by Dai Smith
“… I understand … I really do, Billy … what you’re saying. To Ceri. To me. And maybe, because you know how well I know you, Billy – so much unforgotten between us, isn’t there? – I understand your motives. But I still want to get you to see, things have moved on, you know, to see that it would be, well, not sensible, just sentimental if I can say, to let yourself be blinded by them, and you would, really, spoil so much that is good. And necessary even. Good, certainly. We’re all convinced of that. If you pursue them.”
I pursed my lips. Not in a discouraging way, I hoped. I wanted to give the impression of hidden and unforgettable things. Things that were indeed between us still. Things I could release if I wanted, with the right persuasion. I wanted her to continue, to be persuasive. And I wanted to know what she was doing with my father’s suitcase, and what was in it.
The speech I had coming was a good one. Prepared, rehearsed maybe, certainly drafted by Ceri for shape and punch, but clear and committed in its message. It was a speech about bringing hope to the hopeless. How could anyone possibly object? Some things were as undeniable as they were familiar. We’d been too young to appreciate the obstacles to our idealism. We’d imagined a moment when things would be possible because of all that had gone before. We could re-root, re-investigate, fertilise the lives and institutions of ordinary people – like her mentor, Ceri, she fought fashionably shy of that old calling card, the working class – with fresh energy, new ideas and determination. We hadn’t been wrong, but we had mistaken what we had really had to play with to make the change possible. OK, maybe we were too excited, even too enjoying of the world turning upside down but, come on, what was the alternative? And it isn’t as if the daily existence of ordinary people was adequate, was it? Even for them. She knew why I’d left. Caught between the icy dismissiveness of my old man and the despair at our generational failure. Which is where, she said, Ceri came in, couldn’t I see? It had taken him some time, too, but he had been amongst the first to recognise that the fight was not ended, only re-located. He was our bridge. It wasn’t, then, that we had to settle for less, only for something different, because needs and opportunities were no longer the same. The politics had atrophied because the whole way of once being had disappeared or shrivelled beyond use or recognition. Aspiration didn’t have to begin at Basingstoke, did it? Community was just a romantic notion. Individuals deserved better, didn’t they? What was wrong with that? Wasn’t that what we were, really, all about, then and now? You didn’t pull the ladder up after you like an Indian rope trick, you helped others up, you encouraged others to climb and you did what you could for those who wouldn’t or couldn’t.
And I had to see how radically altered people were, hadn’t I? They voted unthinkingly in the past and now hardly bothered to vote at all. The past was, OK, often glorious to read about but romanticised like hell and probably shit to live through. Especially if you were a woman. She gave me that from down-under look that told me she knew this instinctively, of course. I nodded her on. Which was why, she confided, they needed not support nor comfort nor flattery but the kind of civic and cultural leadership that could ensure social and structural change. Ceri had given up on the petty squabbling of the remnants of his own political past to embrace the wider vision that a new coalition of interests offered and for which he, and some others with both roots and networks, could serve as a conduit. These channels had to be dug and lubricated by people with the same local knowledge and soaring ambition. But these people – a modest, implicit acknowledgement of herself, Gwilym and Maldwyn this time – were not somehow cheating or conniving to exclude ordinary people. No, they had an extraordinary desire to help people who, in these serially neglected and benighted valleys, could no longer help themselves. As a group, she said. As individuals, she said. It had to change, didn’t it?
Bran then led me by the hand through the plans they had devised together to provide an exemplar which would be the envy of regeneration projects across Europe, and wider still. It met all the current needs of its surrounding dependants – economic and social – and, what was wonderfully more, it would bring the sharpest brains and the deepest wallets into a cultural symbiosis. She liked that word. She liked it so much she used it twice. I could see the symbiotic connection she was eager to make. Money and minds, together. Wow. What a sweet combo. When she saw the light bulb was on she expanded on the fruits of this treasure trove and gently explained how such deals were always complex, fraught with bureaucracy, be-devilled by rivalry, hamstrung by low expectation and clouded vision. There had to be leaders, big and bold enough to translate their individual ambition into the passion for progressive action that had always inspired them. It still did. That was the point. To create a mini storm by false accusation that would, nonetheless, take time and trouble to refute, with all the collateral, possibly fatal, damage the project would suffer, well, to do that, would be to make the mistake, but in reverse, we’d all made two decades ago. This was now. It was great I was back but I had to be back, if not for good, then, at least, in the interest of the good. And the people of course. Of course.
