Flame and Slag Page 8

  “Pavings?” inquired Llew, spavined like a Middle Ages grotesque over his black stick. “For why, Selina?”

  “Ellen’s pram, Llew. She won’t have to bring it through the house every time, and with the second one coming soon, do you see, Llew, more convenient, isn’t it?”

  Alienated from prams, Llew hecked away a couple of paces, the threaded milk-bottle tops spinning, softly thrumming on the taut white cotton criss-crossed over short sticks pegged into the ground all the way up the yard. He reminded me of my grandmother, the same blind self-commitment. “Dere ’ma, Selina,” he said gruffly, leaving us now, tracking out to the gate with the same bristling purpose as Granny Stevens. Syndrome of the indefatigable Celt, his intransigent attitude: Watch out, I am on my way, informing Mrs Cynon without raising his head, then standing like a withered tree for her to open the gate and limping away, his duty done.

  Mrs Cynon repeated Llew’s advice, saying, “He will speak to the Council foreman. It’s up to us to pay transport from the Council yard. Lovely flagstones for you, from the pavements in Thelma Street.”

  Ellen said, “No, thanks, I don’t want them, not from Thelma Street.”

  “I’ll tell Llew, let him know the position,” I said, running the unseeded pathway curve out to the gate. But he’d gone.

  “Leave this to me,” promised Mrs Cynon. “Vernon Price -Plasterer, he’ll know what’s best. I’ll have a quiet little chat with him.”

  So we had a poured concrete path, the pale seedlings half an inch high, tightly sown, green for always when our Elizabeth was born.

  The message came down the pit at 10 a.m., another sandy-haired baby girl, weight seven pounds. Mother and child doing well.

  “On the piss tonight — celebrate,” Charlie Page said, bending his elbow, taking the blade of his shovel up to his mouth. “Wait till you’ve knocked out eight like me; gets a bit abnoxious by then. I shan’t forget the time my old gel dropped a miscarriage in the Gaiety — let’s see, ten years come next September. Honest, my main thought was, thank the lovin’ Jesus. I was playing cork pool over in the ’stute, six of us in the game an’ I won the bloody pool.

  She had our last baby the day those Russians sent up their first Sputnik, October the fourth it was, nineteen-fifty-seven. Now she can’t have any more since they op’rated on her. Bad year that was for us, seven bob rise for wagemen and the following year the bastards asked us to work six shifts a week. Christ, our fathers must’a turned over up there in Daren cemetery. Us silly buggers, we fought an’ fought for the five-day week.”

  I said, “What about if you had your time all over again, Charlie?”

  “Nothing wrong with a man trying to dig his grave with his weapon,” he said. “Nature, ent it?”

  We didn’t ease off throwing coal on the chains, welcome face slips from the front of the cut.

  “Reesy, you heard the talk about the Germans drivin’ through to Brynywawr?”

  “Rumour?” I said.

  “Aye, they were arguing in the Earl Haig last night. Morfed’s big Pole reckons it’s def’nite. He’s a boy, he is; the guts of him taking on a piece like Morfed Owen.”

  I said, “Don’t be a bloody clec all your life, Charlie.”

  “No but she’s like one of those American maniacs you see in films who can’t leave it there. Look, Christ, it isn’t as if I begrudge Fred Fransceska or Morfed herself for that matter. S’life, ent it, natural, mun, natch-ur-al. My old lady had sixteen of us, seven boys an’ nine girls. I got four brothers working over in Brynywawr, doin’ as much for the country as Lord Alf in his little white aeroplane.”

  “We’ll be in Brynywawr this time next year,” I said.

  “No doubt. Double bon cages over there an’ all.”

  “Drift, Charlie,” I said. “All the Seven Feet coal carried out on a main belt to this drift above Brynywawr washery.”

  Calculating his distance, he stepped back from a heaving spill of top coal, warning, “Watch it, Rees, it’s workin’ up towards you,” reaching the bigger lumps first, throwing them on the chains. “Christ, mun,” he said, “by the time a man shoves his feet under the table his fuckin’ stent’ll be down in Cardiff docks, way things are goin’ on.”

  I said, “Progress, butty.”

  “My ring. See that new creeper machinery up on top pit? Five men workin’ the bloody thing. Before now, before, old Sid Davies and his horse kept the whole pit goin’ as regards full ’uns and empties. And lissen! The fuckin’ nag was older than Sid hisself! As you know! Ask me, s’load of ballux. Those Germans’ll work in the raw, the daft buggers. They’ll be on sticks when me an’ my old girl’ll be watching concerts in Daren Social. I’ve seen plenty of slashers takin’ the short-cut road up to Daren cemetery.”

