The White Dove

He waited for a second, listening to the sea and the wind, and then he said, ‘Will you marry me, Mari?’

‘Yes.’

That was it, then, Nick thought. That was how it happened. You loved someone in a way that wasn’t quite exactly the same as all the others, for her pink cheeks and her smile and the scent of lilacs, and you found yourself marrying her.

To have and to hold. From this day forth for ever more. It wasn’t his voice but a stranger’s, mocking him inside his own head. But before Nick could catch himself up short for his own sourness, Mari’s delight overpowered him. Her arms were round his neck and her mouth was warm against his.

‘I love you, Nick. Oh, I love you.’

Her fervour touched him and made him smile so that he forgot everything else. ‘You sure? Me and the Fed? Me and the pit and Nantlas and the owners?’

‘Curse the whole bloody lot of them. I only love you.’ Her hands reached out to him, touching him and drawing him closer to her. ‘Nick, will you do it again? Please?’ They lay down once more, and the walls of the sand hollow enclosed them all over again.

It was almost dark when they reached the station, and the train for the valleys was waiting at the platform. Nick helped Mari up into the high carriage again, and was amused to find himself possessively smoothing the hem of her skirt so that no one else might catch a glimpse of the smooth whiteness above her knees. As they sat down, side by side on the gritty seats, he smelt the dust and smoke and knew that their holiday was over. Pushing back the thought, he asked her fiercely, ‘Are you mine? Really all mine?’

In the filthy, dimly lit train Mari was beautiful. Her hair was tousled and dark around her face, and her mouth looked fuller, bruised with kissing.

She smiled at him. ‘All. Always. We’re engaged now, aren’t we?’

Their hands were knotted together and Nick rubbed the bare fingers of her left hand with his.

‘I’ll buy you a ring. We’ll go into Cardiff and you can choose one. Does it matter if it isn’t a great diamond?’

‘Doesn’t matter if it’s a brass curtain ring, so long as it’s yours. I’ve got my mug, for now. It’ll have pride of place, you know, when we’re married. In the middle of our parlour mantel. To remind us of today.’

The train jolted savagely and then shuddered forward. Through the smeared window Nick watched the platform lights dropping behind them and the velvety August night wrapping round the train like a glove.

Quietly, he said, ‘It isn’t going to be easy, my love.’

Mari was too completely happy even to want to listen to his warnings. ‘When has it ever been, for our sort?’

‘Harder, then. Much harder. Worse than 1921, do you remember that? That was only a rehearsal for what’s coming to us.’

Mari remembered 1921. For the four months that the strike had lasted, March to July, neither her dad nor her brothers had worked. She herself had been earning a few pence a week then, doing mending and heavy cleaning for one of the pit managers’ wives, and her mother had taken in some washing. The five of them had lived on that, on bread and potatoes and hoarded tea, and had been luckier than many others.

She sighed now. ‘Why not be grateful for things as they are? Everyone except you says they’re better. They may be bad in other places, but there’s work for everyone who really wants it in the Rhondda now. Forty thousand men. You said so yourself.’

Nick turned away from the window, and the lights of towns strung out along the valley sides like so many necklaces, pretty at this distance.

‘It won’t last. It can’t. We can’t compete, you see. Not with German reparation coal, not with subsidized exports from everywhere. Nor with oil for shipping, and the hydroelectric. Steam coal’s had its day, my love, and so have we. Unless —’ his dark face was suddenly flooded with vivid colour — ‘unless we can change everything. Stop the owners lining their pockets. Nationalize the industry. Invest. Mechanize. Subsidize. And pay a fair wage to the men who do the work.’

Mari stroked his hand, running her fingers over the calluses, soothing him. ‘We’ll manage somehow, you and me. I know we will. You’re strong and willing, and they’ll always give you work while there’s still work to do.’

‘I won’t do it,’ he interrupted her. ‘Not in the old yes-to-me, no-to-him victimizing ways. There has to be work for every man, fair and square. And you’re wrong, in any case. I’ll be the first out, given what I believe in. And I’ll fight for the right for others to believe in too.’

Mari went on stroking his wrist, her voice gentle. It was old ground between them, and she hardly hesitated over it. ‘And I work too, don’t I? If what you’re afraid of does happen, we’ll still have something.’

