Jones Black Parade

1. Auflage 2011
ISBN: 978-1-906998-67-7
Verlag: Parthian Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 400 Seiten

One of Merthyr's Victorian brickyard girls, Saran watches the world parade past her doorstep on the banks of the stinking and rat-infested Morlais Brook: the fair-day revellers; the chapel-goers and the funeral processions. She never misses a trip to the town's wooden theatres, despite her life ruled by the 5 a.m. hooter, pit strikes, politics and the First World War that takes away so many of her children. Her Glyn will work a treble shift for beer money; her brother Harry is the district's most notorious drinker and fighter until he is 'saved'. The town changes and grows but Saran is still there for Glyn, for Harry, for her children and grandchildren. In his 1935 novel Black Parade, writer, soldier and political activist Jack Jones creates a superbly riotous, clear and unsentimental picture of Merthyr life as his home town reels headlong into the twentieth century.

Jack Jones was born in Merthyr Tydfil in 1884. He left school at twelve to work with his father as a miner. His political engagement saw him act for the Miners Federation; join the Communist Party, then Labour. He stood as Liberal candidate for Neath in 1929. Married with five children, he earned a living through mining, as a platform-speaker, navvy, salesman, assistant cinema-manager and writer. In 1948 he was made a CBE, and in 1968 he was elected first president of the English section of Yr Academi Gymreig.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Jones, Jack

Leseproben

CHAPTER 1

A HECTIC WEEKEND – SATURDAY

Two stark-naked young men in the living room of the cottage singing a duet from one of Dr Parry’s operas as a middle-aged woman picked up and hung away the pit clothes they had shed. They had both washed white the upper halves of their coal-blackened bodies, and the elder of the two was standing in the tub half filled with warm water washing his lower part, using the washing flannel with one hand, the other hand he used to screen his secret parts from the woman.

The duet ended, and the young man standing near the fireplace cried impatiently: ‘Come on, Glyn, hurry up out of that tub so as I can finish washing. There’s good beer waiting for me in a dozen places…’

‘How many times have I told you to leave your talk about the beer until you get outside this house?’ said his brother in an undertone. ‘The end of it’ll be that dad’ll hear you and then… and how many times have I told you about standing about naked and showing all you’ve got in front of Marged. Cover up, for shame’s sake.’

‘Oh, Marged don’t mind, ’tisn’t as if she was a slip of a girl. You’re not particular, are you, Marged?’

‘If I said I was it’d make no difference. Do you want me to wash your back, Glyn?’

‘If you please,’ said Glyn, kneeling down in the tub to enable her to do so.

‘Damned particular, ain’t you?’ grumbled the impatient Dai. ‘Every night you wash his back for him. If you only knew how weakening it is; once a week’s often enough to have the back washed.’

‘If you had it washed as often as Glyn, then I wouldn’t have to wash two of your shirts for every one of his,’ said the woman as she bent over the kneeling man and started washing the coal-dust from off his back.

‘Oh, so that’s why you’re always asking him to wash his back, is it? I thought there was something behind it.’ He rubbed his week’s growth of beard. ‘Well, if there’s many waiting in Humpy’s this’ll have to stay on till some time next week. I don’t believe in wasting time – and holiday time in particular – hanging about barbers’ shops.’

‘If you leave it much longer the barber will be able to play music on it,’ said Marged.

‘Ay, Annie Laurie with variations,’ laughed Glyn as he rose to his feet, his back clean and wiped dry. He swilled his soapy legs and stepped out of the tub on to the piece of sacking spread out near the fireplace. ‘Though I was nearly as bad until I went out for a scrape last night, for I knew it would mean waiting in Humpy’s a couple of hours if I left it until today.’

‘I’m not waiting any two hours,’ said Dai as he stepped into the tub.

‘I was going to get you clean water,’ said Marged.

‘Never mind, this’ll do. I’m not so particular as some people. You attend to Glyn, and turn him out smart, for he’s going to meet his wench, his lovely Saran, today.’

‘Shut up. No, not that shirt, Marged. My best flannel.’

‘And his best blue pilot suit, remember, Marged; and his best silk muffler and new ’lastic-sides. Yes, turn him out smart, for he got to make up for last Saturday when he got drunk and left her waiting…’

Glyn stopped his mouth with a slap from the rough towel.

‘You look after yourself, and leave me look after myself, Dai lad.’

They went on washing and dressing and singing. They were a handsome pair of young men, now that they could be seen free of the disguise of the coating of coal-dust. A bit Spanish-looking, of medium height, bodies graceful and slight, yet strong. Dark complexioned, wearing long, drooping, silky moustaches and tiny tufts just below the cleft of the lower lip. The elder wore earrings of gold wire, for his eyes’ sake, he maintained; his eyes having been strained in the darkness of the mine too soon after their first opening, for he had started work in the mines – against his father’s will – at the tender age of eight. The younger had two more years of boyhood, up to the age of ten, before he, too, started work in the mines under his brother’s wing.

