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Nantlas, Rhondda Fach, 1924

‘You ready then, Mari?’

Mari Powell stepped back from the tiny mirror over the sink in the back kitchen. She had been the first girl in Nantlas to cut her hair, and although everyone had copied her now, even Ellen Lewis who looked a fright whatever she did to herself, she was still proud of the glossy brown cap and the ripple of careful waves over her right temple.

‘Don’t rush me. Don’t you want me to look nice?’

She smiled over her shoulder at Nick Penry waiting impatiently for her on the doorstep, and bobbed up on her toes in an effort to see the reflection of her new blouse. She had made it herself, from a remnant of bright blue cotton from Howell’s summer clearance in Cardiff. Although her skirt was old she had shortened it daringly, and judged that the effect was almost as good as a completely new outfit.

‘Not a lot of point in looking nice to stay in Nantlas. If you don’t come now it’s either that or walk to Barry.’

‘Oh, all right then. I’m coming.’ Mari patted her hair one last time and hurried to the door. For a moment, balanced on the step above Nick, her face was almost level with his. He was smiling back at her, but the look in his eyes disconcerted her, as it had always done. They had known one another for six months now. Nick had come up to the house first on union business, to see her dad, after Dai Powell had moved up from the town of Port Talbot to the Rhondda valley, where the pits clustered thickly together, to work at the Rhondda and Peris-Hughes Associated Collieries No. 2 Nantlas Pit.

Nick Penry was deputy miners’ agent for the pit, one of the men’s elected union representatives, young for it at only twenty-three. Her dad had said to Mari, after Nick had gone, ‘Well. I’m not saying that he hasn’t got the right ideas, because he has. But there’s a lad who’s got his sights set further than the next yard of coal.’

Mari couldn’t have cared less whether or not Nick Penry was fervent enough in his opposition to the hated pit owners, or in his support for the new Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald and his Labour government. She simply thought that Nick was the handsomest man she had ever seen. He was tall for a Welshman, black-haired, with dark and quick eyes that could flicker with laughter. He had stared straight at her so that Mari knew he was seeing her, but at the same time looking through her to something beyond. He was there, appraising her, amused and friendly, and yet not there at all.

But a week later he had called again, to ask her to go with him to the dance at the Miners’ Rest. They had been going together ever since.

Mari wobbled on the doorstep, her cheeks pink and her bobbed brown hair shining. Nick put out his arms to catch her. She fell against him willingly, laughing and smelling his holiday smell of strong soap and ironed flannel.

She put her cheek against her shoulder as he swung her down into the dusty entry behind the row of houses. ‘You could give me a kiss if you felt like it.’

‘There’ll be plenty of time for that later. Why d’you think I’m taking you all the way out to Barry, if it isn’t to get you behind a sand-dune?’ But he kissed her just the same, in full view of all the back kitchen windows in the row. His mouth was very warm, and Mari felt the curl of it because he was still smiling. She glowed with pride of possession as he drew her arm firmly through his and they turned to walk up the entry. Nick Penry was all she wanted.

‘Tara, Mam,’ she called up to the little back window. ‘We’re off now. You’ll see us when you see us.’

Out in the steeply cobbled street men in work clothes were straggling home up the hill, still black with pit dirt and with their tin snap boxes under their arms. The shift had changed, and the day men were already at work in Nantlas No. 1 and 2 pits.

Everyone knew Nick. There were friendly waves and greetings as each little group passed them. A big man stopped and grinned at them, tips and tongue and the rims of his eyes very pink in his dust-blackened face.

‘Where are you two off to then, all done up? Not Sunday, is it?’

‘We’re going down to Barry. Mari’s got a whole day off from up at the Lodge, and it’s a holiday for me as well.’

‘Lucky for some,’ the big man called cheerfully after them. Nick took Mari’s hand and began to run, pulling her after him so that her heels clattered on the stones. She was laughing and protesting, and then they heard the ring of heavier boots coming after them, running even faster. Nick looked back over his shoulder and then stopped, frowning.

Flying headlong down the hill was a young man, hardly more than a boy. He was white-faced, with bright, anxious eyes, and his torn shirt showed the hollow chest beneath. Nick caught his arm as the man scrambled by.

‘Late is it, Bryn?’

The runner spun round, trying to jerk his shirtsleeve away from Nick’s grasp. He was gasping for breath.

‘Again. Can’t afford it, neither, on the day money, not like you piece men. But I can’t sleep at nights, and then in the morning I can’t get my eyes open. But mebbe I’ll catch them yet, if I run.’ He was off, down the hill towards the huddle of buildings at the head of Nantlas No. 1.

‘Come and see me after,’ Nick shouted. ‘I’ll see your gang foreman.’

He wasn’t smiling any more, and he didn’t take Mari’s hand again. They began to walk on, soberly now.

‘He hasn’t a chance,’ Nick said. ‘They’ll have gone down long ago. He might as well have stopped in bed. That’s where he should be, anyway.’

Mari glanced sideways. ‘The dicai, is it?’

‘What do you think, looking at him?’

The dicai was the word they used, defiantly and almost lightly, for tuberculosis. The miners’ curse stalked the pits and the damp, crowded little houses down the hillsides.

‘He’s got to go down, Nick. There’s only him and that doolally sister, and his mam’s bad as well now.’

‘Do you think I don’t know? I’ll have to see if I can get something for them from the Fed. He needs to go down the coast, somewhere away from here. Curse it, Mari, and curse them.’

The Fed was the South Wales Miners’ Federation. Mari knew that them could only be the pit owners, and she knew too that there was no point in trying to talk about it now. She slipped her hand back into his and walked quietly beside him, waiting for him to stop glaring ahead at something she couldn’t see, and come back to her.

