Flame and Slag (3 page)

2

Monday morning four weeks later and I didn’t even have a clean shirt to wear. Old Gran muttering over the sink, mulish as a man-faced hilly-billy woman, dabbing the collar of my dingy
Double-two
with a stained cake of white blanco. Forgetting to send our wash to the laundry, she remembered that tin of blanco; probably kept it tucked away since my summer plimsoll days in junior school. Our wedding morning was an omen of time unspent, sometimes not having a respectable shirt at all and Ellen similarly skimped for clothes being merely part of its spending. Aye,
charismata
for ever on its backside, more or less, due to the selective code of the Welfare State.

“If your father Dai heard this carry-on, he’d knock some sense into you, Reesy, yes he would. But what I say is, make your own bed and lie on it. Don’t come back here when she scrags your hair out by the roots. Kate Minty wasn’t her mother for nothing. There, best I can do at short notice. Air it by the fire first,”— a round-arm jerk flinging the smeared
Double-two
into my face.

I borrowed an outsize shirt off my best man, Percy Cynon.

“Gran, don’t forget,” I said, “the reception’s at twelve o’clock. I’ll send a car for you and Granch. Where’s he now, out with his pigeons?”

She screeched through the open window, “Glyndwr! You change them durr-ty clothes!” Her animosity mumbled on, ingrained, fruitless, ‘Ach, ach, him and his messy old pigeons, stink the house out they do”; then again, “Glyndwr!”

She was crone-humming the old Will Hopkin’s ballad,
Myfi sy’n fachgen ieuanc ffôl
when I said, “Cheerio then, Gran, wish me luck,” and for the first time since wiping my snotty nose in her sack apron old Granny Stevens pressed a tight-lipped sign on my cheek. Her gift, having abandoned cause for kissing.

My grandfather was still sitting on the wooden steps outside his pigeon loft. We shook hands, tears wetting down alongside his nose, his moustached mouth wabbling, croaking, “Rees, always remember, boy bach, a good wife is better than bread,” so I swallowed throat-burn jogging out to the white-ribboned wedding car, the whole main street length of Daren blurring past the window before I lit a cigarette, relaxed, less for awareness than submission, admitting defeat. I felt agreeably conquered, another ready-made man.

All the earth under the stars can only behave as earth, but people wed. Marriage the essence, each pair unfolding its own pantheon of bliss, purgation, righteousness, blasphemy, penultimate heavens and hells of perfect necessity. Ashpit ascetics carry howling marriage traces in their cells; neither can death always, not even the bloodiest, sever matrimony, unpick the wedlock between outwardly humdrum Tristrams and Isoldes, Darbys and Joans, the Romeos and Juliets of our for ever spreading fringe.

The eight minutes registrar’s ceremony passed in mindlessness, a kind of alien truce from living, Ellen perfectly at ease with the middle-aged spinster civil servant, sharing small, shyly connected maiden smiles, the minutiae of affectionless affinity welding them together. Afterwards we crossed the road to a pub, drank champagne and journeyed the ten mountain and scrubland, tip-flanked and village-wriggled miles back to Upper Daren.

We rented the long smoke room in Waun Arms, fifty guests eating off vestally draped trestle tables, Percy Cynon’s mother in charge (her tablecloths, too), Percy reading a speech we’d manufactured together — the least bonhomie infectious best man, fifteen stone of covenanted bachelor, almost compulsorily elected best man due to Mrs Selina Cynon’s guaranteed worth as catering organizer, as queen of protocol at weddings, funerals, socially promising births, anything intrinsic to female morale, emancipatory or of precedent in Daren. Percy and I worked neighbour stents in Caib colliery. His grandfather, Thomas Ivor Cynon, threw the first sod, beginning forty years of steam-coal production, his photograph also hanging in Caib institute. A bearded man, diminutive Viking with rolled-out lips and swollen eyes: original chairman of the Federation lodge.

“Speech,” whispered Ellen. “My love, it’s your turn.”

A group from the pit were singing, “
Sixteen tons and what do you get, another day older and deeper in debt
”— they’d hogged the bar since before Gran blanco-ed my shirt collar. It’s a man’s world, underground, virtuous history having driven out women and children.

I said, “Ladies and gentlemen…”

“Luvhah!” they bawled. “The great luvhah!”

