The Fire People

by Alexander Cordell

Genres: Historical Fiction; Victorian Romance

Synopsis

Set in the ironmaking town of Merthyr Tydfil, The Fire People is the story of Dic Penderyn who in 1831 became the first Welsh Martyr of the working class. Hanged for a crime that he did not commit, his story is told in this powerful novel which describes the events which took place during the famous Merthyr Tydfil riots of 1831.

Release date: August 7, 2014

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 256

Sample

THERE was more commotion going on than a Tipperary bath night.

Big Bonce was clogging around with Lady Godiva; Curly Hayloft, as bald as an egg, was doing a bull-fight with Tilly; Skin-Crone, the cook, was beating time to the shriek of the fiddle, and the navvy hut was alive with dancers of Kerry and County Mayo.

And as Gideon played he saw in his near-blind stare the twenty beds, the labour-dead sleepers straight off shift and the dark eyes of the Welsh girl who watched him from a seat in the corner. Someone turned up the lamps and he now saw more clearly as he fiddled out the old Irish reel: the coloured waistcoats of the navvies he saw, the violent disorder of the blankets, the mud-stained jerkins and hobnail boots, the soaked dresses of the wives hung up to dry: all this he saw partly by vision and partly by memory, from the days before he was blind. And he knew that in a shadow by the table old Peg Jarrotty, the wake corpse, would be hanging by a rope under his arm-pits, a broom under his chin, and a pint of home-brew slopping in his fist. Hooked on his chest would be the coffin plate—‘Peg Jarrotty, Wexford: died June 14th, 1830.’

‘There’s me wee darling!’ cried Tilly, dancing up in a sweeping of skirts. ‘Won’t you raise us a smile, Peg Jarrotty, for the look on your face makes me miserable to death!’ and she tipped him under the chin.

Vaguely, Gideon wondered if it was respectful to the dead, but he played on, smiling: this is what they wanted, he reflected; this was their religion.

Belcher Big Turn came up, all sixteen stones of him. ‘Sure, hasn’t he drained that pint yet? It’s the same stuff he used to sink down the Somerset Arms, isn’t it?’

‘It is not!’ shouted Lady Godiva. ‘He never touched that dish-water without a two-inch livener, isn’t that right, me lovely dead fella? Shall I lace it up with a drop o’ hard stuff?’ And she stroked his face.

‘Can’t you show some respect for the dead?’ asked Jobina, the Welsh girl in the corner, and she rose, her dark eyes sweeping around the dancers.

Gideon lowered his fiddle; the noise of the hut faded.

Jobina said: ‘I can stand the randies and the heathen language, but I can’t abide the wakes. Do you have to act like animals?’

‘She’s asking for a filling up again,’ said Moll Maguire.

‘You leave the Irish to the Irish, woman!’ shouted Tilly.

‘And the Welsh to the Welsh, and remember it!’ Jobina put her hands on her hips. ‘Irish, you call yourselves? Dancing around a corpse, and him hanging from the ceiling with a broom under his chin? Don’t tell me they do that in Kerry.’ She strolled the room, looking them up and down. ‘You’ve got him like a pig on hooks. Have him down tonight before I’m back off shift or I’m taking it to Foreman. It’s bad enough having to eat with live Irish without sleeping with dead ones.’

‘Heavens above!’ gasped Tilly. ‘Did you hear that? She’s asking for a doin’…’

‘Ach,’ said Belcher testily, ‘we’re not after woman-fighting. If the wee Welsh bitch wants old Jarrotty down, I say let’s give it.’

‘Why give her anything? She’s a foreigner here,’ cried Tilly, breasting up.

‘You’re the foreigners,’ replied Jobina, ‘or isn’t this the county of Glamorgan?’

Big Bonce swung to Gideon, crying, ‘What do you say, fiddler—you’re Welsh, too, aren’t you?’

‘The fella’s as Irish as me, aren’t ye, son?’ Moll Maguire now, with her arm around Gideon’s waist; she was tall for a woman, yet only inches above his shoulder. Gideon smiled with slow charm, saying:

‘It’s no odds to me, Irish—I’m only the fiddler, and you pay well.’

