parade past her doorstep on the banks of the stinking and rat-infested Morlais Brook: the fair-day revellers; the chapel-goers and the funeral processions. She never misses a trip to the town's wooden theatres, despite her life ruled by the 5 a.m. hooter, pit strikes, politics and the First World War that takes away so many of her children. Her Glyn will work a treble shift for beer money; her brother Harry is the district's most notorious drinker and fighter until he is 'saved'. The town changes and grows but Saran is still there for Glyn, for Harry, for her children and grandchildren. In his 1935 novel Black Parade, writer, soldier and political activist Jack Jones creates a superbly riotous, clear and unsentimental picture of Merthyr life as his home town reels headlong into the twentieth century.

Leseprobe

BLACK PARADE

JACK JONES

‘I remember when all the decent people in Lichfield got drunk every night, and were not the worse thought of. Ale was cheap…’

Dr Johnson

Contents

Title PageEpigraphFOREWORDCHAPTER 1: A HECTIC WEEKEND – SATURDAYCHAPTER 2: A HECTIC WEEKEND – SUNDAYCHAPTER 3: A HECTIC WEEKEND – MONDAYCHAPTER 4: CHRISTMAS IS HERE AGAIN – AND AGAINCHAPTER 5: A MARRIAGE HAS BEEN ARRANGEDCHAPTER 6: IN BORROWED PLUMESCHAPTER 7: A NICE BROTHER-IN-LAW HE ISCHAPTER 8: THE PATAGONIAN PANTHERCHAPTER 9: RECONSTRUCTIONCHAPTER 10: BREAKAWAYSCHAPTER 11: ‘ISN’T HE LOVELY, GRANNY?’CHAPTER 12: SARAN RENDERS FIRST AID TO A RIOTERCHAPTER 13: OH, OH, OH, IT’S A LUV-ER-LY WARCHAPTER 14: ’STREWTH, WHAT A BLOODY GAME THIS ISCHAPTER 15: SHOUTING THROUGHCHAPTER 16: ALL THE WORLD’S A STAGECHAPTER 17: HOME, SWEET, SWEET HOMECHAPTER 18: CARRYING ONAbout the AuthorCopyright

LIBRARY OF WALES

FOREWORD

Merthyr Tydfil for Jack Jones was a stern and forbidding father, a nurturing mother, lover, friend and mortal enemy. His native town, built on its four great ironworks, forged his talent and purged his verbose and cumbersome prose of its impurities. The pressures of reliving his life there – not to mention the heroic efforts of his copy editors – tempered a style of steel-hard simplicity fit for the elemental story of his people pitted against the black cruelty of nature and the red-clawed savagery of Man.

The town is never the mere backcloth against which the lives of his characters are played out. With its massive heart, its indomitable soul, the Merthyr of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries dominates his best books – the three great novels, Black Parade, Bidden to the Feast (1938) and Off to Philadelphia in the Morning (1947) and the magnificent autobiography, Unfinished Journey (1937). Its dangerous streets provide a public stage for the great battles that conflict his families – the Morgans, the Davieses, the Parrys and the Joneses. There, the life-affirming vitality of its pubs, clubs, fairs, theatres and boxing booths and the bare-knuckled brutality of mountain-top contests howl against the constraint of nonconformity’s careful Christianity.

In Black Parade the fight, as old as civilisation, divides the Morgan family between father Glyn, the hard-working, hard-drinking miner and his upwardly mobile, fashionably Christian eldest son, Benny and his snobbish wife, Annie. It rages within an individual, hellraising Harry, Glyn’s workshy, violent brother-in-law, a street fighter of considerable skill and reckless courage. When he is knocked down by a works engine on his way home from a night behind the coke ovens with a prostitute, he loses a leg. The judgement on his past life is reinforced when he is swept up in Evan Roberts’ revival of 1905 and ‘gets’ religion. Glyn is no more enamoured of the new Harry, endlessly preaching his gospel, than he was of the violent old.

The same conflict raged within Jack Jones himself. His imagination was fired by the street fairs, the canvas-topped auctions, the music halls, above all by the penny-dreadful Victorian melodramas and great Shakespearean tragedies which enthralled him as a boy selling snacks to the audience in the newly-opened Theatre Royal. The pages of Black Parade hum with colourful characters like the disgraced headmaster ‘Davies, MA,’ who with his threadbare frock coat, unkempt red beard and fiery eyes busks for a few pennies by declaiming speeches from the great Elizabethan playwrights. Despite, or perhaps because of, his obvious contempt for his audiences they contribute enough to keep him drunk and to pay for his lodgings in Merthyr’s notorious red-light district along the banks of the River Taff.

Ultimately the town’s pagan licentiousness ends, like Davies, in a lonely and meaningless death if it is not tempered by a Christian compassion. When Saran, Glyn’s long-suffering wife, hurries to join the throng gathering to listen to a speech by miners’ leader A. J. Cook during the long lock-out of 1926, his overblown rhetoric is compared to the simple socialism of her Christian brother, Harry, as he talks to the old, the infirm and the simple-minded locked up in the town’s workhouse. The message is reinforced by the cinematic expedient of cutting directly from the union leader’s bombast to Harry’s quiet sincerity.

Cook struggles to bolster the miners’ confidence:

‘… men are now solid again in the areas that looked like letting us down. After a solidarity campaign in which I am pleased to say that I have been supported by all the Labour MPs with the exception of a reactionary handful – and we shall deal with them when the time comes – I am now in a position to report that our men everywhere are as solid as they ever were. And I am pleased to be able to inform you that we are winning the sympathy of the British public….’

But Harry tells of the hawker he saw selling needles and cotton from door to door in Merthyr’s incessant rain:

‘Wet through, he must have been, and still the people who answered the knock slammed the doors in his face.’

The next day Harry sees men singing for a few pennies as they walk along the gutter. They, too, are ignored.

‘No man should have to go from door to door selling needles and cotton in the rain, or sing in the gutter either. But when they are forced to do it, don’t you think, brothers, that people should be kinder to ’em? Of course they should, for we never know…’

Without the Christian’s compassion, wild Merthyr would end in an orgy of self-destruction. The message is as much the novelist’s as it is Harry’s.