At last Nick shrugged. They had left Nantlas behind them, and their faces were turned away from the rows of houses lined above the pithead clutter of lifting gear and dust-black brick buildings. They were on the Maerdy road, and the high valley sides were suddenly summer green. The sun was already hot. It was a fine day for the seaside. The river splashed beside the road, and if he didn’t look at it Nick found that he could forget that the water was clogged with coal waste and the bankside grass was more black than green. Across the river the railway track ran up to the pithead, and rows of empty trucks were waiting to be shunted up for loading. Nick turned away from that too. He squeezed Mari’s hand, and then let it go so that he could put his arm around her shoulders. Her skin felt very warm through the crisp blue cotton, and her hair smelt of lilac. He kissed the top of her head and she drew closer under his arm, lengthening her stride comically so that they walked in step with her hip against his thigh.

‘It’s our holiday,’ Nick said softly. ‘Come on, let’s catch that train.’

He was smiling again. The sun was shining, he had twelve shillings in his pocket, and Mari Powell beside him. He liked Mari. She was cheerful and straightforward, and she was also the prettiest girl in the two valleys. Nick was sure of that, because he had been a committed judge of Rhondda girls from the age of sixteen. No, now wasn’t the time to be thinking of the pit, or the South Wales Miners’ Federation, or of Bryn Jones’s torn chest and the bloody iniquities of the owners who had given it to him.

Mari was pointing down the road with her free hand. ‘Look. The train’s in. We’ll have to run for it, now.’

A frantic dash down to the station brought them out on the platform just as the guard was lifting his whistle to his mouth. Nick tore open the nearest door, swung Mari up so that her skirt billowed and he glimpsed the tops of her white cotton stockings, and leapt in beside her. They collapsed into the dusty seats with Mari tugging at her skirt hem and then putting her hands up to smooth her windblown bob. Nick looked at her pink cheeks and round, shining brown eyes.

‘I love you, Mari,’ he said, surprising himself.

Mari wasn’t surprised. ‘I know,’ she said simply. ‘I love you, too.’

Everyone went down to Barry when they had time and money to spend. In the good days before the War it was always bursting with miners and their wives and children, determined to enjoy themselves in the halls and bars and tea-rooms. On summer afternoons the sands were packed with picnicking families down for the day from the valleys.

It wasn’t quite the same in Barry any more, or anywhere across the South Wales coalfields.

Pits were closing because markets were shrinking, and the work wasn’t there any longer. The money wasn’t there either, even for the lucky ones who were in work, since the terrible days of the 1921 strike and the huge wage cuts that had followed it.

Looking round at the sea front, Nick saw how much it had changed from the times of his childhood outings. Everywhere had seemed freshly painted then, glittering with bright lights and tempting things to buy, or just to look at. Today, even though it was the middle of August, almost every other shopfront seemed to be closed up, some with forbidding boards over the windows. Those that were still open were trying hard, offering jugs of fresh pinky-brown shrimps and mounds of shiny blue-black winkles, green and red and gilt paper hats with ‘Barry Island’ printed on them, china mugs and brightly patterned souvenirs, sweets and tin spades and buckets and trays of teas for the beach. But the paint was peeling and the awnings were torn and faded, and there were only straggles of people passing in front of them in place of the old, cheerful crowds.

Beyond the pale green railings edging the front the sand was freshly uncovered, hard and brown and glittering in a thousand tiny points under the sun. The air smelt wonderfully clean and salty. That hadn’t changed, at least.

Mari ran to the railings and hung over them, calling to him. ‘Look at the sea, Nick. Come on, let’s run down to the water now.’

‘And get sand all over your shoes and those lovely white stockings?’ he teased her.

‘I’ll take them off,’ she said, mock-daringly, and then added, ‘Or no, later perhaps.’

They walked down to the water’s edge where the wavelets turned over themselves and the fringe of foam was swallowed up by the wet sand. There were two or three tiny flawless pink shells amongst the crushed white and grey fragments of larger ones at the tideline. Nick picked them up and closed them in the palm of Mari’s hand, seeing how the skin was rough and reddened from the washing and mending she did for Mrs Peris up at the Lodge.

‘Aren’t they pretty?’ Mari said. ‘Like little pink pearls.’

‘I’d give you real pearls, if I could,’ Nick said. There was something about today that put a rough edge in his voice. It was a happy day, a beautiful day, but it hurt him too.

‘That would be nice,’ Mari answered. ‘But I don’t need pearls, do I? I’m happy just as I am. Here, this minute.’

For a long, long moment they looked at each other.

In the end it was Nick who turned away, his back to the glitter of the sun on the sea, to look back at the rows of roofs and windows along the front. It looked better from here. The colours seemed no more than faded and softened by the salt wind, and the blank eyes of windows were less noticeable. In the centre was a red-brick public house, Victorian mock-Gothic with fantastic turrets and spires, topped by a gilded cockerel on a weather vane.

‘What would you like to do?’ he asked her formally. ‘Shall we have a drink at the Cock? Or are you hungry? We can have a fish dinner right away, if you want.’

‘Oh, a drink first, please. Then something to eat, and then we can go for a walk afterwards.’

They sat side by side on the hard, shiny red leather seats in the Cock, looking at the other holidaymakers. Nick drank two pints of beer, and Mari had two glasses of dark, sweet sherry. After the second her cheeks went even pinker and she found it doubly difficult to listen to what Nick was saying.

He was talking about the Miners’ Federation, and how important it was that every miner should be committed to it and its leaders, so that they could stand together and fight the bosses.

‘Nothing like 1921 must ever happen again,’ he said. ‘No more Black Fridays.’

