Bred of Heaven (10 page)

My guide underground is Brian Lewis, under-manager at Unity. In his smart blue shirt and formal trousers he has the look of someone whom office life hasn't quite succeeded in taming. He can talk the talk of business, figures, productivity, but that frame looks built for a more physical life. He's a sizeable unit is Brian; as a young man he played at centre three-quarter for Aberavon and was offered a signing-on fee to go and play league up country. Employment opportunities in Welsh mining have shrunk to almost nothing, but he has never been out of work since joining the industry in 1976 as an eighteen-year-old. ‘I signed on behind my father's back,' he says. ‘He wasn't happy, but I could make £22 a week instead of £11.' He started as a face worker at Blaenant, but was offered the chance to train as a mine deputy in Swansea, then, having some O levels, as a mining engineer in Pontypridd. While on strike in 1984–5, he was allowed by the union to attend college. He has since worked mostly at the western end of the coalfield – at Abernant near Pontardawe, Betws near Ammanford, Penallta near Ystrad Mynach. But much of his working life was spent at Tower colliery in Hirwaun. Until 1993, when coal prices dropped through the floor and the pit was deemed uneconomical, it was just another struggling mine. It acquired notoriety when it reopened as a workers' buyout. Brian stayed there till it finally closed in early 2008 and after a brief spell in small mines he came to Cwmgwrach.

The first portal to the underworld is the pithead baths. It's full of row upon row of three-tier numbered metal lockers – far more than is needed for a mine that employs around one hundred men. I change into bright-orange trousers, bright-orange shirt, bright-orange jacket with white luminous strips, bright-orange shin-guards
and black lace-up boots. The trousers would be a snug fit for a plumper midriff. As I transmogrify myself from civilian to collier, I think of Big Pit, the museum at Blaenavon which memorialises a decimated industry. The locker doors there are decorated with images of famous mining men. Idris Davies, b. 1905, the collier's boy who became the people's poet for inter-war industrial Wales. A. J. Cook, b. 1884, the miners' leader who during the General Strike coined the phrase ‘Not a penny off the pay, not a second on the day'. Bert Coombes, b. 1897, author of the collier's autobiography
These Poor Hands
. ‘Slogger Bill', b. 1921, who cut 234 tons of coal in six shifts from a six-foot seam, and turned down an MBE.

I stumble out into the bright morning light, barrel down one of those metal-grill stairwells that sing with each tread, then cross the yard. There is a pile of coal as tall as a house and as long as four. It must weigh thousands of tons. Beyond it we enter the hole in the flank of the hill. This is a drift mine. Unlike a deep-shaft pit, fed by lifts sunk hundreds of metres into the netherworld, in a drift mine you descend to the coal seam on foot (though at the start of the shift the men travel down on the belt).

Brian walks about four miles a day. In previous jobs it was up to twelve. He moves with a burly stride, booted feet wide apart. I stumble along like an eager child, trying hard to feel manly. I am intensely conscious of the signals I must give out: privileged, metropolitan, puny. These are the badges of my white-collar life. They are only partly shrouded by the luminous gear I've been issued with. At least in the darkness everyone else sticks out like a sore thumb too. After reaching a point where we have to clamber over the conveyor belt and dip through a gap, we come to a junction. Down to the right is one of the two roads Unity has been driving into the earth to reach the seam. But we take the left fork and keep walking. Overhead on the left is a huge cylindrical fan pumping air
down towards the coalface. We follow it for nearly half a mile, the slope keeping to a constant gradient of one in seven. Every so often there are man-sized holes dug into the corrugated walling – for colliers to squeeze into when machinery passes. I'm wondering what on earth could be big enough to force a man into the fabric of the wall.

A few minutes later I have my answer. A hundred metres off I can see lights and white strips looming; cap lamps are milling around a huge solid presence squatting on the arched roadway. It glowers ominously as we approach, a brontosaurian vehicular hulk. It's as long as a pantechnicon, as low as a Land Cruiser, an unspeakable mechanised apparition. As we pass its flank I can see tank tracks under its skirts.

