Flame and Slag (6 page)

Ellen said, “Dad, dad, dad, damn you,” lullabying it soft voiced, the bitterness drawn fine, belonging to her pulse.

“Don’t get upset, my beaut,” I said.

“The horrible way he died.”

“I know.”

“Rees, why do we stay in Daren? The grief will always be here, even if they remove the tip and close the colliery.”

“Hey,” I said, “close the Caib? We’re driving down to the Seven Feet seam, my love. There’s enough coal there for a hundred years, and know what the next move is? They’re bringing in a German firm to drive on the main roadways, mining engineers from Germany under contract to the NCB. We’ll have Germans living here in Daren next January, Germans, Poles, maybe coloured men. They’re opening headings in plenty of other pits all over the country.”

Ellen wasn’t listening, her murmur fumbling tentative as the beginning of thought. “Yes, Rees, it doesn’t matter. We’ll have sons, more daughters” — rancour kindling, suddenly rasping raw, ferocious, too savage for reason, feline, a threshold surge, comingling of womb and mind: “Listen to me, you, you … when Lydia was born I felt sorry for her! Do you understand? Sorry for
her
sake. They were all crying, crying and groaning in the next room. My father was dead! Lydia was alive! He was spying down at us from that old photograph, my daughter squealing like a rabbit, alive. Lydia, our baby, Rees, ours! Do you hear, ours!”

“I know, Ellen, please, I know! Jesus God, my love, as if I don’t realize what you’ve gone through.”

Swaying in anguish, her mouth and eyes screwed up tight, I felt afraid to touch her. Then patience came over her cold as winter. “We’ll harden to it,” she said.

I said, “We will, we must harden to it,” confessing my own lost, submerged heartbreak: “We’ve got to stay, my love. As your father says” — waving that sixpenny maroon exercise-book, the old fashioned copperplate rambling without pause from beginning to end — “if we can’t live with it here, find ourselves here, we shan’t be able to anywhere else. Unless we cheat. All right, some families from Thelma Street are leaving Daren; let them run away, let them find comfort in new places, new faces. Let people talk, back-chat and bicker their bastard-born heads off about Daren!” And now it came out, out, out: “My father was killed in Caib pit, smashed, he was smashed, girl! He was smashed to bloody pieces.”

Ellen’s white face fell awry. “Your father? Why haven’t you told me? Rees, why hasn’t somebody told me?” — pulling my head down, pleading, sympathy dissembling her lovely frozen calm. “We’ll stay, Rees, stay for always. Is it a secret? Why is it a secret about him?”

“I don’t need to cry my bloody eyes out,” I said. “It’s so long ago, the shame, the stupid guilt. He broke one of the laws. My father climbed over crossed rails into old workings, that’s when the fall caught him, came down on him in this old airway return road. He went there to relieve himself. One chance in a million, true as God, one chance in a million, but the Caib killed him. My mother died then, she soon died, she died in her own way. Granny Stevens brought me to this house, dragged me snivelling all the way. I remember I had hiccups from crying. My clothes were thrown in a washing basket slung over her arm. She dragged me like a lost pup. They never spoke about my parents. Even Saturday nights when Granch had a load on the guilt was there, deep as the bloody Caib. Can you understand the shame, Ellen? Why they put their son out of their minds, because he was killed with his trousers down? See how crazy they were? Ask anybody in Daren how Dai Stevens was killed. They’ll say buried under a fall. Ask them when it happened. They’ll say the day before Vesting Day. I was three years old and all the fucking houses” — Ellen grinned, thank God — “were plastered with flags and union jacks, speeches in the ’stute, on the Square, open tap all day in the pubs, old Granch too drunk to stand, Siloh bloody Male Voice Choir on the BBC, aye, and my father buried, crushed into his own mess. They brought out his remains in a feed sack. There wasn’t a man’s body left to plant up in Daren cemetery; they just went through the motions.”

Ellen said, “Your mother suffered.”

“She did,” I said, failing to sneer, “worse than Granny Stevens. My love, you’re married into a mad family.”

“But your grandmother was old, feeble.”

“My mother, Ellen — you won’t hear about her either, not from any respectable woman in Daren. But they know, they know all right. In the snugs and back rooms they’ll still gossip about my mother.”

