“Who the hell is he, then, with you?” Dai said.
“Home Secretary,” James Rowlands said, and having his pint from Cyfartha very grateful, “in London.”
“Is he somebody, then?” Dai said, as wise as before.
“I think,” James Rowlands said, through the drink.
“Soldiers,” Dai said, with quiet. “English soldiers, I suppose?”
“Would they be fools, and send Welsh?” James Rowlands asked him.
“The only fools here,” Dai said, “are us. But English soldiers, eh, Cyfartha?”
“Trouble,” Cyfartha said.
“Eyes or no eyes,” Dai said, “I will be in it. Bloody English soldiers, indeed. To hell with them, eh, Cyfartha?”
“To hell, Dai, my little one, to hell,” Cyfartha said.
Only a couple of days later, when they were both serving soldiers of the West Riding Regiment and some Munster Fusiliers with all the beer they could drink, and not a pennypiece in payment:
“Well,” I said to Dai, “a good one, you are. To hell with the English soldiers, then? With beer to cool them down there, is it?”
“O,” he said, and coming a bit red. “Good boys, they are, see. No harm in them, and swearing very tidy about coming here, too. Couple of officers up in the front room, and saying worse than the men, eh, Cyfartha?”
“Educated they are,” Cyfartha said. “No trouble from these down here. They are only having a few pence a day pay, and nothing extra for a black eye.”
In all the other valleys there was trouble and to spare, with baton charges, and fights between pickets and blacklegs. But in our Valley, although the men were in the streets all day, nothing more than shouting was going on.
Again the mark of shoulders rubbing in idleness was coming plain to be seen, all along the walls in the main street, telling of the thousands wasting the rich moments of their lives, with the earth offering them an abundance just beneath their feet, and given free to them, by God.
Well, well.
If ever I will have the privilege to meet God the Father face to face, I will ask did He laugh, or did He cry, when He saw and heard what we were doing down here, with a concern that runs itself, and given to us free.
Wonder to me He has never put a fist through the clouds to squash us flat. Or perhaps, like the good Dr. Johnson, His time will come, and then it will hurt all the more. I am in shivers to think of the Day.
The Day of Reckoning.
I think that perhaps no bad trouble would have come close to us if a policeman had not taken it upon himself in his sweetness of dignity to hit a half-wit with his stick.
Old Sami Canal Water, we called the half-wit, because his mother made ginger beer that he sold at the pit-tops, and a poor living indeed, but they owed nobody and kept from the rates.
The men were coming back from a meeting and I was up on the banking waiting for my father, and I saw a policeman galloping his mare and shouting to the men to make way.
Some of them ran up the banking in fear of the mare’s hoofs, but those further away started to shout and some of them lined up to stop him.
Old Sami Canal Water was running from one side of the street to the other, lost, screaming in fear, and beating his hands together, and the bottles falling from his basket to burst white and splashing in the road, and with each burst, a scream from him, and trying to pick up the broken bits, and the mare coming at him stretch-neck.
And almost under her forelegs another bottle burst, and she reared, and Sami fell, clawing at her, with only the whites of his eyes showing, and the policeman raised his stick and brought it down on Sami’s head with the sound of a spoon on a boiled egg.
War.
Anything in blue, with silver buttons, from that day on, was an enemy.
That policeman, who knew Sami, and all of us, was no stranger. But if he had a mother, she was hard put to know her son that night. He went over the bank, quick, and his mare was behind the Three Bells for weeks after, well fed, and fat, ownerless.
That night, more than a thousand men attacked the colliery to have the blood of the police in the boiler-house.
But they were not all our men. There were strangers among them, who seemed to be giving the orders, and I could hear somebody calling to put the pumps from work and flood the pit, so I was off, quick, to find Dai and Cyfartha.
“Right,” said Dai. “Call the boys, Cyfartha.”
Off down to the pit-top we went, in pitch darkness, about twenty of us, and round the back, away from the road where all the men were shouting.
Glass was smashed in the windows of the offices, and stones were hitting like hail against the walls of the power house.
“What will they gain, the fools?” Dai said, with his hand on my shoulder. “Give them a shout in the winding-house, Cyfartha.”
So Cyfartha and a couple of us lifted a shout to Iorweth and the door opened a crack to show his face behind the lantern, but he saw there were many of us and shut it again, so we had more shouting to do, and at last we were in.
Iorweth had been in the winding-house with his shift mates for days, sleeping there, afraid to go home in case the men set about him for a blackleg.
“We want a look through a window, quiet,” Dai said, “only to see the happy little man with most to say, outside there. Then we will have him. Iorweth, my little one, and you shall come home with us in peace, and I will sleep in your house, is it?”
“Thank you, Dai,” Iorweth said, too tired to smile. “Glad I will be, indeed. Go you.”
So up we went to the windows, carefully, not to have a stone in the eye, and looked out on the crowd. Big windows of many small panes they were, to have light for the engineers busy on the big wheel.
The crowd stretched up the banking toward the village, packed tight, and all their faces white in the light of flares. Shouting they were, and young men in front with armfuls of stones, throwing for bets, to see who could smash most panes.
