It wasn’t the sort of decision to be made in a hurry and, in the more sensible part of her mind, Alison knew that. But in her present state, doomed to be homeless in a month’s time and buffeted between hope and disappointment, it was a lifeline.
Two days later, she took her first step away from the difficulties at Barnaby Green and went to stay with Brad.
The children were delighted with the move. They brought their favourite toys with them and all their bedtime stories, they didn’t have that horrid long walk to school, and because they never knew when she was going to swear or say something awful, Brad was wonderfully outrageous company. They learned to eat kippers for breakfast and slept happily one at each end in a single bed.
‘We can see our hedgehog every day,’ Jon told his ‘friend Morgan’ when he came down to visit them. ‘He lives in the garden.’
‘We live up the stairs,’ Emma said. ‘With lots an’ lots of things.’ Brad’s chaotic untidiness was an endless source of treasure and adventure.
Alison was surprised by how happy they all were. Brad was content to let her do the bulk of the cooking. The kids were being good. There was always someone to talk to and the view of the sea from the living room window was a daily pleasure. Morgan came down to see her two or three times a week, and each visit was better than the last. In short, life with Brad passed at quite breathtaking speed. Soon the mad March winds were blowing them towards the end of term and the Easter holiday. On the last day of the term Alison finally found a house that would suit.
It was in one of the older roads in the town, one of a long terrace with a small, tatty garden, a living room, kitchen and bathroom downstairs and two sizeable bedrooms on the first floor under the eaves. It had been let out to students for several years so the carpets were stained, the walls were covered in the remains of posters and bits of Blu-tack and the whole place was grubby.
‘But I can soon see to all that,’ Alison said, as she and Morgan took their second look round. ‘I’ve still got the carpet from Shore Street. I could put that down in here. It’s got possibilities.’
‘We’ll work on it together,’ Morgan said. ‘And don’t say “I can manage” or you’ll make me feel unwanted.’
So the agreement was signed and the moving day fixed for six weeks hence. And then, just as Morgan was beginning to feel that things were sorting themselves out at last, he had a phone call.
It was late at night and he’d just let himself into his flat after his long drive back from Hampton. He picked up the receiver happily, thinking it would be Ali, phoning to tell him something she’d forgotten when they said goodbye.
But it was his sister Sarah.
‘Sorry to call you this time a’ night Mor,’ she said. ‘I called earlier but you were out.’
The tenor of her voice alerted him to bad news. ‘What is it?’ he asked.
She told him with characteristic directness. ‘Granddad’s worse.’
‘Much worse?’
‘He’s dyin’, Mor. Can you get home?’
Chapter Nineteen
It was very quiet in the back parlour at Blaenhydyglyn. When Morgan and Sarah edged into the room, the only sounds they could hear were the wooden rhythm of the clock in the hall, the lick of flames from the coal fire and the terrible rasp and crackle of Granddad’s struggle for breath.
The old man lay on a mattress on the floor where he’d been for the last three weeks, his long emaciated body spread out in front of the fire and his nose and mouth covered by an oxygen mask. Nan sat in the shadows in her old nursing chair, supporting his white head against her knees. The disease had gradually drained him of all his strength. He hadn’t been able to climb the stairs for more than three months and for the last four weeks it had been all he could do to struggle out to the toilet. As the days passed, he’d grown more and more cold, even though Nan kept the fire going night and day. Now he was felled and every breath was an agonising effort.
For a few seconds, Morgan was afraid they’d come too late and that the old man was already dead, for his face was an alarming yellowy-grey and, despite the mask, they could see that his lips were purple with lack of oxygen. But his eyes flickered open when he heard them approach and he recognised them both, the old glint returning briefly.
Morgan knelt on the floor beside him. ‘How are you, Granddad?’ he said. And then felt stupid to be asking such a question.
The old man coughed for a long time before he could speak, and when his answer came it was faint and hoarse. But implacable. ‘Goin’ boy,’ he said. ‘On the way out.’
