Pontypridd 05 - Such Sweet Sorrow

by Catrin Collier

  ‘If you work hard, you may get promoted to fully-fledged miners,’ the under-manager continued. ‘But don’t go looking for advancement soon. If sales and markets don’t pick up, we won’t be able to keep the men we’ve already got on the books, let alone take on more. As it is, I don’t know what the miners without jobs are going to say when they find out you two are working here.’ The whistle blew. ‘Take them to the stores and get them kitted out with helmets and lamps, Evan, and make it quick. I don’t want the cage held up.’ Evan walked alongside a stone building to a stable door. He pushed the top half open and shouted for attention, watching as the storekeeper booked out helmets, lamps, picks and shovels against Luke and Alexander’s names.

  ‘Your pay will be docked to cover the equipment,’ Evan warned. ‘Mark everything with your name and don’t take your eyes off any of it, especially the lamps: your lives may depend on them.’

  Alexander smiled as he pushed the helmet on his head, but there was no answering smile on Evan’s face. It was then he remembered the newsreels he’d seen of women waiting at the top of pithead cages just like this one. He suddenly realised that this was no longer a noble political gesture, but his life for the duration; and if he was careless, it also could be his death.

  The waitresses were screaming at the woman who made the teas and coffees because she wasn’t making them fast enough; the girls who served cakes over the front counter of the café were quarrelling with the boy who was ferrying trays of newly baked confectionery up from the basement kitchen, because none of the cakes he brought were the ones they wanted, and Tina was shouting at everyone, principally the cook who had baked four times the usual quota of sugarless ‘sugar’ buns, because the sugar ration had run out.

  The door clanged open. At that moment she would have given everything she had to see William framed in the doorway. It was bizarre. He’d been gone for barely twenty-four hours, he wouldn’t be home for at least six weeks and already she was having difficulty remembering his face, his smile, the expression in his eyes when he had slipped the ring on her finger to the accompaniment of clapping from the girls and jeers and catcalls from the boys, especially Angelo.

  ‘Miss Ronconi?’

  She looked blankly at the small, thin man in front of her.

  ‘You are feeling all right, Miss Ronconi?’ He raised his hat, and she couldn’t help comparing his wizened frame and yellowed skin with William’s robust physical presence and strength.

  ‘Yes, sorry, just discussing the day’s baking with the cook.’

  ‘Sorry to be calling so early, Miss Ronconi, but I have to start my rounds somewhere. My name is Henley, Ministry of Food, here to discuss your food allowance for the cafés.’

  ‘I think you should discuss that with my father in our High Street café.’

  ‘It says here that I should discuss it with a Miss Laura Ronconi,’ he said, referring to a sheaf of papers in his hand.

  ‘She had a baby yesterday.’ Suppressing an urge to leave the shocked expression on the man’s face, she relented. ‘She’s married to the local doctor, but because this is a family business she uses her maiden name when she’s here.’

  ‘Yes, quite.’

  ‘As I said, you’ll find Papa in our High Street café.’ While she gave him directions she searched her mind for somewhere quiet she could go. She needed time to herself, time to think. Retrieving her handbag from behind the counter, she poured herself a cup of coffee and climbed the stairs to the banqueting room which was opened only when they had a function booked.

  Sinking on to a chair she placed her handbag on the table next to her. Opening it, she pulled out the writing pad and fountain pen she’d dropped into it that morning in the hope of finding time to write to William. She wrote her address neatly in the top right-hand corner of the page just as she’d been taught in Maesycoed school, then she put down her pen, folded her arms, sat back and remembered.

  William winking at her every time she dared turn her head from the teacher, because he’d fought Alwyn Collins from Danygraig Street for the desk in the ‘boys’ row’ opposite hers. Playtimes when William had led her into forbidden corners so they could experiment with kissing. The excitement of her debut dance in the Catholic Hall in Treforest when William had claimed every dance despite her eldest brother Ronnie’s presence. Their first real kiss behind that same hall after she had run outside with William when Ronnie had assumed she’d been fetching her coat.

