Pontypridd 01 - Hearts of Gold

by Catrin Collier

  Frost and that meant a cold and slippery walk down the Graig hill to the hospital. She left the window and heaved on the bottom drawer of the dressing table. It jerked out sluggishly, with the stickiness of furniture kept too long in a cold, damp house. Rummaging impatiently through the tangle of clothes, she searched for an extra pair of back woollen stockings. Nurses, especially trainee nurses were only supposed to wear one pair, but her legs had been almost blue with cold when she’d left her ward at the end of yesterday’s shift, and there hadn’t been frost on the ground then.

  She found the stockings and tossed them on to the pile of underclothes and uniform that she’d laid out on the stool the night before. Warm legs were worth the risk of an official reprimand, even from Sister Church.

  Heaving the drawer shut with her foot as well as her hands, she went to the washstand. She picked up the unwieldy old-fashioned yellow jug decorated with transfers of sepia country scenes and tried to pour its contents into the washbowl.

  Nothing happened. Shivering as the chill atmosphere permeated her dressing gown she brushed her dark hair away from her face and looked down into the jug. Pushing her fingers into the neck, she confirmed her suspicions. A thick frozen crust capped the water.

  Even if she succeeded in breaking through it without cracking the jug, the thought of washing in chunks of ice didn’t appeal to her. Pulling the collar of her dressing gown as high as it would go she tightened the belt and left the bedroom, stepping down on to the top stair.

  Unlike the bedroom, the stairs were carpeted with jute, held in place by three cornered oak rods. She trod lightly on the third and fourth stair from the top. Their rods were fragile – broken when her brothers, Haydn and Eddie, had purloined them to use as swords after watching a Douglas Fairbanks’ film. The rods had survived the fencing match, but neither had survived the beating her mother had inflicted on the boys with them when she’d found out what they’d done.

  The light was burning in the downstairs passage as she made her way to the back kitchen. Her father, mother and eldest brother were up and dressed, breakfasting at the massive dark oak table that, together with the open-shelved dresser, dominated the room.

  ‘Good morning, Bethan,’ her mother offered frigidly with a scarcely perceptible nod towards the corner where their lodger Alun Jones was lacing his collier’s boots.

  Alun looked up and for all of his thirty-five years turned a bright shade of beetroot.

  Irritated, Bethan tied her dressing gown even closer around her shivering body.

  ‘Good morning,’ she mumbled in reply to her mother’s greeting. ‘The water in the jug is frozen, so I came down for some warm,’ she added, trying to excuse her state of undress.

  In middle age, Elizabeth Powell was a tall, thin, spare woman. Spare in flesh and spare in spirit. Bethan, like her brothers and Maud, was afraid not so much of her mother but of the atmosphere she exuded which was guaranteed to dampen the liveliest spirit. Elizabeth certainly had an outstanding ability to make herself and everyone around her feel miserable and uncomfortable.

  But she hadn’t always possessed that trait. She’d acquired and honed it to perfection during twenty-one years of silent, suffering marriage to Evan Powell.

  Her silence. His suffering.

  At the time none of the Powells’ friends or acquaintances could fathom exactly why Evan Powell, a strapping, tall, dark (and curly-haired with it) handsome young miner of twenty-three had suddenly decided to pay court to a thin, dour schoolmistress ten years older than himself. But court her he had, and the courtship had culminated a few weeks later in a full chapel wedding attended by both families.

  Elizabeth’s relatives had been both bemused and upset by the match. In their opinion Elizabeth hadn’t so much, stepped down in the world, as slid. True, she had little to recommend her as a wife. Thirty three years old, like most women of her generation she was terrified of being left on the shelf.

  She certainly had no pretensions to beauty. Even then, her hair could have been more accurately described as colourless rather than fair. Her eyes were of a blue more faded than vibrant, and her face thin-nosed, thin-lipped, thin-browed, tended to look disapprovingly down on the world in general, and Pontypridd and the working-class area of the Graig where Evan Powell lived in particular.

  She was tall for a woman. Five feet nine inches and Evan’s younger brother, William, rather unkindly commented that the one good thing that could be said about her was she looked well on his brother’s arm from the rear.

