How Green Was My Valley

by Richard Llewellyn

  He closed the book, slow, with steady hands.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “She is with sickness,” I said.

  “Has she had a doctor?” he asked me, and something new in the voice.

  “No,” I said. “Sickness of heart, it is.”

  He put his hands flat on the table, and stood quickly, and his hands left greyness on the shine of the table top.

  “I can do nothing, Huw,” he said.

  “You are a preacher, sir,” I said. “Come unto me all ye that are weary.”

  “O, Huw,” he said.

  Then there was quiet again, and while it was quiet, and while he stood with the knuckles of his fists together, I went.

  It was weeks after that when my mother told me that Angharad wanted to see me. I had told my mother what had happened, every word, and she had said not a word. Not even a click of the tongue. But I had special little bits for tea for long after.

  I found her in the kitchen garden having beans from the scarlet runners. Long green walls of them, there were, and Angharad in white among them.

  “Well,” I said, behind her.

  She gave me half a look over her shoulder, with her hands busy with the beans over her head, and letting them drop into the basket without looking.

  “Well,” she said, “there is a stranger you are.”

  Gentle, with smiles, and her voice a bit lost among the leaves, and a good colour, from pulling at the beans with her arms up.

  There was a wall between us, of a stickiness, not to be seen, with steps on both sides, but neither of us able to move our legs. Kind strangers, we were.

  “Yes,” I said, “will I help you?”

  “I am finished,” she said. “Let us go in the house.”

  Down by the currant bushes she stopped to see if fly was in them, but when she had looked at a couple of leaves she stood straight again.

  “I am sorry I was nasty to you, Huw,” she said, with quickness, and some shake in the voice, and looking at the bush.

  “Not nasty,” I said, and without comfort, and wanting to run.

  “Nasty,” she said, with more of strength, and quieter, as though she felt, with me, the size of my hands, and my shame for them. They were everywhere but right. “I could have killed myself when you had gone. Nasty I have been, to a lot of people, and no fault of theirs. I was sorry, Huw, and I am sorry now.”

  “It is nothing, girl,” I said, and more uncomfortable, and redder than she was coming to be. There is a fool you feel when somebody is saying they are sorry for doing something to you. It is worse than if you had done something yourself. So you are having the worst of it twice, start and finish.

  “Shall we kiss?” she asked me, and pulling her hat down with both hands, shy as a wren, and very gentle.

  “Yes,” I said, and kissed her chin, but she kissed me solid.

  Then she blew out her breath with fat cheeks.

  “Well, dammo,” she said. “It is out, at last, then.”

  “What, now?” I asked her.

  “Saying I was sorry,” she said, and with a laugh. “Practising for weeks I have been, boy. And nothing I said, I was going to say.”

  “No need for it,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said, “there was. Come you, let us have a chase round the garden, is it? Last one to the greenhouse has got bugs.”

  Off we went, and me keeping just behind her, and she with her skirts bunched in her hands, running as though glory to come was down there, and laughing up into the sky, and stopping at last because her hat was coming off, and the hat-pins pulling her plaits loose.

  “O,” she was laughing, and swallowing air, and holding her chest, and pulling out hat-pins and hair-pins. “There is good, Huw.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Good, indeed.”

  She looked down at the pins in her hands, and the wind blew about her hair, and she was quiet.

  The smells of the garden were rising warm about us, of turned earth down by the strawberry beds, and the songs of the currant bushes, and a good fatness of syrup from the apple trees, with bitter freshness of dahlias flowing on the top. And the wind happy to carry it on his head with a little whistle, like a butcher boy with a good big baron for somebody.

  She looked at me, looked down again, turned the hat-pins, looked down the path and watched a little blue butterfly, down at the pins, up at me, down again. Up and down, again. Up and down. Up.

  “Thank you, Huw,” she said, and looking from one eye to the other.

  “It was nothing,” I said.

  Down at the pins again.

