Last Train to Gloryhole
Read Last Train to Gloryhole Online
Authors: Keith Price
Dedication:
For Alison, hoping it might help
bring us back together
ONTENTS
To Pen-Y-Fan
You stand so proud and noble against the lightening sky,
The rising sun trims your skirts with gold,
The dawning day, for you, no mystery holds,
It will pass as countless days gone by
And be no more.
You stand erect, defiant against the gathering storm,
The thunderous clouds a bonnet for your brow,
The mighty winds do not your shoulders bow,
While we of weaker, mortal, human flesh
Are tossed and blown.
You stand so silent, peaceful before the evening sky,
The moon and stars caress your form with light,
The features of your face are veiled by night,
You stand eternal, constant, to the end of time -
We live and die.
– Charles Harvey
HAPTER
1
I remember it as if it were yesterday. One night in late winter, and just months before her death, my mother told me how, during the war, and on the very night of her own mother’s funeral, she had retired early to her bed only to be awoken and terrified out of her wits by the sight of her mother - the grandmother I never knew - standing at the foot of her bed, dressed in the very clothes that she had just been buried in.
I well recall how I shuddered, then leaned towards her and carefully poured the last of Beryl’s C
arling Black Label
into the half-pint glass she held out for me, and, watching the foaming bubbles rise, and listening to them fizz, pondered for some moments over her startling revelation. I stared into Beryl’s thin, rouged, but coarsely lined face, and I recall how I seemed to see my mother in a completely new light. As she sat forward in the chair, I sipped long and hard from my own golden glass, then watched pityingly as she leaned even further forward so as to turn on the television. Now seventy-nine - and just months from her abrupt demise - I was alarmed that she could barely manage to switch the set on, let alone turn the knob in her frail fingers to increase the volume.
‘God, Mam! What did she do?’ I asked her, shouting now above the noisy TV-commercial that was playing. Beryl rested her frothing glass on the window-sill beside her and turned and looked at me askance, almost as though I were a stranger, or worse, some newly-arrived preacher from a chapel she avoided, and who had just walked in uninvited from off the street. ‘Why, she went away of course!’ she replied sharply. Yes, that was all she said, for soon after that the cat perched on the slanting, slate roof signified the beginning of her favourite soap.
Strange as it may sound, up until then I had believed every single thing my mother had ever told me. How, for instance, when a child, she told me that it was imperative that I got a smallpox-vaccination, and she had had us queue up two-and-a-half times round the clinic, and for the best part of a day, in order to obtain it; that, shockingly, I had failed the simple music-test at school to be loaned out the shiny, semi-precious, wooden recorder of my dreams, that even tone-deaf Lorraine Morgan got given; that I was to be punished at home for calling a half-German boy at school ‘a bloody Nazi!’; and, worst by far, that I needed to wear glasses! The very shame of it. And me, like my Uncle Bryn from Penydarren decades before, a future Arsenal and Wales footballer at the very least. Ever since when I have concluded that this last declaration of hers was most likely an apt and rightful punishment for the unforgivable nature of the, plainly racist, penultimate one. After all, I soon learned from David Trott’s mother’s own lips (in the hushed private office of the Junior School headmistress, no less) that Greta and her future husband had travelled across land and sea, with neither sleep nor luggage, all the way to England, then to Wales, in their efforts to escape the tyrant Hitler, and not at all, as I had announced shrilly in the school dining-hall the previous day, to spy for him!
Yes, it transpired that my dear mother had been right about all the things that I still regard as the key parameters of my childhood, and many more things besides. But of course I didn’t believe for one moment what she told me on that particular winter evening in her steamy back-parlour about her mother’s ghost. Indeed how could anyone with an ounce of sound judgement accept such abject nonsense? I asked myself. I had enjoyed a grammar-school education for heaven’s sake, and had supped, conversed, and even argued with the best. I decided that my beloved Beryl had unquestionably dissembled that night, and so had deceived me for the very first time in my life, and, looking back, it may be that, subconsciously, I was never quite able to forgive her for it.
The following day, on returning to my home just a few miles up the valley, I soon discovered that my mother’s tale had upset me considerably: for the second time I now felt deeply betrayed by a woman whom I loved. Beryl died that April before I even got the chance to revisit the matter with her, and this time perhaps get her to admit to the truth. However, maybe I should have shown greater consideration for her, considering the mean and solitary nature of her death - her sudden heart-attack, her ignominious fall from an easy-chair, the abject, prostrate hiatus before her unfortunate discovery on the floor of the room by the young delivery-boy from the shop across the road - but, like a fool, I was headstrong and self-righteous. Beryl had deceived me about her own mother, I told myself, and, as if to confirm
the lie
, during the weeks after her death I noted how she never appeared to
me
once, even though, in my inimitable grief, I must have summoned her daily.