Mari sighed. It was a part of Nick that she didn’t understand. Of course there should be a union, and of course all working men should belong to it. But all his talk of fights, and power bases, and nationalization and public ownership, and radicalization, and the Sankey Commission, she didn’t understand that at all.

There always would be bosses, and they never would want to pay the men the proper wage. Nor would they want to put their profits into mechanizing the mines and making them safer to work in, not while there were still plenty of men more than willing to go down them just as they were and for less and less money.

Secretly, Mari didn’t believe that all the unions in the world would ever change anything. There always would be men like Mr Peris who owned the third biggest colliery group in South Wales, and his wife who gave her handmade silk underwear away to her maid after two or three wearings, and there would be men and women like Nick and herself. If the men came out on strike, obedient to Nick and his kind who truly believed in the possibility of change, then the bosses just sent in the police and the troops and the strike-breakers, the miners got angrier and hungrier, and then when they couldn’t hold out against the hunger and the cold any longer, they went back down for less money than before. It would be just the same, Mari thought, if she told Mrs Peris’s housekeeper up at the Lodge that she rather thought she wouldn’t do quite so much of the heavy washing any more, but would like an extra two shillings a week just the same. She would simply find herself replaced by another Nantlas girl who would be glad to do what Mari Powell did, and without making any trouble about it.

Nick had stopped talking now, and he was looking at her with the same queer light in his eyes. Nick had unusual eyes, grey-green and pale against his dark skin and hair.

‘You don’t understand any of this, do you?’ he said.

‘Of course I do,’ Mari protested rapidly. ‘I understand, and I agree with you. So there’s no need to lecture me like one of your miners’ lodge meetings.’ She tried to look indignant, but at the same time she slid closer to him on the hard, slippery seat. ‘I don’t much want to talk about it, that’s all, not today. I’d rather have you to myself, not share you with every collier in Nantlas as well as the South Wales Miners’ Federation.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, contrite. ‘Let’s forget it at once.’ But before he put his arm around her shoulders again he said, as if he was warning her, ‘It’s important, Mari. Not just to me, but to all of us. I just want you to understand that if … if you have me, if you want me, you have the fight too. Do you?’

‘Yes.’ She was answering both his questions, thinking only of one.

With surprising gentleness for a big man, Nick touched her cheek with his fingertips. Then he grinned at her. ‘Too serious. Much too serious. What d’you say, shall we have another drink?’

‘Trying to get me drunk, is it?’

‘Of course. Then I can have my wicked way with you. A large one, then?’

‘No, thanks. You can buy me that fish dinner instead.’

Later, when they came out again, they turned westwards down the front into the sunshine. They dawdled arm in arm past the shopfronts, examining the displays. In the last shop in the line Nick bought a white china mug with Cymru am Byth gold-lettered on one side and Croeso i Barry on the other over highly coloured views of the resort.

‘To remind you of this elegant excursion,’ he said gravely.

Mari thanked him, equally gravely.

Then they were walking away from the sea front, down to where the road turned into a sandy track and then wound away around a little headland into an empty space of coarse grass and sunny hollows. For a while they walked in silence, listening to the sea and the grass swishing at their ankles. Although they were barely half a mile from the clamour of Barry, they might have been alone in the world.

Nick stopped at a deep hollow, enclosed on three sides by sun-warmed slopes tufted with seagrass, but open to the sea and the sky at the front. ‘Let’s stop for a while,’ he said.

They sat down with their backs against the sand and at once the steep walls insulated them. The sea was no more than a faint whisper, and the only other sound was the cry of a seagull directly overhead.

Mari thought that it was the first time they had ever been properly alone. Nick was lying back with his eyes closed. Without his penetrating stare and with the quick crackle of his talk silenced, he looked younger, softer-faced.

For once Nick wasn’t thinking of anything at all. He was simply relishing the quiet, the clean smell of the salt-scoured air, and the red light of the sun on his eyelids. It was so different from the confined dark, the noise and the often suffocating heat of every day.

When he opened his eyes again it was to look at Mari. She was lying propped up on one elbow, watching the slow trickle of sand grains past her arm. With her rosy cheeks and round brown eyes she looked polished, shiny with health like an apple, and that was an unusual attraction in Nantlas. Nick’s appraisal took in the rest of her. She was slim, but not thin, with a neat waist. And although she was short like the other girls in the valley, she had pretty legs and ankles. It amused Nick that she knew he was looking at her, admiring her, and wouldn’t meet his eyes.

‘Your shoes are full of sand,’ he said softly.

At once Mari sat up. ‘I said I’d take them off, didn’t I?’

She kicked off the shoes and then, deftly and unaffectedly, she unhooked her stockings and rolled them down over her knees and ankles. Her bare skin was very white, and Nick saw that her feet were small and square. Suddenly he was struck by her vulnerability, and his own. He knelt in the sand and kissed the instep of one foot. The skin was smooth and very warm.

He looked up at her and saw that she was smiling.

‘How old are you, Mari?’

‘Nineteen. I told you before.’

‘Do you think that’s old enough?’

He liked her better still because she didn’t pretend to be shocked, or not to know what he meant.

‘Yes. If it’s with you.’

The afternoon sun filled their hollow. As he reached to kiss her mouth Nick saw that the light had tipped her brown eyelashes with gold. Then their eyes closed, and for a long moment they didn’t see or hear anything else. Nick’s hand reached up and fumbled with the buttons of the new blue blouse. They came undone and he slid it off, stroking her shoulders and touching the hollows beside her neck. Then he found the buttons of her skirt and undid those too. Mari sat facing him in her cotton camisole neatly trimmed with cheap lace. Somehow it looked wrong beside the sharp grass and the clean washed sand.

‘Please take it off. I don’t think I can find the right buttons.’