Hats off, I thought. She was good. Really good, PR taken to the nth degree, and presented with flair. Reasoned intelligence without too heavy a sell could be a winner every time. Not this time though. What a crock of shit, I thought. We are for them despite themselves. They are finished otherwise. They don’t understand anyway. Their usefulness is dependent on how they are used. Their history is cut off from any future they might have. Their remaining purpose is to stand aside or be led to higher ground they don’t even glimpse anymore. QED.
I pursed my lips again. She seemed to think this signalled how bowled over I was. Yeah, that and some. I readied myself for the bullet to the brain still to come. She tapped the suitcase with an unvarnished fingernail. Did I recognise it? I said it seemed familiar. She told me the old man had asked her to take it away when he sensed he was dying and to give it to me if I ever came back. That it was full of notes and papers and a few books and magazines he seemed to have researched and culled. Some writing by him and a few letters, she said. She thought, and Ceri had agreed it seems, that it was all revelatory. In an uncanny way, she conjectured, it might be said to connect up me and the old man, and lots of other things which had seemed too large scale to be personal. Yet, here it was, up close and personal. I’d understand.
She stood and formally shook my hand before thinking better of it and leaning down to kiss my cheek.
“I’ll leave the case,” she said. “It’s interesting, I promise. Please look at it. You might say it’ll clear your mind. No doubts, eh? Love you, Billy. Really do. Sorry it didn’t work out. But life never stays still, does it?”
I watched her leave, smiling at Pavel as she did, making the air around her fragrant by her passage. Funny how deceptive things like that can be. I looked at the case. I sighed for a time long past. I picked it up as I got to my feet, and carried it to the lift and my room. I had some reading to do. It was lucky my eyes were starting to feel up for it.
* * * * *
I placed it bottom-down on the bed and contemplated it for a while. Whatever was inside would do me no good. Bran would not have brought it to do me good. It was what effect it was meant to have which alone concerned her. I went for a walk. Just to the window. I looked out from six floors down through the screen of treeleaf to the wall of the mock castle beneath. That wall was equipped to snarl back. The wall ran alongside the main road which roared past. The wall was topped with stone animals – a whole Victorian menagerie of them – pouncing and crawling and leaping over the battlements that would hold them in still flight forever. A whole city had sprung up around their sculpting, one paid for like them in the same mineral coin that had made it, for a time, the world’s Coalopolis.
I crossed the royal-blue carpeted floor back to the foot of the low divan bed and stared at my nemesis. I leaned forward on impulse and released the two rusting metal catches which sprung up and back with an emphatic
snap. I paused. I knelt down. I opened the lid of the cheap cardboard and leatherette case as slowly as inevitability would allow. I had no curiosity, only anxiety. If I knew the shallows of Bran all too well, I knew the depths of the old man even better. To be wary of one was to fear the other. A scent of curling brown paper and a whiff of dead days uncurled to meet me.
