The Emerald Valley (32 page)

With the police after them the Batch Row women had scattered, and it looked as if several arrests had been made. ‘Nosey', trying to look as if he didn't care a hang, pulled up his soaking trousers, buttoned them and continued his walk between the jeering men to the irreverent piping notes of a penny whistle. Sickened, Harry turned away.

‘They say his son's coming with the trucks later on to get his coal allowance,' said Tommy, who had slipped off to be in the thick of the excitement. ‘Shall we hang around and wait for un?'

Harry shook his head. ‘I think I'm going home, Tom.'

‘Why? What's the matter?'

Harry hesitated, wishing he had the courage to say out loud that he had no stomach for any more tormenting of one of their own, but the words refused to come.

‘Oh nothing – I just want my dinner,' he muttered.

‘I s'pose we might as well come too,' Tommy agreed and Reg added, ‘It was a good laugh, though, wasn't it? Served old “Nosey” right!'

‘I felt sorry for him,' Harry ventured.

‘Sorry for him? Sorry for a
blackleg!
' the Clements boys chorused and Harry retreated.

‘Well, he must have felt a real fool …'

‘And so he should!' Tommy stated. ‘I would have done far worse if I'd had half a chance.'

Harry said nothing. One day, he thought; one day I'll stand up and say that it's all wrong for miner to be set against miner … and this is what poverty does for you. But for the moment, no one would listen or take the slightest notice.

‘Come on then, lads, last one up the hill is a lazy scoundrel!' he joked.

… And tried not to feel a Judas as he turned his back on the despair and frustration of those still in the thick of the protest.

In the back bedroom of the house in Hope Terrace, a small boy stood kicking disconsolately at the skirting board with the rounded toe of brand-new brown leather sandals, while in the pockets of his equally new grey flannel shorts, his hands made small tight fists.

‘I hate her!' he muttered, thrusting his full lower lip forward with each word. ‘I hate her!'

But though the pain inside him was worse even than when he had scrumped a bellyful of half-ripe apples, he did not cry. At eight years old Huw James was not only tough, he was also bright as a button. Tears did no good. He had learned that a long time ago, playing in the back streets of Pontypridd. Tears were for sissies. If you got hurt, you hit out. It was the only way.

But until now, however much hitting out he had done, there had always been home to go back to – a small, dark, safe cottage in the shadow of the slag-heaps – and Mam, who had laughed a lot even when things went wrong, and who hugged him close with arms so thin he could almost circle them with his eight-year-old hands, and who washed the mud and blood and jam off his face and hands every night before he went to bed.

Until a year ago, there had been the man he called ‘Dad'too, but only ever on the sidelines. Dad was of medium height and beefy-broad, a taciturn man who had spent little time in the cottage and less with Huw. The boy had thought nothing of this; in his experience, mothers stayed at home and fathers went out to work and to the pub. Some fathers, it was true, also sang in the male voice choir once a week. Occasionally Huw and his friends had stopped outside the practice hall to listen to the soaring resonance that filled the whole air like thunder, making every particle sing with it; it had taken his breath away to think that glorious noise was made by a lot of men you wouldn't look at twice if you saw them walking down the street alone … men like Jones the butcher and Williams the milk, and the family of six brothers who lived at the top end of his Rank and went everywhere together.

But Dad was not in the choir and Huw had accepted this as a fact of life just as he accepted that Dad never went to chapel on Sundays, and was more likely to give him a cuff round the ear than a word of praise.

Sometimes, just sometimes, Dad would come out of that self-imposed silence to tell Huw stories about the war; in years to come these sessions, all too brief and all too seldom, were the only thing about Dad that Huw remembered with pleasure.