‘Is there anything I can do?’
‘Stay by here a bit.’
‘Of course.’
‘That’s all any of us can do,’ Nan said. ‘Watch and wait. Be with him.’ She stroked his white hair, very, very gently, and spoke to him in Welsh, her words soft as a caress.
‘We take it turn and turn about durin’ the day,’ Sarah whispered. ‘One hour on, four hours off. Mam and Dad stay overnight. Alice and Megan were here this morning. That way it’s possible.’
But only just. The approaching death cast its pall over the entire house and filled the little back room to the exclusion of everything except thought.
Morgan felt as though he had travelled backwards in time, as though he was a child again. Standing powerless at the edge of the family in a house where the living room was like an oven and the rest of the house was cold, he once more glimpsed the subliminal strength of emotions he could neither understand nor control.
He and Sarah stayed for their allotted hour, saying little and doing less. Some of the time they sat in the back parlour waiting to answer if Granddad spoke or needed anything. Once they simply stood by the narrow window in the back parlour and looked out at the hillside like naughty children put in a corner and told to watch the wall. They were both relieved when Dai and Hywell arrived to take over the vigil.
‘How long’s he been like that?’ Morgan asked as he drove his sister back down the mountainside to her home in Port Talbot.
‘Three days,’ Sarah said tearfully. ‘Poor Granddad. He won’t complain, Mor. That’s the dreadful thing. He’s in agony most of the time, an’ he won’t complain.’
‘He never did.’
‘No. But it makes it worse somehow.’
The mountainside was lush with spring, young leaf shimmering with recent rain, young ferns curled like green hair. In the distance, Blaenhydyglyn looked timeless, with its long terraces of stone houses cuffed and collared with white coigns and lintels and its vertical streets set into the mountainside as neat and secure as studs. The pit where they’d all worked was long since closed, but the village had survived, school, club, pubs, steep street full of shops, the friends and neighbours. A neat, clean, orderly, caring place. He remembered how Nan used to polish the furniture every day, and sweep the dust from her doorstep. But she couldn’t sweep it out of her husband’s lungs. And now he was dying of it. Myn uffern!
They were well away from the village now, so the important question could be asked. ‘How long’s he got?’
‘Days, hours, a week maybe.’
‘Duw!’
‘It’s not fair, is it, Mor. He’s worked so hard all his life and been such a good man. He shouldn’t have to die like this.’
‘No,’ Morgan agreed. ‘He shouldn’t.’ And he had a sudden and vivid recall of Mam crying on the day he’d told her he was going to work in the pit, crying for fear of the dust and the terrible knowledge of what it could do. ‘You’ll end up like your Granddad,’ she’d grieved. ‘Gaspin’ your life out. Never catchin’ your breath.’
It was a time for remembrance. That night he and his sisters and their husbands and children gathered for an evening meal at their parents’ house before Mam and Dad set off for their nightly vigil with Nan. Granddad was remembered with jokes and affection all through the meal.
‘I got the pictures of young Morgan’s christening somewhere,’ Dad said, searching for them. ‘Here th
ey are. Remember that one?’ And there was the old man, with the infant on his knee, beaming in the midst of his family, with Nan hovering protectively beside him and a row of children at his feet.
‘He’s always been such a one for the family,’ Mam said.
‘We’re all here now, Mam,’ Megan told her. ‘Except for our Trefor. Any news of him yet?’
‘We sent a fax,’ Dad said. ‘They’re in the West Indies, that’s the trouble. It’s bound to take a bit a’ time.’
‘He’ll be here as soon as he can,’ Morgan said. They had to be together now. It was the only strength they had and they all knew it.
Trefor phoned late that night. He was at Heathrow. Just got in. He’d hired a car and was driving straight down. ‘Don’t wait up, Mor,’ he said. ‘I got a key.’
But Morgan waited for him just the same. What was the point of going to bed? He couldn’t have slept. Not with Granddad dying by inches just up the valley.