  Before her marriage Elizabeth had possessed a good figure, and she’d known how to dress. But when marriage put an end to her career as an assistant school mistress in Maesycoed junior school, it also put an end to the generous dress allowance that had been her one extravagance. Not that she came to marriage empty-handed. She’d saved a little money of her own to add to the small nest egg her mother had left her, and Evan, generous and self-sacrificing to the last, had urged her to spend that money or at least the interest it accumulated, on herself.

  However, her Baptist minister father had fostered a spirit of sanctity towards savings within the confines of her flat breast that was matched only by the feeling of absolute superiority to the mining classes that he’d engendered in her narrow mind. She would have as soon pawned the family bible as used her deposit account to buy smart or fashionable clothes.

  The marriage, begun as an anomaly, continued in silence.

  Evan never discussed his feelings with anyone, least of all his wife and Elizabeth, disgusted with herself for falling prey to what she privately considered a lapse into “bestial passion” never divulged what had attracted her to Evan.

  Evan was extremely good-looking, even by Pontypridd standards where well set up strongly built colliers were the rule rather than the exception. Six feet three inches in his stocking feet, with an exotic swarthy complexion that he’d inherited from his maternal Spanish grandfather, he was just the type to excite John Joseph Bull’s suspicions.

  John Joseph was Elizabeth’s uncle, the brother of her dead father. A Baptist minister too, he knew, or thought he knew, everything there was to know about lust, as those who heard his sermons soon found out.

  “A devil sent demon to lead the weak and ungodly into a foul world of naked, hairy limbs, lewdness and lechery.”

  Small children sat bemused as he railed against both sexes for their fragile, miserable morals.

  Unlike some of his colleagues he realised that women could fall prey to the temptations of that particular cardinal sin as well as men. As an active revivalist, evangelist and minister of God, his knowledge was not based on experience but on years of watching and noting the depths to which the people who lived within the boundaries of his chapelʼs sphere could sink.

  He ascribed his interest in the human condition to charitable motives. Evan who was considered remarkably well-read even for a miner, called it by another name. Voyeurism.

  John Joseph’s wife Hetty, a small, quiet, mousy woman some twenty years younger than he, had a sense of duty that extended into every aspect of their joyless married life, from the kitchen to the bedroom and the Sunday night ritual during which, after lengthy and suitable prayer, John Joseph lifted her nightdress – the only night of the week he allowed himself to do so.

  Hetty was a paragon but John Joseph saw enough miners’ daughters and wives to know that other kinds existed.

  Some were even brazen enough to eye men when they sat in his chapel pews. He’d caught sight of them after the service, walking off shamelessly, arm in arm with their paramours into the secluded areas of Ynysangharad War Memorial Park, or up Pit Road where they disappeared into the woods around Shoni’s pond.

  The thought of his niece and Evan Powell following either route incensed and disgusted him. But Elizabeth Bull was way past the age when she needed a guardian’s blessing to marry. He could do nothing except voice his disapproval. Which he did long, loud and vociferously, both before and after the ceremony.


  He’d refused to give Elizabeth away on the grounds that he wouldn’t be an active party to her social demise. But his contempt for Evan and the mining classes didn’t prevent him from officiating as minister over the proceedings. It also gave him the opportunity to speak at the small reception that his wife Hetty had dutifully arranged in the vestry.

  He saw himself as a plain speaking man, but even Hetty, who was used to his harsh, God-fearing ways, cringed when he pointed a long thin finger at Elizabeth, glowered at her darkly and bellowed that he was glad, really glad, that his dead brother and sister-in-law were not alive to see their daughter sink so low.

  Elizabeth recalled his words every day of her married life. They came to here even now as she looked around her kitchen and saw her daughter in a state of undress, the unhealthy colour rising in the lodger’s cheeks as he surreptitiously ogled the curves outlined beneath the thin cloth of Bethan’s dressing gown, her son and husband sitting at the table, boots off, not even wearing collars with their shirts.

  She felt that not only herself but her children had sunk to the lowest level of the working-class life she’d been forced to live and had learned to despise with every fibre of her being.

  ‘I’ll draw the water for you, Beth.’ Haydn smiled cheerfully at his sister as he pushed the last piece of bread and jam from his plate into his mouth.

