Flame and Slag (7 page)

Daren women were still wearing mourning headscarves. Plain squares of black nylon, shilling each, Marks and Spencers.

The boom continued when the German engineering firm, now registered in Great Britain — the same Deutschland capital that Adolf Hitler spent, feeling himself exceeding precious, poor driven gout-head-started the underground roadway to the Seven Feet seam. Hard-grafting men, these Germans, Poles, Ukrainians. Money-men, like the early ones in Daren who needed two and three generations to cultivate themselves, to feel they belonged, were homogeneous to mining and therefore privileged, entitled to respect if not adequate reward for their insular role, mining being a full-time role, more a way of life than other production jobs, carrying with it the paradox of self-sufficient arrogance and the unique fatalism that succumbs to change, is incapable of change. The principles of Change: evolutionary, devolutionary, involutionary, revolutionary, of progress and regress, of ingression, eggression and digression. Survival hurts poets — and miners, sailors, soldiers, slaves, for whom mining, the seas, soldiering and slavery is greater than themselves, as poets are governed by abstract language. London’s Westminster and Daren’s borough council, neither of these can leave scratch marks more significant than those on the cave walls of Altimara.

Rees Stevens doesn’t have to blurb this piece either. Naked facts and figures are published every year in
Whitaker’s
. Histories embalmed, egos preserved without a creak, flawless, bang-on as yesterday’s weather. Anyone can use
Whitaker’s
for anything, any year book, any chart, statistical record, any statement of accounts.
Vide Whitaker’s
1960, in terms of mining, first the destiny deciders: NCB Chairman, £10,000 a year plus £1,000 expenses; Deputy Chairman, £8,000 a year plus £500 allowance; six Board members at £7,500 a year, plus £500 allowances; four part-time members at £1,000 a year. Secretary of the Board and under-secretary, salaries not given. Nine director-generals, salaries not given. Nine chairmen of divisional boards, salaries not given. Right then, these are the supermen, the long-heads, the brains, statutory and paid for, like we elect and pay for Ministers, panjandrum councillors, inland revenue wizards, the whole incendiary civil service galaxy. Then a little tailpiece in
Whitaker’s
says: ‘Estimated average earnings, including Allowances in Kind of all adult male workers in 1960 was £16.4.0 per week.’ Observe the charming definitive,
workers
.

But what a calculation! The last penny accounted for, issued direct from Hobart House to
Whitaker’s
. Disrespectfully compare this tailpiece with the nice round-figure salaries paid to Board administrators and the records of coal production and distribution. All those blind noughts frothing at the end.

Now, quoting from the Welsh press, Celtic culture’s hallelujah horn, our upside-down, jock-strapped cornucopia:

‘117 pits have been closed in Wales since 1946.’

Aye indeed, we were nationalized in 1947.

There are no publicized records of men (numbers, when and where) suffering from dust, no how, when and where record of the disabled, but the NCB annual statement of accounts does publish the
total
amount of money paid to disabled miners and ex-miners. Thuswise, pussy and hard-handed comrades, figures on paper determine self-preciousness and destiny, and bugger them about considerably, most often regardless.

Pardon the taint of spleen, of plebeian bile.

Back in 1960 we had no qualms about Caib colliery. The coal was there in the Four Feet, millions of tons of high-grade steam coal. Only two explosions in thirty-four years, the killed men forgotten, just about forgotten. Ours was a good pit. In 1960 we had a sharp lodge committee. Compo cases were looked after, we ran a tote for pensioners, gave them £5 hampers and a cheque every Christmas. Daren Dramatic Society was established in Caib institute. We had ten chapels and a Welsh Church of England, two cinemas, a film society, three pigeon clubs, a dog fanciers’ club, four soccer teams, cricket and rugby teams, the Women’s Guild was a power combine, Daren and District Angling Association, a bowls team, motor-cycle club, Barclay’s and Midland banks were thriving on H.P. deals, and the railway tunnel under Waunwen was still open in 1960. We had a swimming pool. The Houghton Four X brewery flourished, serving nine pubs and two affiliated clubs, plus the Earl Haig and Daren Social and Welfare Club (bingo three nights, dances two nights, concerts two nights), and the borough council were planning their two-phase housing project costing three million pounds.

Two thousand Daren folk, mostly girls, worked in a radio and television factory.

In 1960 the NCB built new screens, washery and flocculation plants for Caib colliery. The Germans, Latvians, Ukrainians and Poles were here, those denationalized characters, couthless but without the bedlam innocence of roaming navvies, drilling, blasting the new underground roadway, shuttling in with their Eimco machines regardless of powder smoke and water, but they wouldn’t handle a shovel if they could help it. In the site office on top pit, you’d see a photograph of Queen Elizabeth II on one wall and a doctored portrait of the owner’s German wife on the opposite wall. Our Queen for patriotism, the other for money. Maybe the times were propitious. Times change. The German firm came without a blip of publicity. They simply arrived, rigged up their gear, sank pits, drove extensive link headings, built factories. Their men did not come to Wales to ease a labour shortage, they came to do business, make legitimate profit.

Tal Harding boarded four Germans in his empty bungalow, Tal himself living forlorn as any father-hammered son in the flat above Daren general post office. Mrs Cynon fostered a Pole named Fred Fransceska. When Fred married a barmaid from the Earl Haig club big Percy acted best man again, his mother in charge of the invitation list. Fred belonged. He’d worn Silesian coal scars on his face since boyhood. Ellen liked Fred. She befriended him. They both ignored questions unrelated to living from day to day. Ellen’s ideas were governed by the assumption that we lived between waking and sleeping, easy when easy, greedy if necessary, scrimping without remorse, pleasuring without guilt. When Fred Fransceska got drunk in our house he showed us where a Russian bullet had ploughed through his buttock, and he was slavering sobs like a ruined behemoth, his underpants around his ankles, Ellen weeping sympathy, Lydia crying because they were, Morfed (Fred’s new wife, half his age) sprinting down the street to
Waun Arms
for more whisky to dilute her first experience of Fred expressing the blues of his youth.

