Land Of My Fathers

by Alexander Cordell

Genres: General Fiction; Historical Fiction; Sagas

Synopsis

Set against the background of the Chartist rebellion, LAND OF MY FATHERS is a heartfelt evocation of the greatest iron town in the world, Merthyr, and of the people who made it so: foundry-owners and workers, immigrants, fortune-hunters, idealists, prostitutes and wastrels. It is also the story of one man, Taliesin Roberts, robust, determined, passionate - and of a three-sided love that will never die.

Release date: August 21, 2014

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 304

Sample

Chapter 1

My tenth birthday, I remember, was one of those early up flying April mornings when even churchyard corpses were dreaming of high-buttoned girls, parasols and kisses.

Certainly it was a day when the clergy from Petter to Wesley Street were sitting ducks.

At six o’clock most mornings the privy ten-holer on Turkey Shore was occupied by bright-faced boyos who always got up first – deacons, the leaders of the community. And here the business of the day would be discussed – as to who would be on what ‘bargain’ that week, who would be carting, and the quality, or otherwise, of the sermon given by a travelling preacher a week last Sunday.

‘First up, first served,’ said Andy Appledore, my mate who sat next to me with the copar ledis, and he lit a rag, dropped it on to a board and floated it down the gully-way of the big ten-holer, and you couldn’t see deacons for dust. The language coming up from that privy was enough to singe the tail off Satan, let alone deacons.

Andy went one way, I went another.

It becomes clear to me, said my father at the inquest, that this particular Englishman is a bad example to a well-mannered Welshman, and I didn’t sit down for a week.

 

I ran fast that morning up to Costog Spinney, then down to the beach where old Joe Herring, my friend the black-faced gull, was waiting for his breakfast.

Dear me, I was in love with the world that morning; it was full of sun, wind, birthday greetings, and all the sweetness of April. Panting on the edge of Ogof Fain I saw the sea below me dancing in spindrift, and he was a marvellous blue with him that week, frothing up his white-topped breakers and smashing them against the harbour wall where the copper carriers spiked the sky with cobwebs of rigging. Far away to the north was Ellan Vannin they call the Isle of Man: to the south was snow-capped Snowdon, and great bedsheet clouds were lumbering across the caverns of the wind.

Ach, I do love the bright springtime days when the mutton chops do handsprings across the meadows. The birds play leap-frog, the lads are all polished and quiffed – putting years on the girls, my mother used to say. Aye, there is something in springtime that gets everyone frisky, and it is a hell of a thing when you’re ten years old, to see folks billing and cooing in hedges and knees up in haylofts, and Satan himself in the back pews of Calfaria, looking for clients, according to my father.

Tall and wide-shouldered is Dada, his head higher than any man in Amlwch . . . with our dead mam’s hymnal on the pew between us. The most eligible widower in Town, I’d heard say, with fat women fanning themselves in flushes at the sight of him.

‘Please keep away from that English Andy Appledore,’ said he.

‘Yes, Dada.’

‘Rock of Ages’ it was then, full blend of soprano, contralto, tenor and bass, with my piping treble coming up beside my father’s voice. In shafts of sunlight from the Chapel windows the dust-motes dance; a blue bottle is wheezing among the polished boots and black-stocking knees.

‘Never been near that ten-hole privy,’ said I.

‘Accepted,’ said my father. ‘And there are a few in Amlwch who may need heating up. In due course all will receive their just deserts, Taliesin, as did Samson for setting fire to the tails of foxes. So take the hiding just to please me, is it?’

‘Yes, Dada.’

Wasn’t me. It was that bloody Appledore.

Sweating, me. In this mood he could rend a lion.

 

On the other side of my father was my Cousin Poll, aged fifteen. All peaches and cream was she under her poke-bonnet, a face all innocence and very flourishing in the breast, being in milk.

