Fall of Giants

“All right, then. Let’s finish with: ‘Is this the kind of thing that should be allowed in your kingdom?’”

Mrs. Ponti said: “It’s a bit tame.”

“No, it’s good,” said Mrs. Dai. “It appeals to his sense of right and wrong.”

Ethel said: “‘We have the honor to be, sir, Your Majesty’s most humble and obedient servants.’”

“Do we have to have that?” said Mrs. Ponti. “I’m not a servant. No offense, Ethel.”

“It’s the normal thing. The earl puts it when he writes a letter to The Times.”

“All right, then.”

Ethel passed the letter around the table. “Put your addresses next to your signatures.”

Mrs. Ponti said: “My writing’s awful, you sign my name.”

Ethel was about to protest, then it occurred to her that Mrs. Ponti might be illiterate, so she did not argue, but simply wrote: “Mrs. Minnie Ponti, 19 Wellington Row.”

She addressed the envelope:

His Majesty the King

Buckingham Palace

London

She sealed the letter and stuck on a stamp. “There we are, then,” she said. The women gave her a round of applause.

She posted the letter the same day.

No reply was ever received.

{VI}

The last Saturday in March was a gray day in South Wales. Low clouds hid the mountaintops and a tireless drizzle fell on Aberowen. Ethel and most of the servants at Tŷ Gwyn left their posts-the earl and princess were away in London-and walked into town.

Policemen had been sent from London to enforce the evictions, and they stood on every street, their heavy raincoats dripping. The Widows’ Strike was national news, and reporters from Cardiff and London had come up on the first morning train, smoking cigarettes and writing in notebooks. There was even a big camera on a tripod.

Ethel stood with her family outside their house and watched. Da was employed by the union, not by Celtic Minerals, and he owned their house; but most of their neighbors were being thrown out. During the course of the morning, they brought their possessions out onto the streets: beds, tables and chairs, cooking pots and chamber pots, a framed picture, a clock, an orange box of crockery and cutlery, a few clothes wrapped in newspaper and tied with string. A small pile of near-worthless goods stood like a sacrificial offering outside each door.

Da’s face was a mask of suppressed rage. Billy looked as if he wanted to have a fight with someone. Gramper kept shaking his head and saying: “I never seen the like, not in all my seventy years.” Mam just looked grim.

Ethel cried and could not stop.

Some of the miners had got other jobs, but it was not easy: a miner could not adapt readily to the work of a shop assistant or a bus conductor, and employers knew this and turned them away when they saw the coal dust under their fingernails. Half a dozen had become merchant sailors, signing on as stokers and getting a pay advance to give to their wives before they left. A few were going to Cardiff or Swansea, hoping for jobs in the steelworks. Many were moving in with relatives in neighboring towns. The rest were simply crowding into another Aberowen house with a non-mining family until the strike was settled.

“The king never replied to the widows’ letter,” Ethel said to Da.

“You handled it wrong,” he said bluntly. “Look at your Mrs. Pankhurst. I don’t believe in votes for women, but she knows how to get noticed.”

“What should I have done, got myself arrested?”

“You don’t need to go that far. If I’d known what you were doing, I’d have told you to send a copy of the letter to the Western Mail.”

“I never thought of that.” Ethel was disheartened to think that she could have done something to prevent these evictions, and had failed.

“The newspaper would have asked the palace whether they had received the letter, and it would have been hard for the king to say he was just going to ignore it.”

“Oh, dammo, I wish I’d asked your advice.”

“Don’t swear,” her mother said.

“Sorry, Mam.”

The London policemen looked on in bewilderment, not understanding the foolish pride and stubbornness that had led to this. Perceval Jones was nowhere to be seen. A reporter from the Daily Mail asked Da for an interview, but the newspaper was hostile to workers, and Da refused.

There were not enough handcarts in town, so people took it in turns to move their goods. The process took hours, but by midafternoon the last pile of possessions had gone, and the keys had been left sticking out of the locks on the front doors. The policemen went back to London.

Ethel stayed in the street for a while. The windows of the empty houses looked blankly back at her, and the rainwater ran down the street pointlessly. She looked across the wet gray slates of the roofs, downhill to the scattered pithead buildings in the valley bottom. She could see a cat walking along a railway line, but otherwise there was no movement. No smoke came from the engine room, and the great twin wheels of the winding gear stood on top of their tower, motionless and redundant in the soft relentless rain.

CHAPTER FIVE – April 1914