Last Train to Gloryhole Read Online Free Page A

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