  “No,” she said, and tears ready. “It was nothing. O, Huw. You were the only one. Nobody else cared. You told him.”

  And crying to break the heart in bits. Coming to stand softly against me and lean, and shake, and the hat-pins sticking in me, and a bumble bee having a good look at both of us.

  “Come on, girl,” I said. “Nothing to cry for, is it? All over, now.”

  “First cry,” she said. “Never before. That is why. All over. Thank God.”

  And off again, worse than ever. But not in pain. A scent from her, from a bottle, that went deep.

  “Finish, now then,” I said, “is it?”

  So up with a good breath, and a smile coming, and a good blow on my handkerchief.

  “Eh, dear,” she said. “I am like an old baby.”

  “I expect there will be a new one in the house when I go back,” I said.

  “Poor Bron,” she said. “Let us pick fruit for her.”

  So back over the mountain I went with a couple of bushel baskets full of blessings from the bushes and trees, and when I was home, I was an uncle again.

  A boy, Taliesin, they called him.

  Ivor was so proud that night.

  And dead within the month.

  We were on night shift and going up to our stall, and I had stopped to have a better grip of the pick. I heard a crack, as though stone had been struck.

  Ivor called in the darkness, but I never heard what he said.

  The roof fell on top of him.

  And I was standing there looking up into a black storm.

  Helpless, as the rock fell, and splintered, and dust flew to blind and strangle.

  Nothing to do but go back, hearing quietness coming quietly among the falls of echoes.

  “Are you right, Morgan?” Rhys was shouting, with a candle in front of his face, and his hand round it.

  “My brother is under the rock,” I said.

  “Blood of Christ, boy,” he said, “have your head sewn, quick. Picks up, and stop work.”

  And men passed me one to another till I was out, and they were pressing forward, with picks hitting at the rock, and lumps being passed from hand to hand, as I had been.

  They found him, but he came up in his coffin, screwed down ready.

  Bron sat in the corner chair for days, still, looking through the doorway, no tears, no frown, nothing of fear. Just sitting quietly and looking.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  “GIVE ONE,” my father said, while he was nursing Taliesin, “and take the other. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.”

  “Go in to that girl in by there,” my mother said, “and say it to her. She will have an answer for you. Or perhaps I will save you trouble.”

  “Hisht now, Beth,” my father said. “Kindle not the wrath.”

  “To hell with the wrath,” my mother said. “And I said it plain to be heard.”

  Mr. Gruffydd used to come up and sit with her, and sometimes take her to Tyn-y-Coed for the afternoon. But it was long before we began to see the old Bron we had known.

  I went back underground with Davy, in his colliery, a little farther away than my father’s, only a few days after Ivor had gone. Then Davy went to London about the Union, and I went in the blacksmith’s shop as a helper.

  One day I came back in the afternoon with a bit of a burn and my mother went down to borrow linseed oil from Bron, and came back with
her.

  “This old boy of mine is always cutting and burning,” my mother said.

  “A good old boy, he is, fair play,” Bron said, and pouring oil.

  “Soft words swell the head,” my mother said. “I am sorry in the heart that I spoke for you to go down the colliery, my little one. Sorry in the heart.”

  “Why, Mama?” I asked her. “Only small, these are. Other men have them, and no notice.”

  “Other men are other men,” said my mother. “But my boys are my boys. A good glass of buttermilk, now then, is it?”

  “Yes, please, Mama,” I said. “And a bit of Bron’s shortcake.”

  “O,” said my mother, with her mouth like a little buttonhole, “so your Mama’s shortcake is to be given to the hens, is it?”

  “No, Mama,” I said, “shortcake day is to-morrow with us, but to-day with Bron.”

  “Only bread I made to-day,” Bron said, with a smile that was only stretching the mouth. “Nobody to eat it, only Gareth and me, and we would rather have currant bread.”

