How Green Was My Valley (66 page)

“I will hold him gentle by the tail for you to hit, Dai,” Cyfartha said.

“And I will hit him to leave the tail in your hand,” Dai said. “Shall we have a little
walk over the mountain tomorrow, Huw?”

“Yes,” I said. “We will go to Tyn-y-Coed to meet my sisters. Some of them were careless
in their language to them and they were frightened they would put hands on them because
of Iestyn.”

Dai looked at me, mouth loose, waiting for words to come, and his eyes went wide from
me to Cyfartha, and back to me, and his fists coming open and shut.

“Your good sisters?” he said, and red coming all over his head, and water to the eyes.
“Well, for the love of God, what are we coming to, now then? Huw, me and you to do
a bit of watching to-morrow night, and Cyfartha and a few good boys a few yards behind.
Eh, Cyfartha?”

“Not too far, Dai,” Cyfartha said, “in case to have a bit of trouble, and me not there
to have the pleasure.”

“Pleasure it will be,” Dai said, and hit his fist on the bar counter with force to
crack planks. “Only please to let me see one eye too many on them, and I will hit
him, by God, to make them sink a shaft to pull him out of the mountain. Eh, Cyfartha?”

“There is cruel you are, Dai, my little one,” Cyfartha said, and very solemn, too.
“If you will hit him a bit harder, see, he will come out the other side and walk home,
and no trouble to anybody.”

James Rowlands came in, with a shortness of breath and a face full of bad news.

“Mr. Winston Churchill is sending soldiers up here,” he said, and his asthma having
him sore.

“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

C
YFARTHA
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.