Flame and Slag Read online

  Ellen raised one, two, three fingers. “From now on, Reesy, it’s you, me and the baby. Shall I read, or shall we …”

  “Put Lydia in her pram and we’ll stroll across to the woods. Afternoon shift tomorrow,” I said. “Long lay in in the morning.”

  Deceptive as a summer iceberg, Ellen said, “The way you arrange our lives around the pit.”

  “It’s easy, beaut, like facts and figures.”

  5

  Concerning figures — apart from Ellen’s 37, 26, 38. Try figuring Time and you’re in a state of obstruction from the start. What I mean is you finish clogged around where you started, unless you form a Theory, become a brilliant artiste of manifesto squiggles. Theorist squigglers are responsible for sonic bangs and mental derailment; they’re our Em Ones for strap-hanging right out of existence by the neck. They can’t discuss murder or the cost of fags with a wagon repairer, not over a casual sort of man-to-man pint.

  God again, where does one get in trying to measure the facts about God? Figure Him out for fair. You’ll hear the sweetest talkers on earth assessing God. Language lemmings they are, and we reckon to ourselves, that’s it, that’s as far as he can possibly go. God-wise he’s there, he’s reached his Lordward limit. Then the wandering telly camera happens to poke at him when he’s listening, someone else explaining (another Almighty statistician), and by the crucified Christ he looks bad, worse than poorly, he looks ill. He’s unloved. Unloveable — like most of us. But unlike a child crying from belly-ache or napkin rash, his whole ontology bleeds, drip-drip-dripping away. Haemophilia of the soul. He’s diseased by a faintish kind of evil perpetuated in the name of Godliness and holiness. Other talkers, natural preachers or what-not, those who sing cliché symbols instead of getting down to minting fresh facts and figures, they aren’t really bothered about God. He’s handy, up there out of the way. For certain you wouldn’t trust them; you couldn’t imagine them turning the other cheek, keep taking it (IT: i.e. adversity, animosity, hatred, love in reverse or the simple mayhem of thrombotic frenzy) left and right until altruism or the State interfered. As a matter of fact, the plain fact of any man feeling himself precious enough to tackle destiny, fate, free-will, conscience, life at his own pace in his own time, allowing leeway for neighbourliness, private diversions, sensible obligations, bouts of ’flu, climatical vagaries, genetical hazards, chance, any such self-identifying man, precious and paying the price for it, is fully armed against other men who figure out destiny, etc., and dictatorially (or governmentally, depends how you react) launch theirs as perfect, date-stamped forged for infinity. For the kind of painless history recorded in Whitaker’s.

  I’m recommending long-term trial and error disintegration, perhaps, as opposed to compulsory One-ness. Perhaps there’s more information in disintegration, less need for the equivalent of another Christ. Savouring saviours usually chafes through to the marrow-bone, and sheer numbers clotting our homo calendar make the absolutely first saviour-bloke who vouchsafed ‘I love YOU’ sound like a gink, of course, he wasn’t at all, not even if he’d clubbed down a queue of panting beaux who couldn’t posit ‘I luv ya’, let alone utter it. Besides, no doubt he, the very first, was probably addressing his mother or his sister. It’s a healthy, starving thought. In keeping with feeling precious enough to pay the price.

  Regarding figures. Someone or maybe hundreds co-ordinated altogether, calculated the Caib tip-slide problem. Working most weekends I spent months clearing the muck and rubble out of number 9 Thelma Street. Six houses opposite were written off as beyond repair, back-sides they were still buried up to the slates. We had assurances from the NCB; they were going to pay in full for repairs, redecorating, refurnishing, the lot. And all that summer walking-stick pensioners with waddling, patient old dogs stood watch and reported progress in the pubs and clubs. Huge yellow earth-shifters and red and black draglines clove a vast basin out of the tip, dumpers and lorries hauling it farther north around Waunwen, unloading the muck nearer the upper reaches of Daren river, where if it slipped again only the native trout population would suffer. Post-glacial trout, their progenitors miraculously arrived, spawning in the barren river — but no matter about the chewed residue of Daren ecology.

