How Green Was My Valley

by Richard Llewellyn

  “It is beyond me, Ianto,” my father said, and knocked out a full pipe in his worry. “There seems to be truth in what you say, indeed. But the Bible and God are not in the business of the pit. Only ledgers and Mammon. You will have it hard, my son. Hard, indeed.”

  “Good,” Ianto said. “It is only when men forget to fight for right that they fail. There are plenty to fight for wrong. We will finish with the sliding scale first, anyway. That will be a start.”

  Night after night, all over the valleys, men met in hundreds to argue about the sliding scale. Older men, like my father, who had earned a handful of sovereigns for a week’s work, were blaming the younger men for the difference, and blind to argument. And they clung to the sliding scale because it was at least a living.

  Then Ianto was discharged from the colliery with Will Thomas and Mostyn Marudydd, all three of them Union workers.

  Men wanted to drop tools there and then, but Ianto kept them in. He wanted no hungry children on his conscience, he said.

  For weeks the three of them went about the pits to have work, but no, even though they were skilled men, there were no places for them.

  “They have sharpened their knives for you,” my father said. “You will never work in the collieries again while you live.”

  “Right you,” Ianto said, “I will go over to the ironworks tomorrow.”

  “Is the Union too poor to pay you whole time?” my father asked him.

  “What I do for the Union,” Ianto said, “is from the heart. Will you have it said of me that I skulked into a job I made for myself?”

  “But Ianto, my little one,” my father said, “somebody has got to do the job and be paid for it.”

  “Good,” said Ianto, “but not me.”

  So over to the ironworks he went, and had a job labouring in the furnaces, and coming back at night to work by the lamp. Four miles there, and four miles back, and a twelve-hour day in between. A bath, and his dinner, and more work with the pen, or with the voice.

  I was still with the blacksmith, but doing jobs underground for most of the time, on trams that broke down, and blunted tools, and on all the little jobs that heat and a hammer will mend.

  I found little joy in working with iron, for it had no will of its own. A pump on the bellows, a heat blown pale, and out comes your iron like a slave, ready to be hit in any shape you please. In wood, you must work with care, and respect, and love. For wood has soul and spirit, and is not at the mercy of triflers. One slip of your chisel in carelessness or ignorance, one shave too many with your plane, and your work is ruined, and fit only for burning.

  But with iron, you shall beat and beat, and only an angriness of sparks, like the spitting of a toad to answer you, and if you make a mistake, back on the fire with it, a leaning on the bellows, and here it is again, poor spiritless stuff, ready to be beaten again.

  I went often to Town to fetch iron in strips from the forge there, when we were low in stock, and held up on a job.

  I was over there one market day, in the afternoon, in my working clothes and black from the pit and feeling shamed to be walking among the people in case I spoilt their good clothes.

  The forge was near to the market hall, so that the farmers could pull up in the square to unload, and trot their horses over to be shod where they could keep an eye out for customers who might be waiting at their stalls to buy.

  So the forge was always a busy place, on market day, full of laughing and voices, and the grunting of bellows, and the hot whispers of fires, and the silver count of hammers beating out the strokes for sweating sledge-hammer men and the stamping of horses, a dull knocking of nails in hoofs, the fall of files on stone, impatient breath of iron drowned in the cooling tank, and sharp to the nose with the frying of hoof as the new blue shoe was fitted.

  And outside, the little blue trap from Tyn-y-Coed, filled at the back with baskets, and inside the forge, the bay mare, with her off hind stretched and held between the knees of the smith.

  I was looking at her and laughing to see the look in her eyes, whether to kick or not, when I heard a voice I knew well.

  “New shoes again,” Mrs. Nicholas was saying, with the smile carved about her nose, to a farmer and his wife from the next valley. “But only to be expected, see. Out all day, she is.”

  “Are you having much work at Tyn-y-Coed, then, Mrs. Nicholas, my little one?” the farmer’s wife asked her.

  “Work never stopping,” said Mrs. Nicholas, and picking the fingers of her gloves. “Come one, come the other, from morning till night.”