‘Nick.’ She was genuinely scandalized now, wrapping her arms protectively around herself. ‘What if someone sees?’ He laughed delightedly. ‘So, Mari. It’s all right to make love and not be married, and to do it outside in the sunshine, but it’s not all right to take your underclothes off? Look, I’m taking mine off.’

Unconcernedly he stripped himself and knelt beside her again. Nick was neither interested in nor ashamed of his own body. For most of the time it was simply an instrument to be worked until it complained, and then in too-rare moments like this it gave him intense pleasure. But Mari was staring in half-abashed fascination, so he waited, trying to be patient with her. She looked at the breadth of his shoulders, and the knots of muscle in his arms. Nick’s skin was white too, but with an unhealthy, underground pallor of hard labour in enclosed places. There were bruises too, old ones fading into yellow and new blue ones. Across his upper arm there was a long puckered scar, blueish under the wrinkled skin as if the wound had not been cleaned properly before healing itself.

‘What’s that?’

‘A shovel,’ he said indifferently. ‘There isn’t a lot of room to work in an uncommon seam, and my arm was in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

‘Oh.’ Mari was looking down to where the sparse dark hair on his chest grew down in a thin line over his belly. Hesitantly, glancing up at him to see if she was doing right, she reached out to touch him.

‘That’s right.’ Nick’s voice was quite different now. ‘Touch me.’

There was another long moment of silence before he asked again. ‘Please. Take that thing off. If there’s anyone anywhere near, they’re doing the same as us. Why should they want to spy?’

Mari raised her arms and slipped the thin cotton off over her head. She sat up straight, lifting her head at the novel sensation of the breeze on her bare skin. She had small, firm breasts with pink nipples. Nick’s dark head bent forward as he touched one, very gently, with his tongue. Then they lay down in each other’s arms, stretching out against each other in the warmth.

‘It feels so lovely,’ Mari said. It was the oddness of another body next to hers, the same skin and heat as her own, but yet so different, and the sun and air on her flesh, and the prickle of the sand beneath her.

‘Here,’ Nick said, lifting her up. ‘Lie on my shirt.’

‘Oh, why? I liked the feel of the sand.’

She felt his deep chuckle in his throat, and suddenly he was the old comical Nick again that she knew quite well from social evenings and dances in the hall of the Miners’ Rest, and snatched half-hours alone in her mam’s front parlour.

‘Because it won’t feel nearly as lovely if we’re both covered in it, believe me.’

Mari was flooded with the sense of her own ignorance and she buried her face against him. ‘Tell me what to do,’ she said.

‘Like this, my love. Like this.’ Nick took her hand, and showed her. Then in his turn he discovered her, a discovery so surprising that it made her forget the sun and the sky, and the sound of the sea, and everything in the world except the two of them. At that moment Mari wouldn’t have known or cared if every man, woman and child in Nantlas had been standing at the lip of the hollow watching them.

Then, much later, she fell asleep with her hair fanned out over the scar on his arm, and his shirt spread over her for covering. Nick lay still, holding her close, and watching the light over them change from bright to pale blue, and then to no colour, at all except for a rim of palest pink.

At last Mari murmured something inaudible, stretched, and opened her eyes. ‘Have I been asleep for very long?’

‘Yes, very long. It was nice, watching you.’

She sat up, shaking the sand out of her hair, and his shirt fell away from her shoulders. At once her hands came up to cover herself.

‘It’s a bit late for that,’ he said, smiling at her.

‘I know that. It’s not you. What if…’ Gingerly she levered herself to peer over the rim of the hollow. The world stretched away ahead, empty except for the sea birds, and she flopped back in relief.

‘Here.’ Nick was holding her clothes out to her, shaken free of sand and folded neatly. He helped her to dress, smoothing the blue cotton and fastening the buttons with surprising dexterity. His hands were rough and cracked, but the fingers were slim for a man’s, and supple. When they were both dressed, they leaned back against the sand. Nick produced a small, slightly crushed bar of chocolate from his pocket and she bit ravenously into it. From another pocket be brought out a green and yellow Gold Flake tin and rolled himself a cigarette, and they sat contentedly together.

‘Nick?’ she asked after a moment. ‘What does it mean? What we … did, just now?’

Nick thought carefully. He had done it quite often before, with different girls, and he had believed that it meant exactly what it seemed to mean. They did it, and they both enjoyed it. He saw to that, because it was important. And then, after they had enjoyed enough of it, they were both free to move on.

The enjoyment part mattered, that was what made the bargain mutual. His first girl had taught him that. Not that she was a girl, exactly. Forty-year-old Mags Jenkin from Mountain Ash had coolly picked him out from a crowd of his seventeen-year-old mates. She was a widow, and nothing special to look at, but she knew all there was to know. ‘I can always tell the ones who’ll be natural at it,’ she had told him after their first time together. It was the first time that he’d stayed out all night, and the first night of his life that he hadn’t slept at all, even though he had to go down the pit just as usual at seven in the morning. ‘Listen,’ Mags had said. ‘The first thing is to make sure that the girl likes it too. It doubles the pleasure of it for you, see? And there’s sense in that, isn’t there?’

Nick had seen the sense of it so clearly that he had pressed her back against the grey blankets yet again, and had been late down at the shaft head for the first time in his life as well.

In due course, as Mags had assured him he would, he had turned his attentions to a younger, prettier girl. Mags had simply picked out another eager seventeen-year-old, and Nick had gone on from there, grateful for what she had taught him and happy with what seemed a satisfactory arrangement for everyone. But Mari Powell was different. Not all that different, he reflected, but it was enough.

‘What would you like it to mean?’ he asked her now, watching the averted pink curve of her face.

‘I’d like …’ She hesitated, and then the words came out in a sudden rush. ‘I’d like it to mean that we’re going to get married.’

