Short story

Here's a story by me. It's For Tommy Bolitho

Tommy Bolitho got buried the day he should have got married. He was due to marry my older sister, Gwen, but he didn’t get to it in the end. In fact, to be straight, he ought to have married her the day that he died down the pit - but at the last minute the wedding was put back by a week and he took the extra shift instead.

It was all to do with what happened to Gwen's dress, made by Tommy's mam. Tommy's mam, who made for all occasions.

Tommy almost had his hand on the shoulder of his morning suit when the word came through that the wedding was off. So he cwtched the suit back in the wardrobe in the front room of his mam’s house in Pritchard Street . Then he went to the drawer where his mam always put his washed dungarees and put them on instead.

I was down at the tram-road at the time, flapping, catching my wind and biding my time, fretting. I’d been up to no good.

*****

There’s a way that mourners walk towards a fresh grave. It’s something like the way that magnets resist one another. Perhaps it’s their remorse, but maybe it’s also fear of the final pit. They never walk straight. There’s a swaying, delaying motion. We’d come across by Top Road, that sodden morning, under the weep of the trees on the hillside, like a sliding seam of black from Edwardsville. The mud was sucking the soles of our boots as we stood around the shallow shaft, sunk for the coffin in Quaker’s Yard.

A part of the plot was reserved for the men that died young. Back then it was half-full. It filled up in 1953 after the explosion in the Deep Navigation that killed eight men and three ponies.

He passed our house on the way to the colliery the day he died. He spent a few minutes with Gwen in the garden, calming her and telling her that one Saturday was as good as another and that he’d enjoy it all the more for the extra helping of anticipation. And yes, he could see that all should be perfect and how lucky they were to have the chance to shift it. He was a boy, such an optimist. Anything broke, he’d fix.

Tommy was killed in a slide a mile underground. Half of the seam he was cutting under came down on him, flattening him like a flower in a book. “He’d hardly have known, gal” the doctor told Gwen, later, with me cwtched in secret behind the Lumber Room settee. “Maybe just a rumble and that was it. Out like a light.”

After the burial, we all walked back to Mr and Mrs Bolitho’s house, slow as men with dusted lungs, for a cup of tea and a bit of cake. All the small circle that knew him were there. I remember Mrs Lewis Pembroke, Jones the Oil, the Thomases, Mr Lewis and Shinkin Miles the Bobby (who tended the graveyard for beer money). Miss Price, Mrs Bolitho’s feeble-minded sister with eyes like skyrockets, did the rounds with the sandwich tray, making the smallest of talk: “Nice now” (though it was raining). The cups chinked and the mantle clock ticked and the day that should have bloomed, withered.

Back home, later, Mam and Gwen retired early to share a bed. Dad sat in quiet rage by the whistling fire and I fiddled on the settee, wishing it could be different, wanting the silence to break. He got up now and then to pace a bit, to tinker, to exercise his tendency to fastidiousness. But once in a patch of contained fury he opened the face of the grandfather clock and wound the hands back hard until something snapped and they flopped down to the six like dead arms.

After a time, I feigned tiredness, though I knew it would be as elusive as a repair to this tear in our lives.

*********

Let me take you back. Let me fold the hours.

It starts with a chase. Like a pebble down a dry gully a boy careers down steep streets between grimy houses. He falls now and then, mostly without incident, but once he catches his already tatty trousers on a mud scrape by the side of the pit manager’s door no less and wrenches a long tear against the grain of the fabric. The tumble and tug threaten to disrobe him in front of the young girls attending to their Saturday errands but the force pulls through the strong seam on the cuff.

He’s up again in a flash, not a smile in him as he pushes off past the all the flowers and the bread and the flesh. His trousers are flapping now as he pelts, like a loose sail in a gale. He’s lost a moment or two in his stumble and the wind’s been partly knocked from him. He hears the loudening, clomping boots of his pursuers, knows that they’re too close by now to allow even a cursory glance over his shoulder.

His ears, after all, are built for hearing to the fore. Knows this, he does, from years on the mountains with his old man, mostly in the dark, draining the hills for sounds as he stalks his quarry. “Moth”, they call him, though perhaps it should be “the cup”, with ears like that. Moth, because he’s always dirty with dust and flapping into things he oughtn’t.

But now it’s tables turned and Moth’s running for his life, or most of it. Are those bumps he senses at the head of his back someone’s fingers? Thank God for his lice-short hair he thinks as he spies the sheep stop at the end of the road that will see him onto the flat land before the allotments and then the tram road and then perhaps, if needs be, the river. There’s no destination fixed in his mind. It’s just not here.

There’s time to think a bit on the straight, and he’s counting on his younger legs to see him through this. He makes out that there are three of them, all sounding as big as cliffs from the percussion of their boots, and he’s taking in their protests, black as death, and their snorts, like horses in the final furlong. They mean to kill him, he’s sure. All this in return for a small practical joke.

He prepares to hurdle, remembering the lie of the path beyond the looming gap. How many paces? Forty perhaps? It’s a long, straight run. But as he does, he sees the dog snout end of Jones the Milk’s van edging out of Tyn-y-banwen Road, like a liner out of port and the approaching black beetle of Mr Bolitho’s car, chattering up the road. It must be the only traffic jam in the whole of south Wales and it’s about to close his path.

