Last Train to Gloryhole (3 page)

Shivering suddenly at the lucidity of my recollection, I got to my feet and buttoned up my suit-jacket, then slipped the photograph back into its plastic cover once again. I swayed to the right, and, immobilised with cramp, fell sideways onto the bed, where I lay back and recalled how Sam and I, like two overgrown moles blessed with sudden sight, had gripped hands and clambered through a shattered, pane-less window, then trudged through a school-yard we had formerly loved and knew so well, yet now found unaccountably lain waste, and as alien to us as the surface of Titan. Our filthy, clutched hands once again slipped apart, I recalled how we had scrambled unsteadily and erratically over twisted benches and milk-crates, dustbin lids and school-bags, all seemingly afloat, yet unmoving, in what resembled, to my young and demented mind at least, a fast-setting sea of dark-chocolate slurry.

Clambering up Sam’s bent back, and, seconds later, perched alongside him atop a fractured, stone wall, to the door-stepping wives of Moy Road I feel sure we most have resembled a pair of ragged chimney-sweeps bent on escaping from the slavery of some dank, grey Victorian manor.

‘Hey! You boys get down off there!’ I recalled one woman had shouted. ‘Head for the hills, you guys!’ she might have better advised us, as John Wayne or The Lone Ranger would surely have commanded to camera in similar circumstances. And so we two shabby cow-pokes tumbled onto the flag-stoned pavement, leapt quickly to our feet, and dashed headlong for home - our haven of love and hope, in a sloping, terraced row, thankfully spared from that sad, Michaelmas-Term sacrifice, or retribution perhaps, delivered upon us innocent children and teachers by that cold, wet, coal-black, low-sweeping, Passover angel.

Yes, my saviour angel that day had been Sam. I rolled my head over on the pillow and closed my eyes, and recalled how, one Saturday afternoon in the autumn of ‘69, and the South African rugby team having arrived in Swansea, he and I had gone along together to see the controversial, ‘all-white’ representative side take on the city’s best. Grasping a half-time pasty in my left hand and a plastic cup of hot tea in the other, I recalled having had to jump back a step or two so as to dodge the duffle-coated torso of a young, bespectacled student in a multi-striped scarf being cruelly tossed over the railings towards us, and then how Sam had soon after dried my clothes and even retrieved my flying pasty for me. The timid, try-less game may have tottered to a close that day, I recalled, but my own conversion seemed bang on target, as was Sam’s; our political senses becoming pricked and transformed in little more than a flash.

If, as many claim, the seeds of future events are carried within ourselves, then surely the truth about the past is to be found in the writings recorded by us all back then. I quickly thumbed through the pages of my one and only remaining diary from the time. With a sharp intake of breath I saw that the final words I had recorded inside it were written in red ink, and so was hesitant to turn over the final page and read what, if anything, I might have followed it with. Instead I quickly thumbed back to page-one.
‘1964!’
That obviously explained the diary’s unusual thickness, I mused: it was a five-year one, of course. I hesitated a moment yet still flicked over the pages to
‘October 1966.’
I noted how most slots on the double-pages lacked an entry of any kind. Then on the 21st stood a single word -
Disaster!
And on the 22nd. three solitary phrases -
‘Yet more rain,’ ‘Toll rises,’
and, finally,
‘Clearing up will most likely take forever.’
A future historian would most probably have surmised that the school’s drains had flooded, and so might never have guessed the truth: the tragic truth that 144 young children and their teachers had perished while seated in pairs at their oak-hewn, ink-welled desks, in what transpired to be their terminal head-count in this life, but doubtless their initial registration in the next.

Once the only town of any notable size in Wales - in industrial terms its very capital - Merthyr Tydfil has a history based upon iron, steam-coal and trains. Having travelled far and wide, I knew only too well how so few people outside Wales were aware that the first steam train ever to run on rails (‘
The Penydarren Locomotive’
) was built in Merthyr, and, in 1804 - little more than a year before the Battle of Trafalgar, in fact, and fully eight years prior to the more famous run of George Stephenson’s
‘Rocket’
- had rattled along on its iron track, and, carrying a cargo of iron southwards along the sinuous Taff Valley, reached a point almost halfway to distant Cardiff. It is said that the local people were so terrified at the train’s shuddering, steam-shrouded passing that they turned aside to shield their eyes and scurried rapidly for cover, whereas some braver-hearted folk chanced their arms, and their lives no doubt, and boldly leapt aboard its veritable ‘caravan’ of jangling trucks for what would prove to be ‘
the journey of a lifetime
.’

