MORNING SERIAL
IT was a speech about bringing hope to the hopeless. How could anyone possibly object? Some things were as undeniable as they were familiar. We’d been too young to appreciate the obstacles to our idealism. We’d imagined a moment when things would be possible because of all that had gone before. We could re-root, re-investigate, fertilise the lives and institutions of ordinary people – like her mentor, Ceri, she fought fashionably shy of that old calling card, the working class – with fresh energy, new ideas and determination. We hadn’t been wrong, but we had mistaken what we had really had to play with to make the change possible. OK, maybe we were too excited, even enjoying the world turning upside down but, come on, what was the alternative? And it isn’t as if the daily existence of ordinary people was adequate, was it? Even for them. She knew why I’d left. Caught between the icy dismissiveness of my old man and the despair at our generational failure. Which is where, she said, Ceri came in, couldn’t I see? It had taken him some time, too, but he had been amongst the first to recognise that the fight was not ended, only re-located. He was our bridge. It wasn’t, then, that we had to settle for less, only for something different, because needs and opportunities were no longer the same. The politics had atrophied because the whole way of once being had disappeared or shrivelled beyond use or recognition. Aspiration didn’t have to begin at Basingstoke, did it? Community was just a romantic notion. Individuals deserved better, didn’t they? What was wrong with that? Wasn’t that what we were, really, all about, then and now? You didn’t pull the ladder up after you like an Indian rope trick, you helped others up, you encouraged others to climb and you did what you could for those who wouldn’t or couldn’t.
And I had to see how radically altered people were, hadn’t I? They voted unthinkingly in the past and now hardly bothered to vote at all. The past was, OK, often glorious to read about but romanticised like hell and probably s**t to live through. Especially if you were a woman.
> The Crossing by Dai Smith is published by Parthian in the Modern Wales series www.parthianbooks.com