An earthier love binds the Morgans’ ramshackle family and its many branches. As Jack Jones makes clear in his memoir Unfinished Journey, the novel Black Parade is Saran Morgan’s book. For most of its life before publication the novel was entitled Saran, short for Sarah Ann. She is named for the novelist’s beloved mother and both are the embodiment of maternal love. Like her real-life counterpart, Saran Morgan epitomises fecundity and nurturing commitment. She spends much of Black Parade with breast bared, suckling the latest of her brood. When her fertility ends, her daughter and daughters-in-law take over, a seemingly endless production line.

Like most working-class mothers in the Merthyr of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, she suffers the most harrowing losses. One brother is killed in South Africa’s Zulu Wars, another disappears, a third, the feisty Harry, is imprisoned, loses a leg and has to be rescued from the workhouse. Two sons die in the horrific explosion that kills four hundred miners at the Universal Colliery Senghenydd in 1913. Two are killed and another is maimed in World War One. Her miner husband and sons suffer through the depredations of the long stoppage of 1926. Through this martyrdom she remains steadfast, loyal, and as crucial to the support and well-being of her loved ones as pit props are to the lives of her men.

It is one of the pleasures of Jack Jones’ vigorous and subtle characterisation that Saran Morgan is more than a passive Earth Mother. From the moment we meet her as a girl working in the brickyard her blunt honesty, her humour and her spirited independence beguile us. She is the financial mainstay for her ageing parents and her two workshy brothers. She may love Glyn, the handsome young miner a little too fond of his drink but she is not prepared to bend to his will. When he fails to turn up to take her to the theatre, she breaks a taboo by seeking him out in the male-only preserve of the taproom at the Black Cock public house. His outraged drinking companions suggest he should teach her some manners by giving her a pair of black eyes.

As a married woman in the early twentieth century she may accept that pride of place in the home goes to the male breadwinners, but long before the book ends she has become the de facto head of the household. She knows Glyn will disapprove if she offers their widowed brother-in-law, the feckless pub entertainer and balladeer Twm Steppwr, a bed in which to die. She does it anyway. And she rescues her brother Harry, a man for whom Glyn feels an intense dislike, from the workhouse in order that he, too, may die under their roof. In her enthusiasm for the theatre and, later, the cinema, this illiterate woman becomes the guardian of the family’s cultural values as well as its spiritual and physical well-being.

As Saran and her family mature, so does that other great protagonist of Black Parade, Merthyr. With the appearance of its imposing Town Hall, its General Hospital, its sports grounds and great parks, its theatres and cinemas, the town grows into a new sense of civic pride. With strong and resilient families like the Morgans forming its backbone, it looks forward to an uncertain future with optimism.

In his life as well as his writing Jack Jones epitomised Merthyr’s restless, often wasteful, creativity. He travelled with bewildering speed from near-illiterate pit boy to soldier, woodsman, salesman for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, internationally-known public speaker, late-flowering novelist, playwright, broadcaster and scriptwriter. During his years as a professional politician he moved from party to party searching in vain for a philosophy that satisfied him. And there were long periods of threadbare poverty on the dole worrying where the next meal for his long-suffering wife, Laura, and their children would come from.

In Black Parade Jack Jones lays strong claim, despite stiff opposition, to being the best fiction writer Merthyr has produced and one of the best to emerge in modern Wales. His neglect in recent decades shames us. His books are out of print, consigned to dusty, forgotten corners of the stacks stores of public libraries. This much-needed Library of Wales edition will help restore to him the reputation he deserves.

Mario Basini

BLACK PARADE

CHAPTER 1

A HECTIC WEEKEND – SATURDAY

Two stark-naked young men in the living room of the cottage singing a duet from one of Dr Parry’s operas as a middle-aged woman picked up and hung away the pit clothes they had shed. They had both washed white the upper halves of their coal-blackened bodies, and the elder of the two was standing in the tub half filled with warm water washing his lower part, using the washing flannel with one hand, the other hand he used to screen his secret parts from the woman.

The duet ended, and the young man standing near the fireplace cried impatiently: ‘Come on, Glyn, hurry up out of that tub so as I can finish washing. There’s good beer waiting for me in a dozen places…’

‘How many times have I told you to leave your talk about the beer until you get outside this house?’ said his brother in an undertone. ‘The end of it’ll be that dad’ll hear you and then… and how many times have I told you about standing about naked and showing all you’ve got in front of Marged. Cover up, for shame’s sake.’

‘Oh, Marged don’t mind, ’tisn’t as if she was a slip of a girl. You’re not particular, are you, Marged?’

‘If I said I was it’d make no difference. Do you want me to wash your back, Glyn?’

‘If you please,’ said Glyn, kneeling down in the tub to enable her to do so.

‘Damned particular, ain’t you?’ grumbled the impatient Dai. ‘Every night you wash his back for him. If you only knew how weakening it is; once a week’s often enough to have the back washed.’

‘If you had it washed as often as Glyn, then I wouldn’t have to wash two of your shirts for every one of his,’ said the woman as she bent over the kneeling man and started washing the coal-dust from off his back.

‘Oh, so that’s why you’re always asking him to wash his back, is it? I thought there was something behind it.’ He rubbed his week’s growth of beard. ‘Well, if there’s many waiting in Humpy’s this’ll have to stay on till some time next week. I don’t believe in wasting time – and holiday time in particular – hanging about barbers’ shops.’

‘If you leave it much longer the barber will be able to play music on it,’ said Marged.

‘Ay, Annie Laurie with variations,’ laughed Glyn as he rose to his feet, his back clean and wiped dry. He swilled his soapy legs and stepped out of the tub on to the piece of sacking spread out near the fireplace. ‘Though I was nearly as bad until I went out for a scrape last night, for I knew it would mean waiting in Humpy’s a couple of hours if I left it until today.’

‘I’m not waiting any two hours,’ said Dai as he stepped into the tub.

‘I was going to get you clean water,’ said Marged.

‘Never mind, this’ll do. I’m not so particular as some people. You attend to Glyn, and turn him out smart, for he’s going to meet his wench, his lovely Saran, today.’

‘Shut up. No, not that shirt, Marged. My best flannel.’

‘And his best blue pilot suit, remember, Marged; and his best silk muffler and new ’lastic-sides. Yes, turn him out smart, for he got to make up for last Saturday when he got drunk and left her waiting…’

Glyn stopped his mouth with a slap from the rough towel.