“There he is,” Cyfartha said. “I see him.”
He was pointing to a small group, standing away from the crowd, with a man in a bowler hat in the middle, doing a lot of talking.
“Me and you, Dai,” Cyfartha said, and jumped down. “Only me and you.”
“Good,” Dai said, and off with jacket and cap. “Take my arm and let go when I am near to him, eh, Cyfartha?”
“Come you, Dai, my little one,” Cyfartha said, and out they went, hand in hand.
They came in the light only when they were a few yards from the group, and when the crowd saw them, they all cheered, for not one of them could mistake the broad, squat bandiness of Dai, with Cyfartha’s straightness beside him.
Straight to the group they went, and then.
O, and then.
The quick, upward passage of Dai’s white forearms, the flash of his fists, and the swinging swiftness of Cyfartha beside him. One after another, the men went on the ground, flat, arms flying apart, faces white one moment, out the next, and no sound coming to us because of the crowd.
Then the two of them walked back with their hands in their pockets with a pile on the ground behind them, and men crowding about to see what harm had been done.
“A mongrel,” Dai said, coming in. “That one in the bowler. I heard him swearing.”
“Iorweth back home, now then,” Cyfartha said.
“Look, Dai,” Iorweth said, “will we go across and help with the fires? The pumps will stop, if not.”
“Come you,” Dai said, and over to the boiler-house we went, but when the crowd saw us going they threw stones again, but too far away to hit us.
The manager was in the boiler-house, tired too, with some policemen playing cards, and a couple of his clerks ready to cry with tiredness, trying to stoke the fires, and making a clerk’s job of it.
“Come from there,” Cyfartha said, and pulled a slice from one of them. “Into your coat and ready for home. A couple of us will stay on here, and you have rest.”
“Are you
men unionists?” the manager asked us.
“Yes,” I said.
“Good God,” he said, and surprised even in his tiredness, “Morgan.”
“But the boilers will be giving steam to-morrow,” I said, “Morgan or not.”
“I am grateful,” he said.
“Who is for home,” Dai said, “go home,” and went, and left Cyfartha and a couple of us, with the policemen playing cards, in the heat of the boiler-house.
At six o’clock in the morning, with frost coming to shine in the light, we saw Bron, all by herself, bent under a basket, hurrying across the pit-top, and calling my name.
“Well, indeed to God,” Cyfartha said, with his mouth full of the breakfast she had brought, “a woman I will thank God to have met.”
“Are you coming home, Huw?” Bronwen asked me.
“When the reliefs come,” I said, and having it cheerful with bacon and eggs.
“No getting in trouble, now then,” she said, and standing with her arm about me.
“Trouble?” I said. “And you coming down here alone? Stay in the house, Bron, my sweetheart, and keep Olwen and the boys in, too. The crowd is with madness.”
“Right, you,” she said. “Come with me to the street, is it?”
So to the street I went, and Cyfartha watching, but the village was without workmen, empty, and the houses coming sharp with morning light.
Lovely was Bronwen that morning, with the cold to put a redness of flowers in her cheeks and her eyes with dear blueness soft for me, and tearful, from the poking fingers of the south-east wind, that was busy about us with mischief.
There is a wholeness about a woman, of shape, and sound, and colour, and taste, and smell, a quietness that is her, that you will want to hold tightly to you, all, every little bit, without words, in peace, for jealousy for the things that escape the clumsiness of your arms. So you feel when you love.
So I felt for Bronwen, but I never told her.
“Well,” she said, when we had stood for a minute, and me trying to think of something to say, and her looking up the street, and at me with a bit of a smile, and up at the Hill again.
“Well,” I said, “remember what I said about coming out of the house. And please to say thank you to Mama for breakfast.”
“Yes,” she said, soft, a little girl having orders for behaviour at a Sunday School treat.
“If old Malachi Edwards wants his chairs,” I said, “he will have to wait. I will be here till the finish.”
“Yes,” she said. “No home, to-night, then?”
“We will see,” I said.
“Good,” she said, and smiling. “Good-bye, now.”
“Good-bye,” I said.
We looked deep at one another again.
O, where is the harm to love any woman who looks as Bron looked, then?”
For her womanness is a blessing about her, and you are tender to put hands upon her and kiss, not with lust, but with the joy of one returning to a lost one.
But there is a binding and trying in the mind and conscience, keeping you from lifting as much as a finger, and those strictures were tight round me, to make me dumb and keep me still.
And she half turned away, and turned to me again as though I had spoken and her eyes with darker colours of blue, now, and seeming to be heavy with a happy concern for me, and her mouth open to ask a question, but then she smiled her smile that was not a smile, and closed her mouth to tight roundness that was of Eve, and then smiled a big, big smile to thaw the frost right down the Valley.
“What now?” I asked her.
“Nothing,” she said. “Only good-bye.”
And up the Hill she went, straight, flat in the back, with a clean, quick step without a scrape of the heel, and halfway up a turn to me, and a wave, and the air coming to smile about her.
Chapter Forty-Two
CYFARTHA looked kindly at me when I went back.