“… I want to thank you all for making our wedding day such a wonderful success. In particular I want to thank Mrs Cynon and her helpers. If any of you blokes happen to mention this occasion in twenty years time, you’ll remember more about this good feed than anything else. I now call upon my wife, Mrs Ellen Stevens, to say a few words.”

Mrs Cynon led the ‘Hear-hears’, the rowdies from Caib yelling, “Mrs Stevens Stamps!”

She didn’t blush, John Vaughan sitting beside her, crying like a peeler of onions, poor sick man. “Friends,” she said, and you could hear the colliery screens clanking far enough away to sound like toy hurdy-gurdy music, “this is the happiest day of my life. I never,
never
expected to wear a wedding ring six weeks after returning home to Daren, which only goes to show”— flashing white teeth at the girls —“that where there’s faith there’s hope.”

Safe on his boozy freedom road, Tal Harding rocked to his feet, whisky slopping over his snazzy waistcoat. “Three cheers for the bride! Hip-pipp!”

The smoke room windows pinged, Tal huzza-ing up the roar like a bacchanalian Nazi.

Ellen sat down, smiling, murmuring cruelly dry as sand, “Fool, the man’s a fool.”

I said, “Tal lost. He’s suffering.”

She stood up again, saying, “Thank you, thank you everybody,” calmly beckoning forward some Caib mates carrying another firkin of beer.

Private in the happy hubbub, I leaned to her ear. “You’re a wicked one, Ellen, marrying me for my income.”

“For love, my love. In sickness and health, for better or worse, to honour and cherish for as long as we both shall live,” promising serenely, her square hand coming down on mine. “I’ll be a good wife, Rees.”

“God, you make it sound like penal servitude,” I said “Don’t dout the flame, girl.”

“We’re mates for always.”

Thirsty strays were coming in from the closed public bar, my half-canned, breathless grandfather haranguing a Caib packer whose young face shone from rich food and beer. “Your nationalization,” contended the old man, “is bound to create more pneumoconiosis. I’m telling you,
bachgen
. Look, all those machines throwing out dust, mun, see! Not the stone-dust like I got,
pneumo
! Mark my words.”

“We must keep up with the times, Mr Stevens”—the packer smirking like a cream-fed cat.

“Aye, boy, and suffer young!”

Struggling under his sickly halo, Ellen’s father cried, “The finest steam coal in the world. Us miners put the great into Great Britain, that’s a fact. Carry on, Glyndwr, I’m listening.”

“
Gwaith, gwaith. Gad ’e fod. Paid a gwneyd dim rhagor!
”
— my lavender-doused grandmother hammering a stern bomp-bomp with her fist on the table. But Grancha croaked his judgement: “Oh, nice and lovely for you now, boy, but bad later. Very bad. Wait till later on when they don’t want our coal and the old pits close down. Oil,
bachgen
, oil tankers coming across the seas.”

“Atomic power!” hailed John Vaughan, his curly white mane quivering like primped fleece.

Ellen caught his arm. “Hush, dad, you haven’t worked underground for fifteen years.”

“Coal is bound to lose in the long run, it’s plain for anyone with eyes to see!”

“Shh, you’ll make yourself ill.” She grimaced, less chagrined than resolute: “Rees, I’m ready to leave now.”

We went around the room, Ellen pacing our farewells, unflinching when she came to Tal Harding, poor Tal’s unsweated body stranded in a massive black-varnished armchair (this left-over piece from rustic times, when Daren folk were obedient to seasons and the weather), solitary at the far end of the long room.

“Go home and sleep,” she said, patting his hand. “Rees and I are leaving now. Goodbye, Tal.”

He appealed from his wet, helpless eyes. “Gaw-bless, Ell-en, Gaw-bless both… Reesy”, the light fading out from him, his jaw failing on gapes, all holds slipping, then Tal’s head gently, safely rolled him into unconsciousness.

“He’s a loser,” I said. “I feel sorry for him.”

“My mastermind husband, you’re a philosopher,” remarked Ellen like sealing dubious goods. “Right now, darling, we’ve been round them all.”