‘You look after yourself, and leave me look after myself, Dai lad.’

They went on washing and dressing and singing. They were a handsome pair of young men, now that they could be seen free of the disguise of the coating of coal-dust. A bit Spanish-looking, of medium height, bodies graceful and slight, yet strong. Dark complexioned, wearing long, drooping, silky moustaches and tiny tufts just below the cleft of the lower lip. The elder wore earrings of gold wire, for his eyes’ sake, he maintained; his eyes having been strained in the darkness of the mine too soon after their first opening, for he had started work in the mines – against his father’s will – at the tender age of eight. The younger had two more years of boyhood, up to the age of ten, before he, too, started work in the mines under his brother’s wing.

Their father, a stonemason, had wanted them apprenticed to his trade, but the mother could see no sense in her lads working as apprentices for next to nothing during the years they might be earning what was regarded as big money in the mines; and as she was a strong-willed woman, her boys went to work down in the mines after they had had a few years’ schooling. For about five years they had worked from twelve to fourteen hours a shift in the mines, and each Saturday had proudly brought home their wages to her. Then, all of a sudden, she died. Marged, a girlhood friend who had never married, and who was about that time beginning to realise that her job as tram-woman on the bleak Cwm pithead was getting beyond her, came in to take care of the house and the father and two sons after her friend’s death; and ’twas lucky for them she did, for in less than a year after the mother’s death the father took to his bed never to leave it alive.

‘He’s in decline, poor fellow,’ Marged told the neighbours; and there he was now lingering on upstairs, cared for by the faithful Marged – loved by his boys and his only daughter, Mary, who had foolishly married… but of her and her feckless husband more later.

The two boys had been named Glyndwr and David, but it was only their father called them by their full names, to everyone outside the home they were ‘Glyn’ and ‘Dai’.

‘Shall I wash your back, Dai?’ Marged asked him.

‘Not today, no time today.’

‘Plenty of time, and God knows it wants washing with three shifts’ dirt on it; but you’re in a hurry to go out to get drunk, ain’t you? Better if the pair of you went to bed to rest for a few hours after working three shifts without a break, as you two have. Rushing out…’

‘Rest, my bottom,’ said Dai, stepping out of the tub on to the sacking, where he stood wiping his legs. ‘Plenty of rest when we’re dead. Today’s the beginning of August Monday for me, the only holiday worth a damn in the year. All…’

‘How can Saturday be the beginning of Monday, you fool?’ asked Marged.

‘It is for me, anyway,’ said Dai. ‘From now until I start back for the pit on Tuesday morning it’ll be August Bank Holiday for me. Too true it will. Only five days a year out of the pit, so make the most of ’em, I say.’

‘Yes, but see you don’t make as much of this one as you did of Whit Monday,’ said Glyn warningly as he fixed his high-crowned bowler hat so as to leave a little of his hair ‘quiff’ showing on the right side underneath the brim. ‘You know what I mean….’ He assumed the helpless look and posture of a drunken man. ‘That’s what I mean.’

‘You look after your bloody self,’ growled Dai.

‘And I can.’ He crossed to the foot of the stairs and called up: ‘I’m off out now, dad. S’long.’

‘S’long, Glyndwr.’

‘Mind you look after him, Marged,’ whispered Glyn, jerking a thumb upwards as he was going out.

The sunshine made him blink at first as he stepped outside the house and started walking from the Twyn across the eminence overlooking the second largest town in Wales to where his ‘wench’ lived in the end house of Brick Row. He smiled and nodded his head as the sound of the organ came up to him from the fairground in the town below. ‘They’re at it early,’ he murmured, stopping to look in the direction of the fairground. Immediately below him was the workhouse, the very thought of which made Marged shudder, he remembered, and below that again was spread out the rapidly growing and prosperous town of Merthyr Tydfil, which, he had been informed during his brief period of schooling, was the second largest town in Wales, ‘stands in the centre of the South Wales Coalfield, and manufactures large quantities of steel’. He stood surveying the scene from Troedyrhiw on the left to Dowlais Top on the right until he saw a young and powerful-looking man with a bundle on his shoulder approaching. Then he started to move on again, only to be pulled up by the stranger.

‘Could you tell me how to get to Bethesda Street, please?’

‘Huh?’ grunted Glyn aggressively.

The stranger repeated what he had said.

Glyn looked him over suspiciously. Yes, he thought, another of these farm-joskins, hundreds of whom were weekly flocking into the coalfield lured by the prospect of what seemed to them extraordinarily high wages. Glyn, like most of the native-born miners and steelworkers whose grandfathers could remember when ponies and donkeys transported what little coal and iron-ore was mined in the district, felt the reverse of friendly to the farmhands who were flocking in from the agricultural areas. They were, in the first place, generally speaking, so much bigger and stronger than the natives. And so humble, cringingly so, when the boss was about, no backbone to stand up for the rights of the miner, afraid to join the miners’ and steelworkers’ unions which were in formation, wouldn’t… anyway, Glyn had no time for them, big yobs, timid tight-purses…

‘Where did you say you wanted to get to?’ he snapped.

The stranger pulled out of his pocket a piece of paper on which an address had been written. ‘Here it is,’ he said, holding out the paper to Glyn after reading what was written thereon again. ‘Amos Davies, 46 Bethesda Street. That’s what Amos hisself wrote down for I when he were down home Christmas-time. Told I to mind and be sure to come to him as soon as I got here; and that he would most certain find I place to stay and a job of work.’

‘Humph. Where you from?’

‘From Hereford way, I be.’

‘Off a farm?’

‘That’s it, Edwards, The Croft… maybe you know it?’

Glyn, now beginning to thaw, shook his head. ‘And been doing a bit of walking by the look of you?’

‘More’n a bit, I been movin’ since daybreak.’

‘Well, you haven’t much further to go before you get to Bethesda Street.’ Glyn pointed down at the town. ‘See that big building down there? No, there, man. That’s the Drill Hall. Now, when you get to that… but there, come along, I’m going part of the way, so you may as well…’

Leaving whatever else he intended saying unsaid, Glyn started off with the big stranger at his side. For a time they walked in silence, then the stranger said: ‘Do you think as I’ll get me a job?’

Glyn laughed shortly. ‘What’s to stop you? You’re big enough, God knows.’

‘Lord, I be glad to hear you say that. And where do you reckon’ll be the best place for I to start at?’

