‘Yes, Mrs Williams.’
‘And I was also sorry to hear about the sentences that you and your brother received today. Everyone in Tonypandy knows that your brother’s wasn’t warranted.’
‘And mine was?’
Mrs Williams ignored his question. ‘I gather Jane Edwards has left Tonypandy.’
‘Apparently so,’ he answered evasively.
‘Not that you’d know anything about her reasons for leaving her house and her husband.’
‘I can’t help you there, Mrs Williams.’
‘How you can stand there, looking as if butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth ...’ She shook her head. ‘Well, I suppose there’s no harm in you walking my girls home again, Joey Evans, if they let you. But I warn you now; I’ll get the carpet beater out if I ever see you alone with one of them. Understand?’
‘Perfectly, Mrs Williams.’
‘Now get off with you. And if you’ve any sense, you’ll go straight home without stopping off to visit some married woman who’s no better than she should be.’
‘This house is mine?’ Harry looked at Lloyd in wonder.
‘Yes.’
‘And everything in it?’
‘And everything in it,’ Lloyd reiterated seriously. ‘But other people have to look after it for you until you are grown up.’
‘Is that man downstairs one of the people who are looking after it for me?’
‘You know that man is your Uncle Geraint, Harry.’ Sali picked up the soldiers Harry had scattered over the floor and returned them to their box.
‘I don’t like him.’
Sali was about to make a protest, but Lloyd shook his head, warning her off.
‘I’m not leaving you and Mam –ever.’ Harry crossed his arms and set his lips together.
‘I promise you now, Harry, that you won’t have to leave us, until you want to.’ Lloyd lifted Harry on to his lap and hugged him.
‘I won’t ever want to.’
‘You will have to leave us to go to school, but that won’t be for ages yet and we’ll talk about it some more when the time comes.’ Lloyd looked at Sali, who nodded agreement.
‘I take it you don’t want to stay for dinner, Lloyd?’ Sali set the box of soldiers on the shelf.
Harry’s hair was damp from perspiration, his face unnaturally warm. Lloyd suspected it was as much from a surfeit of emotion as the heat of the fire.
‘Harry has school in the morning. The sooner we get home the sooner he can go to bed. How about it, young man?’ Lloyd refrained from mentioning Geraint, although he doubted that after the scene downstairs he and Sali’s eldest brother would ever be able to sit at the same table and make even semi-polite conversation again.
Harry climbed off Lloyd’s lap, went to the shelf and picked up the box of soldiers. ‘If this is my house and everything in it is mine, can I take these home?’
Sali thought for a moment before answering him. ‘Just this once, darling, but our house isn’t big enough to take all the toys and books that are here, you know that.’
‘I only want these. They have a different uniform to the ones at home and I can have better battles.’
Sali held out her hand. ‘Bring them with you and we’ll go downstairs and get your coat.’
The brake the Federation had paid to bring Billy Evans on the last leg of his journey home from the Royal Infirmary in Cardiff, met him, Lloyd and Victor at Tonypandy Station on a wet and windy Saturday morning. Billy acknowledged the men who had come to wish him well, but he insisted on getting straight into the cab to prevent them from making any speeches. Victor and Lloyd helped him and they set off.
Harry was sitting just inside the open front door watching and waiting for the first sign of them, and the moment he spotted the brake turning the corner, he ran down the passage into the kitchen.
‘Uncle’s Billy’s here.’
Sali set down the jug of mint sauce she had been mixing to go with the shoulder of mutton Victor had earned up at the farm. She exchanged anxious glances with Joey, who was polishing the brass fire irons as part of his drive to prove to the family that he had turned into an altogether more helpful, considerate and responsible being after the fiasco of his relationship with Jane Edwards.
‘Remember what Lloyd said,’ Sali warned.
‘I will.’
They were all worried. Mr Evans had continued to remain withdrawn and almost detached from life during the months he’d spent in the hospital, never showing the slightest emotion –anger or pleasure –on their Sunday visits, although the doctor had warned them that rage and irritability in a patient were common after an amputation. The ‘two visitors to a bed’ rule the ward sister rigidly administered meant they hadn’t been together as a family since the morning he and Lloyd had set off for Cardiff. But whenever they exchanged notes after their visits, they all agreed that he appeared to be indifferent to the happenings within the Union, had never once asked about the strike, or the family. Even the news of his forthcoming first grandchild had only resulted in a faint smile.