I don’t want that. Nick heard his own sharp, inner voice. Do I?

Yet he had brought Mari down here, knowing that he would make love to her in a hollow by the sea, and knowing that it would be something different from the careful, deliberately casual encounters he had had in the past. He had wanted it to be different.

Nick frowned very slightly, and looked around him as if for another, less obvious avenue to move down.

But there was none. Everyone was married. All the men he worked with, almost all his friends. Rapidly, Nick tried to sum up for himself what being married would mean. Not living in his dad’s house any more, but a struggle to find and pay for another, identical house a little way off in one of the terraces. And then there would be Mari, pretty, cheerful Mari to come home to, and warm in bed beside him every night. There would be no other girls, but that would just mean an end to snatched hours in icy front parlours, or out in the cold in some corner of the valley. Mari and he would have their own room, their own bed. A life of their own.

He looked at Mari now, sitting tensely beside him in her blue blouse, apparently intent on the sand trickling out between the fingers of her clenched fist. ‘And would you have me?’

Her fists unclenched at once, and Nick saw the full blaze of delighted surprise in her face. ‘Nick, you know I would.’

He waited for a second, listening to the sea and the wind, and then he said, ‘Will you marry me, Mari?’

‘Yes.’

That was it, then, Nick thought. That was how it happened. You loved someone in a way that wasn’t quite exactly the same as all the others, for her pink cheeks and her smile and the scent of lilacs, and you found yourself marrying her.

To have and to hold. From this day forth for ever more. It wasn’t his voice but a stranger’s, mocking him inside his own head. But before Nick could catch himself up short for his own sourness, Mari’s delight overpowered him. Her arms were round his neck and her mouth was warm against his.

‘I love you, Nick. Oh, I love you.’

Her fervour touched him and made him smile so that he forgot everything else. ‘You sure? Me and the Fed? Me and the pit and Nantlas and the owners?’

‘Curse the whole bloody lot of them. I only love you.’ Her hands reached out to him, touching him and drawing him closer to her. ‘Nick, will you do it again? Please?’ They lay down once more, and the walls of the sand hollow enclosed them all over again.

It was almost dark when they reached the station, and the train for the valleys was waiting at the platform. Nick helped Mari up into the high carriage again, and was amused to find himself possessively smoothing the hem of her skirt so that no one else might catch a glimpse of the smooth whiteness above her knees. As they sat down, side by side on the gritty seats, he smelt the dust and smoke and knew that their holiday was over. Pushing back the thought, he asked her fiercely, ‘Are you mine? Really all mine?’

In the filthy, dimly lit train Mari was beautiful. Her hair was tousled and dark around her face, and her mouth looked fuller, bruised with kissing.

She smiled at him. ‘All. Always. We’re engaged now, aren’t we?’

Their hands were knotted together and Nick rubbed the bare fingers of her left hand with his.

‘I’ll buy you a ring. We’ll go into Cardiff and you can choose one. Does it matter if it isn’t a great diamond?’

‘Doesn’t matter if it’s a brass curtain ring, so long as it’s yours. I’ve got my mug, for now. It’ll have pride of place, you know, when we’re married. In the middle of our parlour mantel. To remind us of today.’

The train jolted savagely and then shuddered forward. Through the smeared window Nick watched the platform lights dropping behind them and the velvety August night wrapping round the train like a glove.

Quietly, he said, ‘It isn’t going to be easy, my love.’

Mari was too completely happy even to want to listen to his warnings. ‘When has it ever been, for our sort?’

‘Harder, then. Much harder. Worse than 1921, do you remember that? That was only a rehearsal for what’s coming to us.’

Mari remembered 1921. For the four months that the strike had lasted, March to July, neither her dad nor her brothers had worked. She herself had been earning a few pence a week then, doing mending and heavy cleaning for one of the pit managers’ wives, and her mother had taken in some washing. The five of them had lived on that, on bread and potatoes and hoarded tea, and had been luckier than many others.

She sighed now. ‘Why not be grateful for things as they are? Everyone except you says they’re better. They may be bad in other places, but there’s work for everyone who really wants it in the Rhondda now. Forty thousand men. You said so yourself.’

Nick turned away from the window, and the lights of towns strung out along the valley sides like so many necklaces, pretty at this distance.

‘It won’t last. It can’t. We can’t compete, you see. Not with German reparation coal, not with subsidized exports from everywhere. Nor with oil for shipping, and the hydroelectric. Steam coal’s had its day, my love, and so have we. Unless —’ his dark face was suddenly flooded with vivid colour — ‘unless we can change everything. Stop the owners lining their pockets. Nationalize the industry. Invest. Mechanize. Subsidize. And pay a fair wage to the men who do the work.’

Mari stroked his hand, running her fingers over the calluses, soothing him. ‘We’ll manage somehow, you and me. I know we will. You’re strong and willing, and they’ll always give you work while there’s still work to do.’

‘I won’t do it,’ he interrupted her. ‘Not in the old yes-to-me, no-to-him victimizing ways. There has to be work for every man, fair and square. And you’re wrong, in any case. I’ll be the first out, given what I believe in. And I’ll fight for the right for others to believe in too.’

Mari went on stroking his wrist, her voice gentle. It was old ground between them, and she hardly hesitated over it. ‘And I work too, don’t I? If what you’re afraid of does happen, we’ll still have something.’

‘Mari.’ He caught her wrist, almost roughly, stopping the stroking. Then he lifted her hand and rubbed it against his cheek. She felt the prickle of stubble and then his tongue as he kissed her fingers. It brought back the sand hollow and what had happened there, and she blushed. ‘Mari, what will happen when the babies come?’