‘You should be ashamed of yourself!’ said Jobina, turning away.

‘And why should he?’ demanded Skin-Crone, the cook from the other end of the hut: she was sitting astride a chair stirring up a cauldron for the midnight supper, and the steam was going up like a witch’s brew. ‘When are we putting wee Jarrotty down, then?’ she asked.

‘He’s having a decent Catholic service the moment we find his leg.’

‘Haven’t ye found it yet, then? Wasn’t it buried under the fall?’

‘How did it happen?’ asked Gideon, and Belcher said:

‘He was barrowing the big stuff on the dram-road slope, with the mule wagging along the line as if tomorrow would do, but little Jarrotty slipped, ye see, and the dram came down. The dram came down, then the mule and then the muck, and he was under six tons of the stuff when we dug him out.’

‘And he’d only got one leg,’ said Moll.

‘Where did the other one get to?’ asked Lady Godiva, scratching.

‘Search me—the mule must have eaten it.’

The talk went on, the drinking was heavy. Gideon leaned against the hut wall and imagined the stars above Taibach, for this was his country. The wind moved over the heath and he smelled the heather and a tang of sulphur from the works, and he raised his face instantly to the salt of the sea-drift, which he loved.

‘Here’s your pay, fiddler, the dancing’s stopped,’ said Belcher, and pressed a shilling into his hand; Gideon took it, and did not reply. Instead, he lifted his head higher to taste the sea-drift, and Jobina followed his sightless gaze to the open window, threw her red shawl over her shoulders for the cropping and wandered towards him.

‘What’s your name?’

He straightened to her. ‘Gideon Davies.’

Bending, she pulled at a red stocking. ‘What the hell are ye doing in a place like this?’

‘What are any of us doing?’ he asked.

‘You local?’

He said evenly: ‘I used to be—Taibach.’

‘Welsh, eh?’

He smiled at her, and she added: ‘It’s a pleasure to be civilised, even if ye have to live with the heathen.’

‘They’re not so bad,’ he said. ‘Give me Irish in preference to the foreigners.’

Beyond the vision of her unseen face he saw the windows of Aberafon winking at the moon, the square thatch of Rhigos where he stole from the orchard: he smelled again the sulphur of the night wind coming up from Briton Ferry and saw the baying brilliance of the night when the molten iron flashed on the bungs of Dowlais. The white-hot bucketings of Skewen and Swansea were in his bedroom of childhood, and he would lie awake listening to the cries of the mules under the whips in the stack-yards and along the dram-roads of Morriston. There was the black shine of the cassocks in the C. of E. the bearded thunderings of Ianto Nonconform in the little red-brick chapel off the Vernon Arms, and the brown arms in summer of the girl he knew but whose name he had forgotten.

‘You play good,’ said the Welsh girl, watching him.

‘Thanks.’

‘Where did you catch it, then?’

‘Taibach Copper Works.’

‘That bloody place, cauldrons and chopped colliers.’

The navvies had stopped carousing now and were feeding on the bench: the pot Skin-Crone was serving from contained many different foods: vegetables which she had stolen from Taibach market made the slush. The meats were attached by strings, and each portion she pulled out with care and gave it to the owner: half a hare for Belcher, a born poacher; two pig’s trotters tied together for Curly Hayloft, a sheep’s head between Mercy Merriman and Betsy Paul, Dick of the Iron Hand’s woman, who was visiting. Crone and Moll shared an ox-tail they had blackmailed from a butcher with two wives; Blackbird feasted on a pound of ribs of beef, which he had bought, being honest. All had wooden spoons, and these they dipped excitedly into the pot, blowing and gasping at the steam and elbowing each other for room.

‘B’ant you eating, fiddler?’ asked Belcher.

‘No, I’m just off to Mamie Goldie,’ replied Gideon.

‘Who’s Mamie Goldie?’ asked Moll. ‘She don’t sound decent.’