Early spring glorified Daren, warming inland from across the Bristol Channel, crazy yellow daffodils guarding the lawn outside Caib institute, the background trees, all hardwood timber, storming massed leaf buds, and Waunwen’s huge black scar completely stabilized, prinking special grass seed planted by the Coal Board, who were still dealing with claims for injury and death. The tip-slide a full year behind us, Daren’s solitary, deserted Welsh Church of England taking a glossy face-lift conversion into a supermarket, and weekly notices in the
Clarion
advising relatives to attend re-burials of exhumed bodies from the churchyard. There they were, many forgotten, entirely unknown Staffordshire and English Border names from over a century ago, from earlier times when only ironmasters worked the soft bituminous coal from mountain levels, the whole uprearing landscape of Daren pocked with these small, overgrown, caved-in holes, each with its hummocky mound-spill of debris turned green as the institute’s front lawn.

“Green always comes back,” Ellen said. “It’s silly, all the shouting and screaming about coal-tips. Look at Daren, marked like an old man’s face, and what’s wrong with that? I hated coming home, but now we’re living our own lives. It’s good to live your own life.”

“You hated circumstances,” I said.

“I did … this time I hope we get a boy,” pausing from cutting sandwiches to thumb at her belly. “Brother for Lydia.”

I said, “Beaut, you don’t have to make my breakfast in the mornings. Stay in bed. I can fix things for myself.”

“Hush up, I’m not helpless. Who had a bump yesterday? They were talking about him in the Co-op.”

“Bloke from lower down. Eddie ’Lectric we call him. He was on extracting — extracting cogs; something hit him in the face.”

“Will he lose his eye?”

“Left eye, aye, according to our ambulance man. I hope to Christ not, because Eddie’s all right. His father went to prison for singing the
Red Flag
outside the manager’s house. Years ago now, years and years. The bastards took him in for disturbing the peace.”

“I worry about you sometimes, Reesy.”

“Don’t,” I said. “The Caib isn’t going to hurt me, not after what happened to Dai Stevens.”

“Only you can learn to live with that, my love.”

“I know.”

Her sphinx smile glimmered. “It’s always
I know
. Of course you do — often. Often. I fell for you straight away, didn’t I? I mean it was one of the reasons, but, Rees, what I think is this: you don’t care about ordinary things. Ordinary things annoy you. Yes, yes, let me finish!” She re-tied the sash cord around her bulging dressing-gown. Lovely, I thought, lovely Ellen.

“Remember this, boy?” she said, waving the foolscap sheets.

“Last year, the NCB competition, World Without War.”

“Aye, World Without War,” I said. “Their title.”

“We should have sent it in, Rees.”

“Doesn’t matter, Ellen. Shove it back between your lovely …”

“Hush!” Her voice thickened:

“ ‘
World Without War.

But first the premise: Could we inhabit it?

Braided hordes of eagled, star-pipped marchers

Seldom diagnosed as mad, our solid muscled

Swaddies desperately bored, the defiant erk,

Taut, as much concerned about his father’s

DSO as girls, our honest, devious matlows

Shaped to blind obedience. We, then, ourselves

Inherit (query) peace, this earth’s untruth,

Where fisted tables snowball further

Ultimatums?

Many of us are television natives.

Or shall any racket, private row between any two

Be resolved in murder? Our cliques, claques,

Caballers, families their ample precedent.

Perhaps first a pre-premise, necessary discretion

In allegiance to Mr C. Darwin, perhaps,

Should be mooted, measured, weighed in wanting

Before that sequel Mount of Olives declaration

Echoes another gnat’s-span moil of joy and chagrin.

The hypothesis might exclude sweet retribution.

We aren’t blessed with mere multitudes below

— There are none below — but entire homo sapiens,

Nary one expendable to the next. Just one alone

Being the plague and glory of art, of everyman’s

Inadequate faith, promise, his life’s work moving

Via catastrophic norms yet ever aimed at clarity.

History plus, or divided by Mr Freud’s exegesis

Will not let us (anyone at all now) claim
peace

Requires martyrdom. Nor war neither, brother.

Nor
heaven
and
hell
— four judgement nouns,

Durable integers of survival’s pristine order,

God-damned absolutes aptly tailored, fitting

Hindsight, reasonable griff, fate, genius itself

e.g. good old William Blake’s soul prising,

Who saw us whole in terms of Was, Is and

Will-be, with sweetly pro-angelic floaters

Run off the sentient, self-same mould. Old W.B.,

He tenanted the howling wilderness of

Failure, too.

So again the given premise: World Without War,

For we who are bored by trick saints (sure, sure)

And daily sickened, festered by righteous edicts

From warring experts, from big specialists

Affined to Al Capone more so than Kristos maimed,

We who are (warranted like them, of course, proven)

Deprived, no, losers, no, encompassed by conflict,

By hope betrothed to love and hate, circlers,

Roundabout riders driven by nobody’s silence,

Belly-aching at the still, small voices saying,
This?

This isn’t, not yet.
Peaky, sensible voices saying,

Your peace my war is the world.
Saying,
Conscience?

Safe in your conscience, sibling, I fold, unfold

My arms.
’”

I said, “Beaut, you make it sound stronger than it is.”

Belly-proud, she lofted the bread knife like a priestess. “Only yesterday I read that strange piece you wrote when I was carrying Lydia. Dammo, you’re not human sometimes. It isn’t even a love poem!”