Flame and Slag (12 page)

Lydia came into the back room for her good-night kiss, Ellen following her. “Listen to this,” I said. “There are no lost causes only different ones.”

Ellen remarked, “He learned the hard way — say
nos da
to daddy,
cariad
.”

“
Nos da
” — Lydia piping obediently, and my heart crowded pure sensation, a leaping crackle of the blood, seeing wild, sandy-haired Dai Stevens in Lydia, and myself triangulating both, her pappy lips innocent as Horlick’s flavoured petals.

“There,
dere nawr
,” Ellen said. My wife Ellen, Mrs Selina Cynon’s willing pupil for every
Shwmae
and familiarizing idiom that binds tight the work-, bread-, bed- and pavement- bonded people of this bloody Wales of ours.

9

Private contractors dismantled the flocculation plant, stripped the interior machinery, the empty building echoing rat squeaks, downpouring rain and the melancholic sibilance of draughts whistling in through broken windows. The long, empty stables, stenched pulse of the Caib before my time, echoed loose sheets creaking and flapping on the roof. Hundreds of red-rusted horseshoes, bent nails still clenching ragged strips and shrunken fragments of chitin hung over man-high rails along the mildewed, whitewashed flaked walls, and dozens of red-rusted “shafts” and “guns” lay bogged in weeds and rushes behind the stables like the shucks of armoured reptiles. Not a house door in Daren carries a
lucky
horseshoe. That trustful rustic past is destroyed, forgotten, buried.

Caib colliery dam was blown down and back-filled with muck from the Seven Feet, and when the neglected smoke stack collapsed one gale-storm September night it obliterated a stray sheep-killer dog almost over the spot where they shot the black runaway bull in 1924. Again pilferers scrounged the soot-grimed ochre bricks to build garden walls, lean-to scullery extensions, garages. The colliery watchman (ex-professional wrestler, exile recently come home to a cushy number on the strength of his reputation) made deals in Daren Social and Welfare Club, even borrowing a Coal Board lorry to make deliveries. History rebounds on the NCB. Looting from collieries carries the hallmark of principle, privilege of the underprivileged. Exploitation by faceless coal-owners matched by equally faceless, certainly depersonalized, NCB top-dogs making decisions affecting rent, food and pleasure. Ultimately, historically sanctioned to boot, the Board executives will brainwash, maim, harass and kill more colliery workers than all the private coal-owners combined. The times deliver men indifferently as tides leave wrack, jetsam and trove, debouching a Kosygin there, a George and Harold here, a Sukarno elsewhere, and always wherever needed, or even wastefully,
people
, men like my father, John Vaughan, the Miskins and Howards, Fred Fransceska, the Tremains and Pages, Llew Hopkins, men like ‘Caib’ Cynon, whose grave has disappeared from the cemetery — Daren’s ten 6 in 1 gradient hillside acres brought from Joseph Gibby’s father (his ownership not to be investigated) for £17 an acre, the business arranged and settled fifty years before Mike Minty tramped over Waunwen parish road with a pocketful of golden sovereigns. Seventy-nine redeployed day wage-men and surface workers travelled twenty-eight miles a shift to long-life pits outside Daren. Caib old tip was ringed around the carved, flattened base with sapling silver birch trees, the new tip finally abandoned in June 1964, when all the waste muck went out through Brynywawr Drift, trammed from there conveniently downhill to marshland, where merely frogs, newts, beetles, sticklebacks and winter feed for infrequent flights of mallard were destroyed.

Now we worked the Seven Feet seam, Caib colliers adjusting themselves to Meco cutter loaders roaring, snarling, whining up and down the faces. A new agreement gave us three shillings a day dust allowance and goggles to wear in the face. We lost the three shillings a shift after they rigged water sprays on the Meco loaders, but the dust still rained: …
particles of less than 5 microns (1 micron= 1/1000 of a millimetre) have the greater pathological significance. The relative pathological significance of various dust components is not fully established, but it is known that particles of free silica have an important influence on the causation of fibrosis of the lungs.

Aye, sure. Black-mouthry, for the use of. Aye indeed.

Science coming in, craft and brute strength petering out.