‘She is clean,’ said Gideon instantly.

‘By God, that’s a change. You lodge with her?’ asked the Welsh girl.

He nodded and she looked again into his face, seeing the tell-tale tattoo of the furnace grit, yet his eyes appeared untouched by the blast: bright blue, they shone in his brown face.

‘How did you collect it?’

He could have gone into the detail, but the wounds were too new to his soul. He could have told her how the copper exploded in a damp mould; that Mike Halloran had just come into the casting-house and stopped for a ladle in front of him, so he took most of it. Also, Popo Hopkin, aged seventy, due to retire in three weeks, took some, too; and screamed and went in circles with his body on fire as the copper bit deep. Halloran died in shrieks they heard as far up as the Brombil dram-road. Strangely, for all his age, Popo did not die, but lived on the black shadows of his forge-sided cottage, nurtured by Company respectability—come in, boys, see what we’re doing for Popo Hopkin. Maintained by a devoted wife on four and six a week pension, Popo lived where the children could not see him. And a disability like this do have a bit of compensation—apart from the four and six—he used to say to the Quakers who visited, faces averted—for you can’t appear shocking in a two-ale bar and you eat that much less with only half a mouth.

In his two years of blindness Gideon had bred great shafts of hope that wounded despair. The comradeship of ear and nose had constructed a new world in his darkness: and touch, a vital sense left to him, completed the resurrection from self-pity. Now he said lightly:

‘There is nothing to tell—the mould was wet, and it spat.’

The navvies quarrelled at the table in good-natured banter and oaths, and Betsy Paul shouted: ‘You’m a fine fiddle, boy. You tried us up in Pontstorehouse?’

‘He do not play in cellars,’ said Jobina.

‘The money’s right in Merthyr, mind—we got fiddlers and organ-grinders, and my Dick Llaw-Haearn is right fond of music. You like to play for silver some time?’ She tore at the sheep’s head, grinning above it with strong white teeth, and swept back her matted hair with a greasy hand.

‘Some time,’ said Gideon. ‘But it’s a Derry fiddle and it sings that much sweeter to the Irish.’

‘You Irish?’ asked Jobina. ‘You said you were Welsh.’

‘Welsh parents and born in Galway.’

‘It makes no difference, there’s still the business of eating. I’m cropping night shift up on Brombil—you going that way?’

Gideon nodded. ‘Miners’ Row.’

‘Bloody good for you—right on top of the mill.’

‘I am not there all the time,’ he said.

Reaching the door of the hut, he turned and bowed to the room. The navvies, now clustered around the wake of Jarrotty, shouted rough goodbyes.

‘The heathen lot of bastards,’ said Jobina.

Gideon touched his hair. ‘Good night, and thank you.’

‘You pay ’em too much respect,’ said she.

As she opened the door the night swept in; the wake candles fluttered and the room was alight with the flashing of the Taibach vents. In the sulphurous stink that enveloped them, Gideon said reflectively, ‘Once, in a hall in Tredegar, I played first violin in Judas Maccabaeus, and I bowed to people then.’

‘Who’s Judas Maccabaeus?’

He smiled as they went down the steps of the hut. ‘It doesn’t matter now.’

‘You staying on here?’ asked Jobina.

‘No. I’m on the road in the morning.’

‘And you blind …?’

‘It makes no difference. Every year I do the round to Merthyr and the Top Towns—on the fiddle with political pamphlets.’

‘God! An agitator! You do this all the year?’

‘Chiefly in summer—too cold on the mountains in winter.’

‘Where you bound tomorrow then?’ she asked.

‘I won’t get far above Mynydd Margam.’

‘We’ll be at Maesteg this time tomorrow—that’s strange.’

‘I thought you were cropping at Brombil all summer,’ said Gideon.

‘Ach, no—there’s no bread in it. If I’m bedding with the navvies I might as well work with them, and the Nipper Tandy gang is on the Maesteg dram-road in the morning—might see more of you?’

‘I doubt it,’ said Gideon.

THE Welsh girl left Gideon at the company shop and took the Constant Incline up to Brombil.