Her face went bright scarlet. Conscious suddenly of the inquisitive faces around them, she whispered, ‘Will we have babies? Would you like that?’

For once, his grey-green eyes were neither opaque nor seeing beyond her. She was fully there, in the centre of his gaze, and she thought it was the happiest moment she had ever known.

‘Yes,’ Nick said. ‘Oh yes, I would like that. And I’d like to be able to give them something too. Something more than just enough to eat, and boots for their feet.’

‘We’ll do it,’ she promised him. She rested her head against his shoulder and he kissed the top of it protectively.

‘I wish,’ he murmured against her hair, ‘I wish we were married already. I want to take you home with me now, to my own bed. No sand. Just you and me, under the covers in the dark. Or no, in the light. So I can see you.’

‘Nick.’ Mari was stifling her laughter. ‘Hush, now. People can hear.’

Their arms were still wrapped round each other when they stepped off the train at Maerdy. Because they didn’t have eyes for anyone else, they didn’t see the shocked and anxious faces on the platform, nor did they hear the buzz of subdued talk that greeted the other passengers.

Nick surrendered their return tickets to the collector at the barrier without a glance, and they began the walk up the valley, still insulated by their happiness. Later, Mari tried to remember what they had talked about, and couldn’t remember any of it except Nick’s low voice, for no one but herself to hear, his arm around her, and his hand over her breast in the safe cover of darkness.

Then they came to the curve of the road, the point where they had started to run for the train only this morning, and they saw the lights.

All the lights were blazing at the Nantlas No. 1 pithead, even though the night shift should have been safely down long ago. If all was well, the only lights showing would be in the winding house where the night surface team manned the lifting gear, and in the little square window of the shift manager’s office. Yet tonight every single window was lit up, and there were other lights too, hand-held because they were bobbing about in the blackness.

In the moment that Nick and Mari stood together at the bend in the valley road, two huge searchlights came on and snuffed out the torches.

Nick had seen those lights before. They were brought to the pithead and erected on hastily assembled scaffolding to assist the rescue workers. He was already running.

Mari’s bewilderment lasted only a split second longer. ‘Explosion.’ She caught the word that Nick shouted back at her over his shoulder as no more than an echo of her own shrill scream. She began to run too, slipping and stumbling in the darkness on the rough road.

Nick was way ahead of her, moving much faster, and then she lost sight of him. But when she came gasping up to the silent crowd waiting at the colliery gates she saw him immediately, right up against the gates, his fists clamped on the bars.

He was shouting, and kicking against the solid ironwork. ‘Let me in. Let me in. Cruickshank, is that you? Open these bloody gates. Do you hear? Open them, you bastard.’

Mari elbowed and jostled her way through the crowd and reached Nick’s side just as Cruickshank, the pit manager, appeared beyond the gates.

‘Ah. Nick Penry, is it? Well then, you’d better come in and add your two penn’orth, for all the difference it’ll make.’

The gates creaked open and Mari slipped in behind Nick before they clanged shut again. Neither of the men paid any attention to her whatsoever, and she moved quickly into the shadow of a low wall.

‘How many?’ Nick said.

Cruickshank shrugged awkwardly. ‘Thirty, from the night book. Maybe one or two more, unofficial.’

Even Mari knew what ‘unofficial’ meant. For safety reasons, only an agreed number of men was allowed to work any given seam at any given time. But if extra men were willing to go in, working the awkward places unacknowledged and for less money than their official counterparts, the managers were glad to let them do it and to keep their names off the books. It meant more coal for less money in less time, after all. It was one of the things that Nick was trying to stop, through the Federation, even though his sympathy was with the often desperate men who were forced to do it.

‘One or two?’ Nick’s voice was harsh.

Cruickshank’s was level in response. ‘Well. Forty-four, we’re almost certain, although we haven’t got all the names yet.’

‘When did it happen?’

‘Just before six. Right at the shift end.’

‘Whose gang?’

‘Dicky Goch’s.’

In the shelter of her wall, Mari shivered. Dicky Goch, a red-haired giant with a turbulent family of red-haired children, was a popular figure in Nantlas. He had a fine singing voice, in the Rest on Saturday nights and in chapel on Sundays.

Nick was looking away from Cruickshank, back to the silent, waiting crowd at the gates. Mari knew that he was counting up the friends, fathers of families and boys of thirteen or fourteen, who worked with Dicky Goch. Then he turned sharply towards the pit-top.

‘Who’s gone down for them?’ he asked. ‘I want to go.’

‘Nick …’ Terror clutched at Mari, and her cry came out as a whisper.

Cruickshank said quietly, ‘It isn’t quite that easy. There’s a fire near the friction gear. The men are in number two district, the Penmor seam. The fire’s blocking the road to them.’

‘In Christ’s name, Cruickshank. Why are you standing here? Are the firemen down there?’ Nick loomed over the pit manager who stepped back quickly.

‘Be careful, Penry. This isn’t your pit. We’ve done everything we can. The shift manager went down right away with some men, but the fire was blocking the road. It’s a damp seam, that. There’s every chance of another explosion. I’ve ordered the pit closed.’

‘Closed?’

Mari shivered again at the cold fury in Nick’s face.

‘Closed. Do you want to risk more lives, man? There’s … there’s a problem with the reverse intake.’

Mari didn’t hear Nick’s muttered words, but she saw his fist swing. The manager scuttled backwards to avoid the blow, hands to his mouth. For a moment Nick stood looking at him, his face full of disgust. Then, awkwardly, he rubbed his knuckles although they hadn’t so much as grazed Cruickshank’s face.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said in a low voice. ‘You’re only the manager. What can you do, except what Peris tells you? How does that make you feel, tonight?’ Without waiting to hear if Cruickshank had any more to say Nick swung away towards the pit buildings.

