How Green Was My Valley

by Richard Llewellyn

  As the doors opened and the men came out, their wives and children followed them into the road and stood to watch them go. My father was one of the first, with Davy, and as soon as the men saw him they started to cheer, for they all thought he was the saviour of the village. But my father was not a vain man, and he disliked any show about him. So he waved them all quiet and started to sing.

  As soon as they heard his voice, tenors and altos waited for their turn, then the baritones and basses, and then the women and children.

  As soon as the singing started, all the doors opened all the way down the Hill, and men and women and children came out to fill the road.

  I looked at the smooth blue sky and the glowing white roofs, the black road, choked with blacker figures of waving men passing down the Hill between groups of women with children clustered about their skirts, all of them flushed by flickering orange lamplight flooding out from open doorways, and heard the rich voices rising in many harmonies, borne upward upon the mists which flew from singing mouths, veiling cold-pinched faces, magnifying the brilliance of hoping eyes, and my heart went tight inside me.

  And round about us the Valley echoed with the hymn, and lights came out in the farms up on the dark mountain, and down at the pit, the men were waving their lamps, hundreds of tiny sparks keeping time to the beat of the music.

  Everybody was singing.

  Peace there was again, see.

  Chapter Three

  I WENT TO SCHOOL with Mrs. Tom Jenkins in a little house far from the village. Tom had been burnt by molten iron at the Works and had done nothing for years only lie in a chair, and his wife had started a school to keep things going. She had two little girls of her own, and while she was teaching they used to sit on stools by the board, separate from the payers. Tom was always in pain, so lessons were often broken off when she went out to see if she could do anything for him.

  We learnt sums and letters, some history and the names of towns and rivers and where they were. Mrs. Tom Jenkins had come from Caernarvon where her father had been a book seller, so, of course, she knew a lot.

  Indeed I will give her what she is due, for she gave us more than our fourpennyworth a week. That was when I was taught to think, but I was never aware of it until I started to work. The other boys and girls who were there with me have all done well, though I am not certain they would say the same for her.

  We used to sit in her front room on stools and rest our slates on our knees. Mrs. Tom stood in front of a blackboard nailed on the wall and wrote with knobs of chalk.

  First thing when we got in, she made us hang up our hats and coats tidy, and then walk into the front room and say good morning to her, and to the little girls. Then we turned about, and the boys set stools for the girls, and the girls got the slates and pencils for the boys.

  When we were all ready, we stood to sing the morning hymn, and Mrs. Tom said a little prayer, asking a blessing on us all, and strength of mind and will to live and learn for the benefit of mankind.

  I remember well trying to think about mankind. I used to try to build up something that would look like mankind because the word Man I knew, and Kind I knew. And I thought at last, that mankind was a very tall man with a beard who was very kind and always bending over people and being good and polite.

  I told that to Mrs. Tom one evening when the others had gone and I was helping her to put Tom right for the night.

  “That is a good picture of Jesus, Huw,” she said.

  “Is Jesus mankind, then?” I asked her, and very surprised I was.

  “Well, indeed,” she said, and she was folding Tom in a blanket, “He did suffer enough to be mankind, whatever.”

  “Well, what is mankind, then, Mrs. Jenkins?” I asked her, for I was sure to have an answer because I had puzzled long enough.

  “Mankind is all of us,” Mrs. Tom said, “you and me and Tom and everybody you can think of all over the world. That is mankind, Huw.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Jenkins,” I said, “but how is it you ask every morning for us to help mankind, then?”

  “Because,” she said, “I want you all to think not only of yourselves and your families but everybody else who is alive. We are all equal, and all of us need helping and there is nobody to help mankind except mankind.”

  “But why do we pray to God if there is only mankind to help?” I asked, because my father was always saying that God was the only help a man could put his trust in, and what Mrs. Tom was saying was new to me.

  “Only God will tell you that, Huw,” she said, and she was looking at Tom. But Mrs. Tom never knew I heard what she said under her breath. “If there is a God,” she said to herself.

  She was looking at Tom just before she slipped his night-cap on. He had caught the iron over his head and shoulders. He was blind, of course, and his nose was burnt off, and his mouth was like a buttonhole with his teeth all black inside, and his head was naked and a purplish colour. He would have been about thirty, then, and my father said he had been a well-favoured man and the finest tenor in the Valley. Now he could only make funny noises in his throat, and I am not sure he knew Mrs. Tom or his little girls. So looking back I am not sure I can blame her for saying what she did.

  That was when I started to think for myself, and perhaps that was what made me come down to this.

  Not that I am not satisfied with what I have become, or that I am where I am. Only that if I had not started to think things for myself and find things for myself, I might have had a happier life judged by ordinary standards, and perhaps I might have been more respected.

  Though neither happiness nor respect are worth anything, because unless both are coming from the truest motives, they are simply deceits. A successful man earns the respect of the world never mind what is the state of his mind, or his manner of earning. So what is the good of such respect, and how happy will such a man be in himself? And if he is what passes for happy, such a state is lower than the self-content of the meanest animal.

