MORNING SERIAL
“SHE lives in Crooked Row… but she’s a good girl, Mam.” His mother silenced him with a quick, angry look.
“Marvin! Never heard of that name. Is she one of those English people from up the north? One of them Lancashire families that came to work in the tinstamping?”
“No, Mam, she’s Welsh, just like me.”
“H’m! Funny name for a Welsh girl. She can’t be up to much.”
Ieuan jumped up. “Mam!” he cried angrily. “You’ve got no right to say such a thing.”
“If she lives in Crooked Row, that’s enough for me,” she challenged. “A fine place to live in. Full of drunken sots. Children running all over the place like as if they was rabbits. What decent family lives there, tell me? Why, there’s not a house that has a decent bit o’ furniture in it. Too poor to buy even a piano.”
“Poor! Can people help if they’re poor?” Ieuan said, roused by her taunts. “Are we millionaires, that you can talk like that about other people who are no worse off than we are? And Sally comes from a respectable family. She’s decent and clean, I tell you. Decent – d’you hear?”
“Now then!” His mother’s voice rose to a shriek. “Don’t you dare shout at me, you young bully! You’re not in the foundry, and I won’t stand for it… Oh! Oh!” She clutched her apron and held it to her face. “A fine way for a boy to talk to his mother,” she wept. “Here am I, working and slaving day in, day out, to bring you up decent and respectable, and you answer me back, and shout at me like – like…” Ieuan sighed. He clenched his teeth.
“I’m not shouting at you, Mam,” he said, striving to control the flood of temper that seethed inside him. “I’ve told you the truth – I was with a girl. I’ve told you her name, where she lives… and I’ve told you she’s good, clean and decent. What more can I say? D’you think I’d want to make friends with those girls who parade town every night? If I picked up one of them you’d have something to say. I’ll be eighteen this year, and surely I can walk out with a girl if I want to. I’m not a baby any more, Mam, and you – you’re making a fuss over nothing.”