‘You be all right, fiddler?’

‘Of course.’

‘I’ll hand ye down to Miners’ if you want it.’

‘I can manage.’

‘Good night to ye, then.’

‘Good night.’

With his fiddle under his arm Gideon began to tap his way down the dram-road which brought the works coal from The Side, and he knew exactly where he was for the thunder of the drams was behind him, singing on the incline; before him, flashing on his open eyes, the vents of the copper works glowed and flared against dull banks of sulphurous clouds. Here, as a child, he had known this place from Granny’s Hole up to The Green where the soldiers paraded. He was at home here, and he knew the blackened trees and the carnage of a burned land. But even in his time he could also remember the clear beauty of the Rhanallt stream where he used to fish for trout with his fingers. Often he had grimly considered the advantages of blindness as row after row of workers’ cottages were flung up across the bright fields of his youth. And there still lived in his ears the chinking tribannau of the breast-ploughing: the steaming, straining oxen, six abreast and led by a horse was a treasured vision of his past, with his clothes dusted white with the lime-carting from Cornelly quarries. His father, long dead, used to hire himself out at the fairs of Swansea for fifteen sovereigns a year, and by this means came to Taibach and the Groeswen cottage where Gideon was born. There was home-brewed ale for weddings and cider for harvesting; bread was baked in an earth oven in the garden—and neighbours came for miles for its service—barley bread for weekdays, pure wheat loaves for Sabbaths, all brown and crusty on the top, and his mouth watered now at the thought of the rich yellow-churned butter of the fat wives on the stalls at Taibach market. Then, on Calan Gaeaf, the first day of November, a pig would be slaughtered, salted and stored in oatmeal. The girls, he remembered, were gay in poke-bonnets and giggles and mostly dark-haired. But one whose name was Angharad Jones was fair, and it was she whom he had kissed in a lane near Rhigos one Whit Sunday: her lips, he remembered, tasted of bitterness, for they had been picking wild sloes.

He awoke from his reflections as Dai End-On, going to the Somerset Arms, hawked deep and spat at his feet. He did not speak, but Gideon knew him by hop smell.

‘Good night, blind man.’ A young tramping Welshman with a bundle on a stick passed him at the top of Miners’. He was rolling a little in his gait; there was about him a happy, tipsy charm.

‘Good night,’ said Gideon.

The red flashes of the casting-house guided Gideon with the accuracy of a lighthouse beam to a ship in an ocean waste, for, by some inexplicable chemistry the vicious light imposed its brilliance on the half-dead retinae of his sight, bringing visions that momentarily exposed panoramas of the blackened landscape. The labouring night shift of Cotton Row and Miners’ bellowed his childhood’s music with a new ferocity, for a big order had come in from Spain. Dram-wheels grated to a stop on the road behind him and Gideon leaped away with astonishing alacrity.

‘You mind your back, Gid!’ cried Randy, Mamie’s boy. ‘You damn near took it that time, remember!’

‘You run me down and you will answer to Mamie,’ said Gideon, smiling, and waited while the dram went past, pushed by two, for another was there; young Blod Irish, by the sound of her, for he heard the soprano in her gasps.

‘You fiddlin’ at the Jarrotty wake tonight, then?’ called Randy over his shoulder: imp-black and in rags was he, and Blod, aged sixteen, with her body as straight as a bar on the dram beside him; hauliers both, and the coal was heaped high, for Randy, to his credit, never pushed easy.

‘Yes,’ called Gideon back, ‘how did you know?’

‘Met a friend of yours—get about a bit for a musician, eh?’