‘Mari.’ He caught her wrist, almost roughly, stopping the stroking. Then he lifted her hand and rubbed it against his cheek. She felt the prickle of stubble and then his tongue as he kissed her fingers. It brought back the sand hollow and what had happened there, and she blushed. ‘Mari, what will happen when the babies come?’

Her face went bright scarlet. Conscious suddenly of the inquisitive faces around them, she whispered, ‘Will we have babies? Would you like that?’

For once, his grey-green eyes were neither opaque nor seeing beyond her. She was fully there, in the centre of his gaze, and she thought it was the happiest moment she had ever known.

‘Yes,’ Nick said. ‘Oh yes, I would like that. And I’d like to be able to give them something too. Something more than just enough to eat, and boots for their feet.’

‘We’ll do it,’ she promised him. She rested her head against his shoulder and he kissed the top of it protectively.

‘I wish,’ he murmured against her hair, ‘I wish we were married already. I want to take you home with me now, to my own bed. No sand. Just you and me, under the covers in the dark. Or no, in the light. So I can see you.’

‘Nick.’ Mari was stifling her laughter. ‘Hush, now. People can hear.’

Their arms were still wrapped round each other when they stepped off the train at Maerdy. Because they didn’t have eyes for anyone else, they didn’t see the shocked and anxious faces on the platform, nor did they hear the buzz of subdued talk that greeted the other passengers.

Nick surrendered their return tickets to the collector at the barrier without a glance, and they began the walk up the valley, still insulated by their happiness. Later, Mari tried to remember what they had talked about, and couldn’t remember any of it except Nick’s low voice, for no one but herself to hear, his arm around her, and his hand over her breast in the safe cover of darkness.

Then they came to the curve of the road, the point where they had started to run for the train only this morning, and they saw the lights.

All the lights were blazing at the Nantlas No. 1 pithead, even though the night shift should have been safely down long ago. If all was well, the only lights showing would be in the winding house where the night surface team manned the lifting gear, and in the little square window of the shift manager’s office. Yet tonight every single window was lit up, and there were other lights too, hand-held because they were bobbing about in the blackness.

In the moment that Nick and Mari stood together at the bend in the valley road, two huge searchlights came on and snuffed out the torches.

Nick had seen those lights before. They were brought to the pithead and erected on hastily assembled scaffolding to assist the rescue workers. He was already running.

Mari’s bewilderment lasted only a split second longer. ‘Explosion.’ She caught the word that Nick shouted back at her over his shoulder as no more than an echo of her own shrill scream. She began to run too, slipping and stumbling in the darkness on the rough road.

Nick was way ahead of her, moving much faster, and then she lost sight of him. But when she came gasping up to the silent crowd waiting at the colliery gates she saw him immediately, right up against the gates, his fists clamped on the bars.

He was shouting, and kicking against the solid ironwork. ‘Let me in. Let me in. Cruickshank, is that you? Open these bloody gates. Do you hear? Open them, you bastard.’

Mari elbowed and jostled her way through the crowd and reached Nick’s side just as Cruickshank, the pit manager, appeared beyond the gates.

‘Ah. Nick Penry, is it? Well then, you’d better come in and add your two penn’orth, for all the difference it’ll make.’

The gates creaked open and Mari slipped in behind Nick before they clanged shut again. Neither of the men paid any attention to her whatsoever, and she moved quickly into the shadow of a low wall.

‘How many?’ Nick said.

Cruickshank shrugged awkwardly. ‘Thirty, from the night book. Maybe one or two more, unofficial.’

Even Mari knew what ‘unofficial’ meant. For safety reasons, only an agreed number of men was allowed to work any given seam at any given time. But if extra men were willing to go in, working the awkward places unacknowledged and for less money than their official counterparts, the managers were glad to let them do it and to keep their names off the books. It meant more coal for less money in less time, after all. It was one of the things that Nick was trying to stop, through the Federation, even though his sympathy was with the often desperate men who were forced to do it.

‘One or two?’ Nick’s voice was harsh.

Cruickshank’s was level in response. ‘Well. Forty-four, we’re almost certain, although we haven’t got all the names yet.’

‘When did it happen?’

‘Just before six. Right at the shift end.’