Flame and Slag Read Online Free Page B

soul-frost.
    We strung fossils and shells on nylon thread and posted them off without a cover note to the spinster registrar who read the rites over us. One morning I wrote lewd fantasy mottoes, to the unknown Mayor of Weston-super-Mare, to three image-famous gossipers pin-stabbed from an old copy of Television Weekly , then two fabricated confessional pages by Dior (Ellen fancied herself as a fashionist), and a requiem for my grandfather’s long-distance champion homer. These samples were sealed in our collection of empty beer bottles and launched off Worm’s Head, the whole campaign amusing Ellen, but I considered myself hellish clever. Penman Reeso from Caib pit operating under licence. Poetastry territory, the Gower peninsula. Gene-land for silly pit-boys.
    Rain came on the sixth afternoon, scuds drumming our caravan, Ellen sluicing off yesterday’s brine and sand, posed like a caryatid at the wash-basin, laughing through splutters. ‘I’m not ticklish! Stop! Stop it… ugh, you greedy pig. Pig,” she said, “pig, pig, pig!” her breasts heaving, dun nipples glowing shiny, and I thought, good God Almighty, my wife. Rees Stevens’s beaut, her pretending whimpers, whooping, yowling temptation. “Don’t! Let me finish washing!”
    Warm-wet, biting, loving.
    Rainy evening in Horton, drowsy Ellen smelling of Lifebuoy, yellow skinned under the creaking, tinted lampshades, cows lowing, gulls screaming, the beach deserted as prehistory, and next day we came home to Daren, to the house below Caib railway siding, where limp John Vaughan marooned himself on the settee.
    Sickness helps to cripple the healthy, but that first year brought maiming and mort in too many shapes.

    First shift down under, swarming August rain feeding the young evergreens on Waunwen, and straightway a walk-out from Number 2 face, Andrew Booth the manager waiting for us at pit-bottom, angrier than he could afford to be against four dozen men who had the “working agreement” ready behind their tongues.
    Percy Cynon said, “You know it as well as we do, Mr Booth. We won’t fill enough coal to cook chips. The face isn’t water bombed.”
    “You’ll have coal by nine o’clock. I’m warning the lot of you. Now get back in there! This is one case you’re going to lose.”
    “What about the two hours, then, Mr Booth?”
    “ Iesu Grist , you’ll make it up before the end of the shift. Now bugger off back in there. Some tired wasters in this pit want coddling — well, they won’t get it from me, not while I’m in charge. Useless bloody shower … men, by the Jesus, men they call themselves.” Squirting small spits to right and left, the brave little Caib autocrat rapped his steel toecap with his safety stick.
    Percy said, “That kind of talk won’t do, Mr Booth. See, we can nail you for abuse as they call it. Question is, these two hours from seven till nine. We’ll go back to the face all right, only there’ll have to be some allowance for the stoppage, as in the agreement.”
    “Day-work, and consider yourselves bloody lucky. Listen” — choking on temper — “I want this pit-bottom clear! So move, get in, move!”
    “Cheeky old sod you are, Mr Booth,” one of the colliers said, another undersized little tiger, shorter than old Booth himself, swaggering gimp-shouldered from the weight of the water jack in his coat pocket.
    Percy wheeled around, doing a pacifying shepherd act with his big arms. “Come on, boys, it’s a fair arrangement. We can’t argue against two hours’ day-work for sitting on our arses.”
    A couple of borers were already in our Number 2 face, water infusion busting out the coal, front slips anyhow, but towards the end of the shift we were using punchers on the hard stuff, the pace fallen off by now, beer steam rising from the regular club-men boozers, all of us waiting for the shout to pack it in. And then at five past two (and he’d done this a thousand times before) Percy Cynon rode the scraper chains