It always set the congregation staring when we took my Cousin Poll to Chapel on Sundays, and she always did herself up gay in colours, contrasting the bombazine black, said she, and the women, creaking and corsetted, gave her the eye. A crying scandal it is, said one: with his woman scarce cold in her grave, said another, that Gwyn Roberts brings a harlot in to share a pew with decent people . . . But my father did not appear to hear this. Through the Chapel door he came, standing politely aside while Polly took her seat. Radiant was my Cousin Poll; a primrose in a bed of deadly nightshade.

A bit more about my father and Cousin Poll, while on the subject.

Large was he, as I have said, with thick-muscled arms where the hairs grew like forest trees: Iberian Welsh to the marrow, the people used to say: so tall that he ducked his head under the back of Three Costog, and that was six foot two. In he comes from the Smelter with funnel dirt upon his face, and there, in the kitchen, sits our Poll feeding my little sister Meg, with a wicked little smile . . .

 

After my mam died, having my sister Meg two months back, my father brought this Polly into our house.

The death of Gwyn Roberts’ missus is a tragedy, they said in Town, and he will be a long time getting over it.

O aye? they were saying now.

For about this time my Cousin Poll brought forth, too, and her baby was dead. So my father took the dead baby from Poll’s breast and buried it with my mother: then he took our Meg and put her on the breast of Poll. Naturally, the people in Town had opinions on it, and Mr. Dafydd Owen, our deacon, said:

‘Your niece’s child was born out of wedlock, Gwyn Roberts – how can you bear it – a baggage suckling your child?’

My father went about his business as if he hadn’t heard.

‘You will show Cousin Poll due respect, Taliesin, you hear me?’

‘Yes, Dada.’

‘Her mother, like yours, is dead; her father is at sea. She is alone and of our blood. It is right and fair that she should come and live with us, you understand?’

‘Yes, Dada.’

‘And do not heed the gossip in the Town.’

‘No, Dada.’

‘Your Cousin Polly’s milk will taste as sweet as Mam’s. If in doubt, ask little Meg.’

‘Yes, Dada.’

‘And Poll is in need of us, poor little soul.’

Mind you, I was coming a bit sore these days about this ‘poor little soul’ business, for she do not look so poor to me, this Cousin Poll, and make sure she has an egg for her breakfast every morning while she is on the feed, and no bloody egg for me.

‘I know where she’d finish up if she belonged to me,’ said Mrs. Dahlia Sapphira.

 

We were at table, I remember. I suppose I could have chosen a better time to raise the subject. Poll was upstairs putting Meg to bed; Dada and me were together after a hard day on Turkey Shore.

‘Born out of wedlock, is it?’ I asked, getting into bread and jam.

My father blew his tea. ‘To what are you referring?’

‘Poll’s baby.’

I could never get the hang of this birthing baby stuff, with Andy saying she’d gone swimming among tadpoles.

‘And who stated that?’ asked my father.

‘The copar ledis do say so.’

Mam’s bread board, warped by years, was beside me on the starched, white cloth. She was a noble little thing, my mam, with Welsh-dark hair and the face of a housewife, with little fat hands for cutting bread and butter on her little fat tum. What that big handsome Gwyn Roberts do see in her I do not know, said more than one, but I knew. Gone? Not to us. She walks this house. Now my father said:

‘Is that a fact? Then tell these copar ledis to stick to chipping copper, or I’ll be down to have their tongues out for measuring. It’s the good girls who get caught for babies, Tal.’

‘Old Poll’s always at it, mind,’ I said.

‘At what?’

‘Don’t know, but Andy Appledore do say so.’

‘One more mention of him and you are straight to bed.’

I did not fear him. He rarely laid a hand on me: to strike a child is to assault the child, he used to say, except when blowing up deacons.

‘Anyway, we can manage on our own,’ I said.

My father gave me a queer old look, and a sigh. ‘We cannot manage on our own, Meg needs her – her milk. I told you.’

‘We can get milk off Dulcie Brown Cow.’

