God Is an Englishman (50 page)

Most of the older pits were sited along the ancient river beds, their skeletal apparatus pitched in the narrow valleys seamed by row upon row of tiny, terraced houses, some of which seemed to have begun life at the top of the hillsides, slithered halfway down, and were now crowding upon the remains of earlier settlements, as though they wanted nothing more than to push them down the shafts and fall on top of them. The conical tips about here were high and crowned with a crust of brittle slurry that, in dry weather, could be broken by the touch of an iron-shod boot but was more often soft and moulded, particularly after winter rains converted the tips into gigantic black sponges. Sometimes, when shifts were coming or going, it looked as though nothing but a multitude of plodding, greyish beetles lived down there, insects trained to the toot of the whistle so that they surged up or down the hills in obedience to some blind, primeval impulse.

The railway had reached this far a long time ago, running out spurs from the Newport-Abergavenny-Hereford line as it dropped down to link up with the South Wales railroad. Trucks, full and empty, moved ceaselessly along these spurs, and more branch lines were building as coal was clawed from newer, smaller pits GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 263

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higher up the slopes, and in valleys where, even yet, green predominated over black and slate grey.

Llangatwg was such a pit, north of the Abergavenny-Merthyr Tydfil road, still only two years old, and as yet without a rail to call its own, discounting the narrow gauge laid dawn by the owners when the pit first opened. For to link Llangatwg to a main siding was proving an expensive business, not only on account of the gradient but because of a freakish rock-seam that ran diagonally across the projected course and converted the approach into a series of ridges that were the despair of the engineers. They had persisted, however, in the way of railway builders, and were now only a mile or so short of the pithead. They might, with luck, have made the connection by the end of the year had not heavy snow fallen, causing a suspension of work. On the second day they called in their teams and paid them off to kick their heels for a week or two. It was hopeless to excavate under conditions of hard frost, and no coal had come down in the last forty-eight hours for the narrow-gauge line was soon obliterated by drifts that built up between the ridges and the levelled tipping ground at the top was already full of freshly mined coal.

Work ceased for the engineers but not for the miners. Fifteen hun dred feet below the mountain the weather was the same all the year round, and men and ponies continued to use the main roads and galleries heedless of the snow, just as they were indifferent, in high summer, to the airlessness of the narrow valley, or the rain bucketing from the rock ledges in spring and autumn. There was even a certain eagerness among the men coming on shift from the town be low to seek the shelter of the pit after the long, stumbling slither up the slope to work, whereas men coming off shift, spilling from the cage like schoolboys, still found the energy to toboggan down the ridges to their homes.

The day shift had been below an hour or more when it happened. Men trundling tubs across the level stretch from grading screens to where a line of trucks stood frozen to the rails, heard a muffled boom and then a long, hissing sigh, as though the mountain had belched and turned in its sleep, and soon the pithead was like a squat mag net attracting everything on two legs for half-a-mile around, and the sustained wail of the siren brought awareness of disaster to night-shift men and womenfolk in the town below, so that the long slope was streaked with running, stumbling figures churning the clean snow into yellow slush as they clawed their way upwards.

Men looking like frenzied gnomes darted in and out of the sheds, shouting to GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 264

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one another that the lower level main road was flooded roof-high, and when the few who had escaped the avalanche of solid water were lifted out and counted it was found that eighty-seven men and boys were missing, perhaps half of them already drowned and the rest, in the more distant galleries, as good as dead, unless, by some miracle, the water could be pumped from the road and shaft, and the rescue teams could make a thorough search against the checkers’ lists.

News of this kind, news of men and boys whose lives hang upon a thread attached to some imponderable shift of circumstances out side the range of men above ground, is not circulated by means of the printed word, or doled out in verbal driblets by some desperately worried official, juggling with words at the window of a besieged oflìce. It circulates freely, accurately, and almost instantaneously within a closed community, where almost every living soul is in volved in the tragedy, and even those who are not find themselves sucked into the vortex by the currents weaving about them.