“More secrets, Rees,” — two fingers pressed against my lips. “You’re no different, turning cruel with this hate locked inside you. We aren’t supposed to carry the sins of our parents. It’s you and me, Rees, and the baby. Now steady yourself. Tell me about your mother.”

I couldn’t say the words.

“You’ve seen me crying, often; why are you ashamed to cry?” — cheerfully aggressive, rolling her fist on my chin. “Big man, is that it? Too tough for tears? Rees-love, my father spilt his heart out in those notebooks. Wait until you come near the end, those years of sickness.”

“Perhaps we should burn them,” I said.

“Not yet, no. Tell me about your mother.”

“She ran away. They say she went first to Cardiff, down the docks, then she went to Tosteg with some old man, living with him, one of those cracked old men who scrounge around ashtips. All I heard from my grandmother was, good riddance after bad rubbish. Just the right answer for a three-year-old kid. It’s easier to understand Caib tip falling on Thelma Street.”

From here I could tell it all, finish the story.

“She died in Sully hospital before I went up to junior school. That was the end, that was the very end for me.”

Ellen raised one, two, three fingers. “From now on, Reesy, it’s you, me and the baby. Shall I read, or shall we …”

“Put Lydia in her pram and we’ll stroll across to the woods. Afternoon shift tomorrow,” I said. “Long lay in in the morning.”

Deceptive as a summer iceberg, Ellen said, “The way you arrange our lives around the pit.”

“It’s easy, beaut, like facts and figures.”

5

Concerning figures — apart from Ellen’s 37, 26, 38. Try figuring Time and you’re in a state of obstruction from the start. What I mean is you finish clogged around where you started, unless you form a Theory, become a brilliant artiste of manifesto squiggles. Theorist squigglers are responsible for sonic bangs and mental derailment; they’re our Em Ones for strap-hanging right out of existence by the neck. They can’t discuss murder or the cost of fags with a wagon repairer, not over a casual sort of man-to-man pint.

God again, where does one get in trying to measure the facts about God? Figure Him out for fair. You’ll hear the sweetest talkers on earth assessing God. Language lemmings they are, and we reckon to ourselves, that’s it, that’s as far as he can possibly go. God-wise he’s there, he’s reached his Lordward limit. Then the wandering telly camera happens to poke at him when he’s
listening
, someone else explaining (another Almighty statistician), and by the crucified Christ he looks bad, worse than poorly, he looks ill. He’s unloved. Unloveable — like most of us. But unlike a child crying from belly-ache or napkin rash, his whole ontology bleeds, drip-drip-dripping away. Haemophilia of the soul. He’s diseased by a faintish kind of evil perpetuated in the name of Godliness and holiness. Other talkers, natural preachers or what-not, those who sing cliché symbols instead of getting down to minting fresh facts and figures, they aren’t really bothered about God. He’s handy, up there out of the way. For certain you wouldn’t trust them; you couldn’t imagine them turning the other cheek, keep taking it (IT: i.e. adversity, animosity, hatred, love in reverse or the simple mayhem of thrombotic frenzy) left and right until altruism or the State interfered. As a matter of fact, the plain fact of any man feeling himself precious enough to tackle destiny, fate, free-will, conscience, life at his own pace in his own time, allowing leeway for neighbourliness, private diversions, sensible obligations, bouts of ’flu, climatical vagaries, genetical hazards, chance, any such self-identifying man, precious and paying the price for it, is fully armed against other men who figure out destiny, etc., and dictatorially (or governmentally, depends how you react) launch theirs as perfect, date-stamped forged for infinity. For the kind of painless history recorded in
Whitaker’s
.

I’m recommending long-term trial and error disintegration, perhaps, as opposed to compulsory One-ness. Perhaps there’s more information in disintegration, less need for the equivalent of another Christ. Savouring saviours usually chafes through to the marrow-bone, and sheer numbers clotting our homo calendar make the absolutely first saviour-bloke who vouchsafed ‘I love YOU’ sound like a gink, of course, he wasn’t at all, not even if he’d clubbed down a queue of panting beaux who couldn’t posit ‘I luv ya’, let alone utter it. Besides, no doubt he, the very first, was probably addressing his mother or his sister. It’s a healthy, starving thought. In keeping with feeling precious enough to pay the price.