  Various specialists came, judgement-gutted with integral calculus, experts qualified to estimate costs in terms of death and property. Not a soul in Daren queried the cost of hiring the draglines, earth-shifters, lorries from private firms; nobody balanced this cost against the coal filled out from Caib since 1926. Somewhere, obviously, button-tappers were wriggling the figures off machines in offices where a ramping human fart would dislocate the cerebellum. Somewhere records were mounting up, but overall old Daren boomed. Pubs, grocers, cafés, even the chapels had their dose of uplift. Then a new edict came in November 1959. The Coal Board offered cash payments for the twenty houses in Thelma Street, thus obliterating Mrs Thelma Gibby, too, Joseph Gibby’s memorial to her after he proved steam coal in the Caib.

  Consequently Mrs Kate Vaughan returned from Hampshire, collected two thousand quid — Thelma Street designated for clearance under Town and Country Planning in any case — bought Lydia a pink knitted suit and turned her back on Daren for always. Feckless, durable Mike Minty’s daughter Kate, brought over the parish road; she left me the best of her life: Ellen.

  Looters moved in. Once the rumour floated that extended colliery railway sidings were to replace Thelma Street, they went into action like locusts. Vans, cars, handcarts, prams, you’d see them trekking to and from the ruined street. Small boys marched the lanes with a couple of rafters, slates, or maybe a pair of water taps wrapped in Daren & District Clarion. Scrap merchants struck with acetylene torches on railings, front gates, guttering, downpipes. Wash-basins vanished, doors, window sashes, coal-sheds, baths, firegrates, floor tiles grained with slurry, with muck ripped, dug, shovelled out of the Caib by the thieves’ grandfathers, great-grandfathers if they helped make the original slag-tip outside Waun Level.

  Mrs Cynon was outraged. “Anybody’d swear nine out of ten families were living on the parish as we had to during the strikes,” she said, Lydia cooped in her left arm, her right hand sweeping disgust, a big florid woman, heavy boned, full mouthed as an innocent voluptuary, hacking at the morality of Daren.

  “You expect people to change, Selina?” Ellen said, inquiring formally, finding it normal the way Thelma Street was attacked, denuded like a providential offering.

  “Everything is changing for the better, merch,” urged Mrs Cynon. “There’s myself on widow’s pension plus allowances, d’you see, Ellie, better off now than when my father slaved all hours, bless him, to keep a roof over our heads and enough food in our stomachs.”

  “But you’ve seen two wars, Selina,” — the smile on Ellen’s face evoking sanction, live and let live.

  “Ach, wars didn’t hurt us worse than Caib tip falling down. We mustn’t expect plain sailing! Trials are sent to test us. What I’m against is carrying on like that!” — the old lady stanced in judgement, pointing across at Thelma Street, the baby gurgling up at her, Mrs Cynon squinting over her bulbous nose, queenly solicitous, “Beth sydd yn bod arnoch chwi nawr, cariad?”

  The day of reckoning never came. Authorized NCB demolishers arrived, packed dynamite under the walls, warning sirens groaned and after the explosions bulldozers churned in, lorries behind them, Thelma Street site levelled off like a recreation ground within a fortnight. And about a month later coal trucks buffered and shunted beneath a new aerial bucket system that lifted Caib muck half a mile around Waunwen to the new tip.

  Daren women were still wearing mourning headscarves. Plain squares of black nylon, shilling each, Marks and Spencers.

  The boom continued when the German engineering firm, now registered in Great Britain — the same Deutschland capital that Adolf Hitler spent, feeling himself exceeding precious, poor driven gout-head-started the underground roadway to the Seven Feet seam. Hard-grafting men, these Germans, Poles, Ukrainians. Money-men, li
ke the early ones in Daren who needed two and three generations to cultivate themselves, to feel they belonged, were homogeneous to mining and therefore privileged, entitled to respect if not adequate reward for their insular role, mining being a full-time role, more a way of life than other production jobs, carrying with it the paradox of self-sufficient arrogance and the unique fatalism that succumbs to change, is incapable of change. The principles of Change: evolutionary, devolutionary, involutionary, revolutionary, of progress and regress, of ingression, eggression and digression. Survival hurts poets — and miners, sailors, soldiers, slaves, for whom mining, the seas, soldiering and slavery is greater than themselves, as poets are governed by abstract language. London’s Westminster and Daren’s borough council, neither of these can leave scratch marks more significant than those on the cave walls of Altimara.

