Winter of the World

‘But people love those gardens. Beautiful, they are. I’ve been there at least once every year since I was a girl. Shame it is to see them go.’

‘There’s a perfectly good recreation ground right in the middle of Aberowen!’

‘It’s not the same,’ said Grandmam imperturbably.

Granda said: ‘Women will never understand politics.’

‘No,’ said Grandmam. ‘I don’t suppose we will.’

Lloyd caught his mother’s eye. She smiled and said nothing.

Billy and Lloyd shared the second bedroom, and Ethel made up a bed on the kitchen floor. ‘I slept in this room every night of my life until I went in the army,’ Billy said as they lay down. ‘And I looked out the window every morning at that fucking slag heap.’

‘Keep your voice down, Uncle Billy,’ Lloyd said. ‘You don’t want your mother to hear you swear.’

‘Aye, you’re right,’ said Billy.

Next morning after breakfast they all walked up the hill to the big house. It was a mild morning, and for a change there was no rain. The ridge of mountains at the skyline was softened with summer grass. As Tŷ Gwyn came into view, Lloyd could not help seeing it more as a beautiful building than as a symbol of oppression. It was both, of course: nothing was simple in politics.

The great iron gates stood open. The Williams family passed into the grounds. A crowd had gathered already: the contractor’s men with their machinery, a hundred or so miners and their families, Earl Fitzherbert with his son Andrew, a handful of reporters with notebooks, and a film crew.

The gardens were breathtaking. The avenue of ancient chestnut trees was in full leaf, there were swans on the lake, and the flower beds blazed with colour. Lloyd guessed the earl had made sure the place looked its best. He wanted to brand the Labour government as wreckers in the eyes of the world.

Lloyd found himself sympathizing with Fitz.

The Mayor of Aberowen was giving an interview. ‘The people of this town are against the open-cast mine,’ he said. Lloyd was surprised: the town council was Labour, and it must have gone against the grain for them to oppose the government. ‘For more than a hundred years, the beauty of these gardens has refreshed the souls of people who live in a grim industrial landscape,’ the Mayor went on. Switching from prepared speech to personal reminiscence, he added: ‘I proposed to my wife under that cedar tree.’

He was interrupted by a loud clanking sound like the footsteps of an iron giant. Turning to look back along the drive, Lloyd saw a huge machine approaching. It looked like the biggest crane in the world. It had an enormous boom ninety feet long and a bucket into which a lorry could easily fit. Most astonishing of all, it moved along on rotating steel shoes that made the earth shake every time they hit the ground.

Billy said proudly to Lloyd: ‘That’s a walking monighan dragline excavator. Picks up six tons of earth at a time.’

The film camera rolled as the monstrous machine stomped up the drive.

Lloyd had only one misgiving about the Labour Party. There was a streak of puritan authoritarianism in many socialists. His grandfather had it, and so did Billy. They were not comfortable with sensual pleasures. Sacrifice and self-denial suited them better. They dismissed the ravishing beauty of these gardens as irrelevant. They were wrong.

Ethel was not that way, nor was Lloyd. Perhaps the killjoy strain had been bred out of their line. He hoped so.

Fitz gave an interview on the pink gravel path while the digger driver manoeuvred his machine into position. ‘The Minister for Coal has told you that when the mine is exhausted the garden will be subject to what he calls an effective restoration programme,’ he said. ‘I say to you that that promise is worthless. It has taken more than a century for my grandfather and my father and I to bring the garden to its present pitch of beauty and harmony. It would take another hundred years to restore it.’

The boom of the excavator was lowered until it stood at a forty-five-degree angle over the shrubbery and flower beds of the west garden. The bucket was positioned over the croquet lawn. There was a long moment of waiting. The crowd fell silent. Billy said loudly: ‘Get on with it, for God’s sake.’

An engineer in a bowler hat blew a whistle.

The bucket was dropped to the earth with a massive thud. Its steel teeth dug into the flat green lawn. The drag rope tautened, there was a loud creak of straining machinery, then the bucket began to move back. As it was dragged across the ground it dug up a bed of huge yellow sunflowers, the rose garden, a shrubbery of summersweet and bottlebrush buckeye, and a small magnolia tree. At the end of its travel the bucket was full of earth, flowers and plants.

The bucket was then lifted to a height of twenty feet, dribbling loose earth and blossoms.