MORNING SERIAL
THERE were three hardback volumes, dating from the 1920s and ’30s. Some magazines, a few maps of the coalfield before 1914, a book of statistics, a red-covered Edwardian railway timetable for coal freight traffic, loosely strewn papers, some typed on old-fashioned ‘flimsy’ but most scrawled over in my old man’s blocky hand.
I shuffled through them. Notes, extracts, disconnected paragraphs of continuous prose and his questions, a list of things to do and read, and a typescript biographical essay, or the start of one, which had been sent to him by post.
At the very bottom of this pile were twenty or so pen-and-ink drawings on 6” by 4” white paper, bundled together in a folder and each initialled with the old man’s D.M. in the left-hand corner. They were of ruins, bombed and blasted, of armoured cars and upturned vehicles, of blacklimbed trees and shuffling men.
They were of Monte Cassino and 1944. A final buff folder just said Letters on its front, and was marked Personal.
It was obvious, from the books alone, that the material he’d assembled was a foray into the life and times of David Alfred Thomas.
The old man had read into the history of the coalfield, and its various makers. But nothing as intensely gathered together as this, so far as I knew. It took me a quick trawl to establish who exactly the object of all this was.
The subject had died in 1918 and when he died he did so as Viscount Rhondda.
He’d been cremated in Golders Green.
The old man must have known that on the day we were there together when Paynter followed Rhondda to the final fire in 1984, because none of the papers seemed to have been worked on, from the few dates he’d added to pages, since 1958.
Lord Rhondda’s ashes were later buried in Llanwern, his country seat in Monmouthshire, as Gwent was then known.
I resisted pulling everything apart too rapidly for one swift explanation.
I wanted to see why this person had caught my old man’s attention for this much effort.
> The Crossing by Dai Smith is published by Parthian in the Modern Wales series www.parthianbooks.com
CONTINUES TOMORROW