Hearts of Gold

‘Bethan! Bethan!’ Elizabeth Powell rapped hard on the door of the bedroom that her daughters’ shared.

‘Coming, Mam,’ Bethan murmured sleepily. She listened as her mother retreated back to her own bedroom then, keeping her eyes firmly closed, she reluctantly forced her hand out of the warm cocoon of sheets and blankets to test the air. It was icy after the warm snugness of the bed, and she quickly pulled her arm back beneath the bedclothes for a few seconds more of blissful warmth.

Once again Elizabeth’s voice cut stridently through the frosty air.

‘I’m up, Mam,’ Bethan lied.

‘I hardly think so.’ Elizabeth opened the door and pushed the switch down on the round black box. Bethan screwed her eyes against the sudden glare of yellow light. It wasn’t enough. Eyelids burning, she burrowed into the bed and pulled the blanket over her head.

‘Breakfast in ten minutes, Bethan,’ her mother’s voice intruded into the darkness.

‘Yes, Mam.’

She waited until she heard the fierce click of the iron latch falling on the bar. The third stair from the top creaked, then the seventh as her mother descended to the ground floor. Keeping her nose hidden beneath the blankets, she opened her eyes and peered sleepily at the room around her.

Apart from a change of wallpaper, it hadn’t altered since her grandmother had left it fourteen years before. The thick red plush curtains that had been hers hung, faded but well-brushed and straight, at the windows. The old-fashioned Victorian mahogany bedroom furniture Caterina had inherited as a bride gleamed darkly against the heavily patterned red and gold walls. Her favourite Rossetti prints hung on the wall next to the wardrobe, and the pink glass ring holder, candlesticks’ and hair tidy that had been a present from her sons stood on the dressing table. The room might now belong to Bethan and her sister Maud, but it was also an encapsulation of Bethan’s earliest childhood memories.

She had toddled in here when she was barely high enough to reach the washstand. Crouching behind the bed, she had watched her grandmother wash and dress and afterwards sit on the stool in front of the dressing-table mirror to brush out her hair. Rich, black, it was scarcely touched with grey on the day she’d died.

Once Caterina had finished, she’d turn and smile. A warm, welcoming, special smile that Bethan knew she kept just for her. And then came the excitement of
the tin
. The old Huntley and Palmer biscuit tin in which Caterina kept her prized collection of foreign coins.

Bethan had spent hours as a child, sitting on the cold, oilcloth-covered floor at Caterina’s feet; playing with them, grouping them into armies fighting strange and wondrous battles that she’d heard the grown-ups talking about. Mons – Amiens – the Somme …

Not only Bethan’s but also her sister’s and brothers’ happiest childhood memories stemmed from the time when Mam Powell had lived with them.

Evan Powell’s’ mother, Caterina, had been a large, warmhearted, old-fashioned Welsh widow who’d spent her life working, caring, cuddling (or cwtching as they say in Wales) her family. True happiness for her had ended along with her husband’s life; contentment vanished the day Evan, brought his bride into the family home. She tried valiantly to conceal her dislike of Elizabeth, but everyone who knew Caterina also knew that she’d never taken to her eldest son’s choice of wife.

In her shrewd, common-sense way Caterina had summed Elizabeth Powell nee Bull up as a cold, arrogant, snobbish woman but, concerned only for Evan’s happiness she could have forgiven Evan’s love any failing other than hard-heartedness.

Fearing for the emotional well-being of her unborn grandchildren it was she who persuaded Evan to set up home with Elizabeth in the parlour and front bedroom of the house that her collier husband had bought for less than two hundred pounds in the “good timesˮ before strikes and the depression hit Pontypridd and the Rhondda mining valleys. And she did it in full knowledge that Elizabeth would destroy the peace and harmony that reigned in the household.

Elizabeth fought hard against Evan’s suggestion of setting up home with her mother-and brother-in-law, but Evan remained firm. Quite aside from his mother’s wishes finances dictated compromise. Not a man to shirk his responsibilities, he accepted that it was his duty as eldest son to support his mother and his wife, and the easiest way he could think of fulfilling both obligations was by installing them under the same roof. Besides, in his acknowledged biased opinion, his mother’s house was amongst the best on the Graig.

