UP THERE IT WAS, on that day, that I knew teeth of fear.
I was coming back, empty of anger, and ready to let tongues have their way, when I saw men working to put up tipping piers from the colliery to the top of the mountain directly behind our house, and all the other houses on the Hill.
“Good day, Lewis,” I said to the foreman. “What is this, then?”
“Slag tip,” he said. “Up the top here.”
“But it will roll down on top of us,” I said.
“In time to come, I suppose,” he said, but not taking much notice. “Years, yet.”
“Years?” I said. “They have got no right. Those are our homes down there.”
“Go on, man,” he said. “Where the hell will the slag go, then? If you want to work, the slag must come out. If it comes out it must have a place to go. So there, you, and here it is.”
No use to blame him.
Useless to curse the men, or their work, or the steel struts they were bolting together to carry deadness to the mountain.
I went to see my father, but he only nodded and wiped his glasses.
“Yes,” he said.
“We must do something, Dada,” I said. “Quick.”
“What?” he asked me, with quiet. “The slag must go somewhere. They can only do the best they can. If they keep it underground as they used to do, it will have to come from the wages of the men. While they are piling slag, they cannot be cutting coal. One of the two. So the mountain it is, for the sake of wages.”
“Who sold the land?” I asked him. “Jones the Chapel?”
“No,” he said, “he sold it long ago.”
“Who, then?” I asked him. “If we know we might get him to sell to all of us on the Hill.”
My father smiled and scratched his head.
“Go and see Abishai Elias,” he said. “He is the owner. Or was. It belongs to the colliery, now. So does all the mountain land, excepting only our land on the Hill.”
“A hiding without a fight,” I said.
“Yes,” my father said. “For the women and children. Leave it, my son.”
I almost hated my father, then, but I saw what he was afraid of doing and I had sympathy, for however hard we fought, we must be beaten by empty bellies. The rights of man are poor things beside the eyes of hungry children. Their hurts are keener than the soreness of injustice.
But then Davy had more trouble, and our minds were busy with him until he was out of it. By that time the tip was built and working, and we could only look up at it with our hands on our hips and curse it, and hope for the hate of Satan to fall on old Elias.
Davy had been back only a few weeks when it happened. My father had spoken for him to start work in his pit, and down he went, gladly, and Wyn was happier than she had been for years, for she was tired of going from one place to another, and wanted a home, and for once in his life he listened to her.
One morning I met him coming up the Hill off the night shift, and even under his dust I could see his anger.
“What, now?” I asked him.
“They have paid me short,” he said. “Working to the waist in water all week, with the boy, and short to-day.”
“How about the minimum?” I asked him.
“They said no,” he said. “But I will have a reckoning.”
He was not allowed to join the shift on Monday because he had written a letter to the manager.
“Right,” said my father. “Let us have a solicitor, and put them in Court. Or the men will come out and more trouble.”
Over the mountain we went, and found a solicitor, a young man, not very happy to take the case because he had thoughts for the future, and he knew, and we knew, that the colliery could starve him out.
“Right you are,” he said. “Leave it to me.”
We left it, and the days and weeks went, with appearances in Court before justices, and commissioners for oaths, and swearings of affidavits, and all the drawn-out painfulness of law cases.
And money going out, and going out, and going out.
“Never mind, my son,” my father said to Davy. “If it costs the last sovereign, the last stick, and the last brick of this house, we will have them before a Judge. And all their slipperiness shall not avail them in the day of judgment. There was a bargain struck, and they shall keep it as we have done.”
The day of the hearing came, and notices were given to Davy with the arms of the King upon them.
“At last,” my father said, and pointed with his pipe to the arms. “Here is a sign, see. As the devil loves the cross, so do rogues love this. Now you shall see another bolting of swine.”
But when we got to the court our solicitor was standing in the front, in the big hall that was dark with the rain outside, waiting for us with impatience, and shaking in the hands with anxiousness.
“Settle with them,” he said, almost in whispers, and looking about to see if any were listening. “Be sensible, Mr. Morgan. They are powerful. They can take the case as far as the House of Lords if they want to, and break you on the way.”
My father’s fists struck into Mr. Vaughan to hold him by the coat as a hawk strikes into a mouse.
“Look,” he said, with splinters of glass in his voice, and his eyes two inches from the little green onions of Mr. Vaughan, “we have come here for a hearing after months. House of Lords or House of God, go in by there and start to make your case, before I will take the bones piecemeal from your carcass.
“Yes, sir,” said Mr. Vaughan, and swallowed a small town, and picked up his papers, and went in, with little steps, like a girl going to meet her other mother for the first time.
A good, big place, the Court, with a smell of books, and ink made from powder, and soft coal smoke.
Up on the high place was the Judge with a robe of blue and red, and grey hair to his shoulders very tidy, and looking as though he was willing to go to his grave before to hear any more of the silliness of men.
Our case was called among the first, and a solicitor stood up to put the colliery case. Detail after detail was read out of Davy’s past life, about his activity as a firebrand, and his discharge, and the generosity of the colliery in having him back again through the good offices of his father.