A group of men were talking about the benefit clubs as he tapped down Miners’. The copper vents mushroomed with flame then, and he saw his door. Opening it quickly, he entered the room that was shared by Little Randy and Dai End-On. Here flashes of the works did not enter, and he was blind again. Like others in Miners’ Row, this was a company cottage, three up, two down; owned by the English Copper Company who owned everything of value in the district, including the population. Yet there existed a paternal benevolence among the masters that allowed them rare acts of generosity, and Nine Miners’ Row was one example. In the tenancy rules signed by her husband, deceased six years ago after passing through ten-ton rollers, Mamie Goldie was allowed to continue tenancy on the undertaking that she did nor take in lodgers. But there were two lodgers in Nine Miners’. There was Zimmerman, a Pole of doubtful origin, who shared with Gideon in the upstairs front, and it was generally agreed to be one of the best upstairs in Taibach: Mamie herself shared the downstairs back with Dai End-On and Little Randy, her son, who was there to keep it proper, for the neighbours can be buggers where a virgin lady is involved, as Mamie used to say.

‘That you, Gid?’ she called now.

‘Yes, Mamie.’

‘You done the navvy?’

‘Yes, the wake is nearly over.’

‘Pity about him, isn’t it?’

‘Ay, a good little man was Peg Jarrotty.’

The silence beat about them after a bedlam of snores from the three Irish brothers Tim, Mike and Joe, Mrs. Billa Jam’s lodgers next door. Lately come in from Fishguard from yet another Irish famine, they had seen people grazing in the fields like cattle up in County Mayo, though it sounds a tall one to me, said Mamie Goldie, for we don’t have the molars for grazin’.

‘Astonishin’, it is, how Mary’s Children always snore in unison,’ she said to Gideon once. ‘The Welsh, on the other hand, snore in harmony: queer, isn’t it?’

It was not queer, it was a fact. Often, when he could not sleep Gideon would wander the deserted streets of Taibach and listen to this phenomenon.

‘It’s lyin’ on their backs that does it,’ said Mamie, ‘and there’s better choral singing done unconscious than swimming the River Jordan in the back pews of Swansea Calfaria upright, and I do mean Swansea, for this lot don’t know a crotchet from tonic sol-fa. You all right, Gid?’

She peered up at him now, clutching at the front of her faded nightgown.

‘Fine, Mamie,’ he said, moving past her.

‘You eaten?’

‘I ate with the Nipper Tandy gang,’ he lied.

The mill roared obscenely between them, and Gideon sensed the warmth of her humanity. Strangely, although he was nearly twenty-six he had never known a woman’s love, nor Mamie the gentleness of a man such as he. He was big, she thought; until now, standing close to him, she had never realised the size of him; and he was made even bigger in her eyes by his unusual gentleness. The men Mamie had known were those of fists and ale, with an eye filled up at the very first argument. Their talk was of the copper vats and iron-pudding, with fighting most Saturdays down at the Oddfellows Lodge of loyal brothers, and the lot of them put together as loyal as a bag of biblical serpents, then some, said Mrs. Billa Jam next door. Gideon, for his part, saw in Mamie Goldie the mother he had lost to the Old Cholera when he was ten years old: always in her presence he smelled again the heavy scent of funeral flowers, and saw in a window a candle flickering on polished oak.

‘You heard about Merve—Billa’s lad next door?’

Mamie loved and nurtured Mervyn Jam, aged nine, and his twin, Saul.

‘No, what has happened?’ Gideon paused at the stairs.

‘Collected a backside of buck-shot from that old devil up on Rhigos.’

‘Mr. Evans?’

‘Mr. Waxey Evans—I’ll give him cobbling, shooting at the boys—far too handy with that blunderbuss, he is.’ She belched and pardoned. ‘All fair to young Merve, he told the truth. Him and Willie Taibach laying night-lines in Rhigos pond and the old beggar comes out and lets fly—got Merve in both cheeks, and one is still in—pellets, I mean. Another two inches and it would ’ave been through his watchercallit. Ain’t good enough, I say—might have laid him up for life.’

‘Is he really hurt?’

‘He was when I was getting ’em out—and Billa nearly fainting off. Daren’t tell his da, of course—not that he’d care—oiling his apple down at the Lodge …’

‘There are still some pellets left in?’

