MORNING SERIAL

MRS Morgan glanced sharply at him through her tears. She hastily dried her eyes on her apron.

“Yes, go to bed? That’s it, bed! Anywhere out of the way,” she shouted.

“Now, Millie-please …the children!” “Fat lot they care, fat lot anybody cares. So long as I’m able to cook, and mend, and darn — that’s all my worth is to them.” Ieuan gripped the banister rail. The beginning of another quarrel, he mused bitterly. It would go on until they went to bed. And in the night hours it would still continue until sleep claimed them both.

But he was glad. Relieved that he had not given way to the momentary compassion he had felt for his mother. For it would have brought nothing but self-recrimination and pain. He wanted to love her. He ached for the love which she had never shown him. But his heart was closed, and she would never be able to open the door.

Slowly, he walked up the narrow staircase to his room. He heard his sisters call to him, but tonight he did not even wish to speak with them. CHAPTER EIGHT Gradually, as the winter months passed, Ieuan’s impressions of the foundry grew clearer. The tall, grim and forbidding buildings that had first frightened him as they lay shrouded in the darkness of early morning, became as familiar to him as his own home. He came to know every corner intimately. There was no longer any mystery. But the dread remained.

Day after day he trudged through the rain, the snow and the slush, greeting by name the many men he had come to know as he stood in the queue at the time office, or picked his way across the darkened yard.

Stumbling along between the curving rails that shimmered in the reddened glow of the steel furnace. A heavy mist drifting in from the estuary. Dull, leaden clouds tumbling across the sky.

The air filled with the tang of salt from the leaping bay, and penetrating fumes of sulphur from the furnace landing.

Somewhere far away the plaintive whistle of a locomotive.