Keeping to the protective shadows, Mari followed him. She felt a smothering sense of relief that the pit was closed and Nick would not be allowed to go down and be swallowed up by the fire.

At the powerhouse door she caught up with him. She pulled at his sleeve and he turned on her, fists clenching again before he saw who it was.

‘Mari?’ He was frowning, blacker-faced than she had ever seen him. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I wanted to be with you. To see you’re … safe.’

‘Don’t be a fool. Is there anyone belonging to you down this pit?’

‘No.’ Like Nick, all Mari’s family worked in Nantlas No. 2.

‘Well, then. Go home out of the way.’ Roughly he pulled her to him and kissed her, and then wrenched her round to face the gates again. Mari wanted to cling to him, dragging him back to her and away from the pit, and her fingers clutched at his Sunday coat.

‘Nick,’ she said desperately, knowing that it was stupid and unable to stop herself, ‘it isn’t a bad omen for us, is it, this happening today?’

‘An omen?’ He was crackling with anger now. ‘Don’t talk such bloody rubbish. More than an omen, isn’t it, for Gath Goch? And Dilys Wyn?’

John Wyn was the miners’ agent for No. 1. He worked with Dicky Goch too, and his fourteen-year-old twin sons as well.

Mari’s arms dropped to her sides. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. Numbly, she began to walk alone back towards the colliery gates.

Nick pushed open the powerhouse doors. He blinked in the light. In the high, red-brick interior the great generators were still humming, keeping the searchlights outside uselessly burning. Polished brass winked proudly back at him. At first glance the cavernous space seemed empty, then Nick looked up to the iron gallery that ran round the walls. A group of men was huddled in front of the air gauges. Most of them were still pit-black, and half a dozen wore the cumbersome back-tanks, coiled tubes and orange webbing of rescue breathing apparatus. Through the generator hum, Nick heard their defeated silence.

He ran to the spiral staircase and took the stairs three at a time, his boots clanging on the iron.

‘Nick.’ The men nodded acknowledgement to him. Among them were their own union representative, Jim Abraham, Nick’s own senior agent from No. 2 pit, and John Wyn’s No. 1 deputy. The shift manager was there too, his face and clothes grimed from his expedition down the shaft.

‘Bad?’ Nick asked, knowing how bad it must be for there to be this silence, this inactivity. When no one spoke he said roughly, ‘What happened, in God’s name?’

One of the men wearing breathing apparatus came wearily forward. In a flat voice he began to tell the story. Nick recognized that it was already becoming a set piece, a tale that would have to be repeated for the Mines Inspector, the manager’s meeting, the inquest. Nick served on the Miners’ Safety Committee, and he had heard half a dozen similar recitals.

‘I went down with Dicky Goch today,’ the miner said. ‘Unofficial, see? It was a normal shift. I was in the last stall, the one next to Dicky, with Rhys there.’ He pointed to one of the other men, also in rescue gear. ‘They were all empty, behind us. The rest of the gang was up ahead.’ Nick nodded, understanding that the official men would have the best places. ‘At ten to six, Dicky came back and told me and Rhys to put up. We were to go back to the main shaft and call through that the rest were coming. We went. We were just passing the junction with two district when we felt the air reversing past us. It was licking the dust up behind us. We knew there was something bad wrong. We ran to the shaft bottom and called through for help. As the cage came down we heard the explosion.’

‘Felt it, more like,’ the other miner corrected him. ‘No noise. Just a shaking and shuddering.’

‘I was on my way down in the lift cage,’ the shift manager put in quickly. He was anxious to convince the men’s representatives that the right things had been done, the right procedures followed. Too eager, too anxious, Nick thought. ‘I met the two men here at the shaft bottom and they told me what had happened. I sent up for the breathing apparatus, collected the other men who had come up meanwhile, and we set off again. The air was rushing past us all the time. It’s a damp seam, the Penmor …’

His voice trailed off uncomfortably.

One of the other men took up the story. ‘We got within fifty yards of the junction of the main haulage road with the road down to Penmor. The fire had taken proper hold. As we stood there, watching like, a great long tongue of blue flame came licking back up towards us. Then it was sucked back again, and the air behind us with it. There was nothing to do. I’ve never seen a fire like it. Trying to fight it with what we had would have been like pissing down into hell.’

There was another long, quiet moment. The generators hummed blindly on.

‘The district was checked today, was it?’ Nick asked softly.

Jim Abraham half-raised his hand to stop him, and then wearily let it fall again. What Nick Penry wanted to know, he found out somehow. And words, whatever they were on either side, could make no difference tonight.

The shift manager, not looking at anyone, said, ‘The report book clearly states that the fireman checked every working stall in the area this morning. There was some gas, but very little. No more than two per cent.’

‘And the empty stalls?’

‘Ah … not today, as it happens. According to the book, that is.’

And so from somewhere, deep in the workings, an outrush of the deadly fire-damp gas had gone undiscovered. It had mixed with the airflow and a tiny spark, perhaps from a cracked safety lamp or even a piece of overheated machinery, had ignited it. And then it had exploded.

In an even softer, and more dangerous, voice Nick said, ‘General Rules, of which even you as shift manager must be aware, state that daily checking for gas escape in every area of the mine is mandatory …’

‘Save it, Nick,’ someone was murmuring. ‘This isn’t the time.’

Down in the body of the powerhouse, the door opened again. The pit manager came in. At his shoulder was a bulky, middle-aged man in evening dress.

‘Here’s Mr Peris, lads,’ the manager shouted up to them.