Their father, a stonemason, had wanted them apprenticed to his trade, but the mother could see no sense in her lads working as apprentices for next to nothing during the years they might be earning what was regarded as big money in the mines; and as she was a strong-willed woman, her boys went to work down in the mines after they had had a few years’ schooling. For about five years they had worked from twelve to fourteen hours a shift in the mines, and each Saturday had proudly brought home their wages to her. Then, all of a sudden, she died. Marged, a girlhood friend who had never married, and who was about that time beginning to realise that her job as tram-woman on the bleak Cwm pithead was getting beyond her, came in to take care of the house and the father and two sons after her friend’s death; and ’twas lucky for them she did, for in less than a year after the mother’s death the father took to his bed never to leave it alive.

‘He’s in decline, poor fellow,’ Marged told the neighbours; and there he was now lingering on upstairs, cared for by the faithful Marged – loved by his boys and his only daughter, Mary, who had foolishly married… but of her and her feckless husband more later.

The two boys had been named Glyndwr and David, but it was only their father called them by their full names, to everyone outside the home they were ‘Glyn’ and ‘Dai’.

‘Shall I wash your back, Dai?’ Marged asked him.

‘Not today, no time today.’

‘Plenty of time, and God knows it wants washing with three shifts’ dirt on it; but you’re in a hurry to go out to get drunk, ain’t you? Better if the pair of you went to bed to rest for a few hours after working three shifts without a break, as you two have. Rushing out…’

‘Rest, my bottom,’ said Dai, stepping out of the tub on to the sacking, where he stood wiping his legs. ‘Plenty of rest when we’re dead. Today’s the beginning of August Monday for me, the only holiday worth a damn in the year. All…’

‘How can Saturday be the beginning of Monday, you fool?’ asked Marged.

‘It is for me, anyway,’ said Dai. ‘From now until I start back for the pit on Tuesday morning it’ll be August Bank Holiday for me. Too true it will. Only five days a year out of the pit, so make the most of ’em, I say.’

‘Yes, but see you don’t make as much of this one as you did of Whit Monday,’ said Glyn warningly as he fixed his high-crowned bowler hat so as to leave a little of his hair ‘quiff’ showing on the right side underneath the brim. ‘You know what I mean….’ He assumed the helpless look and posture of a drunken man. ‘That’s what I mean.’

‘You look after your bloody self,’ growled Dai.

‘And I can.’ He crossed to the foot of the stairs and called up: ‘I’m off out now, dad. S’long.’

‘S’long, Glyndwr.’

‘Mind you look after him, Marged,’ whispered Glyn, jerking a thumb upwards as he was going out.

The sunshine made him blink at first as he stepped outside the house and started walking from the Twyn across the eminence overlooking the second largest town in Wales to where his ‘wench’ lived in the end house of Brick Row. He smiled and nodded his head as the sound of the organ came up to him from the fairground in the town below. ‘They’re at it early,’ he murmured, stopping to look in the direction of the fairground. Immediately below him was the workhouse, the very thought of which made Marged shudder, he remembered, and below that again was spread out the rapidly growing and prosperous town of Merthyr Tydfil, which, he had been informed during his brief period of schooling, was the second largest town in Wales, ‘stands in the centre of the South Wales Coalfield, and manufactures large quantities of steel’. He stood surveying the scene from Troedyrhiw on the left to Dowlais Top on the right until he saw a young and powerful-looking man with a bundle on his shoulder approaching. Then he started to move on again, only to be pulled up by the stranger.

‘Could you tell me how to get to Bethesda Street, please?’

‘Huh?’ grunted Glyn aggressively.

The stranger repeated what he had said.

Glyn looked him over suspiciously. Yes, he thought, another of these farm-joskins, hundreds of whom were weekly flocking into the coalfield lured by the prospect of what seemed to them extraordinarily high wages. Glyn, like most of the native-born miners and steelworkers whose grandfathers could remember when ponies and donkeys transported what little coal and iron-ore was mined in the district, felt the reverse of friendly to the farmhands who were flocking in from the agricultural areas. They were, in the first place, generally speaking, so much bigger and stronger than the natives. And so humble, cringingly so, when the boss was about, no backbone to stand up for the rights of the miner, afraid to join the miners’ and steelworkers’ unions which were in formation, wouldn’t… anyway, Glyn had no time for them, big yobs, timid tight-purses…

‘Where did you say you wanted to get to?’ he snapped.

The stranger pulled out of his pocket a piece of paper on which an address had been written. ‘Here it is,’ he said, holding out the paper to Glyn after reading what was written thereon again. ‘Amos Davies, 46 Bethesda Street. That’s what Amos hisself wrote down for I when he were down home Christmas-time....