‘We cannot. Your sister is not a bull calf. Now, do you think we could have an end to this?’

The kettle was grieving on the hob. My mam used to swing it off with a smile. I wanted to run upstairs and cry on the bed. Ever since Poll had come he had taken less notice of me. Now he said, his hand in my hair:

‘Be generous, Tal – she had nobody in the world but us.’

Serve her bloody right.

Mind you, there were some happy compensations in having a harlot in the place, and a happy little soul was old Poll, give her credit; coming in, crying, ‘Morning, Uncle Gwyn, how you doin’, Cousin Tal? (she couldn’t even speak English, never mind Welsh) Make a good breakfast, both of you, and a bottle for my darling Cousin Meg – steak and kidney one side, rice pudding the other . . . There, there . . .’ and she opens the front of her bodice, whispering as mothers do, ‘Hush you, hush . . . old Poll’s got plenty,’ and our Meg crowed delighted in her tears and clamped herself on like a navvy on to a pint.

My father said, his voice low, ‘A good boy you are, Tal, not staring. Ladies are entitled to privacy and respect when feeding babies.’

So everybody was happy at such times, including me, for I could see old Poll at it in the cracked mirror of the kitchen. And a good old set she had on her, too, smooth and white, the colour of lotus flowers. Beautiful are women, I think, possessing such lovely things.

‘She is taking it, Polly?’ my father asked his pipe.

‘Yes, Uncle Gwyn.’

‘She is a lusty baby. You have no pain?’

‘No, Uncle Gwyn.’

Mind, this was the daughter my father always wanted, for once I heard him talking about this to my mam. ‘A son for you and a daughter for me, eh, Peg? A little poke-bonnet in the house, woman, and I’ll be doubly blessed . . .’

Now he said, ‘If pain comes, Poll, you’ll tell me, yeh?’

‘Doin’ fine, Uncle Gwyn, really, Uncle Gwyn.’

Dear me, Uncle Gwyn.

I still say we could have got it off Dulcie Brown Cow.

 

About this time I received a lesson in the sweet mystery of life, as Dada called it: trust my mate Andy Appledore not to be behind the curtain, either, when Cousin Poll was handing out religious instruction, though the way she was acting now butter wouldn’t have melted in her mouth. And my father would have had fits with his legs up if he’d seen the way she behaved in our barn on Saturday Fair Night, the week after Easter.

Mind you, it’s on summer nights mostly when grown-ups start getting frisky, I find, when the moon sits smiling on the sea and warm winds come fanning in from Snowdon. The animals are at it, too, I’ve noticed, with Bill, my ferret, knocking hell out of Milly, and Ben Rooster, our cockerel, rousting up his women, to say nothing of the lads in Town.

About the hottest male in Amlwch that year was my mate Appledore. Rising sixteen was he, with ambitions to do his utmost for Welsh womanhood, said the copar ledis, who spent most of the day fighting him off, and these days he was breathing down the neck of my Cousin Poll.

‘Your night in, Tal, Poll’s night out – and don’t forget to shut up the hens, there’s foxes about,’ said my father, on his way out for his Oddfellows pint.

‘And don’t have any women in, mind,’ added Poll. Done up in her Fair Night braveries was she, all pink and flouncy, and she fluttered an eye at me.

‘And where might you be off to, Madam?’ asked Dada.

‘Band of Hope.’

‘A good girl you are,’ said he, kissing her. ‘Here’s a penny for the South African missionaries. Back at half-past nine, remember.’

‘In bed by nine, Uncle Gwyn, if that suits you better.’

‘And keep away from that Andy Appledore.’

It appalled her. ‘O, shame and damnation on you, Uncle Gwyn, for such a suggestion!’ and she wriggled and went coy, melting him.

O aye? I thought. If that penny lands in the Fund for Missionaries I’d be mistaken; more likely a couple of gin tots for her and Andy Appledore, for I knew they were on the booze, and turn our barn near Three Costog into an abode of love.

