Smith The Crossing

1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-1-912681-84-6
Verlag: Parthian Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

The Crossing bridges the past and the present and connects Wales with America, as it tells of coal owners and coal workers in the age of great transatlantic liners and fortunes to be made. At its heart is a father's search for his daughter in Welsh valleys no longer proud, where creaming off regeneration grants has replaced coal mining as a way of life and development parks now stand where once did pit head wheels. It follows a lifetime's search for lost love, the sinking of a great ship in a great war, misplaced family and forlorn hopes where individual lives are shaped and fated in the shadow of modernity and the cold hand of progress. This brave, bold and challenging work conjures a vivid cast of characters into being and offering - with ready vim and ample vigour - their compelling, complex and ultimately telling story.

Dai Smith was born in the Rhondda in 1945. His writing has encompassed history, biography, essays and criticism. He was the Series Editor of the Library of Wales and Chair of the Arts Council Wales and was made a CBE for services to arts and culture in Wales in 2016. He currently edits the Modern Wales Series and is Chair of the Dylan Thomas Prize. With The Crossing, Dai Smith has built upon and completed his trilogy of fictional work, Dream On, What I Know I Cannot Say and What Lies Beneath.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Smith, Dai

Leseproben

BEFORE TIME

An inquest was held on Monday 6 instant, at the Miners’ Arms, before the Deputy Coroner, Thomas Williams, on the body of Thomas Roberts, aged eleven years. Deceased was a doorboy. On Thursday 2 instant, between two and three in the afternoon, while he was at work a journey of trams loaded with coal passed over his legs. He was taken home and attended by doctors but died on Saturday. The verdict was accidental death.

Cardiff and Merthyr Guardian, Friday, 10 July 1863

Richard Thomas, a young fellow twelve years of age was working in a stall with his father on Tuesday when a mass of coal fell on him from the roof and crushed him so seriously that he died an hour afterwards.

Cardiff and Merthyr Guardian, Friday, 14 October, 1864

Fatal accident to a doorboy at Ysguborwen pit. On Tuesday last Ifor Evans of Robertstown was killed when a stone fell from the roof and he was killed instantly. The poor little fellow was only twelve years of age.

Cardiff and Merthyr Guardian, Saturday, 16 June, 1866

Miscellanea. Taliesin Arthur Lloyd Papers. Box16.
National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth.

The lower gorse-covered and stone-strewn flanks of the mountain, bilious yellow in summer and in winter a grey sage hue, almost abutted up against the back of the House where it squatted, square and unseemly, all alone in its hollow, an imitation of a Georgian mansion decked out in Victorian concrete with a whitewashed stucco finish. From its frontage a drive, in truth more a broad cinder path, bisected a tussocky lawn and ran down the slope towards the river and the valley’s bottom level. Above the House the mountainside rose steeply to an abrupt peak, a plateau to be crossed on foot along worn narrow tracks and precipitously down its nether side to the adjacent valley, which was then, in the 1860s first heard before it was glimpsed, and, by night as well as day, by the distant clamour and incessant noise of its spawning ironworks and gargantuan foundries, before it was smelled through a rising noxious pall of smoke, a perpetual cloud of sulphur, fire, and falling clinkers drifting over a careless scatter of dwelling houses, shacks, mansions, public houses and shops, large and small, selling goods and all the basic provisions for life. And all of this human settlement, the most populous and the most pungent town ever seen in Wales, dribbled out and along the blackened banks of its river or was etched into terraced rows on the hills, a half-sketched portent of all that was to come.

As a grocer in that spew of a town his father had made enough profit to speculate, with others, in opening up horizontal drift mines for easy coal seams to meet the needs of the ironmasters. If the latter were well-endowed in capital and incomers, these new men were neither. They stretched their pooled resources to limits quickly reached. So, when he, the father, had the House in Ysguborwen built in the further valley he teetered between greater profits yet and looming bankruptcy. The House was not there, in the Aberdare valley, to serve as any kind of rural retreat from the stench and miasmic diseases which hung over every single Merthyr life, whether fabulously rich or sickeningly poor, as a bringer of illness and frequent death. The House was the marker put down by a man intent on success. It was the risky gamble a funded and backed man might take as an earnest of his willingness to engage in more and more speculative ventures. To sink deeper, more costly mine shafts in search of deeper and more lucrative coal seams. If he failed the House would go, and all that went with it.