‘Take your choice, stranger, take your choice, for there’s plenty of places waiting for the likes o’ you.’ He stopped to point away to the right and went on wasting irony: ‘Up there to the seven Dowlais pits – but maybe they’ll be a bit far for you to travel to and fro night and morning, so p’raps you’d better start in one or other of those six pits across there. Them’s the Cyfarthfa collieries, owned by Crawshay Brothers….’

‘I think Amos said ’e works in one o’ they.’

‘Then down there to the left there’s another six pits belonging to the Hills Plymouth Company.’

‘My, plenty of pits.’

‘Any God’s amount. Of course, if you’ve anything against being shot down a pit in a cage every morning – which’ll make you feel as though your belly’s flying out of your mouth – then we’ve got scores of nice drifts, levels and slopes running from the surface into those mountains, where you can walk on your own two pins right from the surface into your work, right into the coalface.’

‘My, that’d be grand.’

Glyn laughed. ‘Would it? No, not so bloody grand, stranger. Give me the pits any day, for in some of those slopes and levels you’re working up to your arse in water from morning to night. The pits are middling dry – and there’s the steelworks. Drier still, they are; so if you don’t like swallowing coal-dust you’d better get yourself a job in one of them. There’s the Dowlais works up there, that’s the biggest, though the Cyfarthfa works is nearly as big, and… but come on if you’re coming, for I’ve got somebody waiting for me.’

They walked down the slope leading into the town. ‘Amos,’ the stranger began again, ‘told I that there’s plenty of overtime to be had. Said as ’ow a man as is willin’ can work double time all the time. But p’raps Amos was only jokin’.’

‘Not him; you can work every hour God sends, work till you drop if you want to. Why, I’ve only just finished working a trebler.’

‘A trebler?’

‘Ay, three shifts down the pit without coming up for a break. That’s the trebler we work to get some extra beer-money.’

‘Oh, overtime?’

‘You can call it what you like, overtime or beertime; but whatever you call it all I can tell you is that I was down the pit from six o’clock yesterday morning until half past two this afternoon. And I wasn’t the only one by a long shot, most of the chaps do it, for the ships in Cardiff are waiting all the time for our coal…. Oh, here we are. I’ve got to meet somebody on this corner. You can’t miss Bethesda Street now, keep to your right until you reach the Drill Hall, and then straight on. S’long, and good luck.’

‘And I’m sure I be thankful to ’ee,’ said the stranger gravely as he walked on alone through the crowded street, leaving Glyn standing on the corner where he had promised to meet his Saran.

Hugging the corner in the hope of avoiding pit-mates who might tempt him to slip in and have just one whilst waiting, Glyn looked down the narrow and crowded street along which the stranger was slowly making progress towards Bethesda Street. Never before had Glyn known the street so crowded with people, most of whom were strangers to him. There had been a time when he could place at least nine out of every ten persons to be met with on the street, but now he couldn’t for the life of him place half of them. He stood and wondered where they all were able to live and sleep, these strangers who had flocked in from God only knew where to crowd the cottages of the neighbourhood, the beds of which had to work double shifts in order to provide rest for men more blest with work than with sleeping accommodation. Not that Glyn saw anything in the least wrong with men on the night shift waiting for the day shift to get up so as they could go to bed; neither was he aware of the wretched housing conditions of the district, conditions which were daily growing worse, and especially so in the neighbourhoods near the steelworks, those neighbourhoods upon which armies of Irish immigrants had descended; for it was the steelworks that the Irish workers favoured, very few of them ventured down the pits. But there were plenty of others coming in to feed the pits with labour power; from the north and west of Wales – and even from the west of England – there was a constant flow of men into the district, as alluring to them as Klondyke goldfields were to the penniless hordes who rushed off there.

The newcomers to the district, with the exception of the happy-go-lucky Irish, were far more sober and thrifty than the natives. Seldom did a North Walian waste his substance on riotous living; and ‘the Cardies’, those who came to the district from the hardbitten, agricultural Cardigan County, were even more thrifty and saving than their countrymen from the north. Those who came in from Carmarthen County were also careful in the extreme with their expenditure, with the result that after a few years’ hard work in the mines and hard saving in the homes, the immigrants from the agricultural counties of the Principality became grocers, clothiers – everything bar publicans – and left the hard work of the mines and steelworks to the natives again. These same careful ones were the backbone of Welsh Nonconformity, which was daily increasing its power for the attack on the Established Church in Wales.

Yes, they were a careful set of people. Glyn noted them that day picking their way through the main street, on which there were numerous drunken and rowdy natives, as though they were avoiding dogs’ messes. Glyn despised them, and grunted contemptuously as he watched them shepherd their too-damned-particular wives through the crowded street. Even carrying shopping baskets for the women, and who ever heard of a man carrying a basket for a woman before these namby-pamby water-drinkers came into the district?

Glyn looked at his Swiss Lever, of which he was very proud. Humph. She was ten minutes late. Trying to pay him out for last Saturday, was she? Well, he hadn’t intended to let her down – he tried to tell her that, but she wouldn’t listen – when he turned into his favourite pub to pay his weekly score and have the usual one on the house, which was the reward for prompt payment. But that pub was referred to as ‘the glue-pot’, anyway. So Saran had waited in vain for her Glyn. Now Glyn waited for a change, and wasn’t he growing impatient. Time after time he consulted the Swiss Lever, until at last he decided to toss up to decide whether he would go and have one, or walk across to where she lived to see what was keeping her.

‘Heads to get a drink, tails to fetch Saran,’ he muttered, tossing a penny into the air and catching it. ‘Tails.’ Disappointed, he was starting across to where Saran lived when he saw her brother Shoni hurrying towards him with a bundle under his arm.

‘I don’t want to meet this flamer,’ he muttered, bolting back to where the coal-trucks were standing at the rear of the Nelson Tavern, where he remained hidden until Shoni had passed by and down the main street. Then he went back to the corner again to wait. If he went across to the house he might run into Harry, and Harry was as bad as Shoni, if not worse. Yes, he thought, that’s the trouble with me and Saran, those blasted brothers of hers.