Night and day became interchangeable. They slept when they could, cat-napping in armchairs when they came off watch. Those off duty cooked meals for those still on. Those who were in Nan’s house at mealtimes cooked for her and coaxed her to eat what she could.
‘You got to keep your strength up,’ they urged. ‘Wouldn’t do for you to fall sick now, would it?’
And Granddad’s struggle went on inexorably.
On the second evening Morgan phoned Alison to give her what news there was. ‘It can’t be very long now,’ he said. ‘He’s very bad. Are you all right?’
‘We’re fine,’ Alison told him. ‘Don’t worry about us. You’ve got enough to think about without that. Just do what you have to do.’
But there was nothing any of them could do. That was the difficulty. Nothing except wait and talk and remember.
‘It’s all wrong,’ Trefor said, on their second evening, when Mam and Dad had left for Blaenhydyglyn, and the rest of the family were sitting round aimlessly. ‘He’s been such a good man, good worker, good parent, good grandparent.’
‘He was a legend in the pit,’ Morgan remembered. ‘Ask old man Griffiths they’d say. And look at all the hard work he did durin’ the strike. I can remember him handin’ out food parcels all hours down at the club.’
They all remembered the strike.
‘What a time that was!’ Megan sighed. ‘All that effort an’ they still closed the pits. You’d ha’ thought after all our men have suffered down the pits, they’d at least have listened to what they had to say.’
‘Tories’ve got cloth ears,’ Morgan said. ‘They never listen to anyone.’
‘We were the enemy within,’ Megan said. ‘Do you remember that? Maggie’s enemy within.’
‘D’you remember Tess Thomas down by the factory gates,’ Alice said, ‘an’ how we all crowded into her living room to watch TV? I don’ know how we all got in.’
‘They had a three-piece suite,’ Megan said, ‘by the factory gates for the pickets to use. Do you remember that? Buff it was. The local police used to sit on it side by side with the colliers.’
‘That was before the heavy mob arrived.’
‘That’s right. An’ a caravan. Two berth with twenty men packed inside like sardines.’
‘Someone set fire to it,’ Alice said. ‘Just before Christmas. Burnt out it was. Be about eleven o’clock at night. Just before Christmas. D’you remember that Megan?’
‘I remember the pickets had a break Christmas,’ Megan said. ‘They didn’t come picketing over the holiday. It was bitterly cold.’
‘I tell you what I remember,’ Trefor said. ‘I remember when the mass picket started and the miners came down from Yorkshire and Kent. There were two thousand men standing outside the gates and nobody made a sound. Two thousand men in total silence. That really impressed me. To be that controlled. Two thousand men in total silence, no cars runnin’, no sound at all. It was like Christmas Day. I’ll never forget it.’
‘I remember when the women’s support group pelted the police with eggs,’ Megan said. ‘You were there, weren’t you, Alice. The police were furious. An’ when they baton-charged us we ran into the houses trying to hide the eggs before we were arrested. You never saw so many eggs. We put them under cushions and upstairs in the bedrooms.’ The memory was making her laugh, for the first time, since their vigil had begun.
‘I put mine in a bookcase,’ Alice said, laughing too. ‘Daft thinking about it now. We should ha’ put them in the kitchen. But you don’t think, do you? Not when you’re frightened. You just do the first thing that comes into your head.’
‘What days they were!’ Sarah said. She was laughing like her sisters, with tears in her eyes, glad of the relief of this swift, black humour.
They were making so much noise that they didn’t hear the phone ring. It wasn’t until Morgan held up a hand for quiet that the sound finally reached them.
It was Mam. ‘He’s goin’,’ she said. ‘I think you ought to come. Just the cousins.’
Laughter was done with instantly. Talk was superfluous. There was a scramble for coats, a rapid departure, the five of them squashed into Morgan’s car, a silent journey through the sleeping town, across the bright lights of the Ml and out on to the hushed enveloping darkness of the Mynydd. ‘He’s goin.’’