No wonder our hens were off the lay; such things can have a bad effect on chickens.

When I went out that night to lock up the henhouse I found our Ben Rooster and his wife Betsy absent. So I went into the barn to look for them. And in there came Cousin Poll hand in hand with Andy Appledore, and what happened then took the shine off cassocks. I just lay there in the shadows, sweating cobs, my hair standing on end and breaking my neck for a closer look. Faint, I crept out of that barn and came face to face with Dada.

‘Well I never!’ said he. ‘I thought you were abed. I was just coming to find Ben Rooster and lock up the henhouse.’

‘Just done that, Dada,’ I lied.

‘And Cousin Poll? Where’s she?’

‘Came home half an hour back.’

He would have asked more, I think, but did not; behind the barn door old Poll giggled in the dark, but I don’t think Dada heard. Instead, he did a strange thing: reaching out, he held me against him, saying:

‘A good little lad you are, Tal. Home then, the two of us?’

It is funny, I think, that grown-ups don’t catch on so quick.

Everybody in Town knew what old Poll was up to, but I suppose that’s difficult to understand when you’re hoping she’s your daughter.

‘Come,’ said Dada, and took my hand; together we climbed the little hill back to Three Costog. So everybody was happy, including old Poll: two hours later she came through my bedroom window like a witch on a broomstick.

That night a fox knocked off poor old Ben Rooster, who was supposed to be locked up in the henhouse, yet my father never even mentioned it.

Strange, really, come to think of it.

Chapter 10

Next morning I saw Old Cog Costog and his Betsy in Town: he was sporting the black eye she’d handed him for tippling it with Alfie Cromwell, the English: she’d warned him a couple of times about his doubtful friendships but Old Cog, the rebel, never took heed of it. ‘I’m the man of the house,’ he used to say, ‘I snap my fingers and she jumps six feet. Aye, a good wife should be on her knees to her husband – “come out and fight, you bloody little coward,” and she’s there on all fours raking under the table.’

One thing about Old Cog; like most Welsh poets he was light in the attic, but he never lost his sense of humour.

With them, outside Greathead’s shop that morning, was my little sister Meg.

Good neighbours were these two, mark me: since I could remember we’d lived next door to each other and never a dull or ditchwater word over the wall between us. Just the usual popping in and out for caddy tea or a bit of lard for rubbing on someone’s chest or liniment for rheumatics; otherwise we kept our distance, like good neighbours should. And she kept quite a good table, too, did Betsy, for Cog earned good money on the engines, though he put a lot of it up against the wall, too, said Dada.

I was up to my elbows in my trews, mooching over the Square when I heard Meg’s little shriek of delight and her face was bright with sun and her head fair curls.

‘Your Poll’s gone, Tal,’ said Betsy, flat.

‘Walked out without a word,’ added Cog.

‘Gone?’ I couldn’t believe it.

Down Market Street that morning the carts were end to end, with stalls going up in St. Eleath’s square and gentry carriages queueing at the bank. Beggars were crying for alms, mostly the riff-raff refuse of the South Wales ironworks; legs off, arms off, many soldiers from the Napoleonic wars. And they raised their drum-stick limbs to us as we stood there talking. Meg sidled up and put her hand in mine.

‘Aye, Tal, Cousin Poll has made off,’ said she.

‘When?’ I asked Betsy, and she eyed me.

‘Dirt to dirt, anna it, Tal Roberts? Never did like her, never approved of her. Told ye so, didn’t I, Cog? Best off without her.’

‘God!’ I raised my eyes to the sky. It was one thing after another. Betsy added:

‘Gone for some fancy chap, more’n likely; very hot under the tails the likes of that Poll, beggin’ ye pardon.’

‘Took one-and-fourpence from the tea caddy, mind,’ said Old Cog, glum. ‘Saving it for the rent, we was, wasn’t we, Mam? And two china dogs and the bread board.’