  ‘Thank you.’ Bethan walked past the pantry and unlatched the planked door that led into the wash house. Switching on the light she sidestepped between the huge, round gas wash boiler and massive stone sink that served the only tap in the house. Opening the outside door, she caught her breath in the face of the cold wind that greeted her, placed her foot in the yard and slid precariously across the four feet of iced paving stones that separated the house and garden ways, grazing her hands painfully in the process.

  She gripped the wall desperately trying to maintain her balanced while she regained her breath. The drains had obviously overflowed before the frost had struck, and the whole of the back yard was covered by a sheet of black ice.

  ‘Sorry, Sis, I would have warned you, but you came out a bit fast.’

  She squinted into the darkness, and saw her youngest brother Eddie brushing his boots on the steps that led to the shed and the square of fenced in dirt where her father kept his lurcher.

  ‘I bet you would have,’ she replied caustically. Rubbing the sting out of her hands she inched her way along the wall until she reached the narrow alley in the back right-hand corner of the yard that led to the ty bach or “little house” that hid the WC.

  Protected from the weather on three sides by the house, high garden wall and the communal outhouse wall they shared with next door, it wasn’t quite as cold as the yard and thanks to the rags that her father had wrapped around the pipes and high cistern, the plumbing worked in spite of the frost.

  The heat blasted welcomingly into her stiff and frozen face when she returned to the kitchen. Haydn was sitting on the kerb of the hearth filling her mother’s enamel kitchen jug from the brass tap of the boiler set into the range.

  ‘Mind you top that water level up before you go.’ Elizabeth carped at Haydn. ‘I’ve no time to do it, and if the level falls low the boiler will blow.

  ‘I’ll do it now:’ Haydn winked at Bethan as he handed the steaming jug across the table. Six feet tall with blond hair and deep blue eyes that could melt the most granite-like heart, Haydn was the family charmer. His looks contributed only in part to that charm. His regular features were set attractively in his long face, and his full mouth was frequently curved into a beguiling smile, but it was his manner that won him most friends. At nineteen, he possessed a tact, diplomacy and an apparent sincerity that was the envy of every clergyman, Baptist as well as Anglican, on the Graig.

  ‘You won’t be topping up anything unless you hurry,’ Elizabeth complained sourly. ‘It’s a quarter-past five now.’

  ‘The wagons won’t be leaving the brewery yard until seven. I’ve plenty of time to get there, persuade the foreman to give me a morning’s work, and load up before they roll,’ Haydn said evenly carrying his plate into the washhouse.

  ‘It’ll take you a good half an hour to get down the hill in this weather.’

  ‘Don’t look for trouble where there is none, Mam.’ Haydn returned with a jug of cold water, and pinched Elizabeth’s wrinkled cheek gently as he passed. He was the only one of her children who would have dared take the liberty. ‘I’ll be in Leyshon’s yard before I know it, with all that ice to slide down.’

  ‘Taking the backside out of your trousers like you did when you were a boy. Well I’ve no money to give you for new ones.’

  ‘I don’t expect you to keep me, Mam.’ Haydn dodged past her and walked over to the hearth.

  Not content with the sight of Haydn doing what she’d asked, Elizabeth turned on Bethan. ‘And you, Miss,’ she said sharply. ‘You’ll have to get a move on if you’re to be on your ward at half-past six.’

  ‘I’m going upstairs now, Mam.’ Despite what she’d said, Bethan still hovered uneasily next to Haydn. ‘I’ll just get a dry towel.’ She unhooked the rope that hoisted the airer to the ceiling.

  ‘And you’ can leave that alone when you like. I put a clean towel upstairs for you and Maud yesterday.’

  ‘Thank you, Mam. I didn’t notice,’ Bethan said meekly. She had achieved what she wanted.

  Her father and Alun Jones had pulled on their coal-encrusted coats and caps, picked up their knapsacks, and were heading out through the door. If she succeeded in lingering in the kitchen for another minute or two she wouldn’t have to embarrass Alun, or herself, again by waking past him in her dressing gown.

  ‘Good luck, snookems,’ her father said with a tenderness that her mother never voiced. ‘Not that you need it.’