Two of them, twin brothers – there had been one other brother, but he died fighting Zulus with the South Wales Borderers – and Glyn often wished that Shoni and Harry would join the regulars and go abroad to some place where they would die like heroes or live without worrying him. But Harry and Shoni were too cute to do anything of that sort; the nearest they were to going was when they joined the Brecon Militia, but that was nothing more than an annual spree for them, for they were in and out of the guardroom during the period of the annual training. Yes, two rough handfuls, no doubt about that, who took advantage of Glyn because he was walking out with their sister. Continually asking for the loan of money, and ordering him to buy them beer whenever he was unfortunate enough to run up against them in a pub, and it was by no means easy to refuse them what they demanded. They’d fight just for the fun of fighting – well, Harry would, but when it came to working – no, thank you. Only horses and fools worked, they were always ready to maintain in argument or bare-knuckle fight.

So they seldom worked, and when they did they contributed but little towards the upkeep of the home, of which Saran was the main support. She earned very good money, being one of the leading hands at the brickyard where she had been employed from the age of ten; and many a time she had to use the poker to defend her earnings when her brothers went to the point of physical violence in an attempt to take by force what they had failed to borrow. The only time when there was anything like peace in the home was when they were away doing their annual training with the Militia. Yet, with all their faults, Saran wouldn’t allow anyone to say anything against her brothers in her presence; though at home she always shielded her wages and her parents from their attacks, outside the home she defended her brothers when people spoke against them.

Yes, a bright pair, Glyn was thinking as he saw Saran coming across the little bridge underneath which oozed along – it only ran or rushed after heavy rain – the most stinking brook in Britain. Glyn consulted the Swiss Lever again and frowned theatrically as Saran approached. She walked in the same challenging manner as her brothers, though in her case it was not swaggering. She was more than good looking. Her figure, though generously inclined, had been kept within bounds by the hard tasks imposed upon it daily in the brickyard, and her clear skin was fair, fairer even than the skin of Shoni, her brother. Open features, with two eyes, large and unwinking, set like two blue pools in her noble-looking head, which was crowned with an abundance of dark brown hair. Her feet, small and shapely, were encased in squeaky elastic-sided boots; but her hands – oh, what hands. Like a navvy’s through years of brick-handling.

Glyn tingled with pleasure as she drew near to him. ‘She gets to look smarter every day,’ he murmured, then assumed a frown. ‘And where do you reckon you’ve been till now?’ he growled as she came up to him smiling. ‘I’ve been waiting here since…’

‘Yes, and so did I wait last Saturday, more fool me, for you. And you needn’t look nasty at me, for I couldn’t leave the house till one of the two had gone. First Shoni took Harry’s black coat and waistcoat out of the drawer to take to pawn, and by trying to stop him I woke Harry, who was sleeping his beer off in the armchair. Then there was ructions, and mam and me had all our work cut out to stop them fighting again. So now you know.’

‘Ay, I just seen Shoni rushing by with a bundle under his arm.’

‘Yes, the shirt off his back, the only one he’s got. Took it to pawn so as to get enough to lift the latch.’

‘Well, if I had two brothers of that sort I’d…’

‘Yes, I know, you’ve told me before; but they happen to be my brothers, see. Well, where are we going?’

‘Down the fairground?’

‘Not much fun down there yet; tonight’s the time to go there.’

‘There’s nowhere else – unless we go to the Penydarren Park to see the foot-racing.’

‘No, I’d rather wait till Monday to see the bicycle races.’

‘Then what’ll we do?’

‘We can go for a bit of a walk, can’t we?’

‘I don’t feel like a lot of walking after working a trebler.’

‘That’s nothing; I could do it on my head.’

‘Yes, you gels can do a hell of a lot – with your mouths. Where do you want to go for a walk?’

‘What if we walk to Pontsarn and back?’

‘As you like. Come on.’

With his hands in the deep pockets of his flap-fronted, bell-bottomed trousers, and his head down as though ashamed to be seen in public with a girl at his side, he plunged into the crowd and pushed along, keeping about a neck ahead of Saran, who followed, not with a doglike air, but with the air of one driving a pig to market. As the horse-drawn bus on its way to Dowlais slowly came up Glyn suggested boarding it for a ride as far as the new Hospital.

‘Don’t be silly, boy,’ Saran told him. ‘What’s the matter with your legs; you must have plenty of money and want to waste some on bus-rides.’

‘I tell you that I was working yesterday, last night…’

‘… and today. Well, nobody forced you to.’

‘That’s all you know, fly-me; but what you don’t know is that if a man don’t put in a few shifts overtime the bosses damned soon let him know he’s not wanted.’

‘Well, you can go somewhere else, can’t you. Plenty of work about.’

‘I know there is, but a man don’t want to be hopping from one pit to another all the time with his tools on his back.’

‘Then don’t keep on about being tired.’ ‘I s’pose you’ll have the last word.’

‘Why shouldn’t I?’

He let her have it, and they pushed along in silence through the street crowded with people hurrying to get their shopping done so as to settle down to the drinking, fairing, fighting and various other diversions which made their rare holidays memorable, usually painfully so. As they pushed along they were hailed by friends, relations and acquaintances, many of whom extended invitations to drink with them or to accompany them to the foot-races, the fairground and other places. Glyn was more than once inclined to respond, and particularly when he was pressed to join one of the many wedding parties met with to drink some healths, for the August holiday was the favourite time for weddings in the district. Hundreds of young couples were joined together on the Saturday morning, and enjoyed what was a lengthy honeymoon for the likes of them before the man started work again on the following Tuesday morning. But Saran kept pushing him on past all invitations and temptations. When they were passing the new Hospital Glyn snorted loudly.

‘What’s the matter, Glyn?’

‘That blasted place.’

‘Well, what’s the matter with it?’

‘Plenty, butcher’s shop, that’s all it is.’

‘Don’t talk so daft.’

‘Talking daft, am I? Well, I’d as well go to hell any day as go to that place, and so would all I’ve ever worked with in the pits. Anything the matter – off it comes, that’s why there’s so many on crutches everywhere. A week last Tuesday I helped to carry Tom Roderick from the pit into that accident ward, and the next I heard was that they had taken his leg off. Phew, smell the damned place. Well, if ever anything happens to me down the pit I hope to God I either dies…’

‘Oh, shut up about dying.’

‘But indeed to God, Saran, them doctors are too fond of the knife for our good. We pay ’em twopence in the pound whether we’re bad or not, and then we’ve got to pay for the building of places like that, in which they practise on us with their knives. Humph, hospitals.’