  “Entertaining, young Mrs. Evans is, now I suppose?” the farmer said. “Old Evans kept them away.”

  “It will never surprise me to see the poor master rise up white from his grave one of these days,” Mrs. Nicholas said. “Only the gravestone is keeping him down there now, I will swear.”

  “Gracious goodness, Mrs. Nicholas, my little one,” the farmer’s wife said, “what for, now then?”

  “What for?” Mrs. Nicholas said, with her hands up, and her eyes up, and the suffering of eternity in her voice. “What is going on in the house, of course. Are you standing there in your good little clothes and saying to my face you are knowing nothing about it?”

  “No,” said the farmer, and taking out his pipe, with his eyebrows up, and his wife coming closer, and both leaning forward. “What, now then?”

  “The only ones in the Five Valleys,” Mrs. Nicholas said, in grief. “Nobody else, only you.”

  “Good God, Mrs. Nicholas,” the farmer said, and looked at his wife, and they pulled a mouth at each other, and looked again at Mrs. Nicholas as though she held their hopes at the Bar. “What, now then?”

  “Not for me to say,” Mrs. Nicholas said, and a shaking of the head, and a look at the floor, as though she saw Old Evans lying there in his winding sheet, “only the housekeeper I am, and forty-seven years, with odd, in the family, and living to curse the day.”

  “Well, well,” the farmer said, “there is terrible it is, whatever it is, is it?”

  “Terrible, Mr. Davies, my little one?” Mrs. Nicholas said, with stiffness, through a closed mouth, and a straightening of the back, and eyes gone dull to think of a word, “Not the word. A collier’s daughter, Mrs. Davies, my little one, using best china and lace tea cloths every day of the week. And that is only a bit of it. Fancy me, you know. A ride in the trap, if you please, with a preacher every day.”

  “With a preacher, Mrs. Nicholas?” Mrs. Davies said, in whispers.

  “Who is he, then?” Mr. Davies asked her, with his hair in crawls with him.

  “Who?” Mrs. Nicholas said. “Who is in the house every night till all hours? Who, are you asking? Who, then? I am in bed, with my candle out.”

  Mrs. Nicholas looked about, but took no notice of me, for I was black, and turned into rock, and she bent to them and whispered, and I saw spit from her speech bright in the air, and as she spoke, their mouths and eyes became round with smiling horror.

  “Eh,” Mr. Davies said.

  “O, Gracious God in Heaven,” said Mrs. Davies, in whispers, as though a fireball was to be expected then and there.

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Nicholas, and fat from duty done, “and how do I know he goes from the house at night?”

  The three of them looked at one another, and devils danced about them.

  “And her poor boy of a husband out in Cape Town,” Mr. Davies said, “bleeding for his country.”

  “Wait you, Mr. Davies,” Mrs. Nicholas said, with her eyes shut as though her life were going from her, and holding up her finger to make the sign of writing with a pen, “only wait, you.”

  “Well done,” said Mr. Davies, in Chapel voice, from the chest, and with sternness, “thou good and faithful servant.”

  “Yes, indeed, Mrs. Nicholas, my little one,” said Mrs. Davies in a voice that the least Mrs. Nicholas had done was to save them all from the gallows. “Suffering you are, now, but reward to come, is it?”

  “O,
I hope, I hope,” said Mrs. Nicholas, and a handkerchief coming to help with the tears. “Poor, poor little Master Iestyn. A slut from a coal mine fouling his home, and him thousands of miles away. O, dear, dear. Ach y fi.”

  “Ach y fi, indeed,” Mrs. Davies said, and a pinkness of the face to be from there and meet others. “In His keeping, you are, Mrs. Nicholas, my little one.”

  I had to go from there then, blind and dumb, job forgotten, nothing in me. Empty, I went, without even a word to Mrs. Nicholas. Yet, feeling nothing, I could have killed her with no thought of to-morrow, but only sickness to touch the fat wrinkles of her neck. But instead, I had the sense to go.

  To Bronwen I went, and found her wiping Taliesin after his bath.