“Breakfast for the gentleman,” he said, “wherever he is. A good one that. If I had met her young, I would have hit you to hell out of it.”
“Two of us to fight, then,” I said, “my brother and me.”
“Yes,” he said, and he looked a bit strange, as though he had said the wrong word.
I wish I had taken more notice, then.
But the fires wanted notice, and the police were waking, so I forgot.
Day after day we were in the pump-room, and my father bringing food to us in the morning, and Dai coming at night, with reliefs.
Every hour the crowd got more dangerous, for the leaders could do nothing, the owners would do nothing, the Government did nothing, and in the meantime, the soldiers marched up and down in handfuls, and the police walked about in fifties, and having it stiff wherever they showed their heads, and windows were smashed and shops were looted, and honest men were stopped from doing what they had a mind to do, by gangs of boys, who had been given eight years of free education, and were still unable to use their minds.
They were outside all day, shouting, throwing, and you must live in front of it to know the sadness of it.
Cattle, to be herded, as with dogs, from gate to gate.
One afternoon we heard a bigger shout outside, and ran to the door to unlock it.
Olwen was trying to fight her way through to us, and with hands on her to tear her cloak and grip her hair.
Out we went with firebars and slices, and into the cattle, and see them run, with a couple on the ground to have a lesson.
“There is a fool of a girl, you are,” I said.
“The horses,” she was crying, “the horses.”
“What, the horses?” I asked her, and ready to hit.
“They are down there in the stables,” she said, with tears thick, “hungry and thirsty, they are.”
“Good God,” Cyfartha said, “forgotten them, I had.”
“Howell has been trying to have a truce to bring them all to the surface,” she said. “They are nearly all up in the other pits, but not here. Dada has just come home from a meeting to tell us, so down I came quick.”
“Cyfartha,” I said, “I will ask the cattle for help.”
“Good,” he said. “I will have the cage up the top, ready.”
Out I went to the crowd, and stones coming to breathe past me.
“Listen,” I shouted to them, “the ponies are down there and nobody to give them comfort. Who will come to help?”
“Let them stay,” somebody shouted. “Nobody is troubling for us.”
But, fair play, the cattle had a voice of pity, and it was deep. Then men began to come forward, and when I had twenty, I had enough. Over to the pit-top we went, and down in the cage.
Well, if you had seen the little horses when they saw us. Like children, they were, ready to sit down at a party, and with just as much noise. All the lights were out down there, and candles were all we had, but the ponies were so full with joy that they pushed against us with their noses, and rubbed their necks, and so put our candles out, and swearing coming high, then, to find matches and light up again.
But the ponies knew the way to the cages, like cats, for darkness was friendly to them, and up we went, cage after cage of them, and all shouting to be going on top to grass.
Eh, dear.
If you had seen those ponies running when we let them loose. Blind they were, but they knew that the mountain had only kindness for them and nothing for them to trip on or trap to bring them low.
If only we could all have been as happy.
My father was going from one pit to another in the district to inspect underground and taking his life as a gift to do it for men were ready to kill anybody going to work for the owners.
I knew my father had gone down the pit that had been Iestyn’s, for he had told me he was going that morning, and to expect him to come up our shaft after a walk right the way through underground. The pumps were keeping the water down as far as we knew, for the gauges showed normal, but he wanted to be sure.
So, while
the cattle were shouting and throwing, and leaders on both sides were arguing and being offended, and men were worrying about such matters as wives and children, my father was underground, with rats and flood-water, and darkness for companions, with his eyes sharp for danger to the livelihood of men.
We heard nothing from him all day, and the afternoon went dark for evening, and still nothing.
“Huw,” Cyfartha said, “come you here, boy.”
He was over by the gauges, looking up at the glass, with his piece of waste to his mouth.
“Well?” I said, and looked at the level.
The black was rising, to tell of water in the pit, and more than the pumps could send out.
“I am going down,” Cyfartha said, and lines in his face. “There is fouling down there.”
“And my father,” I said.
“Perhaps he came up the other end,” Cyfartha said. “Give me an hour.”
“Right,” I said, and we shook hands, and I went to the winding-house to tell Iorweth to lower the cage, then over to the crowd that was waiting for police to show themselves.
“The pit is flooding,” I shouted to them. “Any volunteers to go down?”
But the men who wanted to come were afraid in case they were beaten in the streets later, or had their homes wrecked while they were down.
“You are cutting your own throats,” I said to them. “If the strike ends to-morrow you will have weeks of waiting while they take water from the levels. More waiting, more idleness, more going without.”
“Come closer,” somebody shouted, “and we will cut your throat and send your guts to Churchill.”
More shouting from the crowd, and a move forward, with stones falling. Nothing could be done with them.
I went back to the boiler-house.
I knew that my mother would be worrying up at home, and I thought with shame of the days I had been in the boiler-house with not a word to her, but only by messages in other mouths. Of all other things we think, but seldom of the comfort of our mothers.
So I waited until police reliefs came, and while the crowd was busy with them, I ran down the banking to the river bed and up as far as the village, at the back of the Three Bells, and in through the side door.
How Green Was My Valley Page 51
