Jones Cwmardy

1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-909844-94-0
Verlag: Parthian Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 885 Seiten

In Cwmardy, Big Jim, collier and ex-Boer War soldier, and his partner Sian endure the impact of strikes, riots, and war, while their son Len emerges as a sharp thinker and dynamic political organizer.

Lewis Jones was born in Clydach Vale in 1897. He started work underground at the age of twelve in the Cambrian Combine Colliery, which was central in the famous 1910-1911 strike that culminated in the Tonypandy riots. Jones absorbed the syndicalist philosophy of direct action and workers' control by which he was surrounded, and, in the Central Labour College which he attended in London from 1923 to 1925, the Marxism that led him to join the Communist Party. Jones became a full-time worker for the National Unemployed Workers' Movement, and led a number of the famous hunger marches of the 1930s from Wales to London. He was elected to the Glamorgan County Council in 1936, and died of a heart attack in 1939, after addressing numerous public meetings in support of the Spanish Republic. Cwmardy (1937) and We Live (1939) are his two epic novels of the experience of south Wales from the 1890s to the 1930s.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Jones, Lewis

Leseproben

AN EVENING IN CWMARDY

Big Jim, known to civil servants and army authorities as James Roberts, stopped abruptly and let his eyes roam over the splendour of the mountain landscape. A coat hung uncouthly from his arm and a soft breeze played on the hairy chest that showed beneath his open red-flannel shirt.

His small son, Len, stood near by wondering what had caused this sudden halt. He saw Big Jim open his mouth as if about to say something, but instead of words came a smacking sound and a large mass of tobacco-stained saliva.

The lad, whose wavy hair shadowed his sad eyes, watched the spittle twirl in the air before it fouled the grass at his feet. Len looked at the massive body that made his own feel puny while Big Jim remained pensively motionless. Father and son remained silent for some minutes, the former looking like a Wild West desperado with the red silk scarf dangling loosely from his neck. His soap-stiffened moustaches gave him a fierce, reckless appearance which Len thought romantic.

The lad eventually grew impatient with the silence. ‘What be you waiting for, dad?’ he asked, his wistful eyes searching for the face that towered above him.

The plaintive voice rose to Big Jim’s ears like a bubble. He looked down on his son and sighed. ‘I be just thinking, Len bach,’ he started, his deep voice tinged with pathos, ‘ ’bout the days long ago, when I did use to walk the fields of the North before ever I come down here to work in the pits.’

The man sighed again, bit his moustache, and sat on a little mound nearby. Len wormed his way to his father’s knee, and the pair silently looked before them at the miles of undulating highland which buried itself in the shimmering haze that marked the encircling distant sea. Here and there the landscape was splashed with patches of purple heather and rich brown bracken whose blended colours stood out boldly in the telescopic clarity of the midsummer evening.

Browsing sheep languidly chewed their way from patch to patch, while larks lifted their song into the blue recesses of the sky. Even the clear air conspired to produce an aspect of tranquil serenity on the mountain top. Rising and falling in tiny semi-visible globules of heat, the air played an irresponsible hide-and-seek with the bladed grass.

The two solitary humans were affected in different ways by the pacific scene. It softly recalled to the rough, toil-scarred miner the days of his youth. But young Len had no such solid memories to be awakened. In their place he felt a vague emotional hunger that made him sad. He turned on his stomach and lay full length on the grass before his father, who was meditatively moving a huge lump of tobacco from check to cheek, occasionally spitting its gravy-like juice into the air.

The lad strained his eyes towards the distant channel. He wondered what the ships it held looked like, and vainly tried to magnify the black spots that dotted the ribbony gleam. A hoarse grunt from Big Jim brought Len to his haunches. ‘Huh,’ said the former, trying to twist the reveries from his mind by twirling his moustaches, ‘this bit of mountain by here, Len bach, is where King Rhys did have his head chopped off.’ The statement was resonant with rolling r’s. Big Jim waited in confident anticipation of a comment from his son.

Len looked at him with wistful interest. ‘For what did they chop his head off, dad?’ he asked.

‘Oh,’ was Jim’s slow reply, ‘I be not quite sure now, boy bach, but I ’spect they did do it ’cause he was a bad man and that was the only way to bring him to his senses.’

Len thought a moment before asking, ‘Well, how was he a bad man and who did chop his head off for it?’

This put Jim out of his depth, but he tried to recover the position by saying as he scratched his head, ‘I don’t hardly ’member now, boy bach. You see, it did happen a long time ago, ay, hundreds of years ago, and I can’t pull things back to my mind these days as I used to.’

