MORNING SERIAL

THE young moulder had made him aware of the intensity of the class struggle, and spoke to him of the injustices and inequalities existing in the prevailing system. And Ieuan, his perceptions sharpened, looked around him with open eyes. He saw for himself the truth of Frank’s observations.

Even in his own district there was stark poverty. Davie Dan’s mother and father, the Derricks, and the Williamses, who lived in a rat-infested house at the bottom of Bythaway’s Lane — a house where in wintertime the floods invaded every room on the ground floor, driving the family and their pathetic bits of furniture into the bare, cheerless and draughty bedrooms.

Then there was the Evans family who lived next door but three. So poor that once, when they were surprised by the unexpected visit of an uncle from Cardiff, they were forced to borrow a bed from Mrs. Thompson next door, in order to put him up for the night. They owned not a sofa or a couch, and what furniture they had was fashioned from plywood tea-chests which the father bought for a few coppers from the grocers’ up town.

The Evans family’s poverty gave cause for humour. But it was ironic that the jokes concerning them were made by people who were not many degrees better off.

Shon Davies, the crippled pensioner who lost his right arm in a tinworks’ shear when a boy, would repeat his favourite anecdote about the Evanses so often that finally he was nicknamed Shon Repeat.

“So many children Jack Evans and his missus got,” Shon would chuckle, stroking his stubbly chin, “that in the night he just rocks ’em to sleep in his lap and then stands ’em up in a corner. Breed like rabbits, do Jack and Flo. But there, making children’s the only bit o’ pleasure they get out o’ life, strikes me.” Yes, even Shon made fun of his own neighbour’s poverty. Shon, whose wife was as incapacitated by her rheumatism as he was by the loss of his right arm, and who was forced to take in washing, brew ginger-beer, trudge to the cinder-tips in search of fuel, and stand on the corner of Hickman Street every Thursday, summer and winter, selling the weekly Mercury.