And here suddenly the corrugated tunnel runs out. After just over a mile of walking downhill we have come to the end of the road. Above us are 550 metres of solid earth. In front is only wall – wall which, by some miracle, broils with fretful life. It convulses in angry reaction to the advance of man and machine. A cluster of miners, faces entirely blackened with coal dust, stand and watch as clumps of rock and rubble detach themselves from the ceiling to thump and scatter cussedly onto the floor, puffing up clouds of particles. A man leaps onto the back of the machine, guns the engine and grapples with the gearstick. The beast jerks and nudges slowly forwards, tank tracks a-growl. And there, mounted on its front and edging towards the coalface, is the most fearsome drill I have ever seen.

One year, to test a much floated family boast that our grandfather was so well-known a figure in South Wales that even the Post Office knew where he lived, my younger brother wrote a letter. On the envelope were the following words:

Bertram
Carmarthen

It took its time but the letter, stamped and franked, found its way to Mount Hill. The postman knocked on the black-and-white front door and asked my grandfather to ensure that next time his correspondent provide them with a little more information to go on. But the barest amount, excluding even his surname, had on this occasion proved sufficient. Bertram Rees was not just any old dentist.

Bert was born in 1901 and grew up on a small farm in Meidrim, a village ten or so miles west of Carmarthen. There were six siblings above him, two below. As in many a home in Wales, education and self-improvement were valued. The four oldest sons went into farming. The only daughter, who was the middle child, married a farmer. The next four sons all qualified as doctors and dentists.

As a young man Bert went up to London to train at Guy's Hospital. On his return to Wales he established himself in Lammas Street in Carmarthen and by 1936 he had managed to buy Mount Hill. Built in the late 1700s in the style of a pavilion in India, it was a prestigious local property which had been in the possession of the family of the Soviet spy Donald Maclean. It cost £2,000. Among his patients was Dylan Thomas, who would come into town from Laugharne and leave without ever, apparently, settling his bill.

My grandfather did not have that difficulty with most of his clients. When the National Health Service was created after the war, the farmers came down from the rolling Carmarthenshire hills and the miners came up from the valleys of the western coalfield and they queued in Lammas Street to have, for the first time in their lives, free dental care – probably, in most cases, their first dental care of any
kind at all. The state reimbursed my grandfather handsomely. His compatriot Aneurin Bevan, the member for Ebbw Vale and architect of the NHS, perhaps did not anticipate that free dentistry for the disenfranchised would entail enriching a few practitioners. So prolific was my grandfather's practice, so assiduous his throughput, that in the House of Commons he was held up as an example of dentists milking the system. That's what we were always told, anyway. By the time Bert retired in his seventies, his practice had the records of 70,000 patients, their names and addresses all entered on individual cards. His sons and grandsons went to Harrow. He himself became a name in Lloyds. He was a pillar of the community, so much so that in 1959 he was appointed High Sheriff of Carmarthenshire and ten years later was president of the Three Counties Argricultural Show, in which capacity he took the salute of the Household Cavalry when that summer – I remember this distinctly – they came down to perform a disappointingly squelchy tattoo at the county show under laden summer skies. For the seventh child of a farmer from Meidrim, it was quite a journey.

Teach yourself Welsh. The time has come. My City Lit course is all very well, but we are learning an average of two and a half useful phrases a week, plus approximately twelve new words. At this rate I will be able to hold a conversation shortly before I retire. So I go to a language bookshop in London and invest in a Teach Yourself Welsh book with a pair of CDs.

I've never taught myself a language before. The emphasis is on listening first, and using the book only as a second line of defence. I click the play button. There's a demo of how to pronounce the various letters. The hard
ch
. I know all this, I think contentedly. The salivating
ll
. I am very much ahead of the curve. The windy
rh
. Maybe I should just skip the first chapter. But hold on. ‘Jayne, Tom
and Matthew,' says the CD, ‘have enrolled on a residential Welsh course in Lampeter.' That's actually not a bad idea. ‘Matthew has been learning Welsh on his own for a few months. On the first morning he is wandering around the college when he meets someone.'