  Rees Stevens doesn’t have to blurb this piece either. Naked facts and figures are published every year in Whitaker’s. Histories embalmed, egos preserved without a creak, flawless, bang-on as yesterday’s weather. Anyone can use Whitaker’s for anything, any year book, any chart, statistical record, any statement of accounts. Vide Whitaker’s 1960, in terms of mining, first the destiny deciders: NCB Chairman, £10,000 a year plus £1,000 expenses; Deputy Chairman, £8,000 a year plus £500 allowance; six Board members at £7,500 a year, plus £500 allowances; four part-time members at £1,000 a year. Secretary of the Board and under-secretary, salaries not given. Nine director-generals, salaries not given. Nine chairmen of divisional boards, salaries not given. Right then, these are the supermen, the long-heads, the brains, statutory and paid for, like we elect and pay for Ministers, panjandrum councillors, inland revenue wizards, the whole incendiary civil service galaxy. Then a little tailpiece in Whitaker’s says: ‘Estimated average earnings, including Allowances in Kind of all adult male workers in 1960 was £16.4.0 per week.’ Observe the charming definitive, workers.

  But what a calculation! The last penny accounted for, issued direct from Hobart House to Whitaker’s. Disrespectfully compare this tailpiece with the nice round-figure salaries paid to Board administrators and the records of coal production and distribution. All those blind noughts frothing at the end.

  Now, quoting from the Welsh press, Celtic culture’s hallelujah horn, our upside-down, jock-strapped cornucopia:

  ‘117 pits have been closed in Wales since 1946.’

  Aye indeed, we were nationalized in 1947.

  There are no publicized records of men (numbers, when and where) suffering from dust, no how, when and where record of the disabled, but the NCB annual statement of accounts does publish the total amount of money paid to disabled miners and ex-miners. Thuswise, pussy and hard-handed comrades, figures on paper determine self-preciousness and destiny, and bugger them about considerably, most often regardless.

  Pardon the taint of spleen, of plebeian bile.

  Back in 1960 we had no qualms about Caib colliery. The coal was there in the Four Feet, millions of tons of high-grade steam coal. Only two explosions in thirty-four years, the killed men forgotten, just about forgotten. Ours was a good pit. In 1960 we had a sharp lodge committee. Compo cases were looked after, we ran a tote for pensioners, gave them £5 hampers and a cheque every Christmas. Daren Dramatic Society was established in Caib institute. We had ten chapels and a Welsh Church of England, two cinemas, a film society, three pigeon clubs, a dog fanciers’ club, four soccer teams, cricket and rugby teams, the Women’s Guild was a power combine, Daren and District Angling Association, a bowls team, motor-cycle club, Barclay’s and Midland banks were thriving on H.P. deals, and the railway tunnel under Waunwen was still open in 1960. We had a swimming pool. The Houghton Four X brewery flourished, serving nine pubs and two affiliated clubs, plus the Earl Haig and Daren Social and Welfare Club (bingo three nights, dances two nights, concerts two nights), and the borough council were planning their two-phase housing project costing three million pounds.

  Two thousand Daren folk, mostly girls, worked in a radio and television factory.

  In 1960 the NCB built new screens, washery and flocculation plants for Caib colliery. The Germans, Latvians, Ukrainians and Poles were here, those denationalized characters, couthless but without the bedlam innocence of roaming navvies, drilling, blasting the new underground roadway, shuttling in with their Eimco machines regardless of powder smoke and water, but they wouldn’t handle a shovel if they could help it. In the site office on top pit, you’d see a photograph of Queen Elizabeth II on one wall and a doctored portrait of the owner’s German wife on the opposite wall. Our Queen for patriotism, the other for money. Maybe the times were propitious. Times change. The German firm came without a blip of publicity. They simply arrived, rigged up their gear, sank pits, drove extensive link headings, built factories. Their men did not come to Wales to ease a labour shortage, they came to do business, make legitimate profit.