When the third of the five children who survived within his second marriage was born in 1856, the father, Samuel Thomas, could not be sure his house had any foundations stronger than his own willpower. His recent colliery dealings were unproven. His string of bank-loaned credit was played out. The child, a boy, was born on a March night amidst the shake of high winds shrieking amongst the trees and torrential rain pelting the sullen house, and turning paths into treacherous streams of mud and rocks. Straightaway, after the birth, he had muttered that the boy would likely have no future, that the workhouse might claim them all. And he had left the House, baby, wife and maidservant and gone out into the overwhelming blackness of the storm, the worst anyone could remember, to return to the huddle of men just half a mile away, who had gathered around their braziers for warmth at the site of his latest attempt to sink a wood-lined shaft deeper and deeper to strike into the famed four-foot seam. If they could keep the inrushing water out of the shaft as they drove through layers of mudstone and shale to reach the seam and then secure the shaft to run roadways from it to begin to work the coal, then for the men there would be work to undertake for a foreseeable future and for him, and his partners, financial security from which to move forward. Time was theirs to order if nothing conspired to make them waste it in delays and doubts. So, even as the slanting rain sheeted down from the mountain and made their heavy woollen clothes sodden, he cursed them for stopping in his enforced absence and sent them back to the bucket, clanging from side to side of the shaft. It held steady as four men at a time clambered into it, and the hand-pulled winch was manned to send it down into the shaft even as the water slapped and rose from below and fell without cease from above.

* * * * *

On summer days, in the first ten years of his life at home, his butties would walk from their cottages below the House to come up the short drive to the front door. They would come in small groups, shy at first until made bolder by the constant welcome, to call at the House for him. They did not knock on the door, only stare at the ornate lion’s-head iron knocker and look, furtively, into the House’s interior through the high multi-paned oblong windows, three on each side of the heavy black-painted door. They waited for their arrival to be noticed inside the house. They glimpsed oak tables and chairs and dressers with gaudy Welsh china and on the walls dark oil paintings of pewter streams and muddy meadows and brown cows,all with gilt frames and hung from rails by brass hooks and chains. The callers were boys about his own age, all coming up from the terraced rows of stone houses in which they lived with mothers and sisters and babies and the fathers who worked for his father as sinkers and hauliers and colliers.

They did not shout out for him directly but, more politely as they thought, when spotted and acknowledged by the opening of the front door they addressed the women of the House, whether maid or cook or mother. He would hear the query and its reply from his first-floor front bedroom where he kept his treasures guarded on shelves, his blown birds’ eggs, some fossils from underground brought by his father, sheets of paper holding dried out flowers or grasses, the skeletons of small animals. He would scurry across the passageway and down the stairs to where the door was held ajar by the maid and, this remembered time, there would be his mother, Rebecca, smiling widely, vital and amused, her hands mussing at her uncoiled black hair, a woman vibrantly attractive in her mid-forties, attentive to her inquisitors.

“Missis. Gall Dai ddod mês ‘da ni heddi chi’n meddwl, Missis?”

And in a warming sunshine which filtered through the dank air of the hollow and lit up the front wall of that gloomy notion of a gentleman’s residence, she would ask her own questions back, mockingly but playfully, in the Welsh they shared as a first tongue.

“Pwy y’ chi i gyd ‘te, mechgyn i? Ydw i’n nabod eich tylw ‘th chi? Ble chi am fynd trwy’r dydd gyda Dai ni?”

They would then, as of practised rote, reel out in turn and one by one, their names.

“Twm Roberts. Harri Roberts. Dic Thomas. Ifor Cardi. Ifor Evans, Sièncyn Williams.”

Until she laughed and raised a hand to acknowledge them whilst ushering her son into their company as they all chorused their direction.

“I’r mynydd rhwng Aberdêr a Merthyr.”

It was still early in the morning and she knew they would not be back before dusk, so each would have some bread and hard cheese wrapped in a cloth and would carry a tin jack of water to be refilled from a stream. She saw to it that her son would carry the same in the small wickerwork basket hung over one shoulder by a leather strap, but with some apples and freshly baked Welsh cakes to share with them, all to be eaten before he could fill his basket with the treasures he would bring home. She lined them up in front of her with her Dai amongst them, and she waved them on, with the readily understood admonition that he was not Dai to everyone they might meet.

“Cofiwch nawr, mae Mister Thomas yn dweud taw David yw ei enw os gwrddwch chi â’r gwr ar y ffordd. Dyna fe ‘te, boys. Byddwch nol cyn iddi nosi, cofiwch. Cer ‘te Dai. Off a chi.”

* * * * *

Years before he was born, the mountainside had already been pocked and riddled with drift headings and small mines hacked into and beneath the slopes, and since then pits were constantly being sunk, worked or abandoned,...