There were three hardback volumes, dating from the 1920s and ’30s. Some magazines, a few maps of the coalfield before 1914, a book of statistics, a red-covered Edwardian railway timetable for coal freight traffic, loosely strewn papers, some typed on old-fashioned ‘flimsy’ but most scrawled over in my old man’s blocky hand. I shuffled through them. Notes, extracts, disconnected paragraphs of continuous prose and questions, a list of things to do and read, and titles or perhaps headings. At the very bottom of this pile were twenty or so pen-and-ink drawings on 6" by 4" white paper, bundled together in a folder and each initialled with the old man’s D.M. in the left hand corner. They were of ruins, bombed and blasted, of armoured cars and upturned vehicles, of black-limbed trees and shuffling men. They were of Monte Cassino and 1944. A final buff folder just said Letters on its front, and was marked Personal. It was obvious, from the books alone, that the material he’d assembled was a foray into the life and times of David Alfred Thomas. The old man had read into the history of the coalfield, and its various makers. But nothing as intensely gathered together as this, so far as I knew. It took me a quick trawl to establish who exactly the object of all this was. The subject had died in 1918 and when he died he did so as Viscount Rhondda. He’d been cremated in Golders Green. The old man must have known that on the day we were there together when Paynter followed Rhondda to the final fire in 1984, because none of the papers seemed to have been worked on, from the few dates he’d added to pages, since 1958. Lord Rhondda’s ashes were later buried in Llanwern, his country seat in Monmouthshire, as Gwent was then known.
I resisted pulling everything apart too rapidly for one swift explanation. I wanted to see why this person had caught my old man’s attention for this much effort. The cornerstones of the life were no great help. He’d been born in 1856 into the large family of a hustling, bustling mid-Victorian coal speculator, Samuel Thomas, who’d branched out from the Aberdare valley to hit pay dirt with the opening up of rich seams in the mid-Rhondda from the 1870s. Enough to pay for a public school education and then a Cambridge degree for his bookish son who, in turn, inherited what became the Cambrian Combine agglomeration of pits. I could see why that might be of interest to the old man. It was around aggressive managerial demands that the Tonypandy riots of 1910, along with the year-long Cambrian Combine strike, occurred. But this was clearly no historian’s quest. No spinning enquiry either into the political detail that festooned the days of a Liberal MP in Imperial Britain until Thomas gave it up to concentrate on a dedicated career as coal capitalist. And more than that, one who longed to control destinies, shape lives, fulfil them through his own power and will. He had spelled it all out in chilling detail in essays and speeches of overweening ambition.
I skimmed a book of memorial essays by his devoted daughter and other contemporaries, along with a hagiographic biography, picking out the salient factual points: that he had been a fortunate survivor when the Germans torpedoed the Lusitania on its return transatlantic voyage from New York in May 1915, and that his chief contemporary and one-time political rival, Lloyd George, Minister of Munitions in that year and made the Prime Minister of the British Empire in December 1916, had been quick to use Thomas’s negotiating skills in America to ensure consistency of supply in the wartime crisis over munitions, and then placed him in his wartime cabinet, from 1917 as Food Controller, from where supreme administrative and imaginative genius allowed besieged Britain to live on rations rather than borrowed time. That won Thomas his Viscountcy, and probably hastened his early death at sixty-three. How large their lives were. How central was their Wales. How significant was coal itself. How it all still lingered.
* * * * *
The old man had begun yet another something he had never finished. It would have been called: ‘The American Prince of Wales’. He had left me shards. Perhaps they had illuminated enough for him, and if you read carefully enough you could still cut yourself on their splinters. I read slowly, as if both subject and author were whole again, then smashed into pieces, glinting, coalescing, but all beyond the reach of my understanding:
His was a concept as much as it was a reality. He ached to make of the reality he had been given something inconceivably greater than its material form. But it was, he knew, that which was merely material which was the matter he must dynamite – but how? – into the future that lay still and inert in deep fissures. Of coal. Of that mineral which, alone, vitalised the blood and iron of conflicting Empires and for which he had more beneficent dreams.
