The Legacy

Lynda La Plante - The Legacy

THE LEGACY

Evelyne Jones sat at the kitchen table, the tip of her tongue pressed to her top lip as she concentrated on her handwriting. The house was silent, everyone asleep, and the kitchen was lit only by firelight. She wore an old shirt of her Da’s, and her long, skinny body was hunched over her work, her bare feet one on top of the other for warmth. Evelyne’s waist-length thick red hair was braided into a single plait down her back. Small wisps of curls clung to her forehead.

She yawned, stretching her arms above her head like a ballet dancer. Her thin frame, without an ounce of fat, was more like a young boy’s, and she was so tall, too tall for her age, head and shoulders above the rest of the girls in her class at school.

Hugh Jones, Evelyne’s father, caught his breath. She hadn’t heard him come down the stairs to stand in the darkness, watching her. Everyone said that poor Evie Jones was no beauty - so tall and thin - her best feature was her wondrous hair. Some had even said it should be ironed, it was like the fan of a concertina. But at that moment Hugh thought she was the most exquisite creature he had ever set eyes on; he couldn’t move, she held him mesmerized by some magic.

Slowly Evelyne became aware of him, and she turned to give him the sweetest of smiles.

‘Oh, Da, I love the family so, I love you all so much.’ ‘Ay, well, that may be right, but you should be abed … get yourself up, gel, now.’

She brushed past him and gave him a tickle in the ribs, and he caught her to him, held her tight. He could smell the soap on her face and neck, and kissed the white, white skin. His voice was muffled with emotion. ‘We all love you, too, gel, with all our hearts.’ Slipping past him she went up to bed, but he remained standing, unable to move. His Evie, his darling child, had been untouchable for that single moment. He was so used to seeing her in her worn clothes, doing the household chores. She was just a little girl, like the other girls in the village, but that moment struck like a warning bell, telling him that Evelyne, his daughter, was different.

Doris Evans looked through the compositions handed in by her class. They were, as usual, grubby, the cheap exercise books food-stained and dog-eared. Coal dust from the small hands made the texture of the paper gritty. Page after page of misspelt, blotched, childish dreams. Their subject was, ‘Choose a character from history, one you would like to have been.’

The stories were similar - in many cases too similar -and Doris suspected that Lizzie-Ann Griffiths had been making herself a few halfpennies. Ninety per cent of the girls from her class fancied being Gaiety Girls, but they all spelt it ‘Gayity’. Doris sighed and corrected the scrawled lines. So much for history.

Doris saved Evelyne Jones’ compositions until the very last. Neat, meticulous handwriting on clean, flat pages -the girl kept her notebook in a brown paper bag. At the top of the page Evelyne had printed the date, February 10th 1909, and the title: ‘I am Christina Georgina Rossetti’. Then in the same perfect handwriting the composition followed. The young girl discussed her love for her brothers, Dante Gabriel and William Michael, but what was so remarkable was that Evelyne had interwoven her feelings for her own brothers around her fictional self. She compared her own family’s education to that of the Rossettis. It caught the teacher’s imagination. Doris was taken aback at the depth of feeling and Evelyne’s sophisticated use of the English language. She wrote about what it was like to be part of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Evelyne was ten years old.

Doris was so fascinated she didn’t even correct the spelling. She turned page after page, until the final paragraph moved her to tears. Evelyne had copied down two lines from one of Christina Rossetti’s poems: Remember me when I am gone away, Gone far away into the silent land, followed by a few lines in which she said that, for many in her village, there would be no distant land, just the blackness of the mine, the blackness of death hanging over them. The blackness never stopped the laughter, the love, but so many lives were lost, and too easily forgotten.

From the schoolroom window, Doris stared down into the village. It was growing dark, and the few streetlights twinkled. In the half-light Doris could see the groups of miners gathering and moving towards the pithead for the night shift.

A hawker led his pony and cart through the village, crying that his apples were cheap, just threepence a pound. Grey house crouched close to grey house, each opening directly on to the street; there were no gardens, no colours to relieve the grey. Doris sighed. Even the leaves were grey, never green, and the berries black before they were red.

Doris hugged her brown coat around her, closed up the school and walked down to the village. It was strange to think that only a few hundred yards from here was that wondrous valley sheltered by mountains, their lower slopes covered with the darker greenness of trees,

the upper by the lighter mountain grasses and ferns which seemed to reach up to meet the sky. Then there was the river, curving across the width of the valley, coursing slowly along the ten miles that separated the village from the sea at Swansea. Doris’ heart often ached to have all that beauty so close, and yet their houses huddled, cramped together with the massive furnaces, the coal slags and trams looming above them, the colliery dominating and overpowering the village.

The miners felt differently. To them, God had been extra kind, because just below all this beauty He had placed seams of coal, anything from eighteen inches to eighteen feet wide, and beds of fireclay and iron ore. But for Doris, man had come and defiled the beauty. Man had blackened nature with his meddling, and she hated the coal. She hated the constant threats of pneumoconiosis, ‘black lungs’, and nystagmus, the wandering eyes, that the men lived under, their poor, bent knees and ‘beat’ elbows. Doris had good reason to hate the mines - she had been widowed by them. Her treasured wedding gown was still kept in tissue paper. Her neat house was scrubbed every day and the gleaming brass in the rarely used kitchen dazzled the eye. The brass candlesticks, the strip of brass on the mantel, even the brass rod above the grate shone. The tiny, immaculate house seemed held in suspense, waiting for the warmth of a family, waiting to come alive, for life to breathe through the flower-papered walls. The big tub hung at the kitchen door ready for her man, even his tools were cleaned and polished, but Walter Evans was never coming home. The house remained a glittering monument.

