MORNING SERIAL

‘I saw a man being controlled by a machine, when it ought to be the other way round,’ my father told me. ‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘that’s why your Dada has arms like Popeye.’

By the time I came along, Dada had moved on to clean work on the production line at the enormous Hoover factory in Pentrebach, which he would continue until retirement. My father would follow him there, but as an apprentice and then a production engineer, thanks to the secondary education he had enjoyed, but which was denied his own father. Of all the good things of the earth that were withheld from those generations – decent housing, clothes and food, medicine, warmth and comfort – the thing most malign was the denial of the chance to learn. This was the greatest cruelty.

Outside of work, my grandfather was always busy. ‘Jack of all trades, master of none’, my grandmother used to say. His garden was his chief concern but he could manage basic carpentry and bricklaying, he could glaze a window, paint and decorate and even cobble shoes on an iron last he kept in his shed. I recall him mixing cement with my father to build our lean-to bathroom, shifting the heavy mixture with seeming ease, handling the shovel methodically with his big blue-veined hands. The only jobs he steered clear of were those involving the innards of machinery or of electrical wiring, which was just as well as the village had quite enough amateur electricians, men whose expertise was gleaned from a partial understanding of the industrial electrics of the pit, but who were nonetheless enthusiastic to ‘have a go’ at domestic wiring.

Though he very rarely talked politics, my grandfather laid the blame for past misfortunes squarely at the door of the Tory Party. ‘They’d chain you to the workbench if they could,’ he said.

Even so, as evidence of the durability of working class Conservatism, nearly every Valleys community could at that time boast a ‘Con’ club (the word ‘Constitutional’ often standing in euphemistically for ‘Conservative’).