He turned the subject sharply. ‘Do you see that red grass over there?’ he asked, pointing a huge forefinger vaguely into the distance. Len looked into the desired direction and fancied he saw the red patch.

‘Ay,’ he said, ‘you do mean that place where the sheep is, dad?’

‘That be it. Well, by there a big battle was once fought between the Cymro and the English. A awful lot of blood was spilt that day and the grass have been red with it ever since.’

Len wanted to ask further questions, but Big Jim lifted him to his feet before they could be made articulate. ‘Come,’ he muttered to his son, ‘it be getting late and your mam will be wondering where we be.’ The pair sauntered slowly across the mountain top that was already crimsoning in the rays spread by the setting sun. Len watched the deepening hues and wondered where they went when darkness fell.

Father and son soon reached the mountain crest, where they again sat down so that the former could have another smoke before descending into the valley. Len knew his father took some time to enjoy a pipe-full of tobacco and resigned himself to the consequent wait. Lying on his stomach the lad surveyed the valley beneath.

His eyes looked down upon the belt of smoke that hung halfway up the mountain like a blanket blotting out everything beneath. The lad watched the billowing cauldron break and twist into ever-changing forms in the clutches of the evening breeze. They swirled into bubbling eddies that brought to his mind thoughts of the broth he had often seen his mother make over the open fireplace of their home.

‘Look, dad,’ he uttered excitedly, ‘i’n’t it like the cawl mam do make if soot was to fall in it from the chimney?’

The analogy tickled Big Jim. ‘Ho ho!’ he guffawed. ‘That be good, muniferni. When I do tell your mam what you have said her belly will shake with laughing. Ho, ho, ho!’

Len could not see the joke, and let his eyes follow the sheep-track winding its way down the mountain breast like a tortuous vein. He saw where it buried itself in the murk and hid as if ashamed of its eventual destination. It was just there, Len knew, that the grass ceased to be green.

Big Jim still showed no signs of moving, although the sun had already dipped half its red orb behind the mountain and was now sending scarlet gleams across the black blanket that was the valley’s sky. Father and son gazed at the changing panorama in silence, their bodies tingling to the palpitating throb of the pit engines that came to them from below. Its vibrant rhythm broke through the air with the monotonous regularity of a ticking clock, and Len felt the vibration soak into his flesh. A muffled hum of voices muted in an incoherent chorus mingled with the throb.

For long minutes the pair lay while the glow from the dipping sun melted into the black pall and became a deeper red. At last Big Jim knocked the burning ashes from his pipe and rose to his feet. ‘Come,’ he commanded the entranced Len, ‘I got to see Dai Cannon, my butty, so we will go down the long way, past the pits.’ Len followed obediently, being always eager to get near the pit that stood at the top end of the valley.

Carefully threading their way down the steep path, they entered the belt of smoke and were soon standing at the foot of the mountain against which the grimy pit- head machinery, buildings, and gear stood out with grim grotesqueness.

Len’s eyes widened at sight of the forbidding black power- houses and the lake of feeding water near them. A score of pipes with tiny holes intersected this latter and sent bubbling sprays of boiling water into the air, where each became a miniature rainbow before falling back into the lake.

Len could not take his eyes from this effervescent, sparkling cascade. ‘Is all the colours in the world by there, dad?’ he asked wonderingly.

Big Jim coughed and blew his nose. ‘Ay, I think they all be there, boy bach,’ he answered doubtfully. ‘But,’ he added, ‘you did ought to see it first thing in the morning when the sun be rising. Ah, that be a sight for sore eyes.’

Len thought a moment before saying, ‘When I grow up and start to work I will be able to see it in the morning, ’on’t I, dad?’

‘Ay, ay, my boy,’ answered Big Jim; adding under his breath, ‘When you start to work you ’on’t want to see it.’ Len did not hear this.

The thought of working in the pit sent ripples through his flesh and made him anxious to grow up quickly. He looked at the trellised ironwork of the pit-head frames, to which the power-houses made such an appropriate background, and sighed longingly. The gleaming rail-tracks which radiated from the pit-head down the valley towards the invisible sea seemed, in his imaginative eyes, to be like veins of quickly coursing blood. Big Jim broke into his thoughts with the command, ‘Follow me, and be careful how you do tread.’

Len followed the imprints of his father’s feet in the powdery coal-dust which thickly coated everything. He passed great piles of logs, some of which were covered with reddish rough bark, while others, slippery and smooth, looked indecent in their nakedness. Big Jim replied to his query on the contrast: ‘Those big heavy uns, with bark, be Frenchmen. You know, those who do bring the onions every year,’ he...