MORNING SERIAL

HIS old man was constantly against the grain in all things. He loved to smoke. Usually untipped Players or Capstan Full Strength which came in weirdly effete, mauve-tinted packets. If he had lived beyond the mid-1980s he would have scorned the huddle of fellow conspirators in the fug of a den for their designated dirty habit. For him the addiction, for such it was, was also a ceremony, for such he made it. The old push-up packs with their frisson of silver foil just covering up the plump white paper rolls of tobacco. The spurt and flare from a struck match. The rich field tang of burning leaf. The wispy curlicues of blue metal smoke. And sharing. Billy had been with him once in a crowded bar full of colliers at the start of Miners’ fortnight, two weeks of caravans and sand and beer to come, with cigarettes flung the one to the other as individual packets were opened up for all. There were men, the old man told him, who brought the habit home from what was then not a distant war. Then they more often than not shared a match and a fag passed on from one battle-dressed baby-faced veteran to another. If it was the warmth of glamour, no less was it the attitude of bravado.

* * * * *

His old man claimed to have met Burt Lancaster. The actor, he said, was not then either a star or indeed an actor. He was a circus performer enlisted into the US Army to divert and entertain the raw troops, mud-soaked and bombarded to a standstill outside Monte Cassino in 1944. Everyone “knew” Burt Lancaster by the time the old man asserted his own former friendship. He told his adult students how The Crimson Pirate, in 1952, was a deliberate riposte to McCarthyite witch-hunts, with the Red Flag waved in the philistine face of Middle America. And what else was The Flame and the Arrow in 1954 if not an assertion of the New Deal which had sustained the young Burton Lancaster in the ’30s?

> The Crossing by Dai Smith is published by Parthian in the Modern Wales series www.parthianbooks.com