The actual steam-engine, both built and driven by the pioneering engineer Richard Trevithick, and ably assisted by skilled, local engineer Rees Jones, is believed by many to have long lain buried in the sloping ground at Penydarren, very close to the site of the old ironworks, where every one of its metal parts, and also the prototype, black rails that it ran upon, were forged.

Very well acquainted, as I recall I was in my teens, with the major facts of both transport development and local history, and having learned everything there was to know about the historic event itself, I can remember venturing to the location alone one late-October night, the small spade and rock-hammer in my shoulder-bag being the solitary tools that I took with me with which I planned to unearth history.

I was filled with high hopes of a monumental discovery only to find myself ambushed and chased away by a gang of boys from Trevithick Street, who, it appeared, were convinced I was trying to raid items from their planned, and already towering, bonfire. Indeed the monstrous tyre that overtook me and, thundering by, almost flattened me, as I sprinted for my life down the steep, grassy slope towards the Morlais Brook, I took to be a staple component of the same, and one of several that the Penydarren gang had clearly stolen from the nearby bus-garage in order to fuel their intended Guy Fawkes’ conflagration.

In the welcome twilight I managed to escape their clutches, but, while joyously scampering off in the direction of Penyard, I only succeeded in walking right into the arms of the very first girl that I ever truly came to care dearly for. Gwen, the small, dusky, brown-eyed beauty told me her name was. I told her that mine was Rod - it wasn’t, obviously - but I found it seemed to matter little in the long run. So thoroughly captivated was I with this strange, new creature that it was hardly surprising that we teamed up, and spent a couple of winter months in each other’s company, celebrating together Hallowe’en, Bonfire Night, then Christmas and the New Year.

But contact between us understandably began to wither when the schools went back after the break, and the nightly grind of Grammar-School homework began to kick in once again, and then suddenly ceased altogether when I discovered, quite by chance, that she and her family had moved to live further up the valley. Yet, unbeknown to the pair of us, our paths were happily destined to cross once again as adults, and that resulting from her husband’s untimely, and quite unexpected, disappearance.

March brown set in soon after four in the afternoon, and by five had already climbed down the flocked paper that was beginning to peel off the cold bedroom’s walls. Outside the picture-window darkness gradually overtook the pavements, and began to isolate the street-lamps that lined the inhabited, living side of Cemetery Road.

Winter was almost behind us once again, thank-fully it had proved a far from harsh one, even by modern-day standards, and very unlike any that I had known as a boy. I well recalled how winter days appeared to be far longer back then, how their water-channels and rain-gutters seemed always to be brimming, and dangerously poised for overflow, their winds stronger and more blustery, their snow blizzards thicker and more fierce, their frosts keener than grief.

I turned over once again and lay on my side, shut my eyes, and allowed myself to scamper back through my book of memories to the front-door of our tiny, terraced cottage in the early morning, where my first task before school had always been to bring in the milk. I recalled how the glass bottles deposited on our door-steps at the passing of the horse-drawn cart seemed always to crack and spill their cream with the very first snows; the drifts outside our door invariably letter-box deep and largely impassable, and the folded
Daily Herald
, hanging from its draughty, metal opening, either dripped with the moisture of the falling snowflakes, or was completely sodden through.

It was in that same little house in Aberfan that my grandfather Charlie had finally succumbed to the extremes of a dour, ash-flicked life and died. The second stroke in as many years had already knocked out his respiratory centre and left his right side paralysed. Everyone in the street was aware that he was barely able to speak, or even open his eyes, although they knew he could still hear our tearful voices, and could yet still move the calloused fingers of his left hand, that once could strum a banjo of a Saturday night in
The Mackintosh, The Labour Club
and
The Cardigan Arms
in Dowlais with the very best of them.