‘Well, I think it’s a good job we’ve got one at last, and it’s a shame to think that there’s only that one for all this district. If anything happened to me…’

‘What, in a brickyard?’ Glyn laughed at the idea.

‘Lord, I didn’t know you had a laugh in you. Yes, in a brickyard; I’m as liable to get hurt there as you are in the pit, ain’t I?’

Glyn walked on in silence, looking back over his right shoulder every ten yards or so at the Hospital with distrust in his eyes, and five minutes away from the Hospital was the country, leafy, shady lanes, from the cool of which no sign of industrialisation could be seen. Woods and fields ready for the harvest. Birds singing, and rabbits hopping about. Glyn led the way into the depths of Goitre Woods.

‘Quiet out here, isn’t it?’ said Saran from the rear.

‘Ay; everybody’s in town.’ Glyn lowered himself to the ground. ‘Let’s sit here.’

Saran turned up her ‘bit of best’ skirt preparatory to seating herself. Couldn’t risk the soiling of her ‘bit of best’; the flannel petticoat was a different matter. Nobody saw that – well, nobody other than Glyn, to whom she was going to be married. So with her skirt turned up to her waist she sat in her petticoat at Glyn’s side. As she sat with her knees drawn up, her legs, encased in thick woollen stockings, came under Glyn’s notice. She blushed and drew down the bottom of the petticoat until it covered even the toes of her elastic-sided boots.

‘Isn’t it grand out here?’ he murmured, reaching for her hand.

‘It is that.’

For a time they sat holding hands, this hewer of coal and this handler of bricks, sat in silence for quite a time. Then Glyn said: ‘Damn, your hands are as rough as mine, if not rougher.’

So they were, though they were not as dirty looking as his. For his hands were scratched and cut in scores of places from wrists to fingertips by the coal he handled daily. And out of the cuts, probably owing to the heat of the afternoon, there oozed a certain blue-black moisture; but her hands, though rougher and more cut about, by the particles of brick against which even leather-guards were not altogether effective, were not as badly discoloured as his, neither did they exude any moisture.

‘Yes, quite as rough as mine,’ he repeated.

‘Can I help my hands being rough?’ she cried angrily, pulling her hand out of his; then, as he started running his hand upwards along her leg: ‘Now, for God’s sake don’t start messing me about.’

‘Hell, can’t a chap touch you?’ he growled.

‘Humph. Touch, indeed.’

He half turned to lie flat on his back and closed his eyes.

‘As if I didn’t know what would happen if I was foolish enough to let you start messing me about,’ she continued. ‘There’s more than one gel working in our brickyard who’ve been caught that way; and when the baby came they were left in the lurch, with everybody pointing their fingers at ’em.’ She stopped to listen, and afterwards murmured: ‘Now, who’d think we could hear the fairground organ from here? Why, we must be nearly two mile away from it.’ She looked down on his face, smiled. ‘Well, ain’t you a nice one,’ she lovingly chided in a murmur which became a lullaby as she continued. ‘You bring me out here to watch you sleeping, silly old boy that you are. Tired, is ’im, tired after working ’im trebler. Well, ’et ’im s’eep, den; and his Saran put ’im head in her lap and teep de old flies off ’im face. Dere ’im is….’

He slept sweetly and soundly after his thirty-odd hours’ continuous labour in the pit, with his head pillowed in Saran’s lap, slept for a few hours, hours during which she enjoyed herself studying his peaceful features. She murmured lullabies from time to time, as though anxious that he should sleep on; she would afterwards sit silent while she played with the long silver chain which encircled his neck twice before attaching itself to the Swiss Lever in his left-hand waistcoat pocket. She touched his face, fondled his hands. The sun was nearing the west when he awoke, and sat up.

‘What time is it?’ He looked at his watch. ‘Damn, it’s gone seven o’clock.’ He rose to his feet. ‘Why didn’t you wake a chap? Come on, let’s go back down, I want a drink, my mouth’s like a limekiln.’ He started off, leaving her to bring up the rear.

‘So you’re going on the booze tonight again?’

‘I said I was going to have a drink.’

‘Yes, I know; same as last Saturday. Well, you can go for all I care. I expect you’ll be reeling drunk long before I’m out of the threeatre.’

‘Not I…. And how many more times must I tell you that it’s theatre, and not “threeatre”?’

‘I’ll call it what I like; it’s me that’s going there, isn’t it?’

‘I’m only telling you for…’

‘Yes, but you needn’t bother; you hurry off to get your share of the holiday beer.’

‘Now, Saran, don’t get nasty – I’ll tell you what.’ They were nearing the little wooden theatre. ‘If you wait here until I’ve had one, and only one, pint in the Black Cock, I’ll come with you. Not that I care to be seen going to the damned place, but as it’s holiday-time…. What’s the play tonight?’ he said, walking across to a crazy little hoarding to consult the playbill.

‘A gel in the brickyard told me it was Sweeney Todd,’ said Saran as she followed him across.

‘Well, it’s not, it’s The Dumb Man of Manchester.’ He pointed. ‘There you are. “Saturday, August 2nd. Mr Cavendish as The Dumb Man of Manchester.” See for yourself.’

‘Well, you know I can’t read; but it’s all the same to me whatever’s on; though the gel in our brickyard said…’

‘“Our be damned. People’d think you owned the place to hear you talk.’

‘How many more times are you going to pick me up about my…’

‘Then talk properly and… here’s a shilling. Get yourself some oranges and nuts and wait here for me until I’ve swallowed a pint in the Black Cock. Shan’t be a jiffy.’

With her bags of oranges and nuts in her hands Saran waited about half an hour outside the little theatre, which by this time was crowded. ‘Only standing room at the back left now,’ the checker at the door, who knew Saran well, told her. On hearing that she walked down as far as the Black Cock and knowingly broke the unwritten law, the law forbidding women on pain of a terrible hiding to call a man out of his drinking place.

‘Is Glyn Morgan in there?’ she asked a man who was coming out.

‘Ay, I think he’s in the taproom.’

‘Will you ask him to come out to me a minute? Saran, tell him.’

‘Go and tell him your bloody self, you cheeky bitch you. By God, it’s coming to something when a man can’t have his pint without being bothered by flaming women. Lucky for you that you’re not a gel of mine….’