The men crowded forward and leaned over the gallery railings. Nick felt the press of them behind him, solid but defeated. Further behind them, unwatched now, were the rows of air gauges with their nil readings. His hands gripped the cold iron. Beneath him, in Lloyd Peris’s upturned face, reddened with food and drink, he read the brazen readiness to bluster out of his responsibilities. Nick felt his throat swell and tighten with the rage inside him.

‘Peris? What happened to the air intake reverse?’ His shout filled the span of the arched roof and echoed back at him. ‘What happened to it, Peris?’

There was no answer. Nick pushed through the men and clanged down the iron stairs again. Cruickshank shrank back a little, but the owner stood his ground squarely.

‘A little too much of the hothead, Penry,’ he said smoothly. ‘It won’t do you or your men any good. Not shouting at me, nor threatening my manager. Now, as you all know’ – he raised his voice so that the men waiting above could hear – ‘there has been a sad accident tonight. I have had a full report from Mr Cruickshank here, who has acted very properly. An unavoidable explosion was followed by an outbreak of fire, which cut off the men’s egress and prevented a rescue party from reaching them. I understand that a number of brave men, led in an exemplary manner by the shift manager, tried to get down there. Thank you for that.’ He smiled, intending a grave, consoling gesture that at the same time took in Nick’s clean face and clothes. The smile looked to Nick like the split in a pumpkin.

‘The intake?’ Nick asked him again, trying to swallow the loathing that was rising inside him as if he was about to vomit.

‘An unfortunate aspect of the accident is the failure of the reversing mechanism,’ Peris added. ‘The trapped men were subject to a negative airflow.’

The redness in front of Nick’s eyes swirled and threatened to blot everything out. He would have reached out to Peris and torn his starched shirt front, and tightened the absurd black bow around his neck until the man’s eyes popped and his tongue swelled between his lips. But Jim Abraham stepped smartly up behind him and locked his arms behind his back. Nick heard his own roaring voice filling his head, the force of it rasping at his throat.

‘They suffocated, man. Why don’t you use the proper words? Make your mouth taste nasty, do they? If the explosion didn’t get them, they suffocated to death, because your safety mechanism never worked. John Wyn told me himself. He said the installation was never completed. You didn’t want to spend the money on it, did you?’

Cut off from the normal air supply by the fire, the trapped men should have been kept alive by a simple switch which would pump in fresh air through the exhaust system. When it had failed, they had been left to die.

Nick twisted to free himself, but Jim Abraham’s grip was like iron.

‘We all know it, Peris. Every man here. It’s your negligence. You murdered forty-four men tonight. You are a common murderer.’

Even as he shouted, Nick knew that his words were a pathetically useless weapon against Lloyd Peris. The owner was already at the powerhouse door.

‘You will have a chance to present your unfounded accusations through the proper channels, Penry. Mr Cruickshank has the duty to inform the relatives of the dead men, with my deepest sympathy. He also has my orders to cap the down air supply. The pit will remain closed until the fire is out and we are sure of its safety. Good night.’

‘Your sympathy?’ Nick was shouting at the closing door, knowing that he sounded like a madman and unable to control himself. ‘Your only sympathy is with yourself because this has disturbed your bloody dinner.’

The heavy door was shut.

Jim Abraham released Nick’s arms. Briefly the older man hugged him, leaving black marks on Nick’s Sunday coat.

‘I know, lad,’ he said gently. ‘We all know. It’s like you want to kill them for it, and not even that would be enough. I was at Senghenydd, remember? Four hundred and thirty-nine men, that day.’

‘I know how many,’ Nick said bitterly. He was suddenly limp, and as defeated with the ebbing of his terrible anger as the ring of men watching him. ‘Forty-four or four hundred, it’s all the same, isn’t it? His fault, and his friends.’

Cruickshank had gone away up the gallery stairs. He had been turning heavy, polished wheels and watching the dials as the pointers flicked and sank back. Now he came to the master switch. He eased it up and the even hum of the generators faltered, dropped in pitch and died away into silence. Outside the searchlights blinked out and the pithead was lit only by the cold, feeble circles of the emergency lights.

Nick had no idea whether it was real or inside his head, but he heard the terrible low cry from the crowd at the gates. There had been no official announcement, but the news would have reached them long ago. They would all know what the sudden dark and quiet meant.

One by one, not looking at each other, the rescue party filed out of the powerhouse. They would go to the families of the dead men, and try to reassure them that they had done all they could.

Nick found himself standing alone in the shadows with the useless machinery towering around him. Wordlessly, numbed by anger that hadn’t yet given way to grief, he made a promise to the men buried in Nantlas No. 1. He promised them that he would fight the greed and callousness and cruelty that had killed them.

Nick shivered. He realized that he had no idea how long he had been standing there. Slowly, moving stiffly, he walked out of the powerhouse and across to the railings. The coal dust crunched with gritty familiarity under his feet. The crowd that had pressed against the railings was gone, taking its grief with it up to the little houses on the hillside. Nick was on his way up too when he saw that not quite everyone was gone. A little way off someone was standing staring back at the pithead. From the torn shirt showing the white glimmer of skin, Nick recognized Bryn Jones. He remembered that he had promised this morning to have a word with Dicky Goch for him. No one would have any more words for Dicky now.

Coming up beside him, Nick saw that Bryn was crying, silent involuntary tears that ran down his face and dripped on to his hopeless chest.

‘All of them, is it?’ Bryn asked.

‘Yes.’ Nick’s arm came briefly around his thin shoulders, hugging him as Jim Abraham had hugged Nick himself. ‘You didn’t get down in time, then? You were lucky today, Bryn.’

‘Call it luck, do you?’ The bitterness was not against Nick, but against all the things that they both knew.

‘Come on,’ Nick told him gently. ‘Don’t stand out in this damp air.’

They turned their backs on the darkened pit and went on up the hill together.