It is as though each new scrap of information is scribbled on a scrap of paper and tossed above the crowd where it is caught and broadcast over a square mile.

A lampman at the foot of the shaft tells of a half-drowned miner gasping out that the water roofed above the first dip in the main road, sealing in the shift a hundred yards or so deeper in the mountain. A checker, who was one of the last up, says that the cage cannot descend below the second level because there must, by now, be twenty foot of water in the shaft. A third man brings news that the supplementary shaft further down the slope is also flooded, and so the news circulates, passed from mouth to mouth in a matter of seconds, and officials, checking names of the missing against known casualties, recruiting rescue teams, and gauging the sucking power of the pump, have no need to keep watchers informed of progress.

It was by some such means that Bryn Lovell heard about it and was able, even at a distance, to estimate the chances of eighty-seven en tombed men, and it was a conviction that he could make a unique contribution that sent him scurrying over from Abergavenny and ploughing up the slope to the pit yard where, by now, some three thousand men and women were standing about the pithead.

He was a strange, sombre man, a misfit in the community in that he was aloof and very solitary, seemingly without the need for the solace of wife, children, or even a friend, and lacking the sense of humour that saves the isolated Celt from self-destruction before he attains middle-age. He was considered, by the few who knew him to be an educated man, with any amount of book learning under his thatch, but this was only half true. Although he had taught himself to GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 265

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read with a primer when he was in his early twenties, he had read but two kinds of books, those dealing with social history and those concerned with moral philosophy, and perhaps it was what he dredged from these humourless tomes that made him walk alone, conjuring with the theories advanced by their erudite authors. He was tall and spare, with thinning grey hair, and a slight stoop. He was also near-sighted, and wore a pair of steel-framed spec tacles that had served his father through two decades of the eight eenth century, and were now pressed into service by his son who was a frugal man and saw no reason to buy a new pair. He sub scribed to no religious cult, his evenings with his books having taught him to distrust all creeds, but he was a man of great integrity and none of those with whom he did business held out for a piece of paper pledging Lovell to abide by his quotations or schedules.

Here in the Mountain Square Lovell had got off to a slow start but he was now firmly established in the north and centre of the Square and was, to Adam’s gratification, making steady progress in short-haul work within an area well-served by rail. He had estab lished a string of reliable agents along the South Wales main line, and Swann-on-Wheels pinnaces and frigates were beginning to be seen in all the upper valleys, where they carried a great variety of goods, everything from pit-props to cabbages. Taken all round Adam Swann had reason to consider Bryn Lovell the most reliable of his provincial managers, equating him, in terms of enterprise, with Catesby in the north, and in terms of reliability with a man like Wadsworth in the Crescents.

When Lovell arrived at the pit he went straight to the engine-house where he spent five minutes staring at the pump. He knew something about pit machinery, for his father and uncles had worked for a man who made pumps and winding gear in the early days of the boom, and Bryn had spent his boyhood in and about the machine shops. He recognised the pump at once as an old Boulton and Watt product, of a kind that had superseded the Newcomen pump some thirty years ago, and it shocked him to find such a museum piece in a new pit. It straddled the engine house like a giant bellows, sucking and wheezing and gurgling, as though protesting against the strain placed upon it. He would say, at a guess, that it was capable of keeping the level of the water constant in the flooded shaft and road but no more than that.

When he had done with looking he asked a furnaceman how it came to be there, and why a new pit like Llangatwg was not equipped with modern apparatus. The man said, breathlessly, that it had been bought second-hand from an old, worked-out pit lower down the valley. Lovell went out of the shed, crossed GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 266

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the yard and shouldered his way through the crowd into the pit manager’s office, where a group of men in topcoats were standing round a stocky figure study ing a plan of the workings. He did not bother to introduce him self but said, firmly but politely, “Who is the owner of the mine? Would it be one of you gentlemen?”

They looked at him, surprised that a layman, and a stranger at that, could ask such a question at a time like this. Then the man hold ing the plan grunted, “I’m pit-manager. Gaffer isn’t here yet. Who the hell are you?”