It was said of him that he knew Jevons’ 1865 tome, The Coal Question: an Inquiry concerning the Progress of the Nation and the Probable Exhaustion of our Coal-Mines, nearly by heart and could and would cite chunks of it out loud, as if it was an amusing party piece. For him it was Nirvana and Apocalypse both. In drawing room and office, at the dinner table or the theatre, he would bore and impress, rant and reason, to the effect that to be born into a coalfield such as South Wales, more, to be charged with its destiny, was to bear a gift incomparable to birth by lineage or politics by choice. The world itself, he would say, could thereby, by this vast reserve of coal, be secured, for a time, for ourselves. Time bought to grow and develop. Elsewhere if need be. He was, this Welshman, in the phrasing of the day, no “little Englander”; but nor was he, this modern Prince, to be defined by the happenstance of being Welsh.
In spate, his clipped conversation raced into speech, and his speech roared into exhortatory impatience. In 1896, when Lloyd George, his Liberal parliamentary colleague, and fellow radical, sought a different future, a Cymru Fydd, around a sense of a distinct Liberal Wales, it was D.A. Thomas who urged wider horizons beyond this, as he saw it, cultural myopia. That year, in counterblast, he wrote a paean to his dream, a world spinning on the axis of his locus:
“… there is no part in the United Kingdom which has so many national and artificial advantages as Cardiff; and these must tell in the near future. In a geographic sense the Welsh capital is admirably situated for the North and South American, West Indian, African, Pacific, East Indian, Australian, Mediterranean, Black Sea, and South and West Continental trades. As a loading port she is unrivalled; numerous vessels having to come to her from London, Liverpool, and Continental ports for outward cargo. Coal is the heaviest of all our exports, and the coalfield of South Wales is the most valuable in the Kingdom for export of cargo and for bunkering steamers.
“… The time has fully arrived when Cardiff should seek to form a large Atlantic trade, both in goods and passengers … Cardiff is first for minimum distance New York to Birmingham, and second to London … In all these phases of trade and convenience for commerce there is a distinct advantage on the side of Cardiff … It is true the principal item [of deadweight tonnage] is that of coal. But it must be borne in mind that coal forms the staple at present for the outward cargoes of all outward bound ships. It is something like three fourths of the whole deadweight of cargoes in our overseas trade. Cardiff has an unlimited supply of the best bunker coal in the world behind her. The coal of the South Welsh basin, as yet unworked, is estimated by the Royal Coal Commission at about 34,000 million tons. Just conceive it!”
His ambition was not to be confined. Neither by the conventional limits of a commercial life set by others nor by the root of the place where he was born. He intended, on the contrary, to use that rooted vigour to reach out beyond the circumstances of birth and upbringing, and to use his own given time and allotted space to make a great social experiment. In essence this is what America meant for him. And in this was he so very different from those who opposed him?
He made it plain that, although he made a great deal of it through
his extensive business dealings, he was not ever merely seeking to make money. It was more that wealth and an assured fortune were his means to make the success he desired follow on. His definition of success was not a narrow one: it would be broad enough to encompass all manner of social and cultural growth. Seeded, tended and controlled by him. His people, as he never ceased to think of those amongst whom he’d lived and who now toiled for him, were, in literal fact, his end. The end purpose of his means. They, he often explained to those who asked, whether in the Press or in Parliament, thrashed about, in a welter of strikes and riots and grumbling, because they, by the nature of things, did not, and could not, possess the means to attain the impossible Nirvana held up before them by Idealists who, in every other sense than for their foolishness, earned his respect. Indeed, he was, he averred, one such himself. The difference was that he had both a finite goal and the practical means to achieve it. He was with his people in this, neither for impractical Socialism nor for the sticking-plaster Welfarism of Lloyd George. He had imagined how a novel collectivity, educated and disciplined and led, could come to a similar understanding of both the benevolence of such a system on this earth and the absolute necessity of the kind of leadership he could ensure in and beyond his time. And the key to this was the happenstance of Coal, its supreme importance. He would invoke his admired Jevons to the effect that coal “is the mainspring of modern material civilisation … not beside but entirely above all other commodities … the material source of the energy of the country, the universal aid, the factor in everything we do, without which we are thrown back into the laborious poverty of early times.” Given this faith, this responsibility, he knew how to conceive of his duty. Being humble was not part of it.
