This sweet and bitter earth

Press, 24 June 1978, Page 17

This sweet and bitter earth

This Sweet and Bitter Earth. By Alexander Cordell. Hodder and Stoughton. 447 pp.

Toby Davies worked first in the dangerous slate-mines of North Wales. There, as the century turned, safety was only a word, and you could pick the experienced slate-miners by the whistle of their dust-wrecked lungs. In Bethesda, Toby meets the vivacious and beautiful Ma Bron, an urchin who makes her way into his heart. He also boards with, and falls in love with, Nanwen O’Hara. She is the wife of an Irish miner who, with the help of ale, is on his way down. The personal entanglements of Toby and the two women are set first in Bethesda and later in the Rhondda. It is a time of rising unrest at the miners’ lot, and brutal repression of that unrest by the police. Cordell, famous for his “Rape of the Fair Country,” understand and loves Wales. When he writes of the Rhondda and its people you can taste the coal dust, feel the Welsh mud, and smell the faggots and peas. Cordell knows his mines and miners, too; he transmits the taste of their fear, anger, and bitterness. A. J. PETRE.