  “Well,” she said, “there is early you are, boy. No bath is ready for you yet or anything.”

  “No matter,” I said, and I told her, and her face was white as the towel when I finished.

  “Eh,” she said, with tiredness, and closing her eyes, and holding Taliesin close to her and lifting her head. “I do hope from my soul that the tongues of people will be slower to hurt when my sons are grown to men, indeed. What good are they having for it?”

  “What are we to do?” I asked her.

  “Tell Angharad,” she said, as though there was no argument.

  “It will kill her,” I said.

  “Better to come from us,” she said. “If that woman have written to Iestyn he will be writing soon or perhaps coming home. That would be worse for her.”

  “Is it true, then?” I asked her. “Is Mr. Gruffydd going over there till all hours?”

  “Do I know?” she asked me, with straightness, and stopping to tie Taliesin’s napkin. “Is it business of mine? Are you questioning it?”

  “No,” I said, and lost inside me. “But I thought it was all lies.”

  “That is not the point,” Bron said, “their business is their business. Nothing to do with us, you, me, or anybody else on earth.”

  “But, Bron,” I said, “he is a preacher.”

  “And a man,” Bron said, “and Angharad is a woman. Well?”

  “Is it right, then, Bron?” I asked her. “She is another man’s wife.”

  She held Taliesin up and kissed him so that her mouth made a lovely roundness in his fat little cheeks and he laughed just like a hen, with his breath coming backwards.

  “How have you been looking at me these months?” she asked me, quick from the kiss, with quietness, and with something of tears.

  I looked down at my hands and saw the veins swollen in the blackness of grime, and I knew a shame that had the edge of a razor cutting deep into me with a hurt that made me want to scream.

  “There is shamed I am, Bron,” I said.

  “Shamed?” she said, and pushed breath from her nose with a sound of impatience, “of being a man? Or being found out?”

  “No,” I said, and the razor doing beautiful work inside me, “to give you extra trouble in the mind.”

  “You are talking nonsense, boy,” she said, and a kiss for Taliesin again. “Go you and bathe. Then some dinner, and we will talk again.”

  While I was having dinner, Bron was upstairs changing into her best, so when she was ready I had finished.

  “Now then,” she said, “will you go to Mr. Gruffydd while I go to Angharad? Or will I go to Mr. Gruffydd?”

  “You go to Angharad,” I said. “If I have my eyes on that black bitch I will strangle her. But how shall I tell Mr. Gruffydd is something beyond me.”

  “Say it out,” Bron said. “Just say. Then it is for him.”

  “Right you,” I said.

  “Good-bye, now,” she said, and came closer and smoothed back my hair, and smiled at me with her teeth and her eyes in slits with shine in them. “O, Huw, there is a nasty bump you have had, too. Did you think I was blind, boy?”

  “No,” I said, “I knew you knew, but I thought no matter as long as nothing was said.”

  She laughed out loud, and a lovely laugh had Bron, deep and from the chest.

  “There is a funny old boy you are,” she said. “We will talk more when I come back, is it?”

  “Yes,” I said, and feeling worse than ever, shamed and angry, and sore in a place I could feel but could not touch, as though I had fallen with my brains on a gravel path, and scraped the skin off.

  “See Mr. Gruffydd before you see Mama,” Bron said, “or she will see by your face that something is sour with you and have it out of you, every word. Good-bye, now.”

  “Good-bye,” I said, and we looked at each other, and I tried to keep from smiling at her, to show that I was feeling serious, but nobody could see her eyes like that and keep trouble inside them.

  So I smiled, and Bron laughed again, with gentleness, and quietly shut the door.

  I sat there till the light had gone, thinking about Bronwen and me, with still the soreness, and plenty of sourness, and some of the shame. But the smile kept coming back and spoiling it. I was coming to be in a sweat of anger with myself for being such a fool as to tell Bronwen that I had thought all would be well if nothing was said, and worse still, to remember her voice when she asked me how I had been looking at her. I thought shame to have been such an animal. I called myself low names and whipped myself raw, in thought, and tried to think of some punishment fit for me.