‘Only one, and I’m after that now—just slipped out for a tot of gin to send the little soul off …’ She smiled, coming closer, breathing gin all over him. ‘Buck-shot in lads is nothing—it’s the men’s the trouble. If God had a heart for women He’d have let nothing in trousers live beyond the age o’ thirteen.’ She added: ‘You seen my Randy boy?’

Gideon nodded.

Mamie said: ‘Were Blod Irish with him?’

‘I … I think so.’

‘And Dai …?’

‘He just passed me, and …’

‘And took his ticket for the Somerset Arms.’ She bowed her head. ‘I see him; parting his whiskers and pouring in a pewter without so much as a swallow.’ Raising her face, she said: ‘You see what me life is, Gid? A randy and a drunkard. Did me boy smell clean?’

‘Like a pear drop—neither ale nor short on him.’

‘Ay, but he’s havin’ it off with that Blod Irish as soon as I’d take me life. But that don’t keep me tossing awake, lad—it’s the ale. If he loosens one in her he can always walk her up to God, but it’s the drinking that’s drowning me—just the same as his father.’

He wanted to go to bed but she retained him with ease, such was her music.

‘An’ me a Jew-Welsh from London—a fool he is to get mixed up with the Irish.’ She turned away. ‘God smooth your dream,’ said she. ‘By the way—Zimmy’s in.’

The works flared again as the copper boiled and in its redness she watched him climb the stairs. When he reached the landing and turned from her sight, Mamie leaned against the door of her kitchen, clasped her hands and stared up with clenched eyes through the roof to the stars.

On the first-floor landing Gideon stopped, his hand outstretched for the door, but he did not touch it. There came in a draught beneath it a faint scent of pine and fire; then he heard a step within the room.

‘That you, Zimmerman?’ He asked this as he entered, but he knew it was not the Pole, for the step was too light for the heavy-footed Zim: also, women breathe in faint sighs when fearful, sounds that only the blind can hear, and he knew that the room window was open for the mill hammers were sharper, the roller-whining keener. Entering swiftly, Gideon shut the door behind him, turned the key and dropped it into his pocket.

Trapped behind the bed the girl glared at him in the flashing of the works, and the smell of her rags, the crushed hay of her rough sleeping came to Gideon’s nostrils. Gaining the window, he slammed it shut; the girl made an inarticulate sound when he moved towards her; she backed away.

‘No nearer,’ she said. ‘One move and I’m swipin’ ye.’

Gideon knew she was young, and smiled; he preferred this ragged aggressor to a fawning servility; and he was wondering what she could be stealing, unless it was something of Zimmerman’s, for he himself owned nothing. Then he realised that he had bought bread and cheese from the Shop that morning. With an agility that amazed him she suddenly leaped across the bed and ran to the door, rattling the handle.

‘It is locked,’ he said, and approached her, gripping her arm as she slid away, and she beat her fists about his face as he pulled her against him, controlling her, and the door rattled from the fight. Mamie stirred downstairs.

‘You all right, Gid?’ she called.

The mill was momentarily silent. Panting, they clung to each other; light flared in the window and the girl knew him for blind. Mamie shouted; ‘You bumped yourself again, Gid?’

The girl in his arms groaned quietly to the pain of his fingers, Gideon cried at the door: ‘Yes, I’m all right, Mamie.’

‘Then tell that Zim to stop kicking about.’

Outside in the Row a man was singing drunkenly. Breathing heavily, Gideon and the girl listened automatically, and she no longer struggled. Nor did she move away when he released her.

‘What have you taken?’

She hugged the food against her.

‘Give it to me,’ he commanded.

She made a sweet lamenting noise, and said: ‘I’m bloody starving, mister.’

‘Give it to me.’

He was impatient of her now. Soon Zimmerman would be back from the Oddfellows, and for all his talk that property was theft, for all his idealistic theories he would hand this one over to the Military because theft was a major crime: property in Taibach was inviolate and the less one possessed the more it was sacrosanct: the child would go to transportation for sure.

Taking the bread from her hands Gideon broke it in half, did the same with the cheese and returned to her a portion of each.

‘Blind, aren’t ye.’ It was a statement, not a question.

