Richards Dai Country

1. Auflage 2011
ISBN: 978-1-906998-73-8
Verlag: Parthian Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 230 Seiten

Alun Richards casts his baleful eye on the central valleys of twentieth-century South Wales from the 1930s to the 1970s, the personal relationships and social ambitions of the inhabitants of this much-fabled country. Includes the best of his short stories, as funny and savage as they are scathing and compassionate, combined with his entrancing autobiographical memoir Days of Absence.

Alun Morgan Richards was born in Pontypridd in 1929. He wrote six novels from 1962 to 1979 and two scintillating collections of short stories, Dai Country (1973) and The Former Miss Merthyr Tydfil (1976). Plays for stage and radio were complemented by original screenplays and adaptations for television, including BBC's Onedin Line. As an editor, he produced best-selling editions of Welsh short stories and tales of the sea for Penguin. His sensitive biography of his close friend, Carwyn James, appeared in 1984 and his own entrancing memoir Days of Absence in 1986.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Richards, Alun

Leseproben

TWO

My grandmother had the kind of face which I find almost impossible to describe. If I see her in my mind’s eye, she is bent and old, her mouth slightly sardonic after she had suffered the first of several strokes; a short dumpy woman, both hands swollen with rheumatism and legs misshapen with varicose veins, but her face – strong even at the end – was ever animated by the brightness of her eyes. They were sharp, brown and intelligent, sweeping at you under a frizz of grey hair, missing nothing. Around her neck she always wore a black velvet band, sometimes with a diamond clip, sometimes not, but I never remember her without this remnant of Victorian fashion, and hardly a photograph exists without it. I suspect she must have been very vain of her neck and in photographs as a young woman you can see a firm chin, a wide humorous mouth, all the evidence of a strong face, full of character. She was small, neat, and in one profile she wears her hair close-cropped, again with the velvet neckband, and here she is full-cheeked and there is an imp of mischief which belongs to someone else. I don’t think she was ever pretty, there is too much chin for that, and even as a young woman it is the kind of face which stands out in a crowd because you sense there is something capable and reliable about it. There is not just the animation of the eyes, a natural shrewdness, but a steadiness too. She had, she used to say wryly, the kind of face that caused people to leave their children with her on trains. And yet, you would not call her plain. There is something too striking there.

The face I knew, however, was marked by life. Experience had riven it until it was homely, and it was at its best seated opposite me by the fireside when we were alone, with perhaps a treat in an unexpected tin box of Allenbury’s glistening blackcurrant pastilles, normally reserved to prevent coughs in chapel. These were the happiest moments in those early years and it was then that I got a sense of the past which never seems to be like anything I have read.

My grandmother’s family can be traced to the previous century, hill farmers all in that most beautiful but happily unknown of terrains, the hilly mountainous country between the bottom tip of the Rhondda and Aberdare valleys, just north of Pontypridd, at whose centre is the parish of Llanwynno. Here my most famous relative, the bard Glanffrwd, is buried; a Welsh poet and cleric whose rise from the obscurity of miner to Dean of St Asaph is a period Welsh success story, the stuff of legends. He was born in 1843 in a small thatched cottage in old Ynysybwl, the eldest of seven children, and his forebears were the descendants of lay brothers who lived at Mynachdy, a sheep farm supervised for the benefit of the monks at Margam Abbey. When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, the brothers lost their living but settled nearby, and one descendant – Glanffrwd’s grandfather – prospered and became the owner of almost all the land he could see between Mountain Ash and Abercynon. His lease on the land was drawn up in the old-fashioned Welsh way, ‘to last while water flowed in the River Cynon’ and for as long as he paid rent at four pounds per annum. However, he sold it for a trifle in a drunken bout with the result that Glanffrwd began life as the son of a woodcutter, only saved from illiteracy by the patience of a deformed schoolmaster. After a spell in the pit in the early years of the coal rush, he became a pupil teacher, then a Nonconformist clergyman, finally entering the Church of England for which he was prepared at Oxford, where he is said to have consorted with Matthew Arnold and other notables. His end came spectacularly. He collapsed on the platform at the National Eisteddfod at Brecon in 1890 while conducting a choir. He was then taken to his brother’s home in Pontypridd where he died. My grandmother was in attendance. He was forty-seven.