  “Snookems.” It had been a long time since he had called her that. On impulse she replaced the jug on the tiled hearth, reached out and hugged him. His working clothes reeked of the acrid odours of coal and male sweat, but neither that nor the coal dust that rubbed off on her face stopped her from planting a hearty kiss on his bristly cheek.

  ‘Thanks for remembering, Dad,’ she murmured. ‘I need all the luck I can get today.’

  ‘Not you,’ Haydn commented firmly, picking up the rag-filled lisle stocking that served as a pot holder. ‘You’ve done enough studying in the last three years to carry you to doctor level, let alone nurse.’

  Bethan moved out of the way as he lifted the lid on the boiler. Clouds of steam filled the air accompanied by a hissing, sizzling sound as water splashed over the hotplates’ as well as into the boiler.

  ‘That’s right, make a mess of it,’ Elizabeth moaned. ‘Just after I’ve black leaded the top.’

  ‘Looks like I have. Sorry, Mam,’ Haydn apologised cheerfully. ‘If you leave it, I’ll clean it off this afternoon.’

  ‘As if I’d leave it.’

  ‘We’re off then, Elizabeth,’ Evan said softly, pushing the tin box that held his food and the bottle that held his cold tea into his blackened knapsack.

  ‘About time,’ she said harshly, angry at being interrupted.

  ‘See you tonight, Bethan,’ Evan murmured as he and Alun left the kitchen.

  As soon as Bethan heard the front door slamming behind them she grabbed the jug, and ran down the passage and up the stairs before her mother could find anything else to complain about.

  When she reached her bedroom she found the door closed and the room in darkness. She switched on the light and carried the steaming jug over to the washstand.

  ‘I thought you’d gone,’ Maud mumbled sleepily from the depths of the bed. ‘I had to get up to turn off the light.’

  ‘Sorry. Go back to sleep.’ Bethan tipped the hot water into the bowl and took the soap and flannel from the dish. The marble surface of the washstand was cold, the flannel encrusted with ice.

  Shivering, she stooped to look in the mirror when she washed, wishing herself shorter and more graceful, l
ike Maud or her best friend and fellow trainee nurse, Laura Ronconi.

  She was huge. Big and clumsy, she decided disparagingly, as she sponged the goose pimples on her exposed skin. Life was completely unfair. She was the eldest, why hadn’t she been blessed with Maud’s looks?

  Her younger sister was a fragile five feet four inches, with the same angelic blue eyes and blonde hair as Haydn.

  Not yet fourteen, she had the quiet grace of a girl on the brink of attractive, elegant womanhood. While she had a dark, drab complexion, and the height of a maypole.

  She finished washing, tipped the water into the slop jar beneath the stand, and began to dress.

  Her hair wasnʼt too bad, she decided critically, studying the cropped black glossy waves, which Maud had coaxed into a style that wouldnʼt have disgraced an aspiring Hollywood starlet. And her eyes, large, brown and thickly fringed with lashes, were passable. Her mouth and nose were all right, taken in isolation, the problem came when the whole was put together. Particularly her enormous shoulders.

  Wide shoulders looked good on her father, Eddie and Haydn, but they looked dreadful on a woman. Life would be so different if sheʼd been born pretty. If not small, fragile and blonde like Maud, then at least petite, vivacious and dark like Laura.

  The chill damp of the bedroom penetrated her bones. Turning her back on the wardrobe mirror she pulled on her clothes as fast as she could. Chemise, liberty bodice, vest, long petticoat, fleecy-lined drawers, two more petticoats, one pair of stockings.

  She picked up the second pair and noticed a hole. Unrolling one of the stockings from her leg she reversed them, donning the one with the hole first, trying valiantly but vainly to manipulate the hole to the sole of her foot.

  Uniform dress, belt with plain buckle; she tried – and failed to suppress an image of herself wearing the coveted silver buckle of the qualified nurse – apron, cuffs, collar and finally the veil that covered her one good feature, her hair. Marginally warmer, she stood in front of the oval mirror on the wardrobe door and tried to see the back of her heels. There was a noticeable and definite light patch on her right heel. She debated whether to remove the extra pair of stockings, but the cold decided for her. If she was lucky Sister Church would be too busy, or too cold herself, to spend time checking the uniform of her final year trainees.