Saran pushed past him and on to the entrance to the taproom, which was crowded. Through the smoke she could see her Glyn, forming one of a jolly group who were harmonising around a small table in the left-hand corner at the far end of the room.

‘Glyn,’ she cried aloud, and a deadly silence ensued. All present were shocked beyond description when they looked towards the door of the taproom and saw standing there one of the sex which should never be seen when men were devoting themselves to the serious, and almost sacred business of drinking. True, women might crowd with other women in the jug-and-bottle departments which were partitioned off from the temples sacred to Bacchus to get the liveners their husbands demanded when awakening with a fat head in the morning; and as a reward for going some husbands, though not many, went so far as to allow their wives to take a glass of something themselves, but only in the jug-and-bottle.

But here was a young woman at the door of the taproom. All the men present, after having believed their eyes, looked to where Glyn was seated with some others in the corner in a way which said plainer than words: ‘Will you please attend to this matter, and deal with this female as she deserves to be dealt with. A pair of black eyes would do her the world of good, and the loss of a few of her front teeth might help to remind her of the danger of rushing in where women should never even lightly tread.’

Glyn knew very well what all present expected him to do. He rose to his feet, and with fist clenched in readiness swaggered across to the door. ‘Well,’ he growled, ‘what the hell do you want?’

Before he could say more she had thrown the bag of oranges and nuts into his face. ‘Just brought you your oranges and nuts,’ she said as she turned and walked out of the place, leaving Glyn to wilt under the contemptuous laughter of those in the taproom until it forced him to leave the place.

Saran, having almost forgotten the incident, was, with two other girls who worked in the brickyard, standing at the back of the little wooden theatre enjoying Act Two of The Dumb Man of Manchester when her Glyn left the Black Cock, where he considered he had been made to ‘look simple’ by her, to walk off his temper.

By this time the narrow main street was packed with people in holiday attire, and in holiday mood. Many men, and also a few women, were already drunk enough to require the combined efforts of relatives and weeping children to assist them homewards. The dead drunks, of whom there were quite a few, Glyn noted, were like Aunt Sallies, at which scores lined up before the stalls were throwing wooden balls; they were without friends or relations, so they were merely shunted from under people’s feet around some corner where they could sleep off the drink that had rendered them quite incapable. All shops and public houses overflowed with people, and there were crowds before the stalls which for over a quarter of a mile were lined up against the bank which buttressed the wall enclosing Penydarren Park. Glyn’s progress through the street tight-packed with people was so slow that he was able to take in and note the various attractions, swindles, caterers and so on, lined up under the wall of the Park.

The boxing booths owned and managed by those friendly rivals, Prof Billy Samuels and Prof Patsy Perkins, around both of which were large crowds, didn’t interest Glyn much, for he was not ‘a lover of the noble art’; but he couldn’t help hearing what Billy Samuels and Patsy Perkins barked that evening from the raised platform before the entrance to their respective booths, on which they were supported by a quartet of battered bruisers, introduced to the crowd as ‘my troupe, and as fine a lot of fighters as ever were presented to Merthyr’s lovers of the noble art’.

‘Never mind what Patsy’s saying; you listen to me,’ Prof Billy Samuels was shouting. ‘Patsy – he’s a Cardiff man, I believe – has got one man as can fight a bit, so I’m told, but I’m willing to back either of these four men of mine as are standing here. Here they are, take a look at ’em…’

‘… I’ll back this lad here, this black man, for fifty pounds to beat either of them four old faggots Bill’s shouting the odds about,’ roared Prof Patsy Perkins. ‘Fifty golden sovereigns…’

‘… Hasn’t got fifty pence,’ Prof Billy Samuels informed the crowd. ‘If he had, this lad of mine, this one here, would have eaten that six feet of black pudding Patsy’s got over there. Here, I’ll tell you what – I’m a sport, I am – and if Patsy’s agreeable I’ll match this lad of mine…’

Glyn had managed to push through beyond the sound of challenge and counter-challenge when a couple of giggling girls squirted water out of ‘Ladies’ Teasers’ down his neck. He swore at them for silly fools. Buying water in leaden tubes to squirt at people. Softness, he thought. He walked past the Indian doctor’s painless-extraction stand, and past the stands of other wonder-working quack medicos; on past stalls that were rapidly being cleared of their stocks of oysters, mussels, cockles; past little portable cookhouses from which steaming-hot faggots and peas were being served to those who liked their food hot even in August. Then on past the stalls catering for those afflicted with a sweet tooth, hordes of whom were shouting for supplies of cheap boiled sweets, brandy-snaps and gingerbread.

Glyn stopped to try his luck at the lucky-packet swindle that was being worked right in the open. The man running the swindle sold the packets at a shilling, ‘and when you open it you may have the surprise of your life, but nobody’s to open the packet until I give the word.’ Having disposed of more than a score at a shilling apiece, he again gave the word, and in each of the packets the buyers of same found about twopennyworth of goods. But there were two of the buyers who proudly displayed golden sovereigns which they said they had found in their packets. Unfortunately for them and for the man running the swindle someone in the crowd recognised the lucky one as the man who been just as lucky several times on a Saturday evening a few weeks previous. Over went the stand, and down underfoot went packets, the seller of same, and his now unlucky accomplices.

The police were rushing up as Glyn moved off to where an old woman dressed in old Welsh costume was selling cockles. At the rear of her stall an ‘Under and Over’ gamble was being operated.

‘Now, gentlemen, why not try your luck. Evens under, evens over, and three to one the lucky old seven. Come on, the more you put down the more you pick up. One chap’s just walked away a couple of pound better off than he came. So slap it down, gents, and…’

Glyn moved on to where old Davies, MA, was competing with hoarse barkers on his right and left. ‘Excerpts from the Classics’ was the line of the old man who had blown into the district from God only knows where. Some there were who said that he had been headmaster of a high school somewhere in England; and that he had lost that job and others through his addiction to drink…. But there were all sorts of rumours; yet all that was known for certain was that he stayed at one of the many common lodging houses situated in the Iron Bridge district of Merthyr, where he paid fourpence a night for a bed and certain other easements and that he was to be found most evenings, weather permitting, declaiming in the open on some pitch or other in order to obtain the money to pay for his bed, a little food and as much drink as he could buy after he had met his food and shelter obligations.