Gideon said: ‘Now get out before somebody catches you in here.’ He opened the door, adding softly, ‘Next time don’t steal—ask for food.’

‘Ach, ye get nothing at all for the asking, for I bloody tried it.’

To him it was pleasant that she was so young—perhaps only about fifteen, he thought. His life since blindness had been the blousy, golden-hearted skitterers of the doorsteps, or the bawdy fish-women of the Old Bar. His mind reached back to the kisses of Angharad Jones, and he wanted this girl to stay. Sometimes Zimmerman, for all his talk of morality and social justice, would bring home a woman. And Gideon would be forced to lie in his blindness while Zimmerman denied him the right to other senses.

‘Go now,’ he said, ‘and do not make a noise.’

She did not speak again and he heard her descend the stairs with a burglar quiet, open the street door and softly close it. The night air touched his lips from the window: he knew he had not done with her. Vagrants such as these haunted goodwill; they could not afford otherwise. Yes, he thought, she would be back. Men, unlike mules, stand skinning twice.

He listened to the smooth, satin clamour of her bare feet racing down the Row.

Zimmerman, his room-mate, came in hours after midnight: Gideon turned in sleep, opening blind eyes to the light of the candle.

‘It is I,’ announced Zimmerman, and began to undress.

‘It was a good Oddfellows?’

‘It was not a meeting of the Oddfellows,’ said the Pole. ‘Sit up, for I have something to say.’

‘It is a damned good time of night.’

‘It is not night,’ said Zimmerman, ‘it is nearly morning. Are you listening?’

Gideon nodded, silently cursing him. This was typical of Zim; everything was dramatic, and if it was not already dramatic, he made it so. Heavy-footed, the big man sat down on the bed.

‘I have been speaking with an agent of the Friendly Association.’

Gideon sat up. ‘The Lancashire people?’

‘Also Doherty of the Cotton Spinners. You hear he has opened an office in London?’

‘For the protection of labour?’

‘For the drawing together of all trade unions—resistance to wage reductions—even to apply for wage increases …’

‘Increases? That is ridiculous!’

‘He is not too ambitious,’ said Zimmerman, and lit his pipe, puffing out smoke. ‘One day it will come. More, there is to be a meeting of colliers of Staffordshire, Yorkshire, Scotland and Wales—to be held at the Bolton Authority Lodge. Meanwhile, we are to test the pulse—you call it that?—of the Welsh.’

‘We aren’t ready for full Unionism yet,’ said Gideon, sitting up. ‘We’d be lucky if we got support for the Benefits.’

Zimmerman said: ‘Wales must be got ready, she cannot lag behind. I told the agents—I am always telling the agents—when the trouble comes it will begin in Wales: these people are like mine, of fire. Up in Bolton they all seem half asleep.’

Gideon said: ‘Sometimes I wonder if we are working for Unionism or rebellion …’

‘Are these not one and the same?’

‘Of course not.’

‘But how can you have Unionism without rebellion? The employers will fight tooth and claw; they will not part with a sovereign unless you eradicate them.’

‘It will take time,’ said Gideon blankly.

‘That is where we differ.’ Zimmerman rose and walked about the room. ‘You may have the time, but I have not.’

‘It can be done,’ came the reply. ‘There is no need for blood.’ The copper works mushroomed flame, the night became white with incandescent fire; immediately in the line of his sight, Gideon saw the Pole quite clearly, then the vision died.

‘I am leaving for Merthyr in the morning,’ said Zimmerman. ‘The population is big—nearly thirty thousand. I am told, too, that unrest is present and that it is likely to grow. You know they have a temporary Union branch there?’

‘I did not know.’

‘You should read the pamphlets, Gid.’

‘I’d be delighted to.’

Zimmerman grunted. ‘I apologise to you. Sometimes I am particularly stupid.’

‘You are being particularly stupid if you think you can organise a riot in Wales.’

‘You should read your history,’ replied the Pole. ‘They are an aggressive little people; they have been organising riots since the digging of Offa’s Dyke, or must I also teach