  Closing her eyes she tried to imagine William holding her. It was no use. She couldn’t feel his presence – his arms around her, his lips on hers as they had been that last night. No matter how hard she concentrated, she failed to conjure the sensation and intensity she craved for. And, worst of all, William’s face persisted in eluding her. The face of the man she loved, had promised to marry, and now had difficulty in recalling.

  Sliding her hand inside the neck of her dress she pulled out the gold locket Laura and Trevor had given her when she had been their bridesmaid, and pressed the catch. The chain was long enough for her to study the photograph of William that she had placed inside. He was laughing, his dark curly hair tousled, blowing in the breeze outside St John’s church. It was his most recent photograph, taken at Eddie’s wedding to Jenny. Smooth featured, too good-looking for peace of mind as Laura had said. Had he already found another girl at the camp? Everyone said that there were girls in army camps. Cooks, laundry maids …

  ‘Miss Ronconi!’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The dried goods rep is here.’

  ‘Tell him I’ll be down in a minute,’ she retorted more sharply than she’d intended. This was it! Her life. With her brothers gone and Laura a mother there’d only be work, work and more work for her from now on. Five minutes snatched here and there for daydreaming if she was lucky, and no time at all if she wasn’t. Nothing to look forward to except reading and writing letters and planning for leaves, and after William’s embarkation leave, even that would be uncertain. She had to persuade him to marry her. If she didn’t she’d run the risk of becoming a dried-up spinster like Myrtle Rees. And any fate, even the unmarrieds’ ward in the Graig Hospital, had to be better than that!

  ‘What is he doing?’

  ‘Searching everyone in case they’re carrying cigarettes and matches.’

  ‘We can’t smoke underground?’

  ‘Not if you want to stay in one piece.’

  ‘Does he have to pat everyone down like that?’

  ‘Regulations.’ An amused grin crossed Evan’s face as he watched Alexander check his pockets.

  ‘I’ve brought my cigarette case and lighter. What do I do with them?’ he asked helplessly.

  ‘Hand them over. One forgetful moment down there could ignite a pocket of methane gas and then we’d all be fried to a crisp.’

  ‘Save Hitler the bother,’ a tired voice muttered from the front of the queue.

  ‘Not sure if that isn’t seditious, Richards,’ another answered.

  ‘Just make sure you get a receipt for those,’ Evan advised as he watched Alexander hand over his silver cigarette case and lighter.

  ‘Don’t trust us now, Evan?’ The man on duty grinned, his teeth two gleaming lines of white set in a grimy face barely visible against the background of dark grey morning.

  ‘When did I ever, Dafydd?’

  ‘That’s a harsh thing to say when you’ve known a man as long as you’ve known me.’

  ‘That’s why I’m saying it.’

  ‘Get a move on there.’

  Alexander pocketed the hastily scribbled receipt and stepped into the cage. It was packed solid with warm bodies. He listened while the winding mechanism emitted increasingly alarming creaks and groans as more and more men joined them until there was no room for him to move or even draw a breath that someone else hadn’t exhaled.

  ‘Take it down!’

  A loud slam was followed by a grating and high-pitched screech. Slowly, infinitely slowly, the cage descended from the
sombre half-light that had passed for morning into a dense, turgid darkness where the air was thick, close, and warmer than on the surface. The fetid odours of male sweat, foul breath, coal dust, damp, earth and other things he’d rather not think about, closed suffocatingly around Alexander. He couldn’t see Luke, but he sensed the boy trembling behind him. He gripped his lamp hard as a tide of sheer panic rose from the pit of his stomach and threatened to swamp his self-control. If there had been something to hold on to – if he hadn’t been hemmed in on all sides by bodies – he might have been tempted to grab whatever came to hand and fight his way back up to the morning that had seemed dark until he had descended into this Stygian gloom. Just as it occurred to him that hell might be this never-ending descent the cage rasped and shuddered to a halt.

  ‘From here we walk.’

  He recognised Evan’s voice, but his figure was no more than a shade amongst shadows, thrown into relief by the flickeringly inadequate light of the lamps.

  ‘Ieuan? Where are you, boy?’

  ‘Here, Mr Powell.’

  ‘Take Luke with you. And by the way you’ve been promoted to miner.’