“What has this to do with the claim?” the Judge asked, as though clean sand had just been dusted on the floor of his mouth.
Eh, dear.
The question had everybody in fits down in front, with whispers and frowns, and little men running on tiptoe with pieces of paper one to another, and the Judge looking at the end of his pen over the top of his spectacles.
“My clients claim,” the solicitor said, “that there is no basis for a claim. The man was paid the wage that he received, which we admit is below the minimum wage, because in the manager’s estimation he was incompetent. That estimation will be borne out by witnesses.”
If you had seen my father’s face.
Davy sat stone-still, arms folded, as man after man we knew well, went into the witness box and swore that Davy was an incompetent workman. And him sitting there, watching them.
And Mr. Vaughan doing nothing, except a bit of a smile here and there to the solicitor on the colliery side.
“Might we hear the claimant?” the Judge asked into the air, to nobody, as though he spoke to hear his voice.
More running down in front, and Mr. Vaughan looking far from happy when he looked at Davy to take his place in the little box near the Judge.
“How are you going to prove to the Court’s satisfaction,” the Judge said, direct at Davy, and I thought, with something of kindness, “that you are, in fact, a competent workman, and entitled to be paid the minimum wage allotted to that class of man?”
Davy looked very good in his best black suit, indeed.
“I have been working since I was twelve, Your Honour,” he said.
The Judge’s greyness shook quickly from side to side, and his glasses flashed in the light of the lamps.
“You may have worked for fifty years,” he said, “but still be lacking in competency. How can you prove your claim?”
My father gave me a dig with his elbow that almost took me from the world with fright.
“The dockets,” he said, in whispers, with fire burning high in his eyes. “The dockets, man. Where are they, with you?”
Thank God for a lifetime of tidiness and order in the home, for every pay docket we had ever had was on the file, all of us, from the first week’s pay we had ever drawn.
I stood up with the files heavy in my arms, and Davy’s eyes came off the Judge to look at me, for he had seen my movement, and all in Court heard me make a way through the benches toward the front.
“What is this man doing?” the Judge asked.
“My brother, Your Honour,” Davy said. “With proof of competency. Those are the amounts I have drawn every week since I started work.”
One docket after another the Judge turned over, and for quiet minutes there was only the voice of crispness in paper to be heard.
Then the Judge looked at Davy, and down at the solicitor.
“Can anybody tell me,” he said, “how a man can earn three and four times, and even more than six times, as much as the amount of this claim, over a period of years in the same colliery, and still be held as an incompetent workman?”
No answer from anybody, but the air going to shrivel about us.
“Apparently not,” said the Judge. “In my view, on evidence provided by the company in its own pay dockets, the plaintiff establishes beyond doubt that he is a competent workman, and therefore is entitled to receive the minimum wage as provided under the agreement. The claim is allowed, with costs.”
I am only sorry that we were not allowed to shake the Judge’s hand, and then dance on the desks.
It was late before we had supper that night, for people were coming from all the other valleys to cheer my father and Davy, and shake their hands, and call them true men. My mother stood to watch, holding her chest with one hand and putting tucks in her apron with the other, pretending to smile.
She knew, and my father knew, that there were two sides to every face.
“Make your minds firm,” my father said to us, while my mother and Olwen were washing up. “To-day is the last of us in this Valley. If I am spared, I have got a couple more years’ work, and then finish, me. Ianto is in iron, and Huw is in wood. What will you do, Davy, my son?”
“I will have my share of the box, Dada,” Davy said, “and I will go to New Zealand. Wyn’s father will come with us.”
“You could go to your good brothers in the United States,” my father said, but with weakness in his voice, for he knew his answer.
“New Zealand,” Davy said, with nothing in his voice or face.
“Not charity, my son,” my father said. “But I will be happy to know you are close together. They are your brothers.”
“New Zealand, Dada,” Davy said.
“Good,” said my father.
“Dada,” Ianto said, “I am going too, I am sorry to say.”
In the dark pane of the window I saw my father shut his eyes.
“You too, Ianto, my son?” he said, with stiffness. “To New Zealand, then?”
“No, Dada,” Ianto said, and looking up at Davy’s jersey, “to Germany. There is a German over at the works there, now, and he says I could have a better job with him. So I will go. There is nothing in front of me here.”
“Say nothing to your Mama,” my father said. “Let this day be over, first.”
We sat still, looking at the floor, and the walls, and the furniture, but not at one another, and we dare not look at my father, for he was fighting rivers.
“Shall we read a chapter, my sons?” he asked us, in a little while, and Davy was up quick to fetch the Book.
“What shall we have, Dada?” he said, with the thickness of guilt and black leather ready on his knee, and his fingers hooked in the pages.
“Isaiah, fifty-five,” my father said. “Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money, come ye, buy and eat. Yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.”
And while Davy read, my mother came to sit by my father, and Olwen sat on the floor with her arm on his knee, and her face on her arm, and his hand was on her head nearly hidden in her hair, and his other hand lay in my mother’s lap, with her hands tight about it.