  Tal Harding boarded four Germans in his empty bungalow, Tal himself living forlorn as any father-hammered son in the flat above Daren general post office. Mrs Cynon fostered a Pole named Fred Fransceska. When Fred married a barmaid from the Earl Haig club big Percy acted best man again, his mother in charge of the invitation list. Fred belonged. He’d worn Silesian coal scars on his face since boyhood. Ellen liked Fred. She befriended him. They both ignored questions unrelated to living from day to day. Ellen’s ideas were governed by the assumption that we lived between waking and sleeping, easy when easy, greedy if necessary, scrimping without remorse, pleasuring without guilt. When Fred Fransceska got drunk in our house he showed us where a Russian bullet had ploughed through his buttock, and he was slavering sobs like a ruined behemoth, his underpants around his ankles, Ellen weeping sympathy, Lydia crying because they were, Morfed (Fred’s new wife, half his age) sprinting down the street to Waun Arms for more whisky to dilute her first experience of Fred expressing the blues of his youth.

  Early spring glorified Daren, warming inland from across the Bristol Channel, crazy yellow daffodils guarding the lawn outside Caib institute, the background trees, all hardwood timber, storming massed leaf buds, and Waunwen’s huge black scar completely stabilized, prinking special grass seed planted by the Coal Board, who were still dealing with claims for injury and death. The tip-slide a full year behind us, Daren’s solitary, deserted Welsh Church of England taking a glossy face-lift conversion into a supermarket, and weekly notices in the Clarion advising relatives to attend re-burials of exhumed bodies from the churchyard. There they were, many forgotten, entirely unknown Staffordshire and English Border names from over a century ago, from earlier times when only ironmasters worked the soft bituminous coal from mountain levels, the whole uprearing landscape of Daren pocked with these small, overgrown, caved-in holes, each with its hummocky mound-spill of debris turned green as the institute’s front lawn.

  “Green always comes back,” Ellen said. “It’s silly, all the shouting and screaming about coal-tips. Look at Daren, marked like an old man’s face, and what’s wrong with that? I hated coming home, but now we’re living our own lives. It’s good to live your own life.”

  “You hated circumstances,” I said.

  “I did … this time I hope we get a boy,” pausing from cutting sandwiches to thumb at her belly. “Brother for Lydia.”

  I said, “Beaut, you don’t have to make my breakfast in the mornings. Stay in bed. I can fix things for myself.”

  “Hush up, I’m not helpless. Who had a bump yesterday? They were talking about him in the Co-op.”

  “Bloke from lower down. Eddie ’Lectric we call him. He was on extracting — extracting cogs; something hit him in the face.”

  “Will he lose his eye?”

  “Left eye, aye, according to our ambulance man. I hope to Christ not, because Eddie’s all right. His father went to prison for singing the Red Flag outside the manager’s house. Years ago now, years and years. The bastards took him in for disturbing the peace.”

  “I worry about you sometimes, Reesy.”

>   “Don’t,” I said. “The Caib isn’t going to hurt me, not after what happened to Dai Stevens.”

  “Only you can learn to live with that, my love.”

  “I know.”

  Her sphinx smile glimmered. “It’s always I know. Of course you do — often. Often. I fell for you straight away, didn’t I? I mean it was one of the reasons, but, Rees, what I think is this: you don’t care about ordinary things. Ordinary things annoy you. Yes, yes, let me finish!” She re-tied the sash cord around her bulging dressing-gown. Lovely, I thought, lovely Ellen.

  “Remember this, boy?” she said, waving the foolscap sheets.

  “Last year, the NCB competition, World Without War.”

  “Aye, World Without War,” I said. “Their title.”

  “We should have sent it in, Rees.”

  “Doesn’t matter, Ellen. Shove it back between your lovely …”

  “Hush!” Her voice thickened:

  “ ‘World Without War.

  But first the premise: Could we inhabit it?

  Braided hordes of eagled, star-pipped marchers

  Seldom diagnosed as mad, our solid muscled

  Swaddies desperately bored, the defiant erk,

  Taut, as much concerned about his father’s

  DSO as girls, our honest, devious matlows

  Shaped to blind obedience. We, then, ourselves

  Inherit (query) peace, this earth’s untruth,

  Where fisted tables snowball further

  Ultimatums?

  Many of us are television natives.

  Or shall any racket, private row between any two

  Be resolved in murder? Our cliques, claques,

  Caballers, families their ample precedent.

  Perhaps first a pre-premise, necessary discretion

  In allegiance to Mr C. Darwin, perhaps,

  Should be mooted, measured, weighed in wanting