The White Dove

‘He hasn’t a chance,’ Nick said. ‘They’ll have gone down long ago. He might as well have stopped in bed. That’s where he should be, anyway.’

Mari glanced sideways. ‘The dicai, is it?’

‘What do you think, looking at him?’

The dicai was the word they used, defiantly and almost lightly, for tuberculosis. The miners’ curse stalked the pits and the damp, crowded little houses down the hillsides.

‘He’s got to go down, Nick. There’s only him and that doolally sister, and his mam’s bad as well now.’

‘Do you think I don’t know? I’ll have to see if I can get something for them from the Fed. He needs to go down the coast, somewhere away from here. Curse it, Mari, and curse them.’

The Fed was the South Wales Miners’ Federation. Mari knew that them could only be the pit owners, and she knew too that there was no point in trying to talk about it now. She slipped her hand back into his and walked quietly beside him, waiting for him to stop glaring ahead at something she couldn’t see, and come back to her.

At last Nick shrugged. They had left Nantlas behind them, and their faces were turned away from the rows of houses lined above the pithead clutter of lifting gear and dust-black brick buildings. They were on the Maerdy road, and the high valley sides were suddenly summer green. The sun was already hot. It was a fine day for the seaside. The river splashed beside the road, and if he didn’t look at it Nick found that he could forget that the water was clogged with coal waste and the bankside grass was more black than green. Across the river the railway track ran up to the pithead, and rows of empty trucks were waiting to be shunted up for loading. Nick turned away from that too. He squeezed Mari’s hand, and then let it go so that he could put his arm around her shoulders. Her skin felt very warm through the crisp blue cotton, and her hair smelt of lilac. He kissed the top of her head and she drew closer under his arm, lengthening her stride comically so that they walked in step with her hip against his thigh.

‘It’s our holiday,’ Nick said softly. ‘Come on, let’s catch that train.’

He was smiling again. The sun was shining, he had twelve shillings in his pocket, and Mari Powell beside him. He liked Mari. She was cheerful and straightforward, and she was also the prettiest girl in the two valleys. Nick was sure of that, because he had been a committed judge of Rhondda girls from the age of sixteen. No, now wasn’t the time to be thinking of the pit, or the South Wales Miners’ Federation, or of Bryn Jones’s torn chest and the bloody iniquities of the owners who had given it to him.

Mari was pointing down the road with her free hand. ‘Look. The train’s in. We’ll have to run for it, now.’

A frantic dash down to the station brought them out on the platform just as the guard was lifting his whistle to his mouth. Nick tore open the nearest door, swung Mari up so that her skirt billowed and he glimpsed the tops of her white cotton stockings, and leapt in beside her. They collapsed into the dusty seats with Mari tugging at her skirt hem and then putting her hands up to smooth her windblown bob. Nick looked at her pink cheeks and round, shining brown eyes.

‘I love you, Mari,’ he said, surprising himself.

Mari wasn’t surprised. ‘I know,’ she said simply. ‘I love you, too.’

Everyone went down to Barry when they had time and money to spend. In the good days before the War it was always bursting with miners and their wives and children, determined to enjoy themselves in the halls and bars and tea-rooms. On summer afternoons the sands were packed with picnicking families down for the day from the valleys.

It wasn’t quite the same in Barry any more, or anywhere across the South Wales coalfields.

Pits were closing because markets were shrinking, and the work wasn’t there any longer. The money wasn’t there either, even for the lucky ones who were in work, since the terrible days of the 1921 strike and the huge wage cuts that had followed it.

Looking round at the sea front, Nick saw how much it had changed from the times of his childhood outings. Everywhere had seemed freshly painted then, glittering with bright lights and tempting things to buy, or just to look at. Today, even though it was the middle of August, almost every other shopfront seemed to be closed up, some with forbidding boards over the windows. Those that were still open were trying hard, offering jugs of fresh pinky-brown shrimps and mounds of shiny blue-black winkles, green and red and gilt paper hats with ‘Barry Island’ printed on them, china mugs and brightly patterned souvenirs, sweets and tin spades and buckets and trays of teas for the beach. But the paint was peeling and the awnings were torn and faded, and there were only straggles of people passing in front of them in place of the old, cheerful crowds.

Beyond the pale green railings edging the front the sand was freshly uncovered, hard and brown and glittering in a thousand tiny points under the sun. The air smelt wonderfully clean and salty. That hadn’t changed, at least.

Mari ran to the railings and hung over them, calling to him. ‘Look at the sea, Nick. Come on, let’s run down to the water now.’

‘And get sand all over your shoes and those lovely white stockings?’ he teased her.

‘I’ll take them off,’ she said, mock-daringly, and then added, ‘Or no, later perhaps.’

They walked down to the water’s edge where the wavelets turned over themselves and the fringe of foam was swallowed up by the wet sand. There were two or three tiny flawless pink shells amongst the crushed white and grey fragments of larger ones at the tideline. Nick picked them up and closed them in the palm of Mari’s hand, seeing how the skin was rough and reddened from the washing and mending she did for Mrs Peris up at the Lodge.