‘Heisht you, darlin’,’ whispered Betsy, elbowing him, ‘he anna got that kind o’ money.’

‘I’ll pay, though,’ I replied. ‘But what about Meg?’

‘O, loveliest of children!’ cried Old Cog, his arms wide to the sun. ‘ “And on that cheek, and o’er that brow, so soft, so calm, yet eloquent . . .” ’ Bending, he kissed Meg’s face.

‘Quiet, you!’ said Betsy. ‘Greathead’s it is this mornin’, not Byron,’ and she smiled into the sun. ‘Can’t mind her, see, son? Things are tight now with my Cog up on the Mona engines, so I’m due out scrubbing.’

‘You mean you can’t have Meg now Poll’s gone?’

‘Sorry, Tal Roberts.’

We stood in the confusion of Amlwch’s sun and wind, the scurrying people, their shouted greetings, the scrape of hobnails, the clopping horses; everybody was in Town that morning, I reckon: racked, undecided, we stared at each other. And Meg’s eyes were filling with tears.

‘Especially with your dada in Beaumaris, an’ all that . . .’ added Betsy.

I said, lifting Meg against me:

‘We’ve got an aunt and uncle down Dowlais way . . . I’ve written them a letter.’

‘O, aye! We forgot! Aunt Mellie, Boppa Williams, isn’t it? Sister on your dada’s side?’ Betsy mopped and flourished, being on the change, and Old Cog shouted at nothing, eyes closed:

‘ “A mind at peace with all below, a heart whose love is innocence. She walks in beauty, like the night . . .” ’ and he reached out, stroking Meg’s cheek. His missus said:

‘Sorry in my heart I am, Tal Roberts. But folks ’ave to eat, see, that’s the trouble,’ and she eased her great fat legs along the pavement, giving Old Cog one in the ribs. ‘Home, you,’ said she. ‘Faggots and peas it is this morning, not Welsh poets.’

I stood watching as they went into Greathead’s.

 

Farther down Market Street, in a raven-black clutch of Chapel worshippers, I bumped into Mr. Dafydd Owen, our Wesleyan Elder.

Parsimony in frugality was he, with a brass-bound Bible under one arm and under the other the books of the Slaughterhouse. Seeing Meg and me, he raised his eyes to Heaven and gathered us against him in grievous pain.

‘Oh, Taliesin!’

‘You ill, Mr. Owen?’

‘Sick to my heart, lad. This morning your father was brought back from the prison at Beaumaris; he is incarcerated now in the gaol in Wesley Street.’

‘For the whipping around Town tomorrow? Yes, I heard, Mr. Owen.’

‘Have you yet seen him?’

‘Red Bracer, the gaoler, would not let me in.’

‘May God grant you strength.’ He wrung his withered hands.

I raised my face. ‘They did the same to Jesus.’

‘Oh, no!’ Censure, deep and pure, lay on his ancient face.

I said, ‘After my father has gone, we’re going from here, too, Mr. Owen. Down south to Dowlais, likely. We have an aunt . . .’

The happy crowds pushed and shoved us in the sun’s nonchalant brightness: I thought of my father . . . the third whipping in a month; this time before his own people, and said, with an effort. ‘No . . . no point in us staying . . .’

‘I understand. And that little harlot, Cousin Poll, she has also deserted you, I understand?’

‘Her business, Mr. Owen. She’s been good to us till now.’

Megan sneezed at the sun and I wiped her nose. ‘No place for her here, either – Poll, I mean.’

But he was not listening. Racking his brains for memory, he said:

‘I have a brother in Dowlais, you know – a deacon in the Welsh Wesleyan – he serves in the same Chapel as Mr. John Guest, the ironmaster, whose wife is Lady Charlotte, the best blood in England. My brother tells me that they are looking for an assistant schoolmaster there . . .’

‘Kind of you, Mr. Owen, but my English is peasant.’