  Silence came to burst among us. We were like rock, not moving. And Ivor was large about the place, putting his boots on, and telling my mother how flat the tenors were singing in the second choir, and humming a bit to show her.

  And my mother standing, holding her chest with her hands that were all of bone, and looking sideways through the window, and her eye, that I could see, shining.

  Bron went to the door and leaned against the jamb, with a hand flat upon the wall inside.

  “O, Mama, my little one,” she said, in a voice that should have been eased with many tears, “I am lonely without him. I put his boots and clothes ready every night. But they are there, still, in the morning. O, Mama, there is lonely I am.”

  My mother stood for minutes after Bron had gone.

  “Huw,” she said, “I will have Bron to live here, if she will come.”

  “She will never come, Mama,” I said. “One mistress in a house.”

  “Then you shall go down there and live, then,” my mother said, and sharp to move and off with her apron. “I will go down now, and find out if she will have you. She have got to cook and mend for somebody, and give comfort for somebody. So till the proper time have gone, and she do find another husband, you will do.”

  “Another husband, Mama?” I asked her, and O God, the world was flying to pieces and black with a new hate that came to drop heavy about me like a fall of rock. A new kind of hatred, I felt. A jealousy, and an envy, and a refusal in blood to see another man beside Bronwen. A newness of vision I found, that made me deny another man to have life in the world of moons beside Bronwen. Clean house, cook, sew, darn, all those things that women do in their daily lives for men, all those things, she might do for another man. But give him passage to the mightiness of song, and the strange poetries, and the noise of harp and timbrel, and a place in golden skies with the spinning of many moons, no. The anointment at the well, the immersion in the living, richer Jordan, the warmer baptism, the glory of enunciation, no.

  No.

  And a hatred came to be red inside me, to keep the no, no.

  I was the sentinel, the vigilant.

  And yet I had no wish to be with Bron as I had been with Ceinwen. With Bron was her own world that she had kept for Ivor, and I was the stranger at the gates, and no desire in me to enter in.

  Then I knew, and felt, the loneliness of Bron. For I was lonely for the world of Ceinwen, the world that was mine and hers, that we had found together. That Garden of Worlds, where stood an Angel with flaming sword to see that we had only a momentary moment of its beauty, and sent us forth again, with shaking breaths and blind eyes and weakness in the limbs to live in desolation jewelled sharp with the memory.

  “Another husband,” my mother said. “Yes, boy. She is young. No wages going in the house. She has got years of beauty yet. And too proud to ask help. Of course, another husband. Quick, too.”

  “I will go and see her,” I said.

  I went down to her, and found her sitting in the corner chair, still looking through the door.

  “Bron,” I said, “would you have me in the house to live?”

  She looked up as though I had been speaking another language.

  “And have my wages,” I said.

  “Your home is with Mama,” she said with quiet, but kind, as though giving excuses to herself. For there was light behind her eyes.

  “My home is wherever I am,” I said.

  “Your Mama will be bruised in the heart,” she said.

  “Mama, it was, who said it first,” I said.

  “From pity,” Bronwen said.

  “Not pity,” I said. “Sense. If you put clothes night and morning, let them be my clothes.”

  “I am not a cook like Mama,” she said, going weak in the voice.

  “You are a cook of cooks,” I said, “but Mama has years of cooking more than you, that is all.”

  “It will make trouble in the family,” she said, looking round the kitchen to see if things to say were hiding behind the teapot, or behind the plates on the dresser, or the copper pots on the mantelpiece.

  “Trouble, yes,” I said. “If you say no. I will feel shamed to have been forward, and Mama will think I am not good enough for you.”

  Quiet, and if things to say were hiding, they were careful not to be seen.

  She looked through the doorway again, but now her hands were putting tucks in her apron. I went over the tiles with my boots sighing in the sand, and shut the door with a swing, and put my back to it, and she looked at me with the smile that was not a smile.

  “Yes or no?” I asked her.

  “Yes,” she said, with calm, and starting the chair to rock.

