think they’ll hold on to their few shillings that way. Christ, Mari, the Fed’s all we’ve got and we’ve got to make them see that nothing will ever get better for us unless they stick to it. It matters more than ever now.’
The fervour for workers’ solidarity that had always galvanized Nick still reverberated in his voice, but Mari read the bleakness in his face. Even Nick was beginning to lose heart. He was seeing the decay spreading across the coalfields as clearly as anyone as the world markets for coal contracted, as the pit owners cut more corners, and as thousands of men struggled humiliatingly for jobs and were paid less and less for the back-breaking hours underground.
Nick had seen his share of it. He had queued hungrily in the dark of winter mornings with dozens of others hoping for a day’s casual pit work, only to be turned away when he reached the lighted pit-top and the managers saw who he was. Once or twice he had even been taken on, and had deliberately been given the most menial of tasks, a bitter insult for a skilled worker like Nick. More recently there hadn’t even been the hope of casual work. For two years, since the hunger march, Nick hadn’t worked in the pits at all. His meagre unemployed benefit had been stopped because, as the official put it, he ‘wasn’t looking hard enough for work if he could spare the time to wander off to London’. The Penrys existed on the few hours of odd jobs that Nick managed to find for himself, on tiny and irregular hand-outs from depleted union funds, on whatever their relatives could spare, and on Co-op credit.
All through it, until Dickon’s illness, Nick had never flagged. He devoted the hours of unwelcome freedom to the Miners’ Federation, and to the individual causes of his members. He was a popular labour organizer and a charismatic speaker, liked and respected all through the valleys. He would walk miles and then spend hours with a single miner, trying to persuade him not to leave the Federation for a toothless, powerless company union. Even the dwindling numbers of his own men, the bleeding away of the strength which he believed was their only hope, had not weakened Nick’s convictions.
Until Dickon’s illness.
Seeing the boy’s new helplessness as the illness sapped his meagre strength, and left the ribs showing through his thin skin, Nick asked himself if it was worth hanging on. If anything in the world was worth seeing Dickon suffer any more than he did already. He heard the answer clearly, his first renegade thought. No, nothing was worth that.
Mari wouldn’t look at him. The down-turning smile was bitter.
‘So, what do you want? Another strike?’
‘If needs be,’ Nick said quietly.
The lines around Mari’s mouth deepened. She stared past Nick, and back down the years stretching behind them. The strike of 1921, when her family had got by on what she and her mother could earn. 1926, the year of Dickon’s babyhood when they were discovering that he would never be like other children, the General Strike and the long, bitter summer that followed it with the miners straggling back to work when the winter cold began to bite. 1928, 1931, the dreary repetition of hardship, and all for nothing. People like Nick and herself had nothing, and they never would.
Angry resentment was alive inside her, and it focused suddenly on Nick.
‘Another strike, is it?’ she murmured. ‘You think you’re such a big man, Nick Penry, don’t you? You with your meetings, up on the platform telling the men with their wives and children back home to lay off work and fight the bosses. Telling them to go another week without money coming in, all for the cause. Well, I’ll tell you something. You’re not a big man. You’re not a man at all. What kind of man is it who can’t bring home food for his child who’s dying? Dickon can’t eat pamphlets, can he? We can’t pay the doctor in Cardiff with workers’ solidarity, can we?’ Mari’s mouth was working although the words had stopped coming. There was a white fleck on her lower lip, and the cords in her neck stood prominent.
‘I hate you,’ she whispered. ‘I hate you, and everything you’ve done to bring us to this.’
‘I haven’t done it,’ Nick said softly. ‘Capitalism has done it.’
Mari moved so quickly that the stinging slap almost caught his face, but Nick was quicker. He held her wrist as she tried to twist sideways to escape him.
‘So what do you want me to do?’ His voice turned hard and cold.
‘I want you to get a job. Leave here, go wherever it is that there’s work.’
Leave the valleys, leave the struggle that’s taken everything since you’ve been old enough to think. Leave what you believe in and the people you care about and go anywhere you can to earn the shillings that will save Dickon.
The unspoken words were tangible between them, sharp and pointed like little flint arrows.
Nick let go of Mari’s wrist and turned away. He took his coat and cap off the peg behind the back door.
‘I’m going for a walk,’ he said. ‘Don’t wait the tea for me, will you?’ That was an ironic shot. For months there had been only one meal a day for the Penrys, and they had already eaten it.
Mari waited, motionless, until the door had banged shut before she let the hot tears spill over.
It was the middle of June. At the end of the covered backs, daylight shone in an oval of blue and gold. Nick left the passage, with its smell of damp brick that never evaporated even in the driest weather, and walked out into the sunshine. The terrace was noisy with the shouts of children who were running after a ball as it rolled away over the steep cobbles. A miner was coming up towards Nick with two whippets straining on the leash. He nodded calmly and strolled on. With so little work to be done, the pace of Nantlas seemed to have slowed to a dawdle. Only the children bothered to run, or to shout to one another.
Nick turned his back on the motionless winding-gear at the valley bottom and climbed upwards. Beyond the last row of houses and the ugly hem of brick-and-slate privies, makeshift sheds and rusting corrugated-iron shelters, was a line of allotments. Half a dozen men were working there, moving to and fro between the tangle of greenery and orange-scarlet flowers that scrambled over the beanpoles. The men straightened up from their hoeing and nodded to Nick as he passed. No one spoke. ‘Going for a walk’ was a recognized way of filling time in a workless day, although until today Nick himself had almost always been too busy to need to contemplate it. Beyond the allotments was bare, open hillside. Nick scrambled upwards, leaving the sprawling black gash of the tips away on his right.
He didn’t stop until he reached the hill crest, panting slightly from the steepness of the climb. A little way below the ridge was an outcrop of rock that made a rough shelter. Nick and his friends had smoked their first cigarettes here when they were boys. As he sat down with his back against the sun-warmed rock Nick smiled a little at the memory of the coughing that had followed. He would have given anything for a cigarette now, but he couldn’t remember when he had last had the money for tobacco.
The sun was almost too hot. Nick took off his jacket and eased his shoulders under the thin shirt that had belonged to his father. It had been a little too small when he had inherited it from the old man, but since he had been out of work the hard muscles of his shoulders and upper arms had softened down and the old shirt, carefully patched by Mari, fitted perfectly now.
Nick had climbed the hill to think. He stared down at the familiar view. Along the valley, at the pit that was still working, he saw a full truck heave into sight and disgorge itself at the pithead. The rumble and clatter reached him a full two seconds later on the heavy, still air. Further away he saw a tiny white signal arm quiver and drop beside the railway line and a train of trucks began to inch forward behind the busy engine. He heard a shrill whistle and the clash of couplings with perfect clarity.
Work.
He had come up here to think but now, with the hopelessness spread neatly out in front of him and the blue-purple roof of his own house in the centre, he knew that there was nothing to think about.
If there was work anywhere, he would have to take it. It went against the grain of everything he believed in and hoped for. It was giving