If any of them had any hope that Mam was wrong, it was dashed as soon as they entered the house. The death rattle was loud and unmistakable in that dark little room. Granddad was deeply unconscious and Nan was grey with misery. Racked with pity and totally powerless they waited with her, taking it in turns to hold her hands as the terrible snoring sounds went on and on and on.
The hours passed and still it went on. Morgan found himself praying for it to stop and was shocked to realise that he was wishing his Granddad dead. His dear, dear Granddad, who’d carried him on his shoulders as a little boy and gone rabbiting with him and helped him with his homework and worked beside him in the pit. Duwydd mawr!
The first faint streaks of daylight coloured the edge of the curtains. Birdsong began with a single tentative chirrup rising against the darkness and grew until it was a full-throated chorus. In the silence of the hall the clock struck five, leaden and loud. The fire was almost out, a single, pale pink coal dying on a bed of grey ash. It was Easter Sunday and another day. And at long terrible last, the old man stopped breathing.
The silence that followed was more dreadful than his death rattle had been. Alice began to cry. ‘My poor, poor old love,’ she wept. ‘What did he do to deserve a death like this?’
For the rest of the day they comforted one another and attended to the chores that had to be done. The undertaker came to the house within an hour, grieving with the family because he’d known old man Griffiths for the last thirty years and couldn’t bear the thought that he’d died of the dust.
But whatever they said to one another was little comfort. Death had knocked a hole through the centre of their lives, leaving them stunned and crippled, clinging together. The date of the funeral was set. Morgan phoned Alison briefly, then he drove back to Guildford to do what work he could. But the days were meaningless with grief.
‘It’ll be better after the funeral,’ Mam said when he phoned her. ‘You know you’ve said goodbye after a funeral.’
But none of them knew how they would withstand the event. To watch him being put into the earth. It was too horrible.
They gathered mutely, marked out from the rest of the village by their black clothes. They huddled together in the chapel as the choir sang and the spring sunlight made dappled patterns on the coffin. They listened with aching hearts as Dad spoke of the good man his father had been.
‘I got a bit of a poem here to end up,’ he said. ‘I thought it would be fittin’ bein’ he was a collier all his life.’ He read it clearly, his voice throbbing with emotion:
I saw white bones in the cinder-shard.
Bones without number;
For many hearts with coal are charred
And few remember.<
br />
‘Amen to that!’ Morgan said. And his endorsement was echoed by others all round the chapel.
Then they were out on the cold hillside and the words of the burial service were being sung into the breeze.
‘Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to receive unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed, we therefore commit his body to the ground.’
And there wasn’t one person by the grave who didn’t see the awful irony of those final words. ‘Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’
Chapter Twenty
Despite her reassurance to Morgan, Alison wasn’t having quite such an easy time in Brad’s disorganised household. They were now into their third week together and there were many irritations – endless dirty coffee cups, the bathroom in constant use, Brad’s perpetual smoking, the way she was teaching the kids to swear – but all too petty to complain about. Not that Alison would have dreamed of complaining when Brad was being so good to them. So her sense of grievance gathered like a boil.
To make matters worse, Brad was fighting an urge to let rip too. The more she heard about Rigg’s behaviour – and she’d heard quite a lot from young Jon – the angrier she became. But she couldn’t say what she felt either. Ali had enough on her plate without that. So they lived together in a state of brittle over-cheerfulness that didn’t help either of them, until, inevitably, matters came to explosion point.
The trigger was a letter from Rigg. Alison found it at Barnaby Green when she went over to do some packing after family tea on Good Friday. Now I shall know where he is, she thought as she picked it up. But there was no address on the letter, no date, not even a salutation. The message was brief and to the point.
‘It is the Mater’s birthday on Sunday. I have ordered flowers Interflora to be sent to you Saturday. No knowing when they would deliver as it is Easter. You can deliver them Sunday morning. Take a little present from the children, chocs would do. We have to keep in with the old bat because of my father’s will. More necessary now than ever. R.’
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