So my dear mother Beryl May went out of my life for good, in what seemed to me a sort of fictional, smoky haze of disappointment, her final words of note to me an unforgivable sham. At least that was the view I took of the matter back then. But I have long since wondered whether her bizarre assertion was in fact
the lie
that I had then pronounced it to be, or whether, unbeknown to both of us, Beryl was simply one whose vision
‘through a glass darkly’
was unexpectedly, miraculously perhaps, unimpaired and crystal-clear. Yes, for my sins, this is the bitter question that I now find myself pondering at least once daily, with or without a darkened glass of ale to aid or cloud my insight. Do such people exist? I often wonder. And if so, was my mother one of them?
The ruddy-faced, bespectacled old lady, her dark, curly head bent low over the sheet-music, pumped her narrow, veined, leather-clad feet on the pedals, as if for dear life, and the bulky, black harmonium responded grudgingly, gasping out in laboured tones the pungent chords and scales of a hymn that the body of assembled mourners all knew, in the biblical sense, to their very souls, and sang out once again with traditional gusto.
‘Love divine, all loves excelling,’
they sang - man and boy, girl and woman.
On this occasion I sang only to stay abreast of them, and not in some vain attempt to out-shine them, as on one, much earlier, childhood visit to
Bethel
that I found I could still faintly recall. This particular hymn was, somewhat strangely, a favourite song of ours at weddings too, I recollected, holding up the single-sheet programme before my fast dampening, lately cataract-shrouded, eyes, in an effort to make out its timeless lines. But it was at a funeral once again that bent Agnes played it for us on that late March day - the sunny, yet sombre, morning of my elder brother Sam’s second - yes, second - and, God Willing, his final, burial.
The screw-fastened pine box, bearing on its gleaming, amber surface a wreath of red, white and yellow flowers, and wound about with a black-and-white woollen, football scarf - the word
‘Martyrs’
stitched across it in large block letters - had been wheeled in from the rear of the room on its squeaking, wooden trellis by two of the most solemn-looking gentlemen ever to don charcoal suits and matching black beards. This anomalous action, I felt, they seemed to effect rather too much in the manner of manoeuvring a wayward shopping-trolley for my liking, but at least I felt to a degree placated by the expert way in which the strange, narrow, overburdened tricycle became parked and secured. With two vertical bolts along its foremost legs, the coffin now sat firmly at rest, straddling the polished middle-aisle rather like a wooden ship in a dry-dock. It lay just ten or so feet before the raised lectern, from behind which the aged, shaggy-haired, Welsh preacher sang out to us his earnest and eternal soul, while staring downwards in due reverence, his large, steady fingers cleaning diligently in his off-white, creased handkerchief his pair of tiny, round-lensed spectacles, his large, flared nostrils sniffling up the first signs of a Spring-cold.
Between verses I turned my head to gaze around the large room. Yes, all my close family were there, I saw, even the remoter strands, comprising, most notably, a long line of young children in white shirts and blouses, all flaunting crisply-ironed tails that flapped back over pert, black-cotton buttocks, some adorned with silver dog-chains, key-fobs, or exposed zips which gleamed brightly in the morning sunlight that streamed in on their tender forms through the tall, trellised windows to one side of the room. If I had felt inclined to make the effort I might have recognised a few of them - or the identity of their parents, at the very least - but my weary and distracted mind only skimmed along the rows from head to head, summarising how, in the cavernous epochs between family interments, the unremitting round of coupling, conception and reproduction proceeded at its all too familiar pace, and the Cook and Rees families could now be seen to be growing quite alarmingly, rather than fizzling out, as I once believed they might conceivably do, given the curious nature of the calamitous chain of events which we in our portion of our dear valley had all had to endure.
I turned and looked behind me to the rear of the church, and quickly registered that none of the actual killers had turned up this time. Yes, they would have other plans, naturally, I told myself. Well they had certainly attended that first time, I recalled, except that, back then, I had no idea what it was that they had actually done, and so had little reason to question their presence, or the seemingly authentic offerings of empathy and contrition which each one had taken great pains to make me. Yes, it was only much later that it became clear to me that, between the four of them, they had endeavoured to affect innocence by jointly conspiring to hide the truth of what had actually taken place on that fateful day in October 1974, just a fortnight or so before the bleak, eighth anniversary of the terrible disaster which befell us at the village-school that Sam and I had once attended just a few short streets away, and which it had proved impossible for anyone in the community to shrug off, or even to tuck away temporarily, as one might an embarrassing love-letter, or a cotton leek, or a folded, felt daffodil, pressed in amongst sundry needles, buttons and cotton-reels in a much-loved corner of the linen-drawer.
‘People often like to give God credit,’ the white-haired pastor suddenly bellowed out from behind his lectern, holding high in his hands a wooden bowl filled to overflowing with fluttering notes, and with a painful, almost wicked, smile emanating our way through brown, gritted teeth. ‘But I see you folk have seen fit to give Him cash! And I’ve little doubt that He will bless you all accordingly, and many times over, for your humble, kind gesture.’