‘Uncle Billy!’
Sali held Harry back, as the cab drew to a halt outside the door. Lloyd opened the door, jumped out and unfolded the steps. Victor followed and they leaned back inside.
Pale-faced, watery-eyed, Billy grabbed the sides of the open door of the cab and levered himself out of his seat. Victor reached for his father’s crutches. Billy leaned forward as if he were about to protest, but seeing there was no way that he could step down from the cab holding them, he allowed Victor to keep them. Lloyd gripped his father’s arms, and lifted him to the pavement. Balancing on his remaining leg, Billy retrieved his crutches and shook off Lloyd’s hands.
‘I can manage,’ he said gruffly.
‘We’re all ready for you, Uncle Billy.’ Harry ran out to meet him. ‘Mam has cooked us a dinner, Dad has bought you tobacco and I put the newspaper on your chair -’
‘Later, Harry.’ Billy tucked his crutches under his arms, leaning heavily as he swung forward. ‘I’m tired. I’m going to my room.’
‘We have to light a fire in Dad’s bedroom. It’s freezing in there, but he insists he doesn’t want to join us, even for dinner.’ Victor returned, grim-faced, to the kitchen from the front room.
‘Even if we had enough coals, he’ll see it as fussing and won’t stand for it,’ Joey warned.
‘Perhaps Harry -’
Lloyd shook his head. ‘No, Sali, it’s not fair to use Harry; you saw how abrupt he was. Did he say anything, Victor?’
‘Only that he wanted peace and quiet. When I told him we’d be quiet in the kitchen, he said he hadn’t had a minute to himself since the accident five months ago.’
‘That’s true enough.’ Joey grasped at the idea. ‘How would you like to lie on a bed in an open ward for almost five months, surrounded by twenty nosy sick people who have nothing better to do than watch you being washed and humiliated day and night by bossy nurses?’
‘Dad was in a side ward,’ Victor reminded.
‘Only for the first month,’ Joey countered.
‘You sound as if you were there, Joey.’ To Sali’s annoyance, Lloyd lifted the plates down from the dresser. Since the day she’d told him she was pregnant he’d begun treating her as if she were at death’s door.
‘When Victor and I swapped over halfway through visiting a couple of Sundays ago, I talked to one of the patients who was allowed out of bed to use the bathroom. He was miserable as sin and he’d only been in there for three weeks. He said he couldn’t wait to be discharged.’
‘Let’s hope it is just the adjustment of coming home after months in hospital.’ Lloyd suspected his father regretted the loss of his independence more than his leg; it was a loss any man would find hard to live with, and a collier, whose job depended on his physical strength and agility, more than most. The doctor’s assurances that his father would be able to live a full life once his wound healed and he was fitted with an artificial leg hadn’t elicited
the slightest response from the patient. Lloyd had even begun to doubt the doctor’s prognosis and wonder if anything would ever lift the depression his father had sunk into.
‘Shall I take him in a tray?’ Sali inserted a skewer into the meat to check it was cooked. When the juices ran clear she lifted it out of the oven.
‘I will,’ Lloyd said.
‘Can I come with you, Dad? I can give him this.’ Harry held up a picture he’d spent all morning drawing of himself with the entire family on the mountain. Lloyd smiled when he saw that Harry had pictured his father standing behind the dogs so you couldn’t see his legs.
‘Yes, Tiger.’ Lloyd ruffled his hair. ‘As long as you realize that Uncle Billy is tired and that might make him a bit grumpy.’
‘It’s taken me longer than I thought it would to make it, but this is the last of the ten pounds that I borrowed from Megan to pay Joey’s and my fine. If you put it in the tin, Sali, I’ll give it to her next Saturday.’ Victor set five pounds on the kitchen table.
‘It’s cost you dear in pain to earn it.’ She set a chair in front of the sink. ‘Sit down and I’ll clean up your face.’