‘Aren’t they pretty?’ Mari said. ‘Like little pink pearls.’

‘I’d give you real pearls, if I could,’ Nick said. There was something about today that put a rough edge in his voice. It was a happy day, a beautiful day, but it hurt him too.

‘That would be nice,’ Mari answered. ‘But I don’t need pearls, do I? I’m happy just as I am. Here, this minute.’

For a long, long moment they looked at each other.

In the end it was Nick who turned away, his back to the glitter of the sun on the sea, to look back at the rows of roofs and windows along the front. It looked better from here. The colours seemed no more than faded and softened by the salt wind, and the blank eyes of windows were less noticeable. In the centre was a red-brick public house, Victorian mock-Gothic with fantastic turrets and spires, topped by a gilded cockerel on a weather vane.

‘What would you like to do?’ he asked her formally. ‘Shall we have a drink at the Cock? Or are you hungry? We can have a fish dinner right away, if you want.’

‘Oh, a drink first, please. Then something to eat, and then we can go for a walk afterwards.’

They sat side by side on the hard, shiny red leather seats in the Cock, looking at the other holidaymakers. Nick drank two pints of beer, and Mari had two glasses of dark, sweet sherry. After the second her cheeks went even pinker and she found it doubly difficult to listen to what Nick was saying.

He was talking about the Miners’ Federation, and how important it was that every miner should be committed to it and its leaders, so that they could stand together and fight the bosses.

‘Nothing like 1921 must ever happen again,’ he said. ‘No more Black Fridays.’

Mari sighed. It was a part of Nick that she didn’t understand. Of course there should be a union, and of course all working men should belong to it. But all his talk of fights, and power bases, and nationalization and public ownership, and radicalization, and the Sankey Commission, she didn’t understand that at all.

There always would be bosses, and they never would want to pay the men the proper wage. Nor would they want to put their profits into mechanizing the mines and making them safer to work in, not while there were still plenty of men more than willing to go down them just as they were and for less and less money.

Secretly, Mari didn’t believe that all the unions in the world would ever change anything. There always would be men like Mr Peris who owned the third biggest colliery group in South Wales, and his wife who gave her handmade silk underwear away to her maid after two or three wearings, and there would be men and women like Nick and herself. If the men came out on strike, obedient to Nick and his kind who truly believed in the possibility of change, then the bosses just sent in the police and the troops and the strike-breakers, the miners got angrier and hungrier, and then when they couldn’t hold out against the hunger and the cold any longer, they went back down for less money than before. It would be just the same, Mari thought, if she told Mrs Peris’s housekeeper up at the Lodge that she rather thought she wouldn’t do quite so much of the heavy washing any more, but would like an extra two shillings a week just the same. She would simply find herself replaced by another Nantlas girl who would be glad to do what Mari Powell did, and without making any trouble about it.

Nick had stopped talking now, and he was looking at her with the same queer light in his eyes. Nick had unusual eyes, grey-green and pale against his dark skin and hair.

‘You don’t understand any of this, do you?’ he said.

‘Of course I do,’ Mari protested rapidly. ‘I understand, and I agree with you. So there’s no need to lecture me like one of your miners’ lodge meetings.’ She tried to look indignant, but at the same time she slid closer to him on the hard, slippery seat. ‘I don’t much want to talk about it, that’s all, not today. I’d rather have you to myself, not share you with every collier in Nantlas as well as the South Wales Miners’ Federation.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, contrite. ‘Let’s forget it at once.’ But before he put his arm around her shoulders again he said, as if he was warning her, ‘It’s important, Mari. Not just to me, but to all of us. I just want you to understand that if … if you have me, if you want me, you have the fight too. Do you?’

‘Yes.’ She was answering both his questions, thinking only of one.

With surprising gentleness for a big man, Nick touched her cheek with his fingertips. Then he grinned at her. ‘Too serious. Much too serious. What d’you say, shall we have another drink?’

‘Trying to get me drunk, is it?’

‘Of course. Then I can have my wicked way with you. A large one, then?’

‘No, thanks. You can buy me that fish dinner instead.’

Later, when they came out again, they turned westwards down the front into the sunshine. They dawdled arm in arm past the shopfronts, examining the displays. In the last shop in the line Nick bought a white china mug with Cymru am Byth gold-lettered on one side and Croeso i Barry on the other over highly coloured views of the resort.

‘To remind you of this elegant excursion,’ he said gravely.

Mari thanked him, equally gravely.

Then they were walking away from the sea front, down to where the road turned into a sandy track and then wound away around a little headland into an empty space of coarse grass and sunny hollows. For a while they walked in silence, listening to the sea and the grass swishing at their ankles. Although they were barely half a mile from the clamour of Barry, they might have been alone in the world.

Nick stopped at a deep hollow, enclosed on three sides by sun-warmed slopes tufted with seagrass, but open to the sea and the sky at the front. ‘Let’s stop for a while,’ he said.