Certainly the bay windowed, double-fronted house in Graig Avenue had more than enough room for all the Powell’s – three good-sized bedrooms, a box room, two front parlours and a comfortable back kitchen complete with a range that held bread and baking ovens as well as a hinge-topped water boiler with a brass tap from which hot water could be drawn. Doors from the kitchen led into a walk-in, stone-slabbed pantry and a lean-to washhouse.

The washhouse opened into the yard that housed the coal house and outside WC (all its own, not shared). It was a palace compared to the back-to-back, two-up one-downs at the foot of the Graig hill.

What Evan didn’t discuss with Elizabeth or his mother, was the full extent of the mortgage on the house. He’d been fourteen and his brother William twelve when their father had collapsed and fallen in front of a tram at the Maritime pit.

Jim Owen, the pit manager, sent Caterina Powell ten pounds to cover the funeral expenses. It was good of him. She knew full well that as the accident was her husband’s fault she was entitled to nothing. The Maritime’s Colliers organised a whip round amongst themselves and raised another fifteen pounds.

It was the largest sum ever collected after a pit death, and a fine testimonial to Evan Powell senior’s popularity, but it wasn’t enough to buy his widow, or his sons, security.

Evan and William left school the day of the funeral, and Jim Owen took them on as boy colliers out of respect for their father.

So they began their working lives where Evan Powell senior had ended his and without giving the matter a thought, also assumed his obligations, paying his bills, his mortgage and providing their mother with housekeeping, the only money she ever handled.

And she, too grief-stricken to realise what was happening, allowed her eldest son to assume the responsibilities of the man of the house, responsibilities he shouldered with a maturity far beyond his years.

Time passed, Caterina’s grief healed after a fashion – and then came Elizabeth.

The major alterations to the domestic life of the Graig Avenue household after Evan and Elizabeth’s marriage came in the shape of the additions they were blessed with. Bethan was born seven months after their wedding day. Haydn less than a year later, Eddie on their fourth anniversary and Maud on Bethan’s sixth birthday.

Caterina and Elizabeth were soon too busy to quarrel, and the initial resentment Elizabeth felt towards her mother-in-law for keeping hold of the domestic reins of the household faded with the birth of Haydn.

The babies generated enough work to keep a dozen pairs of hands occupied, let alone two. And although neither woman learned to like, let alone love the other, seven years under the same roof did teach them a wary kind of tolerance.

The thunder of Haydn and Eddie’s feet hammering down the stairs shook Bethan out of her reverie. It would be wonderful to lie here for another two or three hours, staring at the walls, thinking of nothing in particular, but duty and her mother called.

Maud stirred next to her in the bed. Pulling the blankets close about her ears, her sister burrowed deeper into the feather mattress, making small, self-satisfied grunting noises as she curled complacently back into her dreams.

Bethan looked enviously at the mop of blonde curls; all that could be seen of Maud above the blankets. What it was to be thirteen years old and still at school. If Maud got up two hours from now she’d still make it to her class in Maesycoed Seniors by nine, but there was little point in wishing herself any younger.

Grabbing the ugly grey woollen dressing gown that her mother had cut and sewn from a surplus army blankets three Christmases ago, she sat up and swung her legs out of the tangle of flannelette sheets and blankets. Five o’clock on any morning was a disgusting hour to leave a warm, comfortable bed. On a cold, dismal January morning it was worse than disgusting. It was brutal.

For all of her five feet eight inches, her feet dangled several inches above the floor. Mam Powell’s bed was higher than any hospital bed. Easy to make, but painful to climb out of when there was ice in the air.

Sliding forward she perched precariously on the edge of the mattress and ran the tips of her toes over the freezing floor in search of her pressed felt slippers. She found one, then standing on her left leg, the other. As she shuffled across the room she thought wistfully of the last film she’d seen in the White Palace.

Claudette Colbert had floated elegantly around a vast, dazzlingly pale, beautifully furnished bedroom in a creamy lace and satin gown that she’d casually referred to as a “negligee”. The actress would probably sooner have died than don a grey woollen dressing gown and flat tartan slippers with red pom-poms. But then, Claudette Colbert looked as though she’d never had to trek out to a back yard first thing in the morning either.