Better fitted to adjustment than most, Ike Pomeroy flourished under the new regime, swanning along the new roadway in a mine-car like a bogus emperor to his office on Brynywawr pit-head.

Conscientious Ike, assiduous at all times, innocuously macabre, the writing gradually appearing on the wall: the Seven Feet was losing money. Absenteeism, accused the Coal Board — gob you, jack, you’re not grafting in the face, half-thought the men without saying it outright, their wives and daughters travelling besides, forty, fifty, sixty miles a day for easier money than working in coal dust that smothered your cap lamp every half-hour. Caib belonged to Brynywawr and we were in the red. We had to produce more coal to pay for the new machinery and pit-head development on Brynywawr. Pay for the losses in Caib, too, and the only currency is coal.

The German firm’s men lived in caravans behind the concrete and glass administration block on Brynywawr, thirty-seven identical caravans plugged in to the colliery generator. They were driving another roadway, opening up the Seven Feet for development: press-button mining by 1967. By 1967 the furnacite plant would be ready, processed coal avalanching on the market. All we had to do was make the pit pay until the machines took over. We were notified accordingly, copy-signed handbills quoting out-put required per man-shift stapled to every employee’s wage packet.

“Propaganda, it’s like Russia,” Ellen said. “If the worst comes to the worst, I’ll get a job in the television factory. You can look after the nippers,” — a snigger of ridicule metaphorically offering kiss my behind to the future, sufficient unto the day is the evil. Perhaps she was a better, truer miner’s wife than myself a miner.

“If they close Brynywawr we’ll have to move from Daren,” I said.

“Why should they, after spending millions on this advanced mining scheme?”

“They closed the Four Feet seam, brand-new bunkers at pit-bottom scarcely used. Practically new washery, screens, flocculation plant. We don’t know how these people think,” I said. “Young colliers on the coal faces, we’re losing confidence in the industry.”

“People never know what other people think,” Ellen said.

“Clues then,” I said. “Clues for the men who are doing the graft.”

She said, “Planners can’t be doers. You’ll have to wait until you’re told.”

More centralized plan-thinking closed Daren railway tunnel; we were cut off,
Western Welsh
buses slashed to run every two hours from Harding’s Square, and Caib N.U.M. lodge muffled because we were now amalgamated with Brynywawr lodge under a different regional area. A deputation from Lower Daren radio and television factory met our M.P. in the Commons. He piped up in the House, was duly recorded in Hansard and committed to limbo.

“Let’s buy a second-hand car,” Ellen said — second-hand from necessity, as we were paying for the old Coal Board house where my grandparents lived and died.

I said, “What for? We don’t bloody well go anywhere.”

“All right, mate, all right, we won’t buy a car. You’re working too hard. Take a shift off tomorrow.”

“It’s faster work,” I said. “Three cuts a shift and you can’t see straight for the racket. Know old Lewsin Whistler? They brought him out yesterday, lump of coal broke his ankle. Lewsin’s gone past it for face work; he should be on a button job out on the gate road. Five of us, Ellen, and it’s all we can do to keep ahead of the machine, just fixing up props and bars. Ah Christ, it’s getting crazier every week. Minutes, love, seconds, minutes, they panic over minutes like prima donnas. Minutes, lost minutes. Spending millions of pounds and panicking over minutes. If my father was alive he wouldn’t have time to leave the face for a piss let alone the other thing.”

“I don’t mind, Rees. It’s better to talk about it.” She said.