“My name is Lovell,” Bryn said, still politely. “I’m Abergavenny manager for Swann-on-Wheels, the hauliers, but there’s no point in wasting time. I know a way to get those men out alive. If you’re prepared to listen I’ll talk. If not then I must go and find the owner.”

The men gaped at him, their protests checked by his air of authority. Then Dowlais, the manager, said, “Never heard o’ you or your business, but if you’ve anything useful to say for Christ’s sake say it. I’ll listen.”

“That pump can’t do more than keep the water level,” Bryn said. “What’s more, if you go on working it like that its boiler will burst and then the water will flood all your levels. It’s a very old pump and ought never to have been installed in the first place.”

Dowlais took his pipe from his mouth, stared hard at Lovell, and then spat at the stove. “You’ve got no call to say things like that,” he said, “even if they’re true.

What the hell do you mean, barging in here and lecturing me about the bloody pump?” He had been on the point of ordering Lovell from the premises, but the man’s unwinking gaze made him think twice about it so he went on, in a surly tone: “Not that you’re talking twaddle. We could clear that shaft and road in twenty-four hours if we had a Shannon pump, but where the hell are we to lay hands on one? You got a Shannon pump in your pocket?” One of the men standing by tittered but Lovell’s expression did not change. He said, in the same level voice, “I know where I can find a Shannon pump. With a cleared line down below I could get it into Llangatwg before dark. There’s a Shannon pump consigned for Steepcote Colliery waiting at Merthyr. It’s lying on a siding now. If I were you I should commandeer it. I wouldn’t waste time getting the owner’s permission, for he doesn’t even know it’s arrived yet. It’s two days early, on account of me hauling the casing to the railhead three days ahead of schedule.”

It was a long speech for a man of Lovell’s temperament and it embarrassed him. Suddenly the men surrounding him formed them selves into a respectful GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 267

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circle while Dowlais, the manager, looked almost exalted. He moved forward a pace and caught Lovell by the arm.
“You just hauled the casing of a Shannon pump to
Abergavenny?
You saw it stowed into a wagon and sent on to Merthyr?”

“Yes,” said Lovell, fastidiously extricating himself from the man ager’s grip, “but that was two days since. The pump is dismantled, of course, and would have to be hauled up here and assembled.”

The flush of excitement in Dowlais’ face faded. He said, with a bitter oath,

“How?
How could a thing as heavy as that be hauled up and set to work? Bloody narrow gauge is frozen solid. We can’t even get a hundredweight of coal down much less something weigh ing four tons up.”

“I’ll get it here if you’ll make a place for it and start it working. You’ve got men here who could assemble it. It’s very simple.”

“Damn it, I could assemble it myself,” Dowlais said, his voice shooting off key,

“and Steepcote’s directors wouldn’t give a curse about me borrowing it. No colliery would at a time like this, wi’ nigh on a hundred men holed up in the galleries east of that dip.” He paused. “How could you get it up? You mean you’ve got waggons and teams down in the town?”

“No,” Bryn said, “I haven’t got any waggons and no teams of my own nearer than Abergavenny. But I could assemble them by the time the Shannon was here, for I know to a decimal point what haul age gear you have about here. It’s part of my business to know a thing like that.”

“Aye, it would be, it would be,” Dowlais said, thoughtfully, and then, suddenly erupting, “Get about it, man! Get drays and teams assembled at the halt platform ready to load up, and leave that bloody Shannon and the railway company to me.

Thomas—Rudlipp—Morgan, run and tell Trevor Davies to clear his line and keep it clear. Stop every train running between Abergavenny and Merthyr both ways, and make him find a driver and fireman to run a light engine and two flat cars along to Merthyr depot the minute you get down there. Tell him you’ve Steepcote’s permission to load that Shannon and bring it back here, and two of you go along and see it’s done, d’ye hear me? Corder, Powlett—tell the linesman and deputy to come in here. I’ll want all those trucks of ours heaved off the rails to leave it clear for offloading. I’ll want the shed over the new shaft stripped clean to house the pump. I’ll want any damn number o’ things…”