If the newsreels and Hollywood stories in the Sunday papers were to be believed, film stars had luxurious bathrooms with bubble-filled baths the size of the paddling pool in Ponty Park. And they could afford to keep fires burning in their bedrooms all night without giving a thought to the twenty-two shillings a load of coal cost a miner on short time and rations.

She twitched aside the curtains and tried to peer through the coating of frost on the window pane. Breathing on the glass, she rubbed hard with the edge of her hand and made a peephole.

The street lamps burned alongside the houses in the Avenue in a straight line, golden beacons radiating a glow that dispelled the navy-blue darkness and lit up the high garden wall of Danygraig House opposite.

Dawn was still hours away. She studied the unmade ground of the street beneath her. It was covered with a fine layer of white, but there were dark shadows alongside the stones. Too thin to be snow.

Frost and that meant a cold and slippery walk down the Graig hill to the hospital. She left the window and heaved on the bottom drawer of the dressing table. It jerked out sluggishly, with the stickiness of furniture kept too long in a cold, damp house. Rummaging impatiently through the tangle of clothes, she searched for an extra pair of back woollen stockings. Nurses, especially trainee nurses were only supposed to wear one pair, but her legs had been almost blue with cold when she’d left her ward at the end of yesterday’s shift, and there hadn’t been frost on the ground then.

She found the stockings and tossed them on to the pile of underclothes and uniform that she’d laid out on the stool the night before. Warm legs were worth the risk of an official reprimand, even from Sister Church.

Heaving the drawer shut with her foot as well as her hands, she went to the washstand. She picked up the unwieldy old-fashioned yellow jug decorated with transfers of sepia country scenes and tried to pour its contents into the washbowl.

Nothing happened. Shivering as the chill atmosphere permeated her dressing gown she brushed her dark hair away from her face and looked down into the jug. Pushing her fingers into the neck, she confirmed her suspicions. A thick frozen crust capped the water.

Even if she succeeded in breaking through it without cracking the jug, the thought of washing in chunks of ice didn’t appeal to her. Pulling the collar of her dressing gown as high as it would go she tightened the belt and left the bedroom, stepping down on to the top stair.

Unlike the bedroom, the stairs were carpeted with jute, held in place by three cornered oak rods. She trod lightly on the third and fourth stair from the top. Their rods were fragile – broken when her brothers, Haydn and Eddie, had purloined them to use as swords after watching a Douglas Fairbanks’ film. The rods had survived the fencing match, but neither had survived the beating her mother had inflicted on the boys with them when she’d found out what they’d done.

The light was burning in the downstairs passage as she made her way to the back kitchen. Her father, mother and eldest brother were up and dressed, breakfasting at the massive dark oak table that, together with the open-shelved dresser, dominated the room.

‘Good morning, Bethan,’ her mother offered frigidly with a scarcely perceptible nod towards the corner where their lodger Alun Jones was lacing his collier’s boots.

Alun looked up and for all of his thirty-five years turned a bright shade of beetroot.

Irritated, Bethan tied her dressing gown even closer around her shivering body.

‘Good morning,’ she mumbled in reply to her mother’s greeting. ‘The water in the jug is frozen, so I came down for some warm,’ she added, trying to excuse her state of undress.

In middle age, Elizabeth Powell was a tall, thin, spare woman. Spare in flesh and spare in spirit. Bethan, like her brothers and Maud, was afraid not so much of her mother but of the atmosphere she exuded which was guaranteed to dampen the liveliest spirit. Elizabeth certainly had an outstanding ability to make herself and everyone around her feel miserable and uncomfortable.

But she hadn’t always possessed that trait. She’d acquired and honed it to perfection during twenty-one years of silent, suffering marriage to Evan Powell.

Her silence. His suffering.

At the time none of the Powells’ friends or acquaintances could fathom exactly why Evan Powell, a strapping, tall, dark (and curly-haired with it) handsome young miner of twenty-three had suddenly decided to pay court to a thin, dour schoolmistress ten years older than himself. But court her he had, and the courtship had culminated a few weeks later in a full chapel wedding attended by both families.

Elizabeth’s relatives had been both bemused and upset by the match. In their opinion Elizabeth hadn’t so much, stepped down in the world, as slid. True, she had little to recommend her as a wife. Thirty three years old, like most women of her generation she was terrified of being left on the shelf.