I slept.
CHAPTER 17
WENT BACK to Ponty a week after this, for the bottom had come out of farming and we were only keeping alive by the skin of our fingers. No trouble with Job Gower, though he grinned a knowing grin: labour would be easy the way things were going, skilled men especially. And I went back to Liam Muldooney in his two foot seam. Good to be with Morfydd again. We were closer than ever now on the morning walks to the pit. Good to be relieved of the strain of pinching, too, for our combined wages were now nineteen shillings. Good to be away from Mari, hell to be away from Mari.
Came Christmas with its white dresses and glaciers, its red log fires and goodwill to neighbours though we were still burning ricks and gates. I was out most weeks with Rhayader now, save when on night shift and somehow or other Mam did not get wind of it though she had played the devil about the state of my face, with a pinch round her mouth and her suspicions of Sixpenny Jane who had marked more than one in the village.
Sweet were the nights when the neighbours called to sit in a circle for Readings of Him. Most religious, our friends, chiefly Nonconformists, though we sported a few Church of England, making allowances for the misguided, being Christmas. Matrons I do love to call at the house best, for they are of the world and with kindness, women like Biddy Flannigan with breasts for weeping on, Abel’s mam, though she’d have given him Abel if she’d known he was burning gates.
“Well, well! Biddy Flannigan!” Mam would cry. “Come you in, fach, get warm by the fire!” And in she would come, black as a tomb with her bulges and wheezings as a mother should be. She sits in fat comfort, then, the sweat lying bright in the folds of her chins, black bun, black brooch with its picture of Victoria, God bless her. Living to satisfy the appetite of Abel, this one; going to grease in the heat of her oven. But she had another at home besides Abel – the idiot offspring of a churchyard digger, second husband, now deceased. Head lolling, spit dribbling, her idiot floundered and grunted, wallowing at table, screaming in bed. My cross, said Biddy, every woman’s got one, if it isn’t the womb it’s the offspring, and Cain is mine, God help him. Strange is the body of Woman, delivering a man one year and spewing a devil the next, though with Abel and Cain in the house it was hard to find the devil.
Christmas dinner eaten now and Black Boar tavern was going like something out of Hades, for the men of the northern industries were sweeping in proper, coming like an army, ragged, starving, desperate; running from the closed pits and blown-out furnaces of the industry. Men who had not seen Carmarthen for years came home, dragging themselves along the highways, sleeping in snow with their little scrags of women and children dragging behind them. But a few had money that Christmas, single ones mostly, and they crowded the taverns from morning till night, quarrelling and drinking to drown their desperation. In his element was Grandfer now, of course; beer-swilled, tub-thumping, laying down the law, and night after night I heard him stumble to his room with Mari’s gentle voice to guide him. Amazing to me that he’d lasted so long – still more amazing where he got his money from for the drinking – must have salted a tidy bit away before the gates sprang up. And the second day after Christmas it lasted no longer.
The county blew up as Grandfer blew up.
The wooden horse was marching day and night now and the hatreds were rising in bitterness and threats. Burning hayricks dotted the countryside, the tollgates were blazing from Llandeilo to Pembroke, and as fast as we burned them they were rebuilt by Bullin, the price of the damage put on the tolls, and burned again. Windows were smashed nightly, gentry salmon weirs blown up, magistrates burned in effigy, people ridiculed in public. The whole teeming countryside from coast to coast brawled and rioted into open revolution. Special constables were sworn in to protect the gates, special constables were dragged out and horsewhipped by the Rebeccas. The dragoons and marines were dashing around arresting people, the magistrates had special sittings, with public warnings and transportations; the prisons were crammed to their doors, workhouses bulging. From Whitland to Laugharne, Saundersfoot to Carmarthen, the yeoman farmers armed for the fight. The poor became poorer, the poorest starved under the new Poor Law. Spindle-legged children were wandering the villages and dying of fever on beds of straw. Mass meetings were held on Mynydd Sylen and the torchlight processions around Picton’s Column, Carmarthen, became bolder and bolder. From the first Rebecca – Tom Rees of Efail-wen – there sprang up a host of new Rebeccas, men of education and most with deep religious beliefs, and the gates went down in scores. But the gates, as Rhayader had told us, were only the outward symbol of oppression. The reasons of discontent reached out to the very throne of England. One bitter complaint was the workhouse test, and people were starving rather than accept it. An evil exchange, Rebecca said; better auction the poor to the highest bidder as in the old days than drive them to the workhouse to be torn apart from their families and starved. Unmarried mothers were another indignity. The new Poor Law sent them straight to the workhouse, for the task of proving paternity was now placed on the woman, and the man usually got off scotfree. Good women, many of these unmarried mothers, said Rebecca – violated by deceit and the promise of marriage, and the Poor Law violated them again. To starve was a crime and thousands were starving rather than enter the workhouses. The