  But the smile kept coming back and spoiling it.

  Bron knew.

  And she laughed about it.

  There is strange, that only a little problem of your own will take your mind far from a tragedy belonging to others. I had forgotten Angharad and Mr. Gruffydd, and only Gareth crying upstairs, and waking Taliesin, made me think of Bronwen’s errand, and so brought me to think of mine.

  So off I went, down the hill at a trot, and round the back of the little house with the sea-shell porch.

  “Well, Huw,” Mr. Gruffydd said, and just pulling down his cuffs, and his face fresh and a bit pale from a wash, with his hat and coat and some books ready on the table, and his slippers pigeon-toed by the chair.

  “Mr. Gruffydd,” I said, “I have got something to tell you.”

  “Will it wait, Huw?” he asked me, and smiling. “I am late now, see.”

  “To Tyn-y-Coed you are going, sir?” I asked him.

  “Yes,” he said, and turned his back to put on his coat, and I knew from the bend of his back that he was ready against attack, and for some reason feeling an anger.

  “That is what I have come for, sir,” I said.

  “For what?” he asked me, and cold, and still with his back to me.

  So I told him.

  Not a move from him all the time. Only standing in the candlelight, with his back to me and his hands fast in the collar of his coat.

  “O,” he said, as though I had told him that rain was starting, “at last then, eh, Huw?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “Next,” he said, “what to do? Angharad must be protected.”

  “You shall do that only by strangling Mrs. Nicholas,” I said.

  “You cannot stop people from talking, Huw,” Mr. Gruffydd said, and still without feeling in his voice, still with his back to me, “nor shall you stop them thinking. They are products of a faulty environment. And faults are what you shall expect.”

  “What shall you do, sir?” I asked him.

  “Leave me, now, my little one,” he said, “I will think about it.”

  “Good night, sir,” I said.

  But he was quiet when I went from there, and still standing with his back to the door when I passed the window.

  The village was still when I went back home after a walk along the river. Not a light anywhere, except at the pit. I had thought to clear my head, but the walk made me feel worse than before, and I found pain alive in me to walk up the hill.

  Even in the time I had been to work, change had come to the river, to the streets, and even to the shape of the village. The river had been built on all the way down to the path that led up to
the Chapel, and the walls of new engine sheds were built flush with the banks, so that the bilge spewed into the stream, and the sound of them all, one after the other, like a sickness.

  The new streets were much narrower than ours, and the front doors opened straight on to the street, no garden, no flowers, no bit of green to bless you coming in or going out. No backyard, either, and not even a blade of grass for a garden. And every house in a street full of houses, on both sides, exactly the same as its neighbour, with not a brick difference. And all of them jammed tight together, with not an inch of air between them.

  Four new slag heaps had been started, with their cable tips running to the top of the mountain, so that the slag dropped on to the green pasture and found a level down among the trees. A big beech, that I had climbed not long before, now reached out of a smoking heap like the hand of a spirit entombed.

  There was a light in the kitchen when I got back, and my heart was lifted to see it.

  Bron was sitting in the chair, sewing, and the kettle jumping on the hob, and the cat leaning his chin on his front paw and opening only one eye for me, and a good smell of onion soup to kiss the nose.

  “Up still?” I said, but not looking at her.

  “We were going to talk,” she said, with smile in her voice, “so I stayed. Did you see Mr. Gruffydd?”

  “Yes, he only said you cannot stop people from talking and thinking,” I said. “He is going to think about it.”

  “Angharad is off back to London, first train,” Bron said.

  “Was she angry?” I asked her.

  “No,” Bron said. “She knew about it.”

  “She knew?” I said.

  “Has she been living all her life here, and no sense?” Bron said.

  “But did she let Mr. Gruffydd go there and go there all this time and no word?” I asked her.

  “Do you think Mr. Gruffydd knew nothing?” she said, and busy with plates.

  “Then what use to tell them, or worry for even a moment?” I asked her, and feeling wronged to the heart.