  “My father was a slasher,” I said, ending Charlie’s talk.

  “Too bloody true,” he agreed.

  We punched and shovelled coal until eleven o’clock, then from twenty past eleven until finishing time.

  Outside the baths on top pit Tal Harding had his car ready to drive me home. There were two neighbour women in the house, Mrs Cynon in charge. Upstairs, the midwife was paying her second visit, offering the baby who looked inhuman, puggy, a reminder that I’d entirely forgotten Lydia as new-born.

  “Sorry, Rees-love, we missed a boy again,” Ellen said. She looked lovely, blanched pure.

  “Are you feeling all right, beaut?” — small shucking squirms coming from the infant in my arms.

  I heard the midwife sniggering discreetly, her and Mrs Cynon out on the stairs landing.

  “I wasn’t afraid this time, Rees. Shall we name her Elizabeth? It’s a good name, Eliz-a-beth.”

  “Elizabeth Stevens,” I said shakily, unable to put my grimed hands and blackened finger-nails near that fresh raw, wrinkled face, trembling at the stark gulf between us, man and six-hour-old infant, Ellen smiling her drained lips, but her violet eyes shone dark, dark, sombre, surrendering to trust.

  “Love me?” she said calmly.

  I said, “More than ever. More now than before we got married.”

  8

  Charlie Page lost his place on the coal in April, a couple of weeks after Yuri Gagarin circled the earth, cheerful as a bus driver, in a hundred and eight minutes. In April a mobile X-ray unit spent three days in Caib ambulance centre; every man and boy had his frontal shot, medical science forward marching over dead bones. Twenty-six men were sent to Cardiff for NCB X-rays. Five of these were later taken to Llandough Pneumoconiosis Research Unit, real old-timers they were, too afraid, stubborn or ignorant to apply for X-rays in Daren hospital through their family doctors. Charlie had fifty per cent, the knowledge ageing him, lining animal despair in his leathery face. He stopped smoking, drank less and took to rambling the hillsides. Regular pathways through and around Daren woods, where other pneumo and silicotic cases eked out their careful days. Favourite open-air route, the old parish road over Waunwen. You’d see them on sunny afternoons (mornings were spent coughing, warming up blood and tissues, preparing heart and lungs), dotted groups and singles up to the Forestry Commission fence and no farther, slow moving as Klondike survivors against the broad green track.

  Soon, true to his spirit, Charlie Page found himself a hobby: archaeology. He bought a pocket compass, magnifying-glass and trowel. His finds were carried in Franklyn’s Mild tobacco tins. After the first tattling paragraph appeared in Daren & District Clarion, Charlie walked alone. He became unobtrusive, secretive as if taken over by the doppelganger of a Hunter and Fisher Folk shaman. Moreover, Charlie had another twenty years to cultivate this metamorphosis.

  In late June he began sleeping out.

  We were walking alongside Daren river, the path wide enough for Elizabeth’s pram, Lydia trotting on her own between rides straddled across my shoulders. White-bibbed dippers whistled, panicking short flights upstream, pipits rose from the warm turf, jigging, trilling, caracoled down again like minuscule glides. Small dark trout hung in the sparkling sh
allows, inbred sensitives, flickering up into deep water blued by the sky. We were half a mile from home, winding below the new muck-tip, pressure already rippling the mountain slope, shearing the turf crosswise. Kneeling at the foot of the tip, Charlie Page in his faded pepper-and-salt tweed suit. He came down to us, abstracted, hands pressing and patting his pockets.

  “Shwmae there, Charlie,” I said. “Find anything?”

  He said, “Howbe, Ellen. Nothin’ much today, boy. See, it’s better after rain, heavy rain, heavy, y’know,” — fumbling a tobacco tin from his pocket: “Last week I found these” — his stiff fingers peeling cotton wool off a clutch of small, fossilized mussels.

  “Good gracious,” applauded Ellen — my ever cordial wife — Charlie watching her as if she might suddenly become dangerous.

  “I’m not sure yet, two hundred million years old, more p’rhaps,” he said. “Must call in the library agen. Find out, see? Hey, just think, salt water everywhere over Daren. No mountains, no woods, no coal. Duw, Duw, there’s changes, ah, Rees?” — scrupulously tucking his finds in the cotton wool and snick-snick, the elastic band off his wrist twice snapped around the tin.