Regarding figures. Someone or maybe hundreds co-ordinated altogether, calculated the Caib tip-slide problem. Working most weekends I spent months clearing the muck and rubble out of number 9 Thelma Street. Six houses opposite were written off as beyond repair, back-sides they were still buried up to the slates. We had assurances from the NCB; they were going to pay in full for repairs, redecorating, refurnishing, the lot. And all that summer walking-stick pensioners with waddling, patient old dogs stood watch and reported progress in the pubs and clubs. Huge yellow earth-shifters and red and black draglines clove a vast basin out of the tip, dumpers and lorries hauling it farther north around Waunwen, unloading the muck nearer the upper reaches of Daren river, where if it slipped again only the native trout population would suffer. Post-glacial trout, their progenitors miraculously arrived, spawning in the barren river — but no matter about the chewed residue of Daren ecology.

Various specialists came, judgement-gutted with integral calculus, experts qualified to estimate costs in terms of death and property. Not a soul in Daren queried the cost of hiring the draglines, earth-shifters, lorries from private firms; nobody balanced this cost against the coal filled out from Caib since 1926. Somewhere, obviously, button-tappers were wriggling the figures off machines in offices where a ramping human fart would dislocate the cerebellum. Somewhere records were mounting up, but overall old Daren boomed. Pubs, grocers, cafés, even the chapels had their dose of uplift. Then a new edict came in November 1959. The Coal Board offered cash payments for the twenty houses in Thelma Street, thus obliterating Mrs Thelma Gibby, too, Joseph Gibby’s memorial to her after he proved steam coal in the Caib.

Consequently Mrs Kate Vaughan returned from Hampshire, collected two thousand quid — Thelma Street designated for clearance under Town and Country Planning in any case — bought Lydia a pink knitted suit and turned her back on Daren for always. Feckless, durable Mike Minty’s daughter Kate, brought over the parish road; she left me the best of her life: Ellen.

Looters moved in. Once the rumour floated that extended colliery railway sidings were to replace Thelma Street, they went into action like locusts. Vans, cars, handcarts, prams, you’d see them trekking to and from the ruined street. Small boys marched the lanes with a couple of rafters, slates, or maybe a pair of water taps wrapped in
Daren & District Clarion
. Scrap merchants struck with acetylene torches on railings, front gates, guttering, downpipes. Wash-basins vanished, doors, window sashes, coal-sheds, baths, firegrates, floor tiles grained with slurry, with muck ripped, dug, shovelled out of the Caib by the thieves’ grandfathers, great-grandfathers if they helped make the original slag-tip outside Waun Level.

Mrs Cynon was outraged. “Anybody’d swear nine out of ten families were living on the parish as we had to during the strikes,” she said, Lydia cooped in her left arm, her right hand sweeping disgust, a big florid woman, heavy boned, full mouthed as an innocent voluptuary, hacking at the morality of Daren.

“You expect people to change, Selina?” Ellen said, inquiring formally, finding it normal the way Thelma Street was attacked, denuded like a providential offering.

“Everything is changing for the better,
merch
,” urged Mrs Cynon. “There’s myself on widow’s pension plus allowances, d’you see, Ellie, better off now than when my father slaved all hours, bless him, to keep a roof over our heads and enough food in our stomachs.”

“But you’ve seen two wars, Selina,” — the smile on Ellen’s face evoking sanction, live and let live.

“Ach, wars didn’t hurt us worse than Caib tip falling down. We mustn’t expect plain sailing! Trials are sent to test us. What I’m against is carrying on like that!” — the old lady stanced in judgement, pointing across at Thelma Street, the baby gurgling up at her, Mrs Cynon squinting over her bulbous nose, queenly solicitous,
“
Be
th sydd yn bod arnoch chwi nawr, cariad?
”

The day of reckoning never came. Authorized NCB demolishers arrived, packed dynamite under the walls, warning sirens groaned and after the explosions bulldozers churned in, lorries behind them, Thelma Street site levelled off like a recreation ground within a fortnight. And about a month later coal trucks buffered and shunted beneath a new aerial bucket system that lifted Caib muck half a mile around Waunwen to the new tip.