  Yet, looking round this little room, such thinking is poor comfort indeed, and strangely empty of satisfaction, too. There must be some way to live your life in a decent manner, thinking and acting decently, and yet manage to make a good living.

  My father was a great one for honest dealing, but he never had his reward down here, and neither did my mother. I am not bitter about anything, and I have no feeling left inside me to be scornful. I am only saying what is in my mind.

  The first time I saw my father as a man, and not as a man who was my father, was when I was coming home from school to my dinner the day the men went back to work after the strike.

  We were all running through winter rain, cold and grey and stinging like needles, splashing in the ruts and puddles, with the hedges whispering aloud as the bare twigs whipped at the drops, and the ditches bubbling and frothing on either side, feeling our feet freezing as the water went over the tops of our boots, and our chests growing cold and sticky as the wet coats got wetter, when we came up the rise where the lane joined the colliery road. Just over the low hedge we could see the cage and power house, and nearer still the place where the checkers stood to rate the trams.

  The checkers had their own little huts to stand in when it was raining or cold, and ever since I could remember there had always been three huts, one for each checker, and the one used by my father was the green one in the middle.

  I stood still as the others raced on, looking at the gap between the other two huts. My father was standing in the rain, checking a tram into his book held under the fold of his sopping coat. He was standing in a puddle made by the drips that fell from his coat, and his hair was plastered down his face.

  His hut had been taken away.

  Whether my staring eyes made him look up or not, I do not know to this day, but when he saw me he moved his pencil from his mouth and put his finger up as though to say I was not to tell my mother, and then waved me to go on home.

  That night I was in bed in this room when I woke up and
heard my father talking to Davy, and my mother crying.

  “You will get nothing without a fight,” Davy was shouting. “Do you think I will allow my father to stand like a dog in the rain and not raise my hands to stop it?”

  “Look after yourself,” my father said. “You shall not make my case a plank for your politics. Leave me out of it. I can take care of myself.”

  “Yes, by God you can,” Davy said, “and drown like a rat.”

  “Hold your tongue this minute,” my father said. “You shall use no blasphemy in this house.”

  “But, Dada,” Davy said, “what are you going to do? You will die of cold when it starts to snow. Let us all stand together and you will see how they will act, then. It is no use one pit coming out. It must be all the pits at once.”

  “If I freeze to death, no matter,” my father said. “You shall not make me an excuse for more striking. I will not have people going without just because I am standing in the cold, and if I did, I would deserve a worse death than that.”

  “But if they find they can do things like that to the spokesman,” Davy said, “what will they try and do to the men?”

  “We will see,” said my father. “I will have no more talk on it. Be silent, now, and go to your bed.”

  Gwilym was lying in the next bed and I could hear from his breath that he was awake and listening.

  “Gwil,” I whispered, “what does Davy want to do?”

  “Shut your mouth, boy,” Gwilym whispered. “Do you want Dada up here with the strap?”

  “But what is it Davy wants?” I whispered, so low I am sure only a mouse and Gwilym could have heard.

  “Fight against the bloody English,” Gwilym whispered, and got up on his elbow.

  A cold tickle went down the bones of my back, and the hair on my neck came up like a brush.

  Gwilym was only fourteen then and just started work on the coal face, although he had been working the ponies for nearly a year. And here he was, the quietest of us all, swearing, and not only that, saying something that was so wicked it made my body ice.

  Davy came up to bed then, and stopped us talking. He slept in my bed, so that I could see when he put the candle down and sat looking at it, that his eyes were open wide and staring black and his face was white and covered with sweat that winked in the light. I shut my eyes in fear and kept them shut a trembling long time, and then I must have gone to sleep.

  Ivor and Bronwen had their own house further down the Hill, so Bronwen was often in with my mother, although my mother never went down there unless she was asked. On Saturday they came in to dinner with us, but nearly always on a Sunday they went over the mountain to see Bronwen’s father and mother and go to the Zion there.

  Ivor felt just as badly about my father as Davy did, but he held his tongue where Davy either would not or could not. He told my father that Davy would have himself known for a rebel and get himself put on the black list at the pit if he was not very careful, but my father said it was no use to talk. The boy had the blood in him and there it was.

  “Then what is it he wants?” Ivor asked, with impatience. “He would never stand to talk two minutes together with me.”

  I could have told him the reason, for I heard Davy call him an old stick in the mud before that, and say that married men were useless in any cause because of their dependents.

  “Davy wants socialism,” my father said. “And he wants a union with everybody in it, all over the world I think he said.”

  “There is nonsense for you,” Ivor said. “Now if he said the colliers, I would be with him.”

  “You can call it what you like, Ivor Morgan,” my brother Gwilym said. “But this I will tell you. There is more sense in Davy’s big toes than you have got all over you.”

  There is surprised my father was, and how angry was Ivor. My father was out of his chair for the strap in a moment, but Gwilym was flying from the house and running down the hill like the spirit of the wind before my father reached the nail, even.

