MORNING SERIAL
SHE did all the housework as well, sometimes for other people who would pay her a few shillings. She had tried all ways and means of earning money, even to the extent of gathering willow twigs and decorating them with buds of coloured modelling clay. These she sold to neighbours who stuck them in flower vases in their front parlours. And often she would work industriously with scraps of silver wrappings from chocolates and sweets, fashioning them into miniature dolls for the children. Shon would offer encouragement and advice from his seat on the biscuit tin, while he counted and hoarded the hundreds of cigarette ends he had collected from the gutters in the main streets.
The more Ieuan read, the more he became convinced of the inequalities that existed around him. In the Pleasant Row neighbourhood, as in all the other workingclass districts in the town, lived hypocritical landlords who attended chapel faithfully. Landlords who battened on excessive rents paid for hovels which were not fit to house cattle.
Children in many families were under-nourished. They had to wear clothes handed down from one to the other. Some had no boots to their feet.
He began to question himself. To reason. Why should men be forced to work for a wage that was barely sufficient to keep body and soul together? Why should there be rich and poor? Were not all men born equal? Then why the distinction? Why should a man, by reason of his investments, enjoy every luxury, while the worker who produced received but a pittance which afforded him no luxury other than a cheap seat at the cinema, a pint or two of beer, or an occasional football excursion to Swansea or Cardiff?
Why should people starve when there was an abundance of food in the world? Why were the miners’ wages so meagre when coal cost human lives? Why the class distinction even in the educational system? His mind became confused with the questions that required an answer. He wanted to discover the reasons for these injustices, and why they had existed throughout the centuries. Were the workers to blame?