Victor didn’t argue with her. The champion the police had found to replace Wainwright was even quicker on his feet. He also packed a harder punch and his ribs felt as though one of the pit ponies had trampled on them.
‘You will give up now, won’t you?’ Sali smeared grease on the smaller cuts after she’d cleaned them.
‘I’d like to save enough to pay Megan’s father fifteen shillings a week so she can leave the lodging house.’
‘The strike can’t go on much longer and then you can start earning your money a sensible way.’
‘Until the pits reopen, I’ll make my money the only way I can.’
Sali grimaced as she filled a bowl with clean water. A cold spring had given way to a warm June and July, but nine months in there was still no sign of the strike breaking, and the soup kitchens were stretched to their utmost, supplying the most basic of rations to the miners’ families. Nearly all the children she saw in Harry’s school and on the streets were as thin-faced, pale and listless as their parents. It was becoming increasingly obvious that the miners couldn’t hold out much longer, but despite the best efforts of the strike leaders, management categorically refused to make a single concession to their demands.
The kitchen door opened, and Mr Evans swung in on his crutches. ‘I thought I heard someone come in. You been fighting again, Victor?’
‘I earned another five pounds boxing. It’s enough to pay Megan back what Joey and I owe her.’
‘Looks like it cost you that much in blood to get it,’ Billy said caustically. ‘Make sure that your brother pays you back as soon as he can.’
‘How did the fitting for the artificial leg go?’ Victor knew that he risked incurring his father’s wrath for even asking.
‘All right.’
‘Lloyd said you’ll have it next week.’
Mr Evans didn’t answer Sali and she didn’t press him. The men who visited him told him he looked well and congratulated him on making a remarkable recovery but she and his sons knew better. He spent most of his days and they suspected nights –sitting alone in his room, looking through the photograph albums his wife had compiled.
‘Who’s after you now, boy?’ Mr Evans asked Joey, as he dashed into the room, cap in hand, gasping for breath.
‘Lloyd sent me up to get Victor. There’s serious trouble down at Ely pit in Penygraig. Hundreds of police are there, the boys are throwing stones at them and the engine house. It’s turning really ugly ...’ Joey fell silent, as a strange expression crossed his father’s face.
‘What does Lloyd think that Victor can do?’
‘The men have a great deal of respect for Victor and his opinions, even more so since the trial.’ Sali knew that Victor would never say anything about the authority he commanded with the strikers, so she said it for him. ‘They know Victor was innocent and that he stopped Luke Thomas from beating up Mr Adams.’
‘Are there blacklegs down there?’ Billy looked to Joey.
‘So rumour has it, although Lloyd couldn’t find anyone who’d actually seen them.’
‘I’ll go with you.’
‘You -’
‘If Lloyd sent for Victor it has to be serious. Joey, run down to Connie’s and ask her to send her delivery cart up here for me.’
‘Are you ...’ Sali fell silent, as Victor frowned at her. There would undoubtedly be trouble and most probably fighting down at Penygraig, but it was also the first time that Billy Evans had shown any signs of animation since he’d left the hospital.
Chapter Nineteen
Sali sank down on her chair after the men left. She looked up at the clock. Another hour and it would be time to fetch Harry from school and go on to the soup kitchen. Since Lloyd’s father had come home from the hospital, she had cut down on the number of hours she worked there, although the only one he would allow to help him wash, change and shave was Lloyd.
She stared at the fire. There was little point in lighting it as she usually did before she fetched Harry, because there was no way of knowing how long the men would be.
‘Hello, anyone in?’ Megan walked into the kitchen.
‘You managed to get an hour off.’
‘Two. I overheard the police officers talking. They said that the strike was about to end ...’
‘That was premature: the strike committee agreed to hold another meeting with management next week, but as the owners are refusing to put anything new on the table I doubt that the men will decide to go back to work. Please sit down,’ Sali invited. ‘I’m sorry, I haven’t lit the fire. With the men on the picket lines, there’s no point in doing it for a while, so I can’t offer you tea, but I made some vinegar biscuits yesterday and as Joey says, there’s plenty of water in the tap.’
‘I’m fine, I had a cup of tea and a slice of apple pie before I left Mrs Palmer’s.’ Megan saw the bowl of water and jar of goose grease on the table next to the sink. ‘Victor’s been boxing again.’