“Bloody
Coal News
, the daft, glamorizing bastards. Anyone who writes for
Coal News
deserves a pill of powder rammed down his gullet. They must think we’re stupid — maybe we are, most of us. It’s like cheering on a football team for these propaganda merchants. Sporty, see? All muck in together, boys, heads down, arses up and out with the coal. Never mind a fuck about my grandfather, my old man, all the compo cases standing like ghosts on the street corners. Space age, by the loving Christ. When we’re not heroes we’re out-and-out wasters. Carrion-headed bastards blah-blahing about absenteeism in the newspapers, they can only see miners in terms of black and white. I’d like to watch those Fleet Street tigers, watch
’
em in action with a twenty-four-pound puncher, that’s all, simply breaking up big stuff to keep the chains moving. Five shifts a week, fifty weeks a year, on the puncher and dust coming back so thick you can feel it clogging in your teeth. We’re all wearing goggles in Brynywawr Seven Feet. Some of our blokes are attending the outpatients for eye treatment. Rash around the eyes. Sweat rash. Aye. The bloody ventilation blows through like the wrong end of a Hoover; if it didn’t, the fucking pit would go up like a volcano. And our union, it’s gone to pieces since we’ve been under the Brynywawr area. Old Watt Howard packed in altogether when Number One finished. Lodge sec. for ten years; now he’s labouring on the council house estate. He threw away about three hundred quid redundancy pay. Why, Ellen? Because there’s no guts left in the men to fight. Jesus Christ, they’re working all kinds of shifts over in Brynywawr. Men who don’t know the meaning of trade unionism, silly-born bastards they are. They come up top pit after a shift, they bath, eat a dinner in the canteen, load their tommy boxes and go straight back down for another shift. They’re sleeping over their meals in the canteen. If my grandfather saw this carry-on, he’d spit blood. Honest to God, there’s no principle left.”

Ellen laid Elizabeth in her cot. “Reesy, you mustn’t feel sorry for yourself,” she said.

“I’m not! Take it easy, girl! All I’m doing is counting the odds.”

She said, “I saw Eddie ’Lectric in the post office the other morning. He hasn’t worked since he lost his eye. Tal Harding slipped him five checks for Daren Social Club. Why don’t we go to the Social Club on Saturday nights? Charlie Page and his wife are there almost every night of the week.”

“Charlie in the telly room and his wife playing bingo. You want to play bingo, Ellen?”

“We could go to a dance. You haven’t taken me dancing since Lizzie was born. Selina will sit in for us.”

“Old English or Pop?” I said.

“Pop! C’mon, brute,” — lolloping into action before our transistor radio heated in to the BBC’s ‘Newly Pressed’.

“
Duw-Duw
, you’re pretty good,” I said. “Sweet jungle hips, you haven’t lost your lovely rhythm.”

“On your feet,” she said, “or I’ll lash out with the well-known Ellen Stevens’s karate where it hurts.”

“Irish Ellen. How’re we doing, beaut?”

“Nicely, boy.”

“Psychological gravy, my love. Long time no gravy. Hey, what’s that for?”

Airy-fairy as that Dame Fonteyn, she choreographed another moth-fluttery slap to my face. “Stop fantasying, Rees. You’ll spoil us.”

“Right… comfort me with dumplings and carved sweetbreads, luncheon meat and lemon meringue pudd, trotters and mulled wine, sperm-whale cutlets and whipped cream. How we doin’, gel?”

“Very nicely,” — by now indifferent, gone on her own, dancing lost, lost without hope, negligent.

“Love me?” I said. “I know I’m awkward sometimes.”

“You don’t knock me around, Rees, only that one time.”

“I was drunk though, beaut.”

“Forget about it, matey.”

“
You
haven’t forgotten.”

She said, “I suppose people can’t love without hating.”

“That’s it, Ellen.”

She laughed, dancing, laughed carelessly, unwinding to ecstasy, a wonderful total howl gurgling downwards, bending her over. “Reesy, Reesy, you stupid guilty fool! Guilty as sin. Look at you! Oh God, oh Jesus bless us, if we can’t
talk
about your parents they’ll never die, don’t you see?”

“But I was drunk, Ellen.”

“That’s the best time! I haven’t been drunk since Selina Cynon fed me gas and air on Elizabeth. My grandfather was a drunken navvy, my mother chased her fancy, my father…” She pealed joy, pagan, ringing: “But I feel perfect! I feel perfect. I’m your wife.
Iesu mawr
, isn’t that enough?”

“We’ll burn up the town next week-end,” I said.

“And start another baby before Lizzie’s off the breast! Steady, matey, take it steady, hm!”

Someone next door jammed on the volume of their television, a neutered trio effetely ragtiming Heinz 57 varieties, and the baby whimpered awake. We cuddled over her cot. “There, there,
cariad
,” Ellen whispered.

I said, “Ask Mrs Cynon to sit in for us tomorrow night.”