Last Train to Gloryhole Read Online Free

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,