  ‘The under-manager told me. Thank you, Mr Powell.’

  ‘It’s Evan now. Don’t let me down.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  As Alexander’s eyes became accustomed to the patchwork glow of lamps he saw men striding purposefully forwards. Someone laughed and he jumped as the sound echoed eerily from the walls.

  ‘All right?’ Evan asked as they set off down a fairly wide, and mercifully, because they were both tall men, high tunnel.

  Alexander’s lamp picked out twin snakes of metal tracks festooned with piles of horse manure on the left-hand side of the pathway, but he couldn’t see any trucks. ‘Entombed is the word that springs to mind,’ he muttered, struggling to subdue a claustrophobia that could turn him into a gibbering idiot at any moment.

  ‘It’s a peculiar sensation and it never goes away, not entirely.’

  ‘I didn’t think it would be like this.’

  ‘What were you expecting?’

  ‘I don’t know. Just not this.’

  ‘This isn’t the coal face, this is only the walkway to the face. There’s miles of these tunnels. Some even connect up to other pits.’ Evan turned a corner. ‘Watch your head!’ The ceiling shelved sharply and Alexander ducked just in time. Even Luke, who was a good few inches below six feet, had to walk bent double. ‘Watch these,’ Evan pointed to one of the wooden pit props that supported the ceiling at random intervals, ‘and listen to them. The second you see one split or hear one crack, shout at the top of your voice and run, because once they go, they bring down tons of rock and coal with them.’

  ‘Does it happen often?’ Alexander asked, trying, and failing, to make the question sound casual.

  ‘Once in a while.’ Evan halted in front of an area heavily shored by an odd assortment of timbers. ‘This is our face. They’ve promised us electric cutters, but they haven’t appeared yet, and not many of the boys are in a hurry to get them. If you’ll pardon my French, the buggers are rumoured to throw out more dust than Hopkin Morgan’s bakehouse when they’re emptying the flour bags, and dust is one thing we can do without more of.’ He slapped his hand on the flaking black wall in front of him.

  ‘We’ll start using the picks here. If we hit a good seam, we’ll work it for all it’s worth. Ieuan, you go to the right with Luke, and both of you,’ he looked hard at Alexander and Luke, ‘watch your lamps. They’re the only thing down here that gives prior warning of gas.’

  Alexander removed and folded his coat. As he looked around for somewhere to put it, he wondered if the atmosphere was oppressively warm, or if he was still suffering from the effects of claustrophobia.

  The hammering of picks and scraping of shovels filled the air as men began to hew great lumps from the earth. Head down, a pony walked slowly towards them, dragging a row of trucks.

  ‘About bloody time too,’ a miner grumbled. Exchanging his pick for a shovel he began to fill a truck.

  ‘You waiting for Christmas?’

  Alexander looked back to the coal face. There was a pile of loose coal in front of Evan, and sweat had already etched white streams in the crust of dust on his face.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Not so quick,’ Evan warned as Alexander hurled his all into his first thrust. ‘There’s a twelve-hour shift ahead of us.’

  ‘What time do we go up top for a meal break?’ Alexander had lowered his voice but he sensed a hundred or more ears waiting for Evan’s reply.

  ‘We get a break, but we eat here.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘There’s no canteens underground, which is why Megan packed snap for us.’

  ‘We eat here?’ Alexander repeated incredulously.

  ‘Right here, at the coal face.’

  ‘Where’s the washroom …’

  ‘Hear that, boys, the fancy Englishman wants a ty bach.’

  ‘I’m not surprised, given some of your habits, Richards.’ Evan continued to swing his pick without breaking his rhythm. ‘If you need to relieve yourself, there’s an abandoned face down there to the left. We try to make it the furthest from where anyone is working.’

  ‘These conditions are not fit for animals …’

  ‘It’s work, boy, and when you’ve gone hungry you come to realise that any work is better than none. Just be grateful you’ve got a job.’