  “There is more Davy in him,” my father said. “I can see trouble coming in this family before long. It seems to me there is a nest of hornets growing in the back bedroom here.”

  My father was looking absently at me. I was in the back bedroom with the others and I felt bound to speak up even though I knew it was wrong.

  “I will be one, too, Dada,” I said, “if it will have you out of the cold.”

  “Go from here, now,” my father said, “before you will have a couple.”

  But his eyes were full of laugh, so I walked out of the house instead of running, and went down to Bronwen.

  I had stopped being shy with her. She had a way of looking at you that had a smile in it, and yet she never properly smiled, so you never knew whether to smile back or keep a straight face. She started to call me The Old Man just after she had set up house, and whenever I went down to her she stopped whatever she was doing and gave me that look till I had sat in Ivor’s big chair.

  “And what is the matter with the old man this time?” she would say. And I would tell her what it was, if it was anything. Else I kept my peace. That afternoon I said nothing to her till she had made a cup of tea.

  “Davy is going to fight the English,” I said to her.

  “Go on, boy,” she said, and laughed.

  “He is,” I said, “I had it from Gwilym.”

  “Gwilym is too young to have sense,” she said.

  “Davy has, though,” I said. “And he is the one.”

  “And what is the old man going to do?” Bronwen asked, and knelt down by me.

  “I am going to fight with them,” I said. “I will have them for making my Dada stand in the rain.”

  Bronwen put her arms round me so quickly she knocked over the tea, but she seemed to care nothing for the broken cup.

  “Well said, Huw,” she whispered. “Fight you, now. That is why there are men and women. Men to fight, women to help.”

  “Are you a rebel, Bron?” I asked her.

  “If that is a rebel,” she said, “indeed, yes.”

  “Good,” I said, “now I am a rebel properly. What is Davy going to do, Bron? Nobody will tell me.”

  Bronwen started to collect the pieces of cup, and she was frowning as she bent.

  “Look, Huw,” she said, “you are too small to know about such things. You go and call Ivor for me.”

  But I asked her again, and I felt angry that she should know as a woman, and yet I was a boy and ignorant. It is funny the ideas a small boy will have.

  “Well, old man,” she said, “if you will have it, Davy is trying to make things better his own way. That is all I know, so let it rest now. Go and call Ivor for me, will you?”

  Chapter Four

  I ASKED MY FATHER about Davy.

  “And what do you want to know for, my son?” my father asked me.

  “All the other boys know, Dada,” I said, “and I should know, too, so that I can help them.”

  “You mind your own business,” my father said, “you have your sums to learn and your own work to do. Do that and do it properly and that is all. Mind what I say, now.”

  I am sorry in a way I disobeyed my father after that because it was always a worry to me, and I knew I would never meet his eye if he caught me, to say nothing of the strap.

  But the truth is I found out about Davy in the usual way a small boy finds out things he is denied to know by older people, and that is through other small boys.

  Mervyn Ellis, son of Dai Ellis the Stable, was one of my best friends then, and was still till a week ago. To him I went next day coming from school, and told him there was some plot or other with my brother at the head. It sounded very noble and desperate, I must say, and I remember I could do nothing with my lower lip when I was telling him. It seemed to go stiff with me, and instead of natural talking, my mouth was going all shapes as though it was feeling proud of itself.

  There is silly you feel when you find yourself unable to control even your own mouth
.

  “I know, boy, I know,” Mervyn said. “There is a meeting on the mountain to-night.”

  “For who?” I asked.

  “Davy and the men, of course,” Mervyn said, “there is dull you are. Your own brother and you never knew that.”

  He told me, then, of all the other meetings that had been going on for months, and of the men who had come over from the other valleys round about. They were going to have a union, Mervyn said, although he had no notion what he meant. So we both said we would go up on the mountain that night and see what there was to be seen.

  Then I knew why Gwilym was never in bed till late, always coming in just before Davy, not through the door, but climbing up the shed to get in this little window. I knew that because the cold draught often woke me up, though I said nothing. I would never split on Gwilym, because he was always in trouble, and if my father had known he was coming in so late through the window, there would have been ructions.

  That night, after I had kissed Mama and Dada good night, I went up with the candle and got under the blanket with all my clothes on.

  “Are you in bed, Huw?” my mother called up, after enough time.

  “Yes, Mama,” I said.

  “Good boy,” my mother said. “Candle.”

  I blew out the candle and lay there looking at the blue criss-crossed square where the window was. I was not exactly afraid now that the time had come, but my heart was beating so loud I was sure they would hear downstairs. It is strange how loud little sounds become when you are in the dark and doing something wrong.

  When I got up the old bed creaked so much I could have given it a good kick for its trouble, but at last, and inch by inch, I was out of it, and even then the bedclothes breathed so loud it was like putting back some old man.

  The floor, then.

  Each plank had something to say, scolding and moaning when I put down a foot and picked it up, and the carpet, too, was stretching and grieving all the way to the chest of drawers by the window.