prefer boys. ‘Promise?’ she said.
‘I promise,’ he said breathlessly.
‘Thank you,’ she said, then she let him kiss her.
The little house in Wellington Row, Aberowen, South Wales, was crowded at one o’clock on Saturday afternoon. Lloyd’s grandfather sat at the kitchen table looking proud. On one side he had his son, Billy Williams, a coal miner who had become Member of Parliament for Aberowen. On the other was his grandson, Lloyd, the Cambridge University student. Absent was his daughter, also a Member of Parliament. It was the Williams dynasty. No one here would ever say that – the notion of a dynasty was undemocratic, and these people believed in democracy the way the Pope believed in God – but, just the same, Lloyd suspected Granda was thinking it.
Also at the table was Uncle Billy’s lifelong friend and agent, Tom Griffiths. Lloyd was honoured to sit with such men. Granda was a veteran of the miners’ union; Uncle Billy had been court-martialled in 1919 for revealing Britain’s secret war against the Bolsheviks; Tom had fought alongside Billy at the Battle of the Somme. This was more impressive than dining with royalty.
Lloyd’s grandmother, Cara Williams, had served them stewed beef with home-made bread, and now they sat drinking tea and smoking. Friends and neighbours had come in, as they always did when Billy was here, and half a dozen of them stood leaning against the walls, smoking pipes and hand-rolled cigarettes, filling the little kitchen with the smell of men and tobacco.
Billy had the short stature and broad shoulders of many miners but, unlike the others, he was well dressed, in a navy-blue suit with a clean white shirt and a red tie. Lloyd noticed that they all used his first name often, as if to emphasize that he was one of them, empowered by their votes. They called Lloyd ‘boyo’, making it clear that they were not over-impressed by a university student. But they addressed Granda as Mr Williams: he was the one they truly respected.
Through the open back door Lloyd could see the slag heap from the mine, an ever-growing mountain which had now reached the lane behind the house.
Lloyd was spending the summer vacation as a low-paid organizer at a camp for unemployed colliers. Their project was to refurbish the Miners’ Institute Library. Lloyd found the physical work of sanding and painting and building shelves a refreshing change from reading Schiller in German and Moliere in French. He enjoyed the banter among the men: he had inherited from his mother a love of the Welsh sense of humour.
It was great, but it was not fighting Fascism. He winced every time he remembered how he had skulked in the Baptist chapel while Boy Fitzherbert and the other bullies chanted in the street and threw stones through the window. He wished he had gone outside and punched someone. It might have been stupid but he would have felt better. He thought about it every night before falling asleep.
He also thought about Daisy Peshkov in a pink silk jacket with puffed sleeves.
He had seen Daisy a second time in May Week. He had gone to a recital in the chapel of King’s College, because the student in the room next to his at Emmanuel was playing the cello; and Daisy had been in the audience with the Westhamptons. She had been wearing a straw hat with a turned-up brim that made her look like a naughty schoolgirl. He had sought her out afterwards, and asked her questions about America, where he had never been. He wanted to know about President Roosevelt’s administration, and whether it had any lessons to teach Britain, but all Daisy talked about was tennis parties and polo matches and yacht clubs. Despite that, he had been captivated by her all over again. He liked her gay chatter all the more because it was punctuated, now and again, by unexpected darts of sarcastic wit. He had said: ‘I don’t want to keep you from your friends – I just wanted to ask about the New Deal’, and she had replied: ‘Oh, boy, you really know how to flatter a girl.’ But then, as they parted, she had said: ‘Call me when you come to London – Mayfair two four three four.’
Today he had come to his grandparents’ house for the midday meal, on his way to the railway station. He had a few days off from the work camp, and he was taking the train to London for a short break. He was vaguely hoping he might run into Daisy, as if London were a little town like Aberowen.
At the camp he was in charge of political education, and he told his grandfather he had organized a series of lectures by left-wing dons from Cambridge. ‘I tell them it’s their chance to get out of the ivory tower and meet the working class, and they find it hard to refuse me.’
Granda’s pale-blue eyes looked down his long, sharp nose. ‘I hope our lads teach them a thing or two about the real world.’
Lloyd pointed to Tom Griffiths’s son, standing in the open back door and listening. At sixteen, Lenny already had the characteristic Griffiths shadow of a black beard that never went away even when his cheeks were freshly shaved. ‘Lenny had an argument with a Marxist lecturer.’
‘Good for you, Len,’ said Granda. Marxism was popular in South Wales, which was sometimes jokingly called Little Moscow, but Granda had always been fiercely anti-Communist.
Lloyd said: ‘Tell Granda what you said, Lenny.’
Lenny grinned and said: ‘In 1872 the anarchist leader Mikhail Bakunin warned Karl Marx that Communists in power would be as oppressive as the aristocracy they replaced. After what has happened in Russia, can you honestly say Bakunin was wrong?’
Granda clapped his hands. A good debating point had always been relished around his kitchen table.
Lloyd’s grandmother poured him a fresh cup of tea. Cara Williams was grey, lined and bent, like all the women of her age in Aberowen. She asked Lloyd: ‘Are you courting yet, my lovely?’
The men grinned and winked.
Lloyd blushed. ‘Too busy studying, Grandmam.’ But an image of Daisy Peshkov came into his mind, together with the phone number: Mayfair two four three four.
His grandmother said: ‘Who’s this Ruby Carter, then?’