‘Perhaps so, but you are beautifully educated in the Welsh classics. Would you like a letter of introduction?’

‘Thank you very much, Mr. Owen.’

I said it to get rid of him, for the mouth often says one thing and the heart another.

It do beat me how Chapel deacons are appointed: this one managed the Amlwch Slaughterhouse, and six carcasses of veal pumped up for the Dinorben gentry come Sunday, plus fifteen ox-tails.

Passing Pritchard’s fields the doe eyes of the little calves always raked me; one day we will pay for this, said my father. Mr. Owen’s question tore me from my thoughts:

‘When will you be going, you say, Taliesin?’

‘When my father leaves Amlwch.’

‘So you will be walking in the whipping procession?’

‘Of course. Mrs. Costog’s having Meg.’

‘Then we will walk together, you and me, and I will give you the letter I promised you then. Meanwhile, remember, I beg you, we Welsh should grovel for crumbs from no employer, least of all to the tenant of Plas Newydd. How old are you, Taliesin?’

‘Seventeen, sir.’

‘May I speak personally?’

I nodded, and he said:

‘If you believe that your father is being whipped for the theft of a few candles, you’re a larger fool than I took you for.’

I nudged Meg and down she went in her little bobbed curtsey, while I bowed.

Patriots were all over the place, I thought; one never knew where they’d turn up next. And Mr. Owen bowed back, a man of impeccable loyalty, religion and tolerance: God knows how he ever got mixed up with a slaughterhouse.

Chapter 11

They brought my father out of the gaol in Wesley Street and tied his wrists to the back of our cart, his arms outspread; starched blood was still upon his shirt from the earlier whippings in Beaumaris, and he moved like a man still on the treadmill. He looked for me among the crowd and I raised a hand to him. Red Bracer, the Amlwch gaoler, after fixing a scold’s bridle over my father’s face, turned Dobie, our horse, and the whip, moving fast, slashed down.

Walking next to me in the procession behind the cart was Mr. Dafydd Owen, and he said:

‘You are worthy of your father, Taliesin. For one so young it is an ordeal, walking behind the cart of a relative’s punishment. You consider the punishment unjust, I take it?’

‘For the theft of a few candles? Of course.’

‘Have you considered – I asked you this before – that a greater charge might be involved?’

I did not reply to this.

 

Outside the Dinorben Hotel were standing the Quality; English mainly, but with a sprinkling of Welsh gentry. These were the people I had seen disembarking from the Irish mail sloop a week or so before. And all about them stood the smelters, carters, tributors and tutworkers; the miners, spraggers, coalers and hewers, also a score or so copar ledis, with whom I once worked. And Mrs. Dahlia Sapphira, who once had designs on my father, raised a fat fist as the cart went by, and shrieked:

‘Stick it, Gwyn Roberts. Stick it, mun!’

Rhiannon was not on the street.

She was standing by a leaded window of the hotel, with her hands over her face.

Most felons were whipped or put in the stocks on Fair Days. It was a change of entertainment from the bull and badger-baiting, cock-throwing, wife-beating and endless pitch and toss. Also, it instructed incoming paupers of the inadvisability of staying too long in Amlwch, and informed the Quality of our Welsh respectability.

Social conditions were going from bad to worse around then, in 1838. With the ore running out on Parys Mountain, the copper boom was over, yet still the immigrants flooded into Amlwch.

With them came the starvers from Ireland and the North Country, bringing in their ranks the blacklisted workers of the rioting southern towns.

After the Bread or Blood riots of Merthyr seven years back, hundreds of wanted men escaped to North Wales. Under assumed names they had streamed with their families into the copper trades, running from the Usk House of Correction. Undercutting Welsh copper wages, the immigrants would crowd the pavements to see the whipping carts go by, cat-calling, whistling, jeering, the blind fools.

‘Go on, Bracer lad – give ’im a penn’orth!’

‘That’s right, make the bugger dance, my lovely!’ . . .