‘I’m afraid so.’ Sali tipped the water down the sink.
‘I wish he wouldn’t.’
‘That makes two of us.’
‘Is he badly hurt?’ Megan bit her lip anxiously.
‘He’s been worse. Just a few small cuts on his face.’
‘One of the officers also said there’s trouble at Ely Colliery,’ Megan said warily. ‘I hope Victor hasn’t gone down there.’
‘He left ten minutes ago. Lloyd was already there. He sent Joey up to get Victor to see if he could calm the men before trouble breaks out again. As usual, there are rumours of blacklegs. Mr Evans went with them.’
‘Is he well enough?’
‘No.’ Sali didn’t say any more. The picket lines were no place for an able-bodied man, let alone one in her father-in-law’s condition, but she knew from past experience that voicing her concerns would only make her worry all the more. All she could do was concentrate on other things until the crisis was over.
‘Will it ever be over?’
‘I don’t see how we can hold out much longer. The union’s paid out so much in strike money it’s virtually bankrupt, and without the ten shillings a week it pays every striker, no one would eat. Lloyd and his father are talking to management, that’s all management ever do –talk. But,’ Sali smiled determinedly as she took the chair opposite Megan’s, ‘as we can’t do a thing about it, let’s forget the strike. It’s a lovely day, the sun is shining and I’m only sorry that Victor isn’t here to enjoy it with you. I wish I could tell you when he’ll be back, but your guess is as good as mine.’
‘You walking over to get Harry from school?’
‘Much to his annoyance. He insists he’s old enough to walk there and back by himself, but I don’t agree. He can do it next term when he’s five and not before.’
‘If you don’t mind, I’ll go with you. I could do with some fresh air. How are you ke
eping?’ Megan nodded to Sali’s thickening waistline.
‘Fine. I’d be happier if Lloyd, his brothers and his father wouldn’t fuss over me quite so much. They won’t let me lift a coal bucket or carry a tray, although I keep telling them I’m having a baby, not dying on my feet.’
‘Think about it, Sali, the last baby to be born in this house was Joey. They’re probably scared witless in case the midwife doesn’t arrive in time and they have to do something.’
‘I wish you were still living next door,’ Sali said sincerely. ‘It would be good to have another woman to talk to whenever I feel like a chat. But then, when you’re twenty-one -’
‘Please, don’t say anything,’ Megan interrupted uneasily, her blood running cold. ‘I don’t want to tempt fate.’
‘I can understand that after waiting so long to marry Lloyd. Sometimes, even now, I find it difficult to believe that we really are married.’
‘And happy despite the strike?’ Megan asked a little wistfully.
‘Most definitely. I’ll comb my hair and then we’ll have a wander in Dunraven Street. We can window shop before we go to the school.’
‘Sounds good to me.’ Megan knew Sali was as worried as her about what was happening in Penygraig. Window shopping wasn’t the best way to pass the time, but it was cheap, and there was a chance that they might meet someone who could take their minds off whatever was happening outside the Ely Colliery for a few minutes.
‘The Evanses know how to pick their women,’ Luke Thomas commented enviously to Alun Richards, as they leaned again the wall of Alun’s house in Pandy Square in the company of half a dozen other strikers who had nothing better to do than watch the world go by.
‘They certainly do.’ Alun stared at the inch or so of leg Megan was showing above her ankle. ‘Good-looking, the pair of them.’
Megan and Sali continued to stroll arm in arm across the square, oblivious to the glances they were attracting from admiring men and other women. Dressed in a two-year-old, green sprigged cotton summer dress, which looked new because she’d had so few chances to wear it, her mass of red curls loosely wound on top of her head, Megan glowed, a picture of health in comparison to the pale-faced, haggard women around her. The lightweight, beige linen maternity suit Sali had bought in Gwilym James, because none of her ordinary clothes fitted her, was elegant and looked expensive. Its box jacket hid her burgeoning figure, and like Megan she positively shone with health and happiness. They stopped, still arm in arm, to speak to Betty Morgan, who was leaving the lodging house.
Winners and Losers Page 34
