Read Online Flame and Slag by Ron Berry - Free Book Online

regardless of powder smoke and water, but they wouldn’t handle a shovel if they could help it. In the site office on top pit, you’d see a photograph of Queen Elizabeth II on one wall and a doctored portrait of the owner’s German wife on the opposite wall. Our Queen for patriotism, the other for money. Maybe the times were propitious. Times change. The German firm came without a blip of publicity. They simply arrived, rigged up their gear, sank pits, drove extensive link headings, built factories. Their men did not come to Wales to ease a labour shortage, they came to do business, make legitimate profit.
    Tal Harding boarded four Germans in his empty bungalow, Tal himself living forlorn as any father-hammered son in the flat above Daren general post office. Mrs Cynon fostered a Pole named Fred Fransceska. When Fred married a barmaid from the Earl Haig club big Percy acted best man again, his mother in charge of the invitation list. Fred belonged. He’d worn Silesian coal scars on his face since boyhood. Ellen liked Fred. She befriended him. They both ignored questions unrelated to living from day to day. Ellen’s ideas were governed by the assumption that we lived between waking and sleeping, easy when easy, greedy if necessary, scrimping without remorse, pleasuring without guilt. When Fred Fransceska got drunk in our house he showed us where a Russian bullet had ploughed through his buttock, and he was slavering sobs like a ruined behemoth, his underpants around his ankles, Ellen weeping sympathy, Lydia crying because they were, Morfed (Fred’s new wife, half his age) sprinting down the street to Waun Arms for more whisky to dilute her first experience of Fred expressing the blues of his youth.
    Early spring glorified Daren, warming inland from across the Bristol Channel, crazy yellow daffodils guarding the lawn outside Caib institute, the background trees, all hardwood timber, storming massed leaf buds, and Waunwen’s huge black scar completely stabilized, prinking special grass seed planted by the Coal Board, who were still dealing with claims for injury and death. The tip-slide a full year behind us, Daren’s solitary, deserted Welsh Church of England taking a glossy face-lift conversion into a supermarket, and weekly notices in the Clarion advising relatives to attend re-burials of exhumed bodies from the churchyard. There they were, many forgotten, entirely unknown Staffordshire and English Border names from over a century ago, from earlier times when only ironmasters worked the soft bituminous coal from mountain levels, the whole uprearing landscape of Daren pocked with these small, overgrown, caved-in holes, each with its hummocky mound-spill of debris turned green as the institute’s front lawn.
    “Green always comes back,” Ellen said. “It’s silly, all the shouting and screaming about coal-tips. Look at Daren, marked like an old man’s face, and what’s wrong with that? I hated coming home, but now we’re living our own lives. It’s good to live your own life.”
    “You hated circumstances,” I said.
    “I did … this time I hope we get a boy,” pausing from cutting sandwiches to thumb at her belly. “Brother for Lydia.”
    I said, “Beaut, you don’t have to make my breakfast in the mornings. Stay in bed. I can fix things for myself.”
    “Hush up, I’m not helpless. Who had a bump yesterday? They were talking about him in the Co-op.”
    “Bloke from lower down. Eddie ’Lectric we call him. He was on extracting — extracting cogs; something hit him in the face.”
    “Will he lose his eye?”
    “Left eye, aye, according to our ambulance man. I hope to Christ not, because Eddie’s all right. His father went to prison for singing the Red Flag outside the manager’s house. Years ago now, years and years. The bastards took him in for disturbing the peace.”
    “I worry about you sometimes, Reesy.”
    “Don’t,” I said. “The Caib isn’t going to hurt me, not after what happened