Continuing philosophically crab-fisted, I reckon honeymoons are rendered to us by way of revelation, I mean in contrast to the wasteful commitments of nature. Meaning NATURE, natural selection’s slavery, whether it be nits breeding in Elizabeth the First’s wig, cow hippos in heat, rut-mad spiders, the deathless morality of grass, space-flight virus, anaconda dialogues, sturgeon idylls, more than all these multiplied to excelsior, whereas for people everywhere, it’s honeymoons. Wedlock fidelity. Our honeymoon edifice two thousand years old, via Deuteronomy 24:5.
When a man hath taken a new wife, he shall not go out to war, neither shall he be charged with any business: but he shall be free at home one year, and shall cheer up his wife which he hath taken
.

Pressing on then, collier-fisted by heritage, we spent our seven days’ honeymoon caravanning in Horton on the Gower coast. Courtship habits prevailed that first afternoon, but thereafter we were proven. Proved each other, I mean, but still I failed to understand my brand-new wife, couldn’t possibly except in the sanctimonious way of bachelors blinkered by pseudo-Christian rearing, slippery books, Rinso-ed films and the buttoned dialectic of Daren. Wales is agog with Daren counterparts, none of them worse than Detroit, hinterland Africa or Llasa.

Between love-knotting and living we strolled and swam, mister and missis blindly happy as nectar-drunk midges inside a hyacinth and all day long the blue sky curved above Horton bay to the sea horizon. What people do, they are. We were lovers.

A dozen caravans were parked in this cow-patted field overlooking the bay, others by the organized drove spaced out below the headland and right around to Port Eynon. In Port Eynon we drank light beer in a pub where
verboten
notices hung everywhere. This old pub had dogs, big dogs, slavering as Nansen’s huskies. Sometimes we carried small flagons to the beach and waited until after dark for sea-mating, undertones snickering all around the summer-night bay, wails dissonant to the purring tide, twined couples stumbling or sculling away from other couples. A hidden world of twos, but during day-time you’d see the inevitable sand plodders, shabby roamers, often elderly, lonely men and women with dead mahogany complexions and the shifty glances of retreat, of inadequacy, of soul-frost.

We strung fossils and shells on nylon thread and posted them off without a cover note to the spinster registrar who read the rites over us. One morning I wrote lewd fantasy mottoes, to the unknown Mayor of Weston-super-Mare, to three image-famous gossipers pin-stabbed from an old copy of
Television Weekly
, then two fabricated confessional pages by Dior (Ellen fancied herself as a fashionist), and a requiem for my grandfather’s long-distance champion homer. These samples were sealed in our collection of empty beer bottles and launched off Worm’s Head, the whole campaign amusing Ellen, but I considered myself hellish clever. Penman Reeso from Caib pit operating under licence. Poetastry territory, the Gower peninsula. Gene-land for silly pit-boys.

Rain came on the sixth afternoon, scuds drumming our caravan, Ellen sluicing off yesterday’s brine and sand, posed like a caryatid at the wash-basin, laughing through splutters. ‘I’m not ticklish! Stop! Stop it… ugh, you greedy pig. Pig,” she said, “pig, pig, pig!” her breasts heaving, dun nipples glowing shiny, and I thought, good God Almighty, my wife. Rees Stevens’s beaut, her pretending whimpers, whooping, yowling temptation. “Don’t! Let me finish washing!”

Warm-wet, biting, loving.

Rainy evening in Horton, drowsy Ellen smelling of Lifebuoy, yellow skinned under the creaking, tinted lampshades, cows lowing, gulls screaming, the beach deserted as prehistory, and next day we came home to Daren, to the house below Caib railway siding, where limp John Vaughan marooned himself on the settee.

Sickness helps to cripple the healthy, but that first year brought maiming and mort in too many shapes.

First shift down under, swarming August rain feeding the young evergreens on Waunwen, and straightway a walk-out from Number 2 face, Andrew Booth the manager waiting for us at pit-bottom, angrier than he could afford to be against four dozen men who had the “working agreement” ready behind their tongues.

Percy Cynon said, “You know it as well as we do, Mr Booth. We won’t fill enough coal to cook chips. The face isn’t water bombed.”

“You’ll have coal by nine o’clock. I’m warning the lot of you. Now get back in there! This is one case you’re going to lose.”

“What about the two hours, then, Mr Booth?”

“
Iesu
Grist
, you’ll make it up before the end of the shift. Now bugger off back in there. Some tired wasters in this pit want coddling — well, they won’t get it from me, not while I’m in charge. Useless bloody shower … men, by the Jesus, men they call themselves.” Squirting small spits to right and left, the brave little Caib autocrat rapped his steel toecap with his safety stick.