I recalled how, on what proved to be his final evening among us, I had detected a blackened hole in the thumb-nail of his rigid right hand that I strangely sensed would now lack the time necessary to work its way out, however many hours or days he might have remaining, and however much longer after death a dead man’s nails were said to continue to grow. And I fondly remembered too how, at the end of that long night, and barely minutes before the welcome sunrise, I felt moved to lean across the blood-stained and phlegm-encrusted pillow to caress his furrowed brow, only to find that his temple was already as cold as the corrie-d, mountain-ice on nearby
Pen-y-Fan
.

My dearest Grandad, (whom we all lovingly addressed as
Dad-cu,
) had breathed his last in those early hours before school began, and so had left me - his youngest grandson, and his ofttimes acolyte - to spit and cough and curse away the day on his behalf, and to poach and proffer, pilfer and plunder, and, as was his wont to do before me, walk the weary world of Wales alone.

I stood up and walked across to the window of the room, and gazed out across the narrow road to the broad side-gate of the cemetery just as its janitor Ivor Coles locked it up for the night with his great, clinking bunch of keys that your average cat-burglar might have given up his fence for. The vast grave-yard’s narrow, dusky lane ran on up the hill to where Sam’s recently re-opened, and now, once again, refilled, and bouquet-strewn grave lay, just a few feet at most from the stony path, as well as to those other, more monumental mounds and memorials that housed, now and forever, the remains of many of my former family-members, among them my own dear mother.

My mind drifted back just six or seven hours this time, to the moment when I had bent my back up there to scatter a handful of soil atop Sam’s coffin for the second time in almost forty years. A crowd of friends and relations had stood around in black attire, accompanied by the odd local journalist, who had more than likely been required to attend purely on account of the very unusual nature of the interment.

I had watched a group of starlings swoop down on a colony of hapless insects, that were understandably oblivious to their lack of camouflage, as they ventured out of the grass-verge and across the grey, tarmacadam lane. And it was back down this same lane, towards the hill-top home in which I now stood, that we had all either driven or strolled, after paying our last respects to my dead brother, before taking time to acknowledge, and tearfully embrace, those distant relatives who had, by now, become almost strangers to us all. having travelled there from as far flung locations as West Wales and England, and so needed to leave early in order to get home again the same day.

The scene from my window was now one of supreme stillness and peace, with just the rising, yellow moon to light up the vast, undulating field of death that for many years now I had, through my second marriage to my darling Gwen, elected to live alongside. The eerie creaking of the gate, as it was dragged to in Ivor Coles’ iron grip, and the horrible clunk of its ultimate closure, saw no one running towards it this evening, I mused, in their desperate efforts to escape the embarrassing predicament of another dreaded lock-in. And yet I felt sure I could still glimpse one solitary figure in the far distance, making her stooping way from the site of my brother’s grave, and gracelessly stumbling away in the direction of the narrow, precipitous path that led down to the furthermost gate of the cemetery - still as yet unchained - and near which I felt sure her VW Passat must be parked.

I strained my weak eyes to the limit in my efforts to be sure. The great shadow cast by the March murmur of starlings, continually circling and folding around itself overhead, did little to assist me, but I opened up the window and, with field-glasses in hand, persisted. Yes, it was one of Sam’s killers all right, I told myself, in fact the very one I had at one time loved and lain with, at a time when we had each found ourselves released from the precepts of first-marriage, and whom, at the time, I had unexpectedly put in the family-way. And then, again with the aid of my trusty binoculars, I was finally able to satisfy myself that, alone and under cover of semi-darkness, and clearly in shame for what she had done, the very first female friend I had ever known had returned at long last to her victim’s grave, and, much like the money spider I had witnessed in church that morning, was now creeping her weary way home again.

‘Bye, Anne! I’ll be back after the staff-meeting. Around five, I expect.’

Hearing no hint of the expected reply, Drew slammed the front-door and, package tucked tightly under his arm, walked down the path to his BMW, spinning round briefly, keys in hand, so as to take in a full, sweeping view of the empty terraced-house that stood next door to his own. He noticed how the letter-box was now even more jammed full of mail than it had been the last time he had looked, and he silently told himself that he would need to go up the path and force it all inside again, either that evening when he returned, or, at the latest, the following day.