His wife, a well-known singer (Llinos y De), was a beauty in more respects than one, according to my grandmother, who would dispense with all this historic preamble with a flicker of the eyelid. The poet Glanffrwd was her father’s brother, but the marriage was not approved of in the family, particularly not by my grandmother who, in emergencies, had the job of lighting coal fires in the beauty’s bedroom and fastening up the forty-odd buttons of the button boots she insisted on wearing despite a lifelong lack of manual dexterity – onerous tasks which were sometimes palliated by the beauty’s fame, for when she was singing, courting couples were said to come from miles around to listen to her. But on the other hand, the old enemy reappeared again, for during Glanffrwd’s lifetime she would very often dispense with half a bottle of eau de cologne in the bedroom before a performance. My grandmother actually helped to dress the corpse with the swigging going on next door, if you please. Her own father at this time was a Deputy of the Ty Mawr Colliery, given a silver plate by the men on the occasion of his marriage. One of Glanffrwd’s sons emigrated to America but the other, like my grandmother’s brothers, was to perish either in France or as a result of the first war. Their photographs haunted me as a child and seem now almost as real to me as my own uncles, two of whom were also to be victims of war. To this day, their medals lie in drawers, a Distinguished Service Order, a Military Cross, a Distinguished Flying Cross, all unlooked at. They perhaps explain why the only time I ever saw real fear cross my grandmother’s face was when I also returned home in uniform, but that was at an easier time, and a long way ahead.

In my fifth year, it was all a mystery, but an entrancing one. On the surface of things there was a mask of respectability, composed of selected facts, but not far below there were the scars left by anguish now long-past, heartbreak which yet had not resulted in any basic change of ideas. We were never pacifists and I was never discouraged from children’s games of war, unlike some of my contemporaries whose families also suffered drastically, Welsh casualties being greater per head of the population than any other country in the British Isles. So in my child’s mind, I led charges over the top and got at the Hun with cold steel, amply provided with props from the commodious cupboards upstairs – a Luger pistol greased in its holster, a bloodstained bayonet, a Sam Browne, a military tunic with the colonel’s crown and pips on the sleeves and, of course, the letters home from the Somme.

Dear Mother,

The food is as well as can be expected and we are seeing quite a bit of the countryside.

But there was another reality, I knew, and my grandmother saw that I knew it, not consciously perhaps, but she was sometimes overcome by the uncontrollable surge of memory that defeats all propaganda because it is full of sights and sounds and smells – sometimes, of unrelated images like the one she had of the outbreak of that first war of ‘the boys marching through the main street of Pontypridd in 1914, a sea of scarlet tunics and polished brass, laughing and joking as the girls followed them to the station’. I, too, was to be a witness of such circumstances in the second war. But we remained patriots all, seeing ourselves in the larger context of the British Isles, regarding ourselves as part of the mainstream, and this never altered.

As it happened, my grandmother never told me of these things as an ordered body of facts, and now when I attempt to bring them together, I can see inconsistencies which passed undetected then – largely because so many of the things she said came as an aside. A death would be announced in the obituary columns of the local newspaper, and my grandmother would say, ‘She led our Willie a dance!’ She also liked stories with a moral and as she grew older, her mind would slip back to her girlhood and the early days of her marriage, one of the reasons being, I suspect, that the first war brought with it a time that was too awful to recollect. Everything changed after that. Avoiding it as an area of damage, my grandmother turned instead to her origins, indulging a predilection for the bizarre stories of country life. Her favourite concerned her expectations in a will; not all the family land had been sold, and she had an uncle and aunt who farmed quite near us – the aunt had promised my grandmother several fields. As a girl, she would go there to help out, she had nursed the aunt in one period of sickness but the time came when the old lady was dying and, suddenly and abruptly, the door was barred to my grandmother and all communication was forbidden. The little farm became a prison.

‘She couldn’t even get a note out,’ my grandmother said emphatically.

She remembered going to the farm, taking a whinberry tart as a gift, but she was greeted by a servant girl who came out into the yard, barring the doorway behind her. The uncle was away and Auntie Leah did not want to be disturbed.

‘Too far gone,’ the girl said.

My grandmother couldn’t understand it. Knowing her as I did, I was surprised she did not thrust her way into the house; but she did not, although she did not leave the whinberry tart either. A week later when the aunt died she discovered the reason for her uncle’s absence. He had gone to see a solicitor in faraway and hostile Neath, had brought him back to the house that very night with the result that the will was altered and my grandmother dispossessed.

‘A good job I didn’t leave the tart,’ my grandmother said. This was what she described as...