Doris threaded her way through the dark streets, hearing the odd murmur of greeting from the young men who remembered her teaching. She kept her head

down, her nose wrinkled against the slight wind that stirred the coal dust. In some of the back yards she could see washing still hanging. The kind of household that left its washing out was the kind that didn’t care. Only on certain days could the washing be done, for unless the wind blew from the north-east it would quickly be covered in coal dust. Windows were always closed unless the north-east wind blew. The cries of the miners’ wives were often heard as they belted their daughters either for not putting out the washing in time or for not bringing it in.

The men were coming off from the day shift. As Doris passed them she could hardly tell one from another. With their blackened faces and clothes they looked much like the coal they mined. Many would need to get the dust from their throats with a few pints before departing homeward for their baths. Doris made a small detour around the pub to avoid the ones who had already downed a few too many.

Doris knew them all, and as she passed they called and smiled. Mrs Griffiths, Lizzie-Ann’s mother, yelled to Doris, her raucous voice grating on Doris’ ears as she asked how her brood were coming along. Doris nodded to her, said that they were doing well, knowing Mrs Griffiths had already decided that they would leave the following term. Over the years Doris had tired of trying to make them understand how a few more years of education would benefit the boys. It had always proved pointless. They just followed their fathers into the mines as soon as they had enough education to sit the qualifying test, usually by the age of thirteen or fourteen. Some slipped in even younger.

The village women never tired of discussing Doris Evans, who even after thirty years was still an outsider,

and always referred to as ‘poor thing’. Some of the women, too young to remember, thought it was because she was widowed and without children, still living alone after all these years. Many whispered that, unlike everyone else in the village, Doris never took in lodgers although she had four rooms. Little Evelyne Jones had been right, oh so right, thought Doris. Memories fade fast. Heartbreak surrounded the village, every family was touched by it, so why should they remember hers?

The bakehouse smelt wonderful and Doris, who had left her tin of dough there in the morning, now collected her fresh bread. She paid her penny and carefully folded the linen over the bread tin. The short distance from the bakehouse to her front door could ruin the bread, covering it with coal dust so that it tasted gritty. She noticed that already her hands and coat had a fine film of dust on them. She blew her hands clean, then hurried on down the dark street.

Halfway down her street Doris met John Prosser, Tom Clapham, Rees Griffiths and Danny Tanner carrying Jack Carlick between them. Jack’s blackened face was screwed up with pain, and he moaned softly. Doris pressed herself against the wall. She had taught so many of these boys and so many of their names were listed on the church walls, for explosions and fires down the mine were an annual occurrence. When the men moved on, she found the back of her coat smudged with soot from the wall.

A group of small children, clutching their farthings, were clustered around Ernesco Melardi’s ice-cream cart. They should have been tucked up in bed, it was almost six, and Doris tut-tutted at them hanging around playing tic-tac. They saw her and waved, and Doris gave a sharp nod of her head. She could hear the children sniggering and whispering behind her but she didn’t turn back. ‘Droopy-Drawers Doris’ was their favourite name for her this week.

It was the sound of a child’s screeching voice that made Doris catch her breath. It was sweeping over her again, and she only just managed to open her front door before her head began to thud with one of the blinding headaches that beset her so often. Doris was back in Clydach Vale again, her head thudding, her ears filled with the sound of the rushing water. She clung to the edge of the polished kitchen table. Twelve years ago, and yet it was as if it were happening at that very moment…

Again she heard the children’s voices, the screaming hooter as the warning went out. The school had been flooded with water from an abandoned coal level. Doris had waded through the slime, searching, calling out the children’s names. Three tiny bodies had been found in the playground, and then little Ned Jones was found curled up like a baby in the corner. Further on the boy’s mother cradled her six-month-old baby girl in her arms, her pitiful body covered in mud. It had been so long ago, but Doris’ vision of the children never dimmed. She stumbled to the rocking chair by the fire, and closed her eyes. It usually began with the memory of the children, then Doris would hear again the sound of clogs clattering on the street, the high-pitched voices calling, ‘Mrs Evans! Mrs Evans!’ Doris rocked herself back and forth, the clogs came closer … oh, so much closer … The fists banged on her door. The smell of the brass polish made her nostrils flare, her eyes water, and the memories swept over her, like the tears that rolled down her face.

They had been married only days, their honeymoon just a weekend in Swansea, and then Walter had returned to the mines. They said he had been in good voice, they’d heard him singing as the cage came up, then he had collapsed and no one could revive him. The doctor said the work had drawn all the moisture from his body and because it was not replaced he had died of dehydration, just like five others that same year.

The rocking chair creaked, Doris sighed, and the pain in her head began to fade, her thin lips moved as she smiled to herself and sweet memories now eased the pain.

Doris’ father was an inspector for the Cardiff Railway Company, and often at weekends he would get tickets for his family to travel around and see the countryside. He was proud of his eldest daughter; Doris was going to Cardiff University to study English. She was artistic and shy and loved to do quick charcoal sketches as the train puffed and chuffed its way across the valley.

On one of her sketching trips she had met Walter and fallen in love. Her father did not approve of the friendship. He considered the illiterate miner to be far beneath his clever daughter. However, when her father fell ill, Doris had no option but to leave the university to take care of him. Her mother had died when she was a child and there was no one else.

Once Walter had travelled all the way to Cardiff to see her, but he had been refused entry to the house by her elder brother. He, like his father, felt Walter was not good enough for her. It was not until Doris’ father died that she was free to marry the patient miner. By this time her brother had qualified as a doctor and had met a well-connected girl. After a terrible argument, Doris had packed a bag and travelled to the village. She knew she would never be happy living with her brother and his snooty bride-to-be. She had wasted no time telling them, had even said that they had aspirations above their station. Doris chuckled, she could still hear herself…