He was a tall and physically upright old man, who wore when dressed to appear before his ‘public’ a threadbare frock coat. With his unkempt, reddish-grey beard and fiery eyes, he looked the reverse of appealing. Yet there was something which impressed a few of those who stood to listen to him. Glyn was always impressed though why or how was more than he could explain. Maybe it was the ‘I am captain of my soul’ air of the old chap. Whatever it was, there were a few who delighted in listening to him, openly contemptuous of his audiences though he was.

Glyn arrived at the old man’s pitch just as he was concluding something from Doctor Faustus. He snorted as the faint applause with which his offering had been received died away, and with a downward motion of the hand strained his beard of some saliva he had discharged into it during his latest effort to educate the masses. Then he smacked his lips and started a gagging interlude.

‘Well, gentlemen,’ he commenced in a tone in which the note of sarcasm was scarcely veiled, ‘I propose rendering one more of my famous masterpieces of elocution, after which, providing you have not melted before then, I will allow you to show your appreciation in the generous manner you usually do. I hardly know what next to favour you with. Perhaps it would be better if I left the selection to you, students of the Classics…’ He broke off to chuckle into his beard. ‘So, I await your commands, gentlemen, but, I implore you, do not ask me to deliver “Horatius” again, for that thing is beginning to repeat with me. Come along, please,’ he cried impatiently. ‘What is it to be? You should know my repertoire by this time. Now.’

He looked out on the crowd expectantly; they regarded him woodenly.

‘What, are you in a hurry to go across to the Nelson for a drink, Davies?’ shouted one who had the reputation of a wag.

‘Frankly, I am, sir,’ replied Davies.

‘Then give us the death of little Eva and then bugger off for your drink,’ shouted the same man, who got a laugh from the crowd.

‘Sorry, sir,’ said Davies, ‘but that lachrymatory masterpiece is reserved for female audiences.’

‘What about that piece you recites about the man and his dagger?’ Glyn shouted from his place in the crowd.

‘The dagger speech from Macbeth. With pleasure, sir.’

After straining his beard once more, he cleared his throat and started to declaim, and went on until he was interrupted by a drunken fat man who staggered up to him to ask: ‘Wha’ you sellin’?’

“O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt,” Davies murmured.

‘Wha’ the hell you mumbling about?’ oozed the fat man.

‘Sir,’ cried Davies, ‘I’ve a few more pearls to cast, so with your kind permission…’

‘Oh, is tha’ wha’ you sellin’? I don’ wan’ any bloody pearls. I thought you was sellin’ some o’ them – some – you know wha’. Some – some – but being as you haven’t – don’ matter a damn, anyway.’

He staggered off towards the nearest portable cookhouse for some peas and faggots, leaving Davies to complete the interrupted soliloquy. Before the faint applause which his offering evoked had subsided Davies was pushing his old bowler hat into the faces of those who had stood their ground long enough to enable him to get to them. Most of the crowd dropped coppers into the hat, Glyn dropped a sixpenny piece, and surprised old Davies, who, after a long look at the sixpenny piece shining brightly from the midst of its humbler fellows in the hat, stared fixedly for a few moments into Glyn’s face. ‘And you are sober,’ he quietly said.

‘Well, what about it?’ said Glyn in the tone of one admitting guilt.

‘And you tossed a sixpence into the old man’s hat. Do you know what Carlyle said about a man with sixpence in his possession?’

‘No, not I. Who’s Carlyle?’

‘He is, well, he is not little Willie’s father. He is the man who preached…. Would you be interested to hear what he thought of this place, this up-and-coming town of yours?’

‘I don’t care a damn what he or anybody said about it.’

Davies took a huge pinch of snuff, then held the box out to Glyn, who shook his head and said: ‘I’ve got my pipe.’

‘So did Carlyle have his, but he was never much the happier for it. He must have looked down on this town of yours on one of his bad days, for what he said about it was: “A place never to be forgotten when once seen. The bleakest spot above ground… a non plus ultra of industrialism, wholly Mammonish, given up to the shopkeeper, supply and demand; presided over by sooty darkness, physical and spiritual, by beer, Methodism, and the devil, to a lamentable and supreme extent.” Yes, and this is the place in which I look like having to end my days,’ cried Davies as though in pain.

‘Well, whoever that man was,’ said Glyn stolidly, ‘he might have said our town was hell and saved all them long words. But he couldn’t have known what he was talking about, for this place is the most coming place in Wales, and in years to come it’ll be a rich city. And how can that man talk about the devil being here when we got more chapels than any other place in Wales – yes, more than Cardiff.’

‘Chapels won’t save your town from the devil; neither will this place ever be a rich and abiding city, young man. Once the earth is raped the people of substance will depart, leaving you and your sort to rot…’

‘It’s you are talking rot, Davies. But, there, what do you know about the place. Better you stick to your reciting.’

‘Perhaps you are right, young man. Will you come across the way to have a drink with me?’

‘No, not to the Lord Nelson, thank you all the same. I wouldn’t wash my feet in what they sell there at the best of times, let alone the beer they get in for holiday-time.’

‘Yes, I know, but I never drink beer during holiday periods,’ explained Davies as he started across to the Lord Nelson, leaving Glyn to do what he pleased.

Having seen Davies disappear into the pub, Glyn again pushed his way along the crowded street. He muttered angrily when he saw his brother Dai, who appeared to be at least three-parts drunk, tossing for drinks near one of the cockle stalls with a man even drunker than himself.

What a day, Glyn was thinking during his slow progress down the street. First Saran had made him look simple as hell in front of all those chaps in the Black Cock. It would be some time before he heard the last of that. And now Dai, drunk and throwing his hard-earned bit of money all over the place before the holiday was properly started.

In anything but holiday mood he continued along the street until he reached the Eagle Hotel, the first of the huge, new-style drinking places the brewers had erected to meet the rapidly increasing demand for drinking room. Glyn thought it a fine place, so did all the finer type of young miners, that small minority able to read and fond of music. Yes, the Eagle was the place for them, for the Eagle had a large and well-conducted singing room, a bar parlour, and instead of the sand which grated so under one’s feet in most of the other drinking places of the district, there was clean sawdust nearly an inch above all floors and in the bronze spittoons, into which it was a pleasure to spit. Then again, the Eagle had glass pint measures of two shapes – one could see the colour of what one was drinking.