THE UNWANTED MAN

Greymouth Evening Star, 13 October 1928, Page 9

THE UNWANTED MAN

WELSH MINER’S AWAKENING.

It means nothing to you that lanto Llewellyn was born at Cwriityssiog in 1898. But it meant something to him. It meant a bad start.

I£ you had been in Cardiff that year .you would have seen footsore, hungry men and women walking the streets at a crawling pace, stopping here and there to sing hymns. “Jesu, lover of my soul,” they sang, in Welsh, to that throat-tightening tune “Aberystwyth”; and when they had finished singing they would look up at the windows in 'hope that one might be opened and a copper fly out. Most often the windows remained as tight as the mouths of the passers-by, who were not too pleased that “those colliers from the hills” had invaded the town again. But there, they were, driven as deer afe driven by bitter weather, down io the place where a bit of food might be going a-begging. Little dark Celtic men, their faces blue-tatooed with •powder-flecks; hopeless women, holding, sometimes, children by the hand. They sang like angels with hell in their hearts.

lanto’s mother had had a poor time during her confinement, and she was a shadow of a woman when the strike ’came. The sight of her, dragging her weary limbs along the street; the child, so light, a heavy burden; and her mate, morose and fierce with hunger—this touched many to commiseration, particularly young Cardiff mothers, who would send their toddlers put with pennies. Dumb and shy, the •children would approach that little group, hold the penny out as long an arm’s length as could be attained, and t then fly back to bury a head in mother’s apron. 1 The first six months Of lanto’s life ,went thus, and' when the strike was tover things were little better. At the grocers and the bakers in Cmytyssiog long tallies had been run up, and for weary months the paying back went on. The boy suffered. He was starved in body, and the hopelessness of the home starved him of happiness. He was suckled on sour milk.

He grew up against a landscape of slagheaps;’ of hillsides, once as beautiful as any in the world, riven and ruined and wrecked; of colliery yards and pithead machinery and coal sid, ings; of a fouled river and dilapidated houses and' a grim four-square chapel that bore upon its unyielding forehead the inscription “Horeb.” Coming and going in the streets, he was accustomed to meet bands of men with coalblack faces, fantastically blotched with red lips and white eyes; and with his domestic interior was associated a back kitchen, containing a tub wherein his father, of the day shift, and the lodger, of the night shift, imperfectly cleansed themselves.

When he was ten father and lodger dramatically ceased to be. His father was in the pit when the explosion happened; the lodger was one of those who went down with the casual heroism of his kind, to see what could be done. You cannot imagine the sort of funeral there was: twenty hearses and miles of people who wound in a black lugubrious procession past Horeb and up the hill to the cemetery where, in the drizzle and murk of a December afternoon, they sang hymns in a minor key.

There were two lodgers after that; and not many years afterwards lanto himself began to go down the pit. From butty to full-grown collier he went, learning the joys of filthy body and filthy/clothes, picking as he lay on his back, picking as he lay on his side, stooping under the low roofs, taking his chance, and once, when a gob-fire spat, nearly taking his departure from the whole jolly game. For relaxation there. was choir practice and an occasional cantata at Horeb. His voice was tenor. He was sixteen when the war came; and when he was eighteen he joined the army. He was soon in the thick of it. There had been some battles as well as roses in Picardy, and there were gaps to fill. He did fairly well, getting the Military Medal for no more than the loss of a finger. He was pulled out the month the Armistice was signed. Far-seeing men foresaw a “boom.” Colliers were wanted. With incredible celerity he found himself back at Cymtyssiog, working ]ih.rd, earning good money, married at Horeb to Jinny Richards, who had always been in the cantatas. His mother was dead. He was proud of Jinny because of that brother of hers, young Dai Richards. A scholar was Dai; he was at the intermediate school in Cardiff; great things were expected of him. A bit of a wild Celt, who never went to Horeb and talked a lot about wage-slaves. The good money lanto was earning was not stinted on the boy; and Dai was at Cambridge, thanks to a scholarship, when lanto at Cwmtyssiog made a supreme resolution. He hadn’t raised a pick for twelve months when young Dai’s letter from Cambridge put the matter brutally. “The simple fact is, you need not wait for what is called recovery. .The heavy industries of this country have got to shed 200,000 men. that’s the plain truth.” f

lanto and Jinny were going to Australia. He was thirty—young enough for a new start. They were in London, and the thing was as good as settled. From London they ran down for one day to say good-bye to Dai at Cambridge. Dai walked them through the grounds of King's. They leaned on the bridge. There were doves in a tree, their throats bubbling with content. Punts lazed by on the river; the willows hung their languid draperies down to the perfect grass; the sun was turning the stone of the colleges to a clear honey colour. The air was drowsy with the smell of the limes.

Dai broke a lohg silence. “Well,” he said, “now you’ve seen the sort of place that the Rhondda Valley and Manchester and the Clyde have to carry on their backs.”' " '

lanto did not. answer. He was watching a fish holding itself steady upstream, with the weeds washing over it in cool, green undulations. "Heaven!” he said with awe. “Isn’t it al! lovely!”

Dai turned on his facetiously. “What! You old mole out of the bowels of the earth under the filthiest, valley in Britain —d’you mean to stand here in the last stronghold of feudalism and talk like that?” And then, more fiercely, “What- the devil has the country ever done for the like of you?” Again Tanto did not answer him. “To think,” he said, “that all tlie time

there were things like this, and that we were going away.” “Were!” Dai cried.

“Were, I said,” lanto replied savagely. “We’re not going now. Jinny, we can’t. The birds don’t sing out there and the flowers, don’t smell.” Jinny clutched his arm. “D’you mean it, lanto, really! I’m glad, I’m glad. I’d have gone, but I hated going.”

Dai looked at the pair of them, spellbound. “lanto, you fool,” he, burst out. at last. “You’re not wanted. Dofi’t you understand? There are two hundred thousand of you—not wanted. Don’t you understand? There are two hundred thousand of you—not wanted.” <

lanto, retreating with Jinny’s arm in his, turned back for a last word. “If they don’t want me they can do the other thing,” he said. “I’m staying. I’ve earned it.” —R. Howard Spring, in “Manchester Guardian.”

DAYLIGHT SAVING.

Remember! Advance the clock half-an-hour to-night. Daylight saving commences to-morrow.