Dad had been in the war almost from the beginning, he had told Huw, rushing off to a recruiting station the moment hostilities commenced and before the Government put a ban on the enlistment of miners. He had fought on the Western Front and seen mates fall all around him, but miraculously the wounds he had suffered had not been serious enough to keep him out of the lines for long and the tales he had to tell of coal-box shells and machine guns, of muddy war – devastated countryside and rotting corpses, of heroics and comradeship, suffering and glory, had fascinated Huw. Even when he was too young to understand, the feeling of it all had drawn him, and from the time he could crawl he had played at soldiers, worming on his stomach between the legs of the kitchen table and attacking – with Dad's bicycle pump for a gun – from behind the sofa and chairs that crammed the dark little living-room.

The trouble was, as Huw discovered as he grew older, that all too often Dad's reminiscences of the war ended in one of his morose moods. All too often the feeling of warm companionship and latent excitement that Huw experienced during the telling would begin to fade as he saw the dark look begin to descend on Dad's blunt features. Always he tried to hang on to it.

‘What then? What else?' he would press Idris, but the more he pressed, the blacker his father's mood would become.

‘That's it. There's nothing more. It's all over and done with a long time ago,' Idris would growl, and bewildered though he was by the change in mood, Huw would know it was time to clear out and leave Dad in peace – or risk a clout.

Apart from the war games, Dad never played with Huw. It would never have occurred to either of them. As soon as he was old enough, Huw was out with the other boys in the Rank, trailing behind them at first and then becoming accepted as one of the pack. With them he played the usual games – wrapping a brick in brown paper and placing it in the centre of the footpath, only to jerk it away when some busybody or other tried to pick it up; or teasing elderly householders by means of a length of cotton attached to their door-knocker and a vantage point behind the walls of bushes so as to give it a quick jerk each time the unfortunate victim had gone back to the kitchen once more. In more law-abiding moments they played ‘tag' and ‘off-ground touch', cricket and football; when there was extra steam to let off they fought, either as individuals or in a gang, rolling on the ground with the ferocity of street fighters twice and three times their age – rolling, gouging, grabbing and kicking. Nobody, with the exception of his dictatorial schoolmaster, ever told Huw he should not fight. Mam sometimes shook her head at the state of him, but there was always an amused look somewhere at the back of her eyes and Dad would only say:

‘Scrapping again? Ah well, you've got to learn, Huw.'

Huw learned. First how to defend himself; then how to attack; then, to his pleased amazement, that attack was the best form of defence anyway. He was not a big boy but scrawny really, like his mother, yet he was strong and fearless and soon had his place in the pecking order of the back streets of Pontypridd, respected and challenged by boys who were bigger, and older, than he.

Altogether, life had been a pretty satisfactory affair for Huw. He played hookey whenever he could both from school and chapel, and he learned different ways of dodging Dad's clips and cuffs. The poor meals served up were no different from what they had ever been – he knew nothing else – but by the age of seven he was wise enough to know how to supplement his diet by pinching a handful of gobstoppers from the counter in ‘Jones the Sweets'shop; and sometimes, if he could distract old Jones for long enough, some mint shrimps or bullseyes too. He was out from, morning till night, winter and summer alike, and if Mam wondered where he went when it rained, she never actually got around to asking – and certainly Huw would never have told her. Even Mam, who accepted most things with that half-smile of reproof, might have forbidden Huw to sneak into the pit offices by courtesy of a faulty window-catch. Huw had discovered it one night when they had been caught in a sudden storm, and he and the other boys classed the occupation as their greatest feat, savouring it whenever they could, growing more and more daring, but always being careful to leave no trace of their presence – and to return the window, by means of bent wire and string, to the position in which they had found it.

Yes, life was one long adventure, always different yet always the same, until tragedy impinged and cracks began to appear in the smooth surface of Huw's world.

It was late summer and Huw and the boys had been on the slag-heap behind the pit. Tipping had long since ceased there and the lads liked to climb to the top and slide down – sometimes on sacks; sometimes, if they were lucky, on an old tin tray. Officials would yell at them if they saw them, but that failed to stop them and dodging officialdom only added to the spice. And that morning they were at the very summit, the supreme vantage point, when they saw the activity in the valley below.