  “We’re on a picnic,” Ellen said. “Would you like some sandwiches, Charlie?”

  “Not between meals, thanks all the same,” — vagueness widening his sunken, light grey eyes. He rolled his head. “You’ll see my cwtch up by there. Spring lock on the door. Very handy in bad weather like we get so often.”

  Charmingly inoffensive, Ellen strolled away, wheeling the pram, her and Lydia singing Old Macdonald had a farm.

  “Man,” I said, “you’re enjoying life since leaving the Caib. How are the wife and family?”

  “Truth to tell, Reesy, I stay out of their way. Thirty-four years underground, me; now I’m making up for lost time like the old Chinks do when they retire from activity.”

  “But you’re keeping busy, searching the tips up there, tramping the forestry roads over the top. Aye, word gets around, Charlie. You’ve been seen; people are on the watch-out since that article in the Clarion.”

  Serious, pucker-faced, he said, “We all make mistakes. I was fuckin’ daft when that youngster came to our house. Look, some other clever bugger told him,” — glancing after Ellen — “about my stuff in the museum. Duw, mun, I’m nothin’ when you consider those experts. Professors and doctors they are.” Then abruptly, “So long, Rees, I’m away now. Don’t mention down in the Caib about my little cwtch.”

  His cwtch was a patchwork of slag-stone walling, old tram-planks and mildewed timbers once carefully notched, hatcheted by men who were probably dead. Discarded pieces of corrugated sheeting made up the forward-sloping roof, the sheets camouflaged with turf and rubble. Housed into the hillside, Charlie’s cwtch looked like a mountain fighter’s derelict observation post. A damp, unhealthy den. All the materials came from Caib tip.

  Ellen said, stating, “Isn’t it ridiculous. He’s uneducated, lived happy as a mochyn all his life, and now he spends his days searching for Stone Age relics. It’s quite mad.”

  The sandwiches were all eaten and we’d finished off a flagon of home-brewed ginger pop. Lydia slept on a rug. The baby was beginning to lose her temper.

  “Snobbish attitude, beaut,” I said. “Old Charlie has found flint scrapers and arrow-heads up on the forestry roads. He’s proving that Hunter and Fisher Folk travelled this far inland from the coast. What have we proved? Nothing. Nothing yesterday, nothing today, nothing tomorrow.”

  “You clever man,” she said, winking affected admiration.

  The baby howled.

  “Throw out thy marvellous left tit and feed the child,” I said.

  “Write it all down about Charlie Page,” — deliberately squirting a fine spray at my face, her rebuffing elbow swinging swiftly at my throat: “Stop it, that’s enough, Reesy!”

  We dozed in the sunshine, Elizabeth sprawled replete, wailing lapwings and bleating sheep on the other side of Daren river, rough pastureland and peat bogs rolling away to the horizon. Between waking and sleeping I felt like a dwarf waiting to become gargantuan. Then came a vivid, sliding dream of pre-industrial Daren, two five-mile-apart feudal mansions, clusters of white-washed cottages, wolves prowling Daren woods (wolves were extinct, but dreams dislocate chronology), hump-backed salmon running the river aggressive as dingo dogs, packhorse trains and cattle drovers travelling down the parish road, feuds and fraternizing between the serfs of Daren and Brynywawr, pitchforks and arson, true hurt-love and hate-rape. A bastard-sourced dream, remnants of oral heritage and mish-mashed education. Then the dream dissolved, intensified again: a white-maned, nanny-goat-bearded patriach stood alone on the green tump above our house. Some Iberian chieftain, Celtic gauleiter, Brythonic jugular slitter, Romanized arse-hole scraper, court favourite, poet … John Vaughan chanting in Cymraeg! He shrank visibly, collapsing to one knee, pleading, stiffening into the death mask he wore when borne neck deep in slurry out through the back door of 9 Thelma Street.

  “Rees,” she said, “wake up; you’re grunting!”

  I dunked my head in the cold river water, wriggling nymphs instantly cutting out, lying doggo, speckle-disguised, or slithering under pebbles. Hunkered over the pool, I watched a pair of magpies plummet down the new tip, then swoop off laterally like wire-operated pantomime artifacts, landing on Charlie Page’s hide-out. Ellen blew a piercing whistle, two fingers vee-ed in her mouth, but we were too far away from the birds. They planed down off the roof, squawking conversationally.