  “Good,” I said, “I will get my bed.”

  So up to this room I came, and rolled up the mattress I am sitting on now, and slid it through the window, and then the bedstead. Downstairs, then, to take them up to the little room like this one in Bron’s house, that was empty. Back to fetch my clothes, and back again to give good-bye to my mother.

  “Well,” she said.

  “Well,” I said.

  “Off again, then,” she said.

  “I will come plenty of times, Mama,” I said.

  “Right, you,” she said. “And supper every night, is it?”

  “Yes, Mama,” I said.

  “Good-bye, now, then,” my mother said, dry.

  “Good-bye, Mama,” I said, and kissed her, and went.

  Quiet, those first few months were, with Bronwen. There was a line drawn between us that was plain as though put there fresh with chalk every day. From each side of that line we lived, and spoke, and smiled. Not as strangers, for we knew each other too well. We knew when we laughed that we were not having all the laugh, that it was not wide, or deep, or high enough, that the best part of it was on each side of the line, kept back. We knew when we talked together that we were not talking with all of us, but only that bit of us that others would see and know as Bronwen and Huw Morgan. If we came near each other we were like hedgehogs with spines to keep away, though we never showed it. But we knew it. The air between us was hot with a hotness that only the two of us could feel. Our laughing was false with a falseness that only we could hear. Our talk was empty, of food, and the colour of Taliesin’s cheeks, and the darkness so early in the evenings. But we know why we were talking emptily, and why we never looked at each other.

  We were gently afraid of each other, though without fear, and with nothing of fright. We were afraid only in the spirit and delicacy of being afraid, of the same nature of afraidness that blood horses feel when a hand is placed upon them, and they shake under the skin from tail to muzzle.

  A fear of the touch, whether from speech, eyes, or body.

  And only because we knew of another world, that could be reached in a moment, and felt for a moment, and gone in only a momentary moment.

  In these months I knew why Eve took leaves, and why they hid from one another, and I r
ealised the magnitude of the curse that sent them from the Garden to work by the sweat of the brow, out of that glory, one to cut coal in a crawling of dust, the other to stand at a sink and scar her wrists with scum from greasy dishes.

  Strange it is that you will live from day to day for months and months, and nothing to happen except getting up and working and going to bed. Then a little thing happens and you watch it grow about you, with terror, and to take the burden a little from you, you try to pretend you are in a dream.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  DAVY was a long time in London, with not much to show except knowledge of what was going on in the Unions up there, and sending reports down to our branch. I did most of the letter writing, and I was able to see the Union having strength as from the flow of my pen.

  Every week new members by the hundred, and every week more and more voices shouting for action against the owners. Shorter working hours, more money, ballots for places where the seam was richest, closing the collieries against outside labour, all had their champions, and all ready to fight.

  Ianto had been speaking night after night for weeks, not for action against the owners, but against the Government. Mr. Gruffydd was with him, there. They wanted to stop the royalties paid to landlords, especially those paid on every ton coming from under pastureland, that paid rent above, and a royalty below only because the main heading ran under it.

  “They will charge royalty on the air above it, next,” Ianto said. “No royalties, none, and our own trucks and engines, and railway staff, and a rental to the railway companies for the use of their tracks all over the country. Then a fleet of coalers of our own to take it out to the world. But out to the world only when every fire-place in the country has got a splendid fire, every scuttle full, and every cellar loaded.”

  “Who is to own all this?” my father asked him, and with steady pulling on his pipe, and looking at the end of his slipper.

  “The people,” Ianto said, in quiet, and pale, with a flame. “Only the people. God made the earth for Man, not for some of the men.”

  “Where will you have the money to buy it, my son?” my father asked him, still steady with the pipe.

  “God made the coal, Dada,” Ianto said. “But Man makes the money. Pity, indeed, if God put His hand down through the clouds and gave us all a bill for the riches He made for us and gave to us, free. What would happen, I wonder?”