MORNING SERIAL

THE mother sniffed. “If that’s how you feel, Dick, then you’d better go out for a walk and cool off.

I’ve got no time for a man who swears in front of his children.” “Swearing, by damn! You’re enough to make any man swear. Why, if I ….” The quarrel continued. Upstairs, the children slept, huddled closely in each other’s arms. And Ieuan waited, until anger and despair drove him to his room.

*** The trade depression worsened. Eventually the steel mills and tinworks closed. Men who had never experienced a day’s unemployment lined up for the dole. Abermor, no longer a thriving Welsh industrial town, became a subject for debate in the Commons. It was discussed in synonymity with the hard-hit towns in the mining valleys of the Rhondda.

The main thoroughfares were crowded daily with men who wandered aimlessly up and down, or stood in groups at the street corners only to be moved on by the police, whose vigilance became the object of anger and derision.

Unemployment. September, October, November, December … month after month dragged by. There was a restlessness in the air. An undercurrent of dissatisfaction. The first weeks of summer had provided many diversions which kept the men’s minds away from the spectre of insecurity that had come to haunt them.

Bowling greens, country walks, angling for mullet in the old dock, cricket matches on Potter’s Park. It was a brief holiday. Soon they would be back at work again. This could not go on indefinitely. Abermor had never suffered an industrial depression.

Cheer up, lads. This’ll be over before we know it. Make the most of the holiday, for holiday it is.

And, by crikey, we’re getting paid for it, too. Not much, but pay it is just the same. Enough to spare for a weekly packet of Woodbines, a pint of beer, or perhaps a seat — a fourpenny one — at the cinema on Wednesday afternoons, if one was careful.

Unemployment. Then came demoralization. Apathy. The men had no inclination to do anything.