  “Where did you learn that trick?” I said.

  “Winchester. A boy named Jack Fleming. He used to kiss me after school.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Tickled, once. Feeling better now, matey?”

  “Jack Fleming? What else could he do besides whistle?”

  She screeched viraginous, “Fancy you! Jealous! Rees gwenwynllyd! Dere ’ma, wˆr bach.”

  “I don’t know so much about your private life, Ellen,” I said.

  She lay outstretched with the baby draped across her belly.

  Lydia amused herself beneath the pram. Fine kiddies, I thought. Perfectly normal. No trouble whatsoever. I’m, we, Ellen and I, we’re lucky. Twelve tons on the chains tomorrow, but we’re blooming. Ours is a great marriage. Sound as the rock of ages.

  “Selina Cynon teaching you Welsh?” I said. “Next thing you’ll be joining Plaid Cymru. What’s your ticket, Mrs Stevens, a poop-stirring bureaucracy in Cardiff like the one in Whitehall?”

  Ellen stroked up and down the baby’s back. “This is Wales. It’s Welsh coal. If you had any pride you’d speak Welsh. I’m going to vote for the National Party next election.”

  I said, “Can you prove it’s superior to be born Welsh than, say, Spanish, or Greek, or Hindu? Where’s the goodness in being Welsh? Have we got double navels or bigger brains? Wouldn’t you like to be a Russian for a couple of years? Or an oriental Jewess? Think how nice it would be if the American Kennedys had a negress great-granny.”

  “Shut your mouth. Stop ranting at me,” she said.

  “You lush Irish mongrel,” I said, dripping over her. “Put Lizzie in the pram, my beauty.”

  “We can’t, darling, not here. Somebody might see us.”

  “Who? They’re in the clubs or sleeping or watching the Sunday film on telly.”

  “Love me, Rees?” — fatalism darkened her eyes again, dark, dark eyes to make a saint feel caged in flux.

  “Of course I love you.”

  “You never say it unless you want something.”

  “For Jesus’ sake, we’re real mates!” I said.

  “I love you, too, matey,” — tremulously fervent like a young girl, lifting up the baby, comforting her in the pram, murmuring, “There-there, Lizzie fach, we mustn’t keep your father waiting.”

  But our Lydia-child clambered over us.

  “Soppy knicks! Never mind, cariad, never mind, accident, accident!” sang Ellen, patiently soothing as if the living u
niverse bobbled placidly in a safe ocean of toddler’s piddle.

  After tea I went into the back room with John Vaughan’s Account. The window overlooks a low mortar-crumbled wall between ours and the house next door. We each have a few square yards of unglazed cobbles and lavatories squatting back to back, with a crack in the door of ours through which you can see Melyn brook. Way down the street, above sixteen crumbling parting walls, stands Ike Pomeroy’s nine-roomed house, built for Caib colliery managers in 1928, while Number One Lodge members were docked tuppences every Friday to pay for the institute. Ike Pomeroy succeeded Andrew Booth. Tall, slender Ike, thinly moustached, fast-witted, humourless, efficient, executing NCB directives perfect as a bladder blown by the wind. It was impossible to fault him. He delegated authority according to the book, Ike himself happily governed by mining economics like a truant officer is ruled by the miching boys who justify his job. Ike Pomeroy neutralized Self. His rather bow-legged schoolmistress wife somehow dropped into Upper Daren secondary modern school — a traditional backstage tactic, the local educational authority offering salaam sahib to the NCB area manager. A dozen Daren-born teachers are on the waiting list to come home from the black, tan and off-white zones of London and Birmingham. Consequently, what I’m saying is you have to know someone on Daren Borough Council to get a decent berth under the local authority. Hoary Wales, aye, learned in guile. Dry-runs are alien to our body politique.

  We couldn’t imagine it then, summer of 1961, Ike Pomeroy coming to effect the last coal raised from Caib Four Feet seam. Prompt into action, slender Ike obediently organized a new pit-bottom junction, the main conveyor belt feeding two 200-ton concrete bunkers, the system working precise as a Smith’s watch until the Germans knocked through to Brynywawr. And afterwards no more coal from the Four Feet came up Caib pit-shaft. Only men and supplies went down. Utilitarian Ike, necessary as a lavatory chain between sterile hygiene and fertile corruption.