He hears a joyful note in the yelps behind him, as though the hounds sense they have the fox cornered. The only way out will be audacity. Speed or youth won’t get him out of this. Or will they? He feels the weight of a hand on his shoulder, the fingers closing around his thin clavicle. He finds a burst.

Jones is out of his van that now fills the road, leaving Mr Bolitho to wait, jittering in his banger. These are the days when the roads run on the first come, first served principle. Jones has pulled the tarpaulin by to fetch an urn. Mr Bolitho, in turn, is out of his car and killing time with an impromptu visit to the Prices, to boast about the day ahead, to glow like coal about his son.

Jones’s back is now offering itself to the boy, his white coat tightly drawn around it, like a marvellous step. He finds another burst of speed and times his steps, one, two, and three with legendary perfection. His coal-blackened boot finds a perch and he flies onto the roof of the lorry, clangs in its middle and enters the unknown space beyond.

It’s full of Mr Bolitho’s car, and mercifully the rumble seat is free of the old man’s portly mother who he’s taken to ferrying to and fro, her waving from back there on high as though it’s a royal visit. So the rumble seat it is, though he’s aware that there’s a lot of gleamy white fabric tucked in there and he cringes as he realises that it’s the dress, fresh from Mrs Bolitho’s shop, all bright and puffy and ready for the wedding. Still, he has no choice and down comes the boot, as light as he can manage it, leaving a hallmark that even the best photographer won’t be able to avoid or the wildest bouquet conceal that afternoon. Then he’s away again, thankful for the springs in the car, offering just enough lift to see him to the path and safety.

Safety that is, bar the impermeable half glance at the unmistakable form sauntering up the hill on the right. In his lens he catches the shiny, earnest face of his Mam, who for one reason or another sees all but minds her own as the players draw up short. She doesn’t let on, ever, that the mark that’s made is his; even when she’s clear, later, that the consequences will ripple forever.

“Did you see him?” they cry to her, oblivious in the confusion to the black stamp. But she shrugs and tells them to get back to the chapel where they’re wanted. Jones is back in his van and up the road before Mr Bolitho, long in the talk and short in the pleasure, leaves the Prices to their peace, not noticing the boy’s Mam as he sets off to deliver the dress.

By now the boy’s cut a swathe through the Evans’s prize beans, like blunt scissors through cloth, then the Lewis’s cewcs and his own dad’s tomatoes before he dares a backward glance, but there’s no sign now of the human hounds. He’s wild with thanks in the now that he’s managed it, but it won’t be long before the cloud of repercussions looms. There’s no escaping things. This world has an edge and they’ll pursue him, those repercussions, to the end.

mysterious anthems

Cover of Independence DayIn the first sentence of his brilliant novel Independence Day, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Richard Ford writes: 'In Haddam, summer floats over tree-softened streets like a sweet lotion balm from a careless, languorous god, and the world falls in tune with its own mysterious anthems.”

His evocation of a perfect morning in a New Jersey town came back to me as I sought to puzzle out what I felt was the connection between three dates in my mind: September 11th 2001, January 15th 2007 and January 20th 2007.

The dates, of course, mark the devastating airborne attacks on mainland US in 2001, the miraculous landing on the Hudson River by the improbably named Pilot Chesley Sullenberger and the inauguration of the 44th President of the United States.

The two airline incidents, so terribly different in character and personal effect, are nonetheless worthy of some sort of symbolic equivalence, standing as they do as bookends to the Bush presidency. Their similar architecture – the vehicles and the location – invite and almost require us to re-examine their resonances.

Where the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the crash landing in Pennsylvania caused untold suffering and grief that cast a pall over a country, the world, international relations and the whole of the Bush presidency, the deft touchdown on a near-frozen Hudson River adjacent to ferry terminals with no loss of life was a triumphant assertion of hope over despair. In their own antithetical ways, each offers a context for their time. In the case of the Hudson incident, such resonant glimmers of light in the face of potential tragedy, especially those placed in time and in counterpoint to previous catastrophes, can serve as powerful and valuable metaphors. They can offer a glimpse of the potential for a better world ahead.

What I believe we are seeing is that occasional gift of history, that uniting of medium and message, providing in this case new leadership with a context, a “mysterious anthem”, as Ford puts it, upon which to layer a new type of administration. Where the Bush presidency seemed consciously or subconsciously to take its cue from 9/11 and led the world into impetuous conflict and global financial crisis, perhaps the miracle on the Hudson – the triumph of hope over adversity – will subliminally draw a line in the sand, snow or ice.

The resonant link between leader and context, software and hardware, plant and soil, artist and medium is rich in reference and repetition on many scales. On either a large or small canvas, there are many times when the world offers up a frame that is perfectly suited to a collision of circumstances in which the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. This cuts both ways, of course - dark and light.

Looking to the light, many examples spring to mind. The early Bob Dylan, who Ginsberg said had “something of the Holy Ghost about him” as he watched an improbable performer tremble his words over his percussive strumming. The West façade of Notre Dame de Chartres cathedral, where sculpture and visual narrative unite with architecture to speak louder than words. The soil of the east coast colonies from which modern day America grew. Each of these disparate, accidental collaborations of circumstance can create wonder and greatness as much as they can darkness.

What we’ve seen and experienced these last eight years, that drawn line might assert, is now behind us. Darker alignments are past. We can look the future, if not unencumbered then at least optimistic that we can get our lives, hopes, ambitions and contributions back in synch with an altogether more harmonious and uplifting anthem than the discordant notes of the last eight years.