  Chapter Eleven

  Alexander pulled a rickety three-legged stool that Eddie had made in school against the wall of the wash-house and collapsed on to it. Even that small movement took more effort and energy than he felt he could spare. He stared down at the broken, bloody, swollen remains of his hands. The pain was intense, all consuming. His fingers were skinned, covered with sores so ingrained with black dirt he doubted they’d ever be clean again. The fingernails he’d so carefully manicured twice a week were split, chipped, dented and host to minute nuggets of coal. His palms were raw, the few areas still covered by skin distended by fat, slug-like blisters.

  ‘Your hands hurt?’ Luke rose from the shallow depths of the narrow tin bath set close to the yard door. Reaching for a towel he tucked the ends around his pale, skinny body and walked over to where Alexander was sitting, his feet leaving large damp prints on the flagstones.

  Alexander nodded dumbly, too tired to speak. Evan had taken the first bath. It had taken ten minutes for the women to fill it with hot water from the copper boiler set in the range in the kitchen, a quarter of an hour of hard scrubbing for Evan to get himself clean and, Alexander reflected ruefully, Evan was well-practised in the art of bathing after a shift spent underground, and another ten minutes to empty the water down the drain in the back yard and clean the bath ready for the next man. By which time the fresh water Megan had carried through to the kitchen had warmed to a sufficiently high temperature for it to be hauled back to the wash-house so the whole procedure could be repeated.

  Despite a deep-seated, bone-aching weariness, Alexander had insisted Luke take second bath. His body cried out for a long soak in scalding, hot water, but one glance at the tin tub Megan had unhooked from a nail on the garden wall had dashed any hopes of a proper bath. Luke was smaller than him and he had only managed to submerge his feet and a scant few inches of his backside by resting his chin on his knees. He’d also noticed that Evan and Luke had been hard pushed to work the soap into a lather powerful enough to remove the coal grime that coated every inch of their bodies, clogging ears, noses, mouths, and lining their eyes with black smudges reminiscent of a vamp’s make-up.

  Alexander gazed disconsolately at the scum that crusted the water Luke had left in the tub. Just the thought of pushing his maimed and swollen fingers through the narrow handles, so the bath could be carried outside to be emptied, made him wince. And he doubted he’d be able to hold the bar of carbolic soap. Quite apart from the pain, his fingers no longer seemed capable of carrying out his bidding.

 
; ‘My hands aren’t just hurting,’ he complained. ‘They’ve been tortured to the point where amputation seems the only option.’

  ‘You should go out to the ty bach and piss on them. It’s the only thing that will harden up hands that have never been put to manual work.’

  ‘What?’ Alexander couldn’t have been more shocked if Evan had suggested he do it in front of the women.

  ‘Mr Powell’s right,’ Luke agreed shyly.

  ‘It’ll sting like blazes, but you won’t find a better disinfectant to pour over those cuts, or toughen up what’s left of your skin,’ Evan continued from the window where he’d set up his shaving mirror and was busily engaged in scraping his chin with a cut-throat razor.

  ‘I’d rather not, if it’s all the same to you two.’

  Evan looked over his shoulder at Alexander and shook his head in sympathy. His own first day down the pit had been over a quarter of a century ago, but he could still remember the agony. ‘It’s well-meant advice. What you do with it is up to you. Can you manage to empty the bath on your own, or do you want help?’

  ‘I can manage,’ Alexander asserted unconvincingly. Feeling the way he did, he doubted he’d be able to put one foot in front of the other, but he was loath to admit that to Evan.

  ‘Here, grab the other handle.’ Evan wiped his chin with the towel he’d slung around his neck, and hooked his fingers through one handle. As Alexander tried to push his hand through the other, his eyes creased in pain.

  ‘Out to the ty bach with you, boy,’ Evan said kindly. ‘Luke and I will empty this and refill it for you.’

  It took Alexander an agonising half an hour to wash, by which time he was chilled to the bone. It was cold in the wash-house, and the water that had been heated for a scant twenty minutes in the copper boiler next to the oven had been barely warm to the touch when brought in, and freezing after thirty minutes of painfully slow washing.

  Shaving was out of the question: he could never have gripped the brush let alone the razor. Fastening his buttons was a torment that expended blood as well as tears, so he concentrated on the vital ones, his fly and the shirt buttons closest to his waist. When he looked around for somewhere to dump his washing, Evan saw him and pointed to a row of hooks on the back wall.