The appearance of the ambulance always caused a stir. Like the Hillsbridge vehicle, it had once been a field ambulance in France and after the war had been detailed for civilian duty. When they saw it in the road below the boys had all stopped what they were doing in order to look. Clearly somebody had been hurt underground. But they were too far away to make out the small, scurrying figures, or to get any clue as to the identity of the man on the stretcher – still … very still … covered by the dark grey blanket.

Strangely they said nothing, not even to each other, and when the ambulance had gone and the scene returned to normal, they took their tin trays and slid merrily down the slag-heap, shrieking and whooping and completely careless that someone had been seriously injured – killed even. But when he went home and turned the corner of his street, Huw found that for some reason his feet were dragging and there was a hollowness inside him which, had he known the word for it, he might have called apprehension or even dread. But he did not understand it, so he went on along the street with a jaunty step and burst in on a scene that would be imprinted on his mind for ever afterwards.

Mam was there, standing in the centre of the room with her hands pressed to her face, weeping. Two of the neighbours were there too, and a black-grimed man Huw recognised as one of the deputies, from the pit. But after the first surprised glance his eyes were drawn irresistibly to the still figure laid out on the sofa. Dad … but a Dad who lay motionless, a Dad from whose face every trace of coal-dust had been washed so that he looked waxy-pale in the light creeping in through the closed curtains.

Huw stopped in his tracks, his blue eyes going wide.

‘Dad?' he said, going towards the sofa.

But one of the neighbours moved quickly to intercept him, restraining him with a warning touch. And then Mam was there too, in front of him, blotting out his view of that strange greyish thing that looked like Dad and yet was …

‘Oh, Huw – Huw … !' Mam's arms were around him, the thinness of them digging into his back and crushing him so that he fought her in panic. ‘He's gone … gone. You're all I've got now. Oh, Huw …'

‘Come on now, don't upset yourself, Sibyl love … And don't frighten the child …' The neighbours took charge, calming the distraught woman, easing Huw away, putting a mug of strong brewed tea into his hands; somehow he found himself acting almost normally, trying to impress them by his calmness, though he hardly knew what to make of what was going on.

Later, when the neighbours had gone and he was upstairs in the tiny room that led off his parents'bedroom, Mam had talked to him. She told him that there had been an accident underground and a large stone had fallen on Dad.

‘He didn't have a chance,' she said sadly. ‘All through the war he went, with hardly a scratch, and then to be killed here in Ponty! It's a funny old life; you'll learn that, Huw.'

Huw had listened quietly, wishing Mam would stop going on about it. He was embarrassed by her talking, just as he was embarrassed when she put her arms around him. He wished he could get out with the boys again, have a bit of fun and forget that all this was happening. He felt no grief, just puzzlement and a little resentment. And he hoped that never again, as long as he lived, would he have to see anyone else is looking as Dad had looked.

For a while after the funeral – when Dad was actually taken into chapel for the first time Huw could ever remember – life reverted to normal. Huw hardly missed him – their paths had crossed too seldom in his lifetime to have formed anything of a pattern – and it was more comfortable by far to get out with the boys and stay out as if nothing had changed.

But it had … and before long there was no escaping the repercussions. Whereas before Mam had seemed to let troubles roll off her like water off a duck's back, now she cried often and after a while even Huw could scarcely fail to notice the way she looked. More than once during the year that followed, she was ill, and each time it took her longer than before to get up and about again. She coughed long and often, bouts that racked her thin body and kept Huw awake at night – Huw, who always fell into bed so tired that Mam had said many a time you could drive a coach and horses through the room and he would never hear them. And without admitting it, Huw had begun to be frightened.

He had tried not to show it, of course, even when Mam packed their things into a carpet bag and took him on the train to a place called Hillsbridge.

‘Why can't I stay at home?' he had asked her.

And Mam had snapped the way she snapped so often these days: ‘You just
can't.
You have to come with me, see?'

Looking back afterwards, Huw was never quite sure when the visit stopped being boring and began to be a nightmare.