I listen to the dialogue –
y deialog
– between Matthew and his tutor, Elen. After the initial greeting (‘Bore da.' ‘Bore da, pwy dych chi?') I fail to understand a single word. I listen again. No. And again. Nope. This is quite upsetting. On about the fifth go I start to make out indistinct sonic patterns, although none that I recognise. After the sixth I check the transcript in the book and it becomes clear that they are indeed, although you could have entirely fooled me, speaking Welsh.

There seems little choice but to clamber onto the snake and slither back down to square one. And so I start all over again, listening, not comprehending, listening, half comprehending, listening, slightly comprehending. I establish that Matthew is by his own admission nervous (
nerfus
). Elen advises him to chillax (
paid a becso =
don't worry).

The sessions are not all about Matthew. There are exercises. How would you greet someone at (a) 10 a.m., (b) 3.20 p.m., (c) 7 p.m.? Answers:
bore da
/
prynhawn da
/
noswaith dda
(soft mutation). We are introduced to the concept of the formal (
chi
) and informal (
ti
) mode of address: which would you use with (a) your grandmother, (b) your best friend, (c) the vicar, (d) the little boy from across the road? The answer to (a), incidentally, is
chi
: in Wales there is respect for grandmothers. We move on to
deialog
2. Jayne, also on the course in Lampeter, claims to be from Ohio (‘Americanes dw i'). A likely story. More improbably still, every learner at this fictive Lampeter seems to be already fluent. ‘Don't forget to mutate!' says exercise five. These model students never
forget to mutate. By
deialog
5 they've had their first coffee break, Matthew is no longer nervous and they are thickening their arteries in the canteen. Matthew orders coffee and chips, which seems a strange combination. Jayne – presumably a lardbucket Midwesterner – is on a diet (
ar ddeiet
). As they chat with Elen the tutor, I come across my first idiom: steady tapping breaks the stone. Persevere, in other words.

From now on I find a corner of every day to teach myself Welsh. I work through a lesson a week. We get on to numbers, addresses, jobs, family trees, age, marital status, shopping habits, likes, dislikes and preferences. Basically it's a dating manual. In Lesson 2 it emerges that the characters are not only excellent Welsh speakers, they are also proficient in a whole panoply of languages. Nor just the regular ones I've had a crack at myself. Jayne claims to speak Irish fluently. Another likely story. Matthew pipes up that he'd like to learn Irish too. I suspect he fancies her, although learning Irish seems an odd route to the heart of a large woman from Ohio. By Lesson 4 I find I can take no further interest in the lives of these characters when the actors voicing them all seem to be the wrong age. Matthew is clearly in his twenties but played by someone who sounds like my great-uncle Bob. I keep on expecting him to holler, ‘Shut the door!' So I just learn the Welsh instead.

By the end of one term of Welsh 1, Module 1, I duck out of the City Lit course. Others have preceded me through the exit, but not for the same reason: they can't stand the heat. I'm so far in front I'm actually in the future, in that thanks to DIY Welsh I can now say how I will do something as well as how I have done it, not to mention how I was doing something and how I did it. Do something (and that's an order): all is being covered in my afternoon study. I no longer exist in the continuous present of the entry-level
learner. I have shown a clean pair of heels to Alpha Pete and to the rest of the class who never liked me anyway.

Vocabulary intake is now officially a compulsion. I know the Welsh words for the parts of the body, the weather, the professions. If I meet a lawyer with a thick moustache on a windy afternoon, I am now equipped to report back in Welsh. I start to make regular visits to the BBC Cymru website, where there's a handy button you can turn on (
troi ymlaen
) and suddenly have tricky words highlighted. If you hover the cursor over them, a translation will ping up on the screen. It's a rich new seam to mine. As well as learning the clichés of news (
newyddion
) and sport (
chwaraeon
) in Welsh, there are articles on Welsh culture and heritage full of handy buzz phrases that I'm going to need as I make my way towards Welshness – things like coal mine (
pwll glo
), National Assembly for Wales (
Cynulliad Cenedlaethol Cymru
), hospital appointment (
apwyntiad ysbyty
) and motte-and-bailey (actually I decided I don